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. ... (continues)