How drugs snuffed out Freddy McConnel's brilliant young life - told in his own vividly moving words
by Freddy McConnel, The Daily Mail, September 3, 2011
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Freddy McConnel was a gifted and charming teenager from a loving family. He should have had the world at his feet. A member of Mensa, he had appeared on Junior Mastermind aged 11.
He had many friends, was popular with girls and had every possible opportunity a young man could want. Yet at 18, the age when he should have been poised on the brink of a glittering university career, he was instead found dead in a London flat on May 28, surrounded by the detritus of heroin use.
Just months earlier he had recorded his intention to inject the drug for the first time, during a visit to his flat by his friend Peaches Geldof.
Last week at the inquest into his death, the coroner recorded a verdict of death by non-dependent drug abuse. His parents say this only deepened their distress because it showed that Freddy had been on the way to kicking his chronic habit.
Freddy had idolised the notorious singer and drug addict Pete Doherty, and Freddy’s father, composer James McConnel, has called on Doherty to ‘take responsibility for the drug culture he has engendered’.
Now Freddy’s parents have decided that their son should speak for himself. They are allowing The Mail on Sunday to publish extracts from his extraordinary journals.
They have been pieced together by Freddy’s mother Annie Tempest, a cartoonist, from five notebooks he wrote between the ages of 14 and 18. Many entries were written on scraps of paper that he tucked inside the diary’s pages.
They offer a profoundly shocking account of the drug culture endemic among sections of the young.
Daisy McConnel, Freddy’s 16-year-old sister, says: ‘People who worship those who glorify drug use will, I hope, see this and realise that it is not “glamorous” but a constant struggle that tears lives apart and has a huge impact on close friends and relatives.
'Growing up with an addict is hell. I hope he’ll be heard clearly and ensure that his death will result in the recovery of many in a similar position.’I was born Freddy James McConnel on September 26, 1992, in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, King’s Lynn. My parents, Annie Tempest and James McConnel, had moved to Norfolk from London not ten months before I was born and were living in a little village outside King’s Lynn.
I have been told that I was everything one could want in a baby: cute, quiet – by which I mean that I wasn’t one of those pestilential little tykes that won’t stop crying – and that I started walking and talking very early. I remember taking great joy at reciting the ‘To be or not to be?’ monologue whenever I got the chance from the age of three.
My father, at that time, was working primarily on writing musicals. My mother was rising to fame with her renowned cartoon strip Tottering-By-Gently.
My sister came along on December 5, 1994, and, as per usual with these cases, diverted my parents’ already sparse attention for the most part on to her.
I suppose I had a normal upper middle-class upbringing. I was ‘diagnosed’, as I like to put it, as a ‘gifted’ child and my mother always expected me to achieve accordingly. This was not a huge problem in earlier years; I even enjoyed the idea that I was abnormally intelligent. I would, however, come to see it as a hateful affliction and an unwelcome burden as my life progressed.
At the age of, well whatever age children start primary school, I did so, at the local state primary school. Being a state school, naturally I experienced, for the first and last time in my life, wonders such as the packed lunch and the lollipop lady and it was at this school that I met my first ‘Best Friend’.
William [not his real name] was on my intellectual level and just as mischievous as I was – a recipe for disaster. We did all the usual things that children do – build Lego castles and run around outside in the sun – but I always seemed to need something more.
I remember very clearly at Christmas when a man dressed as Father Christmas came to give us all presents. When I was handed mine – a box of colouring crayons – I felt a great deal worse than when I’d had no present at all. My point being that nothing was ever good enough: I needed more.
At the age of six, I was asked to leave Brisley Primary School due to my aptitude for making trouble. This was, I think, the first big sign of things to come.
At seven, I was accepted into Gresham’s Preparatory School, a year above my own age group due to my ‘excellent potential’. Before I knew it I was head of the class.
I coasted through my time at prep school – academically that is – on common sense and intelligence alone without doing a scrap of actual work.
