In this abridged extract from her new book Coming Clean: A True Story of Love, Addiction and Recovery (Bloomsbury) Liz Fraser describes her family’s move to Venice in the hope of a fresh start …

On 2 October 2018 we left the UK: Mike, me and our 10-month-old daughter, in a white Ford Escort van filled to the roof, back and sides with everything we owned. 

As we drove through the pre-dawn towards the Shuttle crossing at Folkestone, I remember being acutely aware of the ground moving beneath us, every minute and mile putting more physical and emotional distance between us and so many problems: the bad nights and arguments, conflicts and confusions, stress, loneliness and drink. It was all being left behind us now and we could start afresh – because, as everyone knows, serious mental health problems magically go away if you drive away from them. 

Except, of course, they don’t. Mike’s problems hadn’t been recycled with our plastic or donated to a charity shop; they were stowed just inches from me in a crudely sealed box in his mind, waiting for their moment to come out again.

Here we were now in our dusty van, a little family of three fleeing the invasions of depression, Life Stress and what I thought was just a bit too much drinking from time to time, seeking to build our own new life in the lagoon. 

Our first few days in Venice were the happiest we ever had there. Everything was bright, exciting and happy: the colours were happy, the sea was happy, the lines of laundry were happy, even the scrawny cats sitting in their window boxes were happy. The late summer sunsets brought Instagram to its knees, and we floated around in a haze of disbelief and Aperol Spritz. We were happy. 

Mike was happy too, or so he seemed in those earliest days; relaxed and calm. He set about learning basic Italian, practising it merrily on any unwilling victim within earshot, and he suddenly wanted to do things, see things, enjoy things and explore. He always said he felt socially and culturally far more at home in Venice than in Cambridge. He soon became a bit of a local hero, this bearded Scottish photographer who loved to share a colourful anecdote and a beer. And another. 

While he cooked, Mike always had a beer or glass of local wine on hand, as people often do when they’re cooking at home in the evening. It was to be a long time before I learned how many empty wine bottles were hidden on a wooden beam, just a few feet above my head. 

While Mike’s eventual descent to the depths of alcoholism was inevitable, I do sometimes wonder if the disasters that followed might not have happened quite so fast, or so severely, had it not been for the Wall Problem. 

Long story short, four days after we arrived I was informed that there was a ‘problem’ in my apartment, in the form of a missing wall. During a conversation with my estate agent in half Italian, half English, half confusion, I learned that in 1984 the previous owners had some internal structural work done, and as part of this reshuffle they were supposed to close off a small alcove between the kitchen and the bathroom with a 1.5m long wall. But they didn’t. 

I think it’s fair to say that from this point on, things started to go rather … wrong. Our peaceful start to Venetian life was shattered as my flat and my brain became filled with architects, builders, plumbers, electricians and tile suppliers. We’d gone from idyllic dreamland to renovation nightmare, our smiles quickly waned and conversation, once excited and happy, became heavy and occasionally argumentative as we struggled to decide where the bath should go, if the tiles should have bevelled or straight edges and if it would annoy us forever to have a corner cupboard that swung the wrong way. Mike would sit slowly emptying a bottle of wine as we drew up yet more plans every evening – after we’d already been to our local bar for an aperitivo before dinner, after a beer on the way home from another walk. 

I don’t know if it’s because my mind was so preoccupied by the building problems, or looking after my daughter, but I really didn’t notice the marked increase in volume of Mike’s alcohol consumption – and I didn’t even know of all the rest that was being consumed when he wasn’t with me. 

Liz Fraser, pictured above, has written a book that is part diary, part travel journal, part love letter.

The amount we drank in Venice rose very quickly, but so stealthily I didn’t even notice it was happening. There were days when we’d quite happily have a drink at 11 a.m., because in Venice ordering a beer in the morning is as normal as a macchiato. If I look back at the photos on my phone of that time, it’s a gallery of booze: Lunch Spritz on San Giorgio. Morning Spritz at Santa Margherita. 11 a.m. Grappa. 2 p.m. Spritz on Giudecca. 6 p.m. Beer in Sant’Elena. 1 p.m. Spritz and crisps in Via Garibaldi. 9 a.m. Prosecco and cake on Lido. 11.24 am beer and Spritz in Cannaregio. 

I soon graduated from lightweight Aperol Spritz to the bitter, heavier Campari Spritz drunk by locals, and then discovered the killer pallina: literally a ‘little ball’, it’s a tiny wine glass filled to the top with a mix of Campari and either white wine or Prosecco. It costs €2 and you can neck one before you’ve had your first olive. 

Where I could happily go a day or three booze-free, Mike, faced with this endless fountain of his beloved poison, never went a day without, and from day one he drank considerably and consistently more than he ever had at home – or at least more than I’d been aware of. It wasn’t just when we were out and about, but at home too. 

He found a wine shop close to our flat, where a litre of local Cabernet cost €3. He’d bring one home almost every day, drink the whole bottle over the course of the evening. I also didn’t know at the time that he used to neck another litre-bottle of wine that he’d snuck into the house somehow, every night, while I went through into our daughter’s bedroom to get her off to sleep. 

I must have seen the signs. I must surely have recognised them from how he’d been before – this creeping, needy way of drinking even when he said he didn’t want to, and his inability to stop. I knew in myself that what I was being told either wasn’t entirely true, or somehow just didn’t feel right, but anything I said to this effect was either immediately explained away with a fair degree of irritation, or I was told I was imagining it or making unfair assumptions and he’d done nothing wrong, he was just tired, OK? 

I often wondered, in all the problems that followed, whether I might have enabled something I should have stopped. Whether I was the one who allowed alcohol to become normalised, to pull up a seat at the dinner table and crack open a beer, when it should never have been allowed through the door. It’s natural for many of us to think this way and to blame ourselves, especially if we have low self-esteem, but I forgive myself now, and know it was quite simply my total lack of understanding of the severity or even existence of Mike’s alcoholism, far less how to handle something like that, which led me never to bat an eyelid at us drinking together, like a normal couple – because I didn’t know he wasn’t, and can never be, a ‘normal’ drinker. 

Extracted from Coming Clean by Liz Fraser, Bloomsbury, €16, which is out now. 

Further reading: What would you do if you found out your husband was gay?