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#Post#: 40--------------------------------------------------
How drink lost me ALL my children, by Mandy Allwood
By: Montraviatommygun Date: March 10, 2011, 6:45 am
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How drink lost me ALL my children, by Mandy Allwood
By KATHRYN KNIGHT
Last updated at 20:38pm on 9th May 2008
Three weeks ago, a dishevelled Mandy Allwood was pictured in a
Sunday tabloid surrounded by empty bottles of wine and cigarette
packets.
A weary drunk who'd started drinking at 7am that day, she
revealed she swigged wine as she did her housework, still trying
to blot out the pain of losing her eight babies all those years
ago.
But no longer, apparently. When I went to see Mandy this week at
her smart three-storey townhouse in Warwick, the 42-year-old
mother is smartly dressed, fully made-up and sober.
"I did have a drink problem," she tells me.
"I'm not proud of it, and I've paid a high price for it. But
that was a few months ago, and I really have dealt with it. I've
finally turned a corner."
Too late, however, to prevent another unpleasant domestic
situation. Currently, her three young daughters, Color, ten,
Kitali, nine, and seven-year-old Rade, are in the custody of
their father after Mandy was arrested for drink driving last
November.
(The children were in the back of the car as their mother, three
times over the limit, drove to the off-licence.)
It is a depressing state of affairs; but then the woman who, 12
years ago, gave birth to octuplets, only to watch them die
within an hour, was perhaps never destined to live an ordinary
life.
Nonetheless, even by the standards of grief and depression that
you might expect in the wake of such an extraordinary event,
Allwood has continued to live out a sorry soap opera. The
drinking and the loss of her children are only the latest sad
episodes.
In the intervening years, there have been, in her own words,
"domestic violence, eating disorders, parental estrangement and
suicide attempts."
And, of course, the drinking. Given that apparently Mandy
herself chose to confide her troubles to a reporter last month,
it is hard to accept her claims that she has not drunk "for
several months."
Whatever the truth, today she is anxious to prove that she is in
control, sober, and keen for a fresh start.
Her drinking, she insists, was only a short-term problem. She
maintains it was triggered in October 2006 when she discovered
her long-term partner, Paul Hudson - father of the octuplets and
also her three surviving children - had been having a three-year
affair with another woman, as well as countless other flings.
"I rang him one night and another woman was in the background
shouting 'Three years Paul, three years' - which was the length
of time they'd been together.
"I confronted him and he admitted it, as well as telling me he'd
slept with many other women over the years. I went to pieces,
lost the plot, and found drink as a crutch.
"I just went a bit off the rails. I couldn't sleep, I was
panicking the whole time, and lonely. It was a bad time and,
yes, I turned to drink.
"But it lasted only a few weeks. One night, I found myself
reaching for the third bottle of wine and thought: 'Mandy, what
are you doing? Pull yourself together.'
"And I did. Although I did have another lapse when I was caught
drink-driving. But I am not an alcoholic, and never have been."
Whatever the truth about her drinking, the discovery of her
partner's infidelity cannot have come altogether as a shock. The
couple's 11-year relationship was always stormy and had been
dogged by infidelity from the beginning; on both parts.
Paul, who is described as a "property developer," although it is
unclear in exactly what form, already had another lover when the
couple first met in 1995, and for many years continued to divide
his time between the two women.
For her part, Mandy was already married and had a three-year-old
son. She left her husband, Simon Pugh, a plasterer, to set up
home with Paul.
In fact, despite presenting a united front when Mandy was
pregnant with the octuplets, Mandy now says the couple never
fully lived together under one roof for any period of time.
Moreover, Mandy says, the relationship was not only erratic but
stormy and violent.
"He was horribly abusive, both physically and emotionally," she
says.
"I had black eyes from him punching me in the face, even when I
was carrying the octuplets. I watched Sleeping With The Enemy
the other night - a film about a bullied wife who lives in
terror of her husband - and I thought: 'That's me.' '"
So why stay? After all, following the death of her eight babies,
Mandy was pregnant by Paul just over a year later, and went on
to have two other daughters in quick succession.
"I think I had just grown very dependent on him," she says.
"As much as I loathed him, it's hard to let someone go when
you've been through everything I have.
"My friends all told me to leave him, but it was hard to find
the strength. My self-esteem was at rock bottom."
Paul and Mandy never were, you suspect, a meeting of minds. "I
fell for him hook, line and sinker," she says. 'I was
mesmerised, and so naive. Besotted, you could say."
So much so, she says, that she was prepared to sever her
relationship with her parents, Ryan and Marion, who owned their
own construction company but did not, she says, approve of Paul.
She maintains that she has not seen her parents for more than a
decade.
What happened next proved to be one of the most fiercely debated
stories of the decade. In 1995, after a series of miscarriages
and longing for a baby, Mandy began to take fertility drugs.
In the spring of 1996, she discovered she was pregnant with
octuplets.
She was offered the chance to terminate some of the foetuses to
give the others a chance of survival, but declined.
It was a decision that some attributed to her eagerness to cash
in on her situation, weighing her babies' lives against the
lucrative newspaper deals she was guaranteed if they all
survived.
Thirteen years on, the suggestion does not sting any less.
"I'm sick of hearing about the fact that I went against my
doctor's advice. I didn't. It was never as simple as that," she
says.