It was here that I started employing my ‘class clown’ tactic so as to prevent people from disliking the real me; you see, if they disliked the front or ‘mask’ that I put on, it didn’t matter much because, in my mind, they weren’t opposed to me, they were opposed to my alter ego, the flippant and awkward little boy who not many openly disliked but no one liked to get too close to. I went through patches of getting close to people but never really followed up, never made a real effort.
The girls were all quite fond of me, I was that cute little oddball who could be really quite charming. I quite liked the headmaster’s daughter and on Valentine’s Day, I sent her a single, long-stemmed red rose. Afterwards I remember feeling strangely happy.
I suppose I felt grown up. It was nice to know that I had done something that, while making her happy, would completely throw her and be a strange surprise – what do you know, the weirdo has a heart.
I like to be unpredictable. I think the all-consuming fear of being normal was damn near running my life.
It was about this time, at the age of nine or so, that we took a family holiday to France where my desire for something ‘more’ took its first turn in the direction of illicit substances.
We were renting a villa with another family. Their son and I took a walk to the local village and, in the shop, thought it would be fun to buy a lighter. The other boy started kicking a cigarette butt on the ground.
I thought it a shame to waste it so I picked it up along with a few more and headed behind a tree and there smoked my first cigarette. I coughed and choked but I did not care.
This was new. This was exciting and for about ten minutes I was fine, but then after the initial thrill had started wearing off, I set out in search of more excitement. After the cigarette, I wanted something new.
I had enjoyed it and I had always associated cigarettes with alcohol, so why not try that? Was I even then beginning to lose my footing on the slippery slope that lay before me?
I don’t know, but this was certainly not a good sign. My first drinking binge came at the age of nine. It was our au pair’s birthday party. The fridge at home was stacked with beers and Bacardi Breezers and once the adults’
dinner had started, I began taking drinks from the fridge and running through the outbuildings to the other garden where I would knock the bottle caps off on a rock and pour them down my gullet as fast as I could.
This continued throughout the evening until the dinner was over and my parents found me barely conscious, lying in the grass under the stars and feeling terribly ill.
I loved the sheer rebelliousness of it all. It simply was not done, nine- year-olds did not enjoy the occasional solitary drinking binge if they were ‘normal’. Mission accomplished, as far as I was concerned.
At 11, I was selected to audition for Junior Mastermind by Mensa – the high IQ society – and chose the life and works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as my specialist subject.
I sailed through the preliminary auditions and found myself at the BBC on the television set for the show. I remember sitting in The Chair having won the specialist subject round and being asked by John Humphrys: ‘What Australian instrument is made with a large tube of wood and creates a low frequency humming noise?’
I said ‘Pass’ after racking my memory and no sooner had I done so than I remembered the answer. I recall a feeling of embarrassment and disappointment equal to none in that instant. I subsequently did the same thing with two more questions, resulting in my losing the lead and finishing third. Being caught off guard cost me my pride.
At 13, I came to the end of prep school and sat Common Entrance exams. I passed with flying colours, of course. I was accepted into Gresham’s Senior School and thus began the dwindling of my academic prowess. I found, to my horror, that I could no longer get by on pure intuition and that if I wanted to succeed to the level I had been doing, I would have to actually do some work, which I considered to be a violation of my deepest principles.
My marks started to drop and I started to develop quite an attitude towards my family. By this point the ‘class clown’ had gone and been replaced by a defiant rebel who gave a flying f*** neither about his academic career nor his family life.
I started to tire of the bubble of country life and wanted to broaden my horizons; I had become friends with a couple of boys from Harrow School who invited me to spend a weekend with them and their friends in London. This was my first taste of fun. This was what life was about.
I remember sitting in a shisha [hookah pipe] bar in Knightsbridge with about seven other people having a drink when I was, for the first time, offered drugs – pills, to be more specific. It didn’t even cross my mind to say no. I took three pills that night and I remember fondly even now stopping dead in my tracks in the middle of Hyde Park, as we were on our way to another bar, to write a poem. The people I was with thought me mad.
It was on one of these weekends that I found myself at a flat belonging to a girl I’d just met, along with a friend of mine and another girl.
