Laura Davis speaks to a mother whose twin sons became addicted to heroin

THERE are three photographs in Elizabeth Burton-Phillips’s family album that together sum up her moving story.

One shows her as a new mother holding her twin boys, a wide smile showing her delight in these two warm babies whose whole lives stretch out in front of them.

The second is of her son Simon Mills, then in his early 20s, his face gaunt and his hair greasy, losing himself to the ravishes of heroin.

When Elizabeth saw him looking like this on the street, she thought he was a stranger, the kind of man you would cross the road to avoid.

Happily, on the third picture, Simon has filled out and is smartly dressed in a suit and tie, but there is still something very wrong with the image.

The young man stands with his arms around his mother and step father, Tony, but there is no sign of the face, identical to his, of his brother Nicholas.

That is because, in the middle of the night on February 18, 2004, there was a knock at the door – two police officers announcing his death, suicide due to drug addiction.

“I had been preparing myself for the fact that both of my sons would die and making myself face that fact every day – heroin does and can kill,” remembers Elizabeth, who lived in Liverpool during the late ’60s and early ’70s.

“When those two policemen knocked on the door and told me Nicholas had died I went through this complete dual emotion of ‘what about Simon?’ Hearing one son’s dead and the other one’s alive, I felt grief and relief at the same time.

“I will never forget eventually being able to get hold of Simon and hearing him crying down the phone ‘Mum, my brother’s hanged himself because of drugs’.”

Nicholas’s suicide, at the age of 27, was the final tragedy in 14 years of drug taking, from the occasional puff of marjuana at 13 to eventually injecting heroin.

Yet he did not come from a deprived background, nor was he a victim of neglect. His family was typically middle-class – his mother a teacher – and the twins had remained close to their father after their parents’ divorce and got on well with their stepfather.

The message that Elizabeth, 56, has since dedicated her life to promoting is that children from all backgrounds can become addicts. She has written a book – Mum, Can You Lend Me Twenty Quid? – and gives talks to parents in similar situations.

“It only takes one of them to say ‘Let’s go and by a packet of fags’ or ‘We know somebody who can get hold of some pot’ and it starts as a bit of a reckless giggle, and before you know where you are it’s getting out of control because it goes hand-in-hand with secrecy,” explains Elizabeth, who taught at St John’s Secondary School in the Scotland Road area of Liverpool and married her first husband in the Metropolitan Cathedral.

Simon and Nicholas hid their drug use so well that it wasn’t until they were in sixth form that their parents became aware of it, called into the headteacher’s office to discuss their sons’ behaviour.

“I remember saying ‘Surely not, I’m a teacher, I’m a mother, I know my children well, they wouldn’t deceive me’ but quite simply they had,” recalls Elizabeth. “I’m not suggesting it was daily use but it was enough to give them a very laid-back attitude and to be disenchanted in their schoolwork. It opened the gate to other drugs.”

When Simon got into trouble with the police and managed to escape a custodial sentence, it triggered the cycle of behaviour that Elizabeth believes is common among parents trying to cope with a child who is an addict. Every time the twins hit rock bottom, she did her best to pull them up and sort them out.

This, she now believes, was actually preventing them from kicking the habit.

“When Simon said ‘Mum I’m a heroin addict’ I thought ‘OK, we can get you another job, we can sort this, I’ll clear the debts and everything will be fine’. It was actually a really foolish mistake because what I was doing was rescuing them from a situation they should have to deal with themselves,” says Elizabeth, who now lives in Berkshire.

“As a mother you’ve got this love in your heart and you’re not going to let them sink. But it’s really, really difficult because the desire has to come from them.

“I would never have publicly broken down, but privately I used to be really upset and it was just awful to see the physical deterioration and the mental control heroin had over them. It was desperately sad and you felt so powerless because you wanted to put it right but you couldn’t.”