"My doctor told me they had a chance, and as long as there was a
chance that was enough. Until you're in that situation, you have
no idea how it feels."
The octuplets - six boys and two girls - were born over a period
of three days at the end of September 1996, all dying within an
hour.
Even today, Mandy says she would not do anything differently.
"If I could change anything, it would be meeting Paul. But I
don't regret what happened with the babies, and I wouldn't make
any decisions differently if it happened again today," she
insists.
"I did what I believed was right. It was never about the money.
Never. I've said it before, but when the babies were laid out in
front of me in their tiny all-in-one gowns, I looked at them and
thought: 'Which of you could I ever have chosen to kill?'"
The babies were buried, amidst the pop of paparazzi flashbulbs,
at a London cemetery. But two years later their tiny coffins
were moved to a secret location, re-interred in a simple
ceremony attended by Mandy, Paul and her baby daughter, Color,
to whom she had given birth naturally in December 1997.
"The re-burial was a form of closure for me, a chance to really
say goodbye in private," Mandy says.
She tries to go to the grave once a month, and always on the
anniversary. "I just leave some flowers and say a little
prayer," she says.
There are no pictures of the babies on the wall of the
comfortable terrace where she now lives - that would be too
painful, Mandy says. But the scan pictures and birth
certificates are kept in a little box by her bed, and even the
thought of it brings tears to her eyes.
"I think about them all the time - of course I do. In some ways,
it feels like it was yesterday. You have to move on, but the
memories are always there."
Her three surviving children all talk openly about the
octuplets.
"They say: 'Oh I wonder what they would be like now,'" says
Mandy. "There aren't any secrets; it's not healthy."
Nor is it particularly healthy, however, for her daughters to be
caught in the crossfire of their parents' increasingly bitter
estrangement, or their mother's fragile mental state.
Last June, in the aftermath of her discovery of Paul's
infidelity, Mandy attempted suicide, washing down sleeping
tablets with alcohol in the cubicle of a public toilet.
"Someone found me and called an ambulance," she says. "The
doctors said I would have died if it had been any longer. It was
only when I woke up in hospital that I realised how lucky I
was."
Within six months, however, came Mandy's arrest for drink
driving. She was caught by police as she drove with her children
to a nearby off-licence, and in January was banned from driving
for two years.
By then, though, something far worse had already happened. In
the wake of her arrest, social workers removed her three
daughters from her care, and they now reside with their father
and his new partner.
Mandy maintains it was a "witchhunt." "The social workers did
two spot checks, calling at home to see if I was drinking," she
says.
"The first time, they didn't find anything. The second, they
said they could smell alcohol on my breath when the only thing I
had taken was mouthwash.
"They took the girls away with them that night. My daughters
were crying and screaming for me as they didn't want to go. It
was horrendous." Again, her eyes fill with tears.
Since then she has relied on twice-weekly phone calls and a
weekly visit with her daughters, although negotiations over
custody are ongoing, and she is confident that the girls will
return home.
"They will be back where they belong," she says.
"I feel terrible about what happened - that is my guilt that I
have to live with. But it was a terrible, terrible blip, and I
don't deserve what has happened to me since."
The problem, though, is that things seem to keep on "happening"
to Mandy. It is hard not to shake off the sense that she is, in
some ways, rather addicted to drama; or at least attracted to
it.
Far from relishing her relative anonymity, Mandy is nurturing
plans for a return to the limelight. She is in discussions to
write her autobiography, as well as cooperating with plans for a
television series based on her life, penned by the respected
dramatist Lynda La Plante.
She says repeatedly that she would like her own problem page or
radio show, arguing that after all her experiences she knows how
to "reach out to people."
A more realistic view may be that she needs the money. While she
made £224,000 from media interviews at the time of her octuplet
pregnancy, the money has long since gone - spent, Mandy says, by
Paul.
"I hardly saw a penny of it, to be honest," she says.
Today, she lives largely on benefits, although talk of her
finances makes her defensive.
"That's my business," she snaps, asked how she makes ends meet.
She softens when asked if she believes she has, finally, turned
a corner, revealing that she has met a new partner, a local
businessman, and that they have been dating since January.
While she will not name him, she feels confident that theirs is
a long-term relationship.
"I've got a new man in my life, whom I adore and who cares for
me. He's older and more responsible, with a lovely soul. I feel
like after 25 years of relationships, I've finally found my
soulmate. He has helped me kick the drinking and stay grounded."
You have to hope, for her sake, that this is true, although
history is not on her side. In fairness, she acknowledges this,
and says she hopes to make amends for past mistakes.
"I want to make amends to my daughters," she says. "I lost my
way for a long time, and made mistakes. I'm certainly not proud
of staying in a bad relationship for so long. It is a bad
example to set to the girls.
"I've also been thinking about trying to get back in touch with
my parents. They're in their early 70s now and they can't change
what they are. But maybe it's time to try to forgive and forget.
They are still my parents."
One wonders what they would make of their long-lost daughter.
Today, she is Mandy the survivor. Tomorrow could be a different
story altogether.
For while there have already been a number of turbulent episodes
in the sad, sometimes depressing drama that is Mandy Allwood's
life, you sense that there are likely to be many more yet to
come.
(HTM) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=565170&in_page_id=1879
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