I woke the next morning in bed, naked with one of the girls, having lost my virginity the night before but not remembering a thing.
I had champagne and cereal for breakfast and left the flat, never to see her again. I was experiencing that unpredictable rush I’d been looking for. Not long afterwards I was walking down Norwich High Street with my best friend at the time, Geoff [not his real name], when I saw a small balloon of what I recognised to be some form of powdered drug lying on the ground. I took it to my dealer who told me I had found £150 worth of top-grade heroin.
[Freddy’s father says he does not know how he had a drug dealer at such a young age, but it is clear Freddy by this time was already involved in the local drug scene.] I sold half of it to him and Geoff and I decided to smoke the rest ourselves. We took it back to my house and I invited a few friends round for the night and when we were all fairly tipsy I decided to reveal to my friends that we had some heroin. They all sat around us in the kitchen as Geoff and I smoked it.
My good friend Kate dared to have a puff on the foil away from prying eyes – obviously that wasn’t enough to get an effect, she just did it for the forbidden factor.
Geoff and I threw up later that night – as is usual when the body is not accustomed to heroin – but we both thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I loved this way of life. That was my first fateful encounter with the drug that would rule my life.
[Freddy’s parents separated in June 2006. Both stayed in Norfolk.] Shortly after this, my school and home life became totally unmanageable. I became angry because I was so confused as to what my life meant – nothing, it seemed at the time. It all came down to one night where I was so scared, trapped in my own mind, that I cut my wrists. Not enough to be called a real ‘suicide attempt’ but badly enough.
One of the teachers saw my blood-soaked sleeve and I was suspended from school.
[Freddy’s parents later removed him from the school.] That night I remember sitting in Dad’s car and him saying to me: ‘If you don’t clean up your act, we’re going to send you to brat camp and you will f****** hate it there.’
I didn’t ‘clean up my act’. They sent me. I f****** hated it there. They were sending me to SageWalk, a ‘wilderness correctional institute’ in Oregon, USA. I thought that I should at least have a little fun before I went.
[In May 2007, Freddy was 14.]
I told Dad that I was going to have a last dinner with a friend of mine in Norwich but hopped on a train to London. I had no money. I had turned off my phone so that the police couldn’t trace it. I went to Hyde Park, the place I associated most with my London friends and I saw, sitting by the entrance, a girl I had met on a night out weeks before.
We had mutual friends and, before I knew it, I was surrounded by all of my London friends and leagues of new people.
We drank, took drugs and, having come to London with no cash, I was surprised to find myself spending the night in a £3 million house in Belgravia with six other people, all slightly older than me – 15 or 16 maybe. I felt that I had definitely found my life’s calling.
The next day the police found me in Harrow School woods where we had gone to drink and smoke weed and take pills. I was driven back to Norfolk that night. My fun was over, now the pain.
[Freddy was in America from May to July 2007.] I arrived at the SageWalk office scared out of my wits. I was stripped of my belongings and clothes and given a bright orange uniform similar to those worn in prison. I was handcuffed, blindfolded and thrust into the back of an SUV for a two-hour drive into the Oregon desert where, with a large, heavy rucksack containing a sleeping bag, rice, lentils and farina (a sort of carbo¬hydrate gloop), a small tarpaulin, orange clothes and hiking boots, I was left in the ‘care’ of two of the hillbillies who accompanied us.
I at once refused to do anything they said and to my horror received a slap to the face. I told them that that was illegal but they ignored me and, as I further protested, one of them pushed me and I fell face- first to the ground, cutting my face and starting to bleed. I recall shrieking amid tears of anguish for my dad to save me but it was to no avail.
About a week into my stay, we were backpacking and there was a small rock face, maybe 10ft high, that we had to climb with our backpacks on. We had already hiked about five miles that day and I was feeling faint.
Halfway up, I lost consciousness for a second, or just lost my footing, and fell 5ft on to a rock. I landed back first and experienced an excruciating pain.
