Growing up in a five-storey house in affluent south Kensington, Eleanor Anstruther enjoyed the privileges that come with being born into the British aristocracy.
Her father was a baronet, descended from a duke, and her weekends were spent riding ponies on the family estate in West Sussex.
The last thing anyone would have expected was for Eleanor’s life to crash to the depths of drug addiction and abject squalor.
And yet, she spent much of her adult life living in squats and ‘self-medicating with every drug there is’.
It was only five years ago that memories of long-repressed sexual abuse resurfaced and she realised what she’d been trying to run away from all those years. ‘I wanted for nothing, materially, and yet I used every substance available, just trying to escape,’ says Eleanor, now 53.
‘Then I saw a photograph of an author in a bath, a glass of wine in her hand, and something about it brought back a memory of our au pair, in a bath, and triggered the most terrible recollections. I remembered being sexually abused by her boyfriend, who lived with her in the basement of our house, and all the pieces of this dreadful puzzle fell into place.
‘Although the picture that formed was absolutely horrific, it meant I was suddenly able to understand why my life turned out as it did.’
Thankfully, this is a story of remarkable redemption. For not only is Eleanor now clean and sober, she is also a successful author and doting mother of 17-year-old twin sons, who has dedicated herself to shielding them from the type of trauma she lived through.
She is speaking out because, she says: ‘Abuse thrives in darkness and silence, so being honest about what happened is a crucial part of healing, for me.’
Having been diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), Eleanor has spent the last few years in therapy coming to terms with her past, even writing about it in her book, A Memoir In 65 Postcards & The Recovery Diaries, which was published last year.
There were times while writing that she felt suicidal.
‘I remember being so worried I might hurt myself that I climbed into the bath – for some reason I felt safe there – and called a friend,’ recalls Eleanor. ‘She was a lifeline. In the grips of CPTSD, it’s hard to believe I’ll ever be able to cope. The symptoms are physical, too. I feel a band of intense pressure around my head and a metallic taste in my mouth.’
But, raised in a family where feelings were rarely talked about, she has never discussed the abuse with her mother, now 94 – her father died 17 years ago, aged 85 – or her siblings.
Eleanor says she ‘doesn’t want to throw my parents under a bus’. She explains, ‘I believe that they did their best, but, whatever your class, if you’re not engaged in your children’s lives then terrible things can happen.’
She also points to the ‘tradition among the upper-classes of disassociating from feelings’, explaining: ‘There was an unconscious desire, in my family, passed down through the generations, to pretend everything was fine, when it really wasn’t. We all colluded in that.
‘How I felt about the things that happened to me never seemed to be important,’ says Eleanor. ‘So I’d take myself away and talk to my cat, my pony and my teddy, instead.’
Eleanor is the daughter of Sir Ian Anstruther, 8th Baronet of Balcaskie and 13th Baronet of Anstruther, and a descendant of the 8th Duke of Argyll. She grew up surrounded by oil paintings of her ancestors and amidst proud discussions about how their lineage could be traced back a thousand years.
She studied at the prestigious Westminster School, where fees start at £44,000 a year, and inherited a substantial trust fund.
Eleanor is the youngest of five children from Sir Ian’s second marriage, to her mother, Susan, an architect. The family spent their summers on a sprawling estate in the South of France. Their Kensington residence, close to the Victoria and Albert Museum, was part of a large estate which had been in the Anstruther family for generations.
Eleanor recalls going to teach English in southern Africa in her late teens and ‘looking out of my little hut in Zimbabwe, and realising it was the first time I’d lived on land that wasn’t ours’.
However, in many other respects, Eleanor’s childhood was far from the traditional upbringing found in most upper-class families.
Her mother, a lifelong Labour voter with a strong social conscience, elected to send her children to local state schools – Eleanor later transferred to Westminster for A-levels – and opened their London home to ‘waifs and strays’, including refugees from central and eastern Europe.
Their father, who preferred a quieter life, spent all his time in Sussex, where the family would join him at weekends.
When Eleanor was a toddler, Susan employed one of the refugees as an au pair. The au pair, in turn, invited her boyfriend to live with her.
Looking back, Eleanor recalls ‘the house too full, my mother too busy, my father rarely there’.
‘As seemed common among my parents’ generation and class, there was emotional poverty, juxtaposed with great material wealth, which was very confusing,’ says Eleanor.
It was against this chaotic backdrop that she was sexually abused by the au pair’s boyfriend when she was five years old.
The memories were so awful that Eleanor suppressed them for decades. She never told her parents what had happened – she’s unsure whether that was through fear or because there were few opportunities for her to confide in them.
‘Something so dark had happened to me, but we were always reminded how ‘lucky’ we were. I didn’t know what to do with all my conflicting emotions, which made me feel sad and ungrateful.’
The au pair was abusive too. Eleanor recalls the terrifying moment she held her out of a fifth-floor window at the family home and, looking down at the black iron spikes below, threatened to drop her. When Eleanor told her mother about the incident, she felt unsupported.
And yet, Eleanor is understanding about her mother’s reaction, believing she had no blueprint for providing her children with appropriate nurturing. Likewise her father. His childhood includes an extraordinary story which Eleanor recalls he would relay casually, without emotion.
