Young women are drinking more than ever. Emma Pinch meets one who has come through the other side of her addiction

DUCKING the gaze of the puffy-faced stranger in the mirror, Jessica reached for the green bottle of mouthwash and tipped it down her throat; then sagged in relief at the alcohol’s comforting burn.

Entire continents separated her dim, bottle-strewn flat from the spacious, loving home of her childhood in rural Cheshire, but the gulf between the two went far further and deeper than mere miles.

Ten years ago, she had been a hopeful university student. Now, stringy-haired, overweight and sinking five bottles of wine a day, the prospect of even leaving her flat left her in paroxysms of anxiety.

Even now, 30-year-old Jessica, who this month celebrates a year since leaving rehab, struggles to put her finger on why she became an alcoholic.

“We had a nice house in rural Cheshire,” she says. “I had a typical mum and dad, money was not an issue, I had a really good education. I went to music lessons, all kinds of dance, ballet, tap, acting classes, and we would go abroad on holiday. Everything you could possibly ask for, really.”

Over the past year, she has spent hours examining her past for any early signposts to her alcoholism. But the unsettling conclusion she has come to is that alcoholism could happen to just about anyone.

“I did ask mum the other day what I was like as a child,” she says. “She said I never wanted to share anything with them, and I was not always terribly motivated, but that could describe countless youngsters. I was quite bookish and loved going to the cinema, but, again, nothing overtly unusual in that.”

In her teens, she says, she started hanging around with older boys and drinking. But she describes herself as “naughty” rather than wild, managed to complete her A-Levels and take up a place at a university down south, studying foreign languages .

“It was the first time I was completely on my own,” she says. “I remember thinking that everyone else must have been given instructions on how to do all this stuff and I had no clue. I was completely out of my comfort zone, and it was then I really turned to alcohol in a big way.

“I’d drink a lot of wine, moving on to vodka and spirits. Basically, I’d drink until my money ran out or I passed out.”

She decided the seat of the anxiety lay in the city she’d chosen and the course, so she embarked on another subject at a more local university. The place changed, but she hadn’t.

“When I went on nights out with friends, I often wouldn’t remember where I’d been or how I got home when I woke up. It was quite dangerous.

“On one occasion, I got so drunk I didn’t know where I was. I made a reverse charges call home and my dad drove a couple of hundred miles through the night to pick me up from a police station. I wasn’t flavour of the month after that.”

She left university again, and landed a job in the entertainment hospitality industry back in Cheshire.

“There’s lots of alcohol around in hospitality, and you do take advantage of it,” she says. “You’re working anti-social hours and it was quite normal to start drinking at 2am when you finished your shift. I’d still be able to function the next day and paste a smile on my face, but I couldn’t understand why, compared to other people my age who were finishing university, my life was such a disaster.”

Her dependency stepped up a gear in her mid-20s.

“I went through stages where I could keep everything ticking over for a few months at a time, but following the break-up of a relationship my drinking started to get completely out of hand.” Her life was spent at work, now in a banking job, or drinking. She was frequently late or off sick.

“I would wake up anxious and not being able to go in was normal. I clearly remember sitting in work, watching the clock, and counting down the time until I could get back to the only thing that never let me down.”