When I put my hand to my back to inspect the damage I felt a hot, thick trickle of blood. I asked for a doctor but received instead a kick to the ribs and an order to keep on hiking. The next break wasn’t for another mile-and-a-half. I have since seen doctors and had X-rays and it seems that it is a permanent injury. This makes me feel extremely bitter and upset.
There were no phones so I couldn’t talk to my parents and the letters were checked before we sent them so I couldn’t tell them what was happening.
I delayed telling my parents even after I was let out because there is a policy that if the child misbehaves within two years, they can be sent back for free.
The brutality continued for two months until I was set free. It was like being born again but I carried a huge amount of resentment.
[A spokesman for Aspen Education, which owns SageWalk Wilderness School declined to comment on Freddy’s claims that he was slapped, shoved and kicked, resulting in bleeding wounds and a permanent back injury during his two-month stay.] I had asked my parents for an escape but they had not listened. They had sat by while I had endured untold physical and emotional pain.
I recall one week there when I was so overrun with emotion that something snapped and I didn’t speak for four or five days. I couldn’t. I felt so completely void. I lived in fear and so was relatively well-behaved as far as my parents could see for a few months after I got back, but then I discovered mephedrone [a drug with effects similar to amphetamines and ecstasy, made illegal in 2010].
My ‘friend’ was a biochemist and had synthesised a new CNS [central nervous system] stimulant that had similar effects to MDMA [ecstasy] but with less neurotoxicity. [Freddy’s father believes the biochemist was a young university researcher but says it is a mystery how he and Freddy became friends.] It was bliss. I was able to get it for 50p a gram and sometimes went through 30 grams a week.
After a year-and-a-half of incessant drug-taking and stimulant binges, a friend hooked me up with a few Hoffman 2000 [a ‘brand’ of LSD] tabs of LSD and I did them with a friend while also using mephedrone.
The result was that every time I used mephedrone after that, I started tripping again which scared me s***less. I refused to stop using mephedrone and I eventually started having psychotic episodes caused by staying awake up to five nights in a row.
This led to a sort of ultimatum where the men in white coats came to the house to decide on what to do to me [This was September 2008.] I had just awoken from sleeping after a heavy binge and when I found the men in the living room I went berserk, begged my parents not to send me anywhere and told them that I was fine. I even showed my dad as I flushed most of my drugs – about 20 grams – down the loo.
The men in white coats decided to section me under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act 1973 and take me to the Priory, Chelmsford. Before I left I rushed up to my room and bombed [ingested] a huge amount of mephedrone in a Rizla along with three or four Valium and I pocketed the rest of the Valium and set off on the drive to Essex.
[Freddy was in the Priory from September to December 2008. He was now 16.] I popped the other four or five Valiums in a service station on the way and arrived at the beginning of a comedown. I was in a monumental mess that night and they had to give me an extra two clonazepam [a drug used to treat anxiety] tablets to calm me down.
As soon as I woke the next morning and went down to breakfast I struck up a friendship with an anorexic girl called Jane [not her real name].
She was the sweetest, prettiest little thing I had ever seen and it soon became more than a friendship. Since relationships were banned and there was a ‘no physical contact’ rule, we’d pass little notes to each other. We felt like toddlers, scared of being caught in petty wrongdoing. We used to sneak kisses behind the piano – it felt like I was stealing moments out of somebody else’s life.
For a short while, I was something close to happy. What comes up though must invariably come down, and the relationship quickly became co-dependent. Our progress in recovery – although I was still smuggling in and using drugs – depended entirely on how much time we’d been able to spend together that week or on if we’d been caught together.
Soon after I left the Priory, we broke up, fairly amicably, which made it all the more difficult. Broken-hearted and no more recovered than when I was admitted, I resumed my old ways.
[Freddy then lived with his father in Norfolk from December 2008 until September 2009. A return to school to study for A-levels ended when a drugs test revealed traces of opiates in Freddy’s urine.] Toward the end of my 16th year, after I had cleaned my act up somewhat, I moved to London to be closer to the music scene so I could play gigs. Things went south very quickly. I was drinking every day and soon stopped turning up to the music college I was supposed to attend.