Sir Ian’s own mother, Enid, had sold him, aged 17, to his childless aunt for £500 (£30,000 today).
The two women fought for custody of him for years, after Enid left home in the grips of postnatal depression when Ian was only two. His mother ultimately won the battle in court but, because she was penniless, she gave up the ‘prize’ in return for money to pay her legal fees.
Both of Eleanor’s parents were educated at boarding schools; her father at Eton.
‘There’s a condition called boarding school syndrome and sufferers learn to cut themselves off, to disassociate from their feelings,’ she says.
‘We’ve all seen The Crown and, while I hate to use the term ‘stiff upper lip’, there is a tradition among the upper-classes of, ‘Stop your nonsense. Get on with it.’ ‘
But the repercussions of bottling things up can be grave indeed.
Eleanor’s abuser moved out of the family home when she was six, but the impact of what he’d done was far-reaching.
A ‘deeply unhappy, isolated’ child, who hated school, aged 13 Eleanor discovered alcohol and marijuana helped her to escape overwhelming sadness and anxiety. By 18, she was well and truly off the rails.
As a post-A-level treat, her father gave her the keys to the family home in France and she invited all her friends, ‘and some who weren’t my friends at all’ to join her there.
‘We drank champagne in the sun and wine on mopeds, and piled dirty plates in bin bags that we left out the back,’ recalls Eleanor. ‘We threw all the sunbeds in the pool. The idiot boys who were not my friends invented a game of shaming anyone who went to bed first by hauling barrels of water up the stairs and tipping them over the sleeping person.
‘The beds were soaked, the mattresses ruined, the water dripped through the ceilings below. We broke everything and left without clearing up or saying sorry.’ Her father didn’t speak to her ‘for many years’ after the incident.
‘I was angry with my friends, and felt my father mustn’t love or care about me,’ Eleanor says. ‘It wasn’t true but, at the time, I felt even more alone in the world.’
Thanks to a substantial trust fund, she was free and, after dropping out of Manchester University, she travelled the world for the next 15 years.
She says she used ‘ecstasy, speed, magic mushrooms and pot’ – heroin and crystal meth came later – and chose to live in squats, even though her trust fund would easily have stretched to renting. ‘I didn’t want anyone to know about my aristocratic background,’ she recalls. ‘Living in a squat, no one asks about those things.’
Aged 24, she inherited a large farmhouse near Godalming in Surrey, which she turned into a commune. This Arts and Crafts house is still her home today, from where she speaks to me over Zoom. It is also the place where she wrote her novel, published last week, In Judgement Of Others. Inspired by a friend with bipolar, it explores how mental health issues and addiction are ignored in affluent communities.
But in her 20s, Eleanor filled its outbuildings with people. Others lived in yurts, teepees and trucks in the grounds.
She would go whole years without contacting her parents, who didn’t know about their youngest daughter’s risky lifestyle. Possibly worst of all, while living in Australia in her 20s, she had started injecting crystal methamphetamine, a highly addictive man-made stimulant. The high was intense, making her feel ‘energised, superhuman’, but it was quickly followed by psychosis, hallucinations and paranoia.
As we speak, it seems almost impossible to imagine this Home Counties mother-of-two scoring drugs in Sydney’s red light area. ‘I remember sharing needles, in a very seedy room. I could have easily picked up HIV or Hepatitis C, but somehow, mercifully, I didn’t,’ says Eleanor. ‘Nor did I ever overdose, but it was all down to luck, not management.’
It was a Damascene moment 19 years ago, aged 34, that finally led to her recovery.
‘I was in a room full of people in Sydney, all using drugs,’ she says. ‘I suddenly saw it for what it was – tragic and dangerous. I got up and left, threw everything away, flew back to England and never used again.’
By the time she returned to England, she weighed just over 6st. Incredibly, her parents never even remarked on their daughter’s ‘skeletal’ state, something she attributes to the unwritten family code not to probe.
Eleanor married a photographer she had met in Australia, and they committed to settling down, serving eviction notices on the residents in her commune.
After struggling to conceive naturally, the couple began IVF, conceiving her sons, Jacobi and Blake, on the third round.
Her marriage ended when the twins were a year old. After several years alone, Eleanor began a relationship with an old friend, Andrew, now 56. These days she is sober, having realised that she was using alcohol as a socially acceptable way to numb her pain.
Eleanor’s main focus has been to ensure her sons feel emotionally supported in a way she – and so many previous generations of her family – did not.
She says: ‘They’ve always known they can talk to me about anything. I’d encourage them to sit and cry and really feel their emotions, with me sitting beside them. As I’ve discovered, if you allow yourself to feel emotions, instead of pushing them down, or numbing them with drugs and alcohol, they do pass.’
Eleanor home educated the boys until they were 11, when they started at Hampshire public school Bedales, first as day pupils, before they chose to board, aged 14.
Although her sons, like her, have enjoyed a gilded life – fees for boarders at Bedales are in excess of £50,000 a year – a loving, nurturing childhood is, Eleanor believes, the greatest privilege she has bestowed upon them.
‘I don’t know a single addict who didn’t experience childhood trauma,’ she says. ‘Everyone who uses ends up either dead, in prison, in psychiatric care – or sober. I thank my lucky stars I was able to choose sober.’
- In Judgement of Others by Eleanor Anstruther is out now.
