The Illicit Still

Paula Douglas

1978

When you get away with something for long enough, there comes a point when you think you've got away with it for good. Then you're in trouble. You become careless; cocky, even. Complacency sidles in and gives caution a good kicking as it slumps snoring in the corner. And so it was with my father.

It was the late 1970s and we'd been living in Libya for five years. Dad was a teacher who successfully supplemented his meagre salary by running an illicit still. He wasn't the only moonshiner in town, but it was widely acknowledged among Tripoli's expatriate community that he was the best. He'd bought the still off an old oilman not long after we first arrived and smuggled it into our villa one night, under cover of darkness, having first tried to disguise it by dressing it up in one of my old nighties and sellotaping a doll's head to the top of it. To Mum's disgust, the grotesque doll-still was then installed in her and Dad's en-suite bathroom. Shortly afterwards, he moved several large black plastic dustbins into the outhouses above the garage and began filling them with the raw mash from which he would eventually make his own peculiarly potent brand of liquor. The mash was a deceptively simple-sounding base of sugar, water and yeast; the trick was to get the proportions right. For months the bins spewed out a frothing, noxious ooze as Dad struggled with the formula. He scuttled about like some mad scientist, anxiously checking the contents of the bins, running batch after batch of mash through the hissing, bubbling still until, one day, he staggered exhausted but triumphant from the bathroom.

'I've done it!' he announced.

My younger sister, Emma, and I peered at the bottle in his hand. The liquid inside looked just like water. We were unimpressed. 'But what does it do, Dad?'

'It makes your old man rich, girls, that's what it does!'

It never made him rich, but for a few years it was, as they say, a nice little earner. By 1978, his hooch had assumed a reputation of near-legendary proportions and he'd scaled up operations significantly to cope with surging demand. The black bins multiplied, the still never stopped and we were the only family in the neighbourhood whose sugar consumption was 100 kilos a month, and rising.

Alcohol was banned in Libya and, although the authorities often turned a blind eye to the thriving booze black-market, police raids were still a regular occurrence. Having no desire to see the inside of one of Libya's notorious prisons, Dad had tried to be discreet about his activities, but his enterprise was one of the worst-kept secrets in Tripoli. The stream of late-night visitors and the ever-present sweet reek of fermenting mash which hung about our house were dead giveaways. But the boot to the door never came and, like the bogeyman you stop believing in, Dad's fear of arrest gradually diminished. Convinced that the police had somehow forgotten about him, he started to relax, cranked up production even further. He should have known better; they were simply biding their time.

All of this was the backdrop to what was, for my sister and me, an idyllic life. While our parents and their friends dreamed of the day they could finally pack up and leave Libya for good, we couldn't imagine living anywhere else. We loved our carefree, barefoot existence and, after five years, we were still in thrall to the sheer exoticism of the place, to the sights, sounds, smells and tastes whose very strangeness had become familiar and comforting.

March 28th, 1978: the day I turned twelve. In the early afternoon, Emma and I headed to a friend's house to watch an imported video, a birthday treat since, for most expat families, a television set was a rare luxury. We were half way through our second episode of Starsky and Hutch when a friend of Mum and Dad's arrived. Betty was tear-stained and shifty, beckoning aside the owner of the house, talking in the urgent undertone used by all bearers of bad news, while all the time shooting furtive glances in our direction. We didn't need to be told what was going on; we knew instantly what had happened; and, in one of the few moments of clarity during what was to become an almost dream-like blurring of days, I understood that something had shifted irrevocably, that the life we had known and loved was over.

We found out later that the police had raided the house that afternoon, as Mum and Dad were drinking coffee and eating slices of my birthday cake with friends. They arrived mob-handed, led by the local chief of station, a dubious honour and one that didn't bode well for a happy outcome. The house had been ruthlessly turned over and Dad had watched in agony as barrel after barrel of his precious mash was poured into the bath and disappeared down the plug-hole. The still was taken away, although Dad was reunited with it a few days later when, in a bizarre piece of public service programming, he was paraded on Libyan television and asked to give a demonstration of how to make moonshine.

Over the next week, my sister and I were ferried around between different friends' houses before being flown back to the UK in the company of two burly oil workers. We didn't see Mum or Dad again for three months. Dad spent most of those in jail. He eventually skipped the country on a fake passport while out on bail and pitched up on my grandparents' doorstep in Dalgety Bay in late June. Mum followed a week later, having spent her remaining days in Tripoli in hiding, hardly daring to breathe until her Alitalia flight had crossed the coastline out into the Mediterranean en route to Italy.

We never saw Libya again.