[Freddy began a course in September 2009 but left in December 2009.] If I did go, however, I would down a small bottle of whisky at about 8am before I went. In those months, I managed to leave the house occasionally to go to or play gigs but I was essentially a shut-in.
It was shortly after Christmas [2009] that I rediscovered heroin, the answer, it seemed, to all my problems. I was sociable again (for a while anyway) and I was no longer depressed – if I had a couple of grams in my pocket I felt complete, whole.
The goods did not outweigh the bads for long. Before long I was stealing from my dad to get a fix and when I ran out, I almost killed myself due to the withdrawals.
My housemates [Freddy was living in a flat in Fulham] caught wind of it and asked me to move out, so now I was back with my dad, making weekly trips back to London to score more skag [heroin].
I would travel four hours there and four hours back, sometimes in withdrawal, to score 3½ grams to get me through the week. I tired of the routine after a while and began using only enough to stave off withdrawals. The turning point came when there was a family holiday to Portugal coming up and it was the first week that I had too little money for enough brown [heroin] to last me the week. I broke down. The plan to come to rehab in South Africa materialised and a week later, after having replenished my stock of smack, I took my last-ever hit and boarded the plane.
Rehab is ever-present in glossy gossip mags, when the latest celebrity loser gets busted for drink- driving or a troubled musician goes one step too far, but it seems to me that most people remain all too blissfully ignorant of what goes on inside these places.
I was admitted to a ‘treatment centre’ in South Africa on July 27, 2010, with a fairly rose-tinted picture of what I thought the coming months would hold. As soon as I drew up in the car park I was seized by a sense of foreboding not helped by the fact that I was withdrawing from heroin.
Where were all the rock stars? Where was the Jacuzzi? I was shown to a tiny room with two single beds, given 2mg of subutex (to help with the withdrawals) and told to come and find someone when I was in better shape.
I was sharing the room with a detoxing alcoholic in his 50s who would NOT stop grunting and moaning. In the space of ten minutes all of my preconceptions had been shattered and I was panicking.
I still held some hope that certain aspects would be as I had imagined until, on my second or third day, I found myself sitting in a group session, being told to ‘f*** off’ by my councillor. I made an error in judgment at this point. All I could think was: ‘I bet Lindsay Lohan doesn’t have to put up with this s*** in rehab.’
I said: ‘You can’t tell me to f*** off.’ She went on to explain that she could, had done and would continue to if I didn’t start ‘working the programme’. So much for my ‘five-star hotel with en-suite shrink’ theory. The days rolled on and I began to see rehab as a sort of boarding school for junkies but instead of lessons we had groups and instead of sports matches we had NA [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings. We even had our equivalent to a school minibus – the ‘loony wagon’ as I liked to call it.
I was surprised how little of being in rehab was about quitting drugs; group consisted of people asking me what emotion I was feeling and then analysing and dissecting whatever I said to such an extent that it made my head spin. Amid all of the ‘discovering who I was’ and ‘accepting my feelings’ I had the substantial task of socialising with the other patients; being a mere 17-year-old in a centre predominantly comprised of middle-aged, Porsche-driving millionaire businessmen presented a tough challenge. I ended up, for the most part, sitting in the corner strumming away on my guitar while they amused themselves with thrilling talk of the Dow Jones Index.
There were a couple of times in the succeeding month or two when I tried, to no avail, to make good my escape by begging my counsellor and using the art of manipulation to sow doubt as to whether I needed to be there.
I started to get ruthlessly ripped apart in groups and one-on-one sessions by my counsellor; it was reminiscent of an enemy prisoner being broken down and interrogated in wartime; excuse my melodramatic analogy.
‘Addiction is not about drugs,’ I was told. ‘Drugs are merely a symptom of a mental illness.’ To this end my entire life was dissected in the search for the ‘underlying issues and causes’, from my parents’ divorce to childhood tantrums to my fear of life itself and much else besides.
I didn’t quite see how all of this ruthless soul-searching would stop me wanting to use drugs but I went with it and gradually started to redevelop and rediscover a – to use a recovery cliche – ‘sense of self’. Much to my surprise I started smiling again – shock horror. I was far too f***** up and hardcore to be doing with such things.
There were times that I felt something not dissimilar to happiness, uncharted territory and rather uncomfortable, I must say.
While in South Africa I still had it in my mind that I was going to use [drugs] again. I didn’t know when, where or with who, but I knew. When I got back to England I went straight into a halfway house in London [in December 2010].
‘I didn’t expect to use so soon but as soon as I got the idea in my mind, I was f*****. I spent the first few days in the halfway house in their daycare facility which I found boring and tedious with minimal helpful input. After my three days of daycare, I had a free day to go and hand out CVs. I had decided to go to see my dealer and get a few grams of heroin.
I picked up [the drugs] and took the train back to London where I met someone else in my halfway house who had relapsed earlier that day. We went to the Starbucks’ dis¬abled toilets with some foil and started what was to be a huge mess.
The rest of the night is hazy but evidently we turned up to the halfway house f*****. The next day they asked me to give them the rest of my heroin but I only gave them one of the two bags, so on the train back to Norfolk, where I was sent home for three days, I was doing huge lines in the bathroom.
I passed out when I reached Norwich station and missed my connecting train. My dad had to get me a taxi. I know that sounds like a small thing but the guilt and shame I felt and feel at this is huge.
Innumerable times, Dad has had to bail me out by getting me taxis when I’ve been stranded. This was doubly striking as I felt the shame even as I was high, which, with heroin, in my experience, is highly unusual. I got back to my dad’s house, f***** out of my mind, and for the next two days I did manual labour (raking leaves) during the day and used [drugs] a lot at night.
I felt empty even when high and after those two days I handed my remaining drugs to my dad and made the decision to end that horrible way of life.
That relapse, if I am to derive a positive from it, has shown me that all using holds for me is misery and destruction, shame and desperation. I am realising, and have been over the past two weeks, that I will never be able to use normally – whatever that means – and that if I pick up, my life will become miserable extremely quickly.
I know this but I’d like to do some more work cementing that point of powerlessness, which is one of the few things I didn’t work on in South Africa.
I went back to London for a couple of days after my relapse so I could be reassessed by my halfway house to see if and when they’d let me back. They recommended I come here to the Clifton Clinic [Freddy wrote most of his final diary entries here] for two weeks before going back, so here I am.
While I’m here I intend to reiterate my powerlessness and work on being able to trust people and realise that my way is, more often than not, the way that will eventually lead me to my grave.
I need help with this as history dictates I can’t do it alone, I am desperate and at the end of my tether. I want my f****** life back.
[Freddy returned to the halfway house and was then moved to a different facility, where he spent two months before leaving on February 21, 2011. What follows is a rare dated entry from his diary.]
28th February [2011] The heroin has reached my stomach and I have been sick. Peaches [Geldof] is coming over later and I am going to inject for the first time; perhaps I will die. I hope I don’t.
I was smoking it earlier but it no longer gives me freedom or enjoyment such as it did before. I hope it will be different shooting up.
I am growing restless, that’s why I am writing in you, really, to keep myself occupied.
[Annie insists that Peaches was not responsible for her son’s death. ‘I don’t blame her,’ she said. ‘Addiction is a disease, not a moral issue.’] It is a strange thing but I find my thoughts turning to my family and how much I love them, they can never know. I am ashamed, but making a valuable or clean man out of me is proving far more insurmountable a task than I’d previously thought. Music, my family, and by extension, love, are all that keep me going at all.
I have just moved to [a friend’s] flat, it’s lovely, it was less than five minutes before I was smoking skag in the bedroom. I feel lost, a passenger at an empty station.
[Freddy was found dead at the flat in May. He died of a heroin overdose. He was 18.]
* The Mail on Sunday is makinga donation to the charity RAPt
(Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoners trust) to help fund a foundation that is being set up in Freddy’s memory. RAPt helps rehabilitate addicted prisoners.
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