Low life
On the seamy side
Jeffrey Bernard
0 n warm and sunny mornings I some- times leave this flat earlier than usual, walk through the market and then up to the Bar Italia in Frith Street to sit outside at a table on the pavement. A handful of us kibitz until we go about our various businesses. Usually there are Alfie the bookmaker, Bernie a man of property, Tony Polledri the owner of the bar and a few with walk- on parts like Jo Jo, a Maltese odd-job man who is incoherent whether drunk or sober. Hovering in the wings is Ali, an alcoholic Indian layabout who is thankfully speech- less. The noise of passing motorbikes is almost unbearable and the fumes made by the general traffic sometimes make me long to be on the Berkshire Downs again in my old farmhouse.
The script we have for this scene is pretty limited but I like to listen to it and watch the players. There is banter, of course, and there is racing to discuss, and finance and women to conjecture about. Everyone drinks a lot of very strong coffee, while I order glasses of orange which I then fortify from the hip flask Deborah gave me for my birthday. We also reminisce about Soho as it once was in the days of 'Italian' Albert Dimes and Jack 'Spot' Comer. In those days, Alfie said, nearly everybody pleaded guilty when they were taken to court because then it was thought that the police didn't lie. Well, they all know differently now. All of this may strike the majority of Spectator readers as being somewhat seamy and trivial but it is no worse for being triv- ial and it is better than sitting in the Patis- serie Valerie surrounded by a mass of Guardian readers.
On one side of the Bar Italia Tony owns a laundry and dry-cleaners and on the other side he has a barber's shop and hair-
dresser's run by a pleasant young woman who pampers me from time to time by shampooing my hair. In the old days, when the cheapest luxury was a shave and hot towels in the barber's shops, there were some good card schools. Games of gin rummy were almost obligatory after you had been refreshed by 'Turin' Aldo. But I witnessed a couple of very nasty fights in his shop. And the Portuguese girls in the laundry iron a mean shirt.
I suppose that what I like about this scene is that it is so reminiscent of Soho in the Fifties. Yesterday I heard that Jo Jo was recently painting the outside of a house in Greek Street when he fell off his ladder, drunk of course, hit the pavement with a terrible crash and sent his can of paint all over a Rolls Royce. He is resilient to say the least and he can walk away from such accidents without getting nicked. He was also working in a café trying to repair a defunct dumb waiter and he fell head-first down the shaft. Well, does anything ever happen to you? He had a bath recently too.
At 11 o'clock I stagger one block to my office, which by comparison to the Bar Italia is as quiet as a seaside boarding- house. Yesterday, though, there was a man sitting at my table who began to whistle. It is a noise I don't like and it grated as much as the sight of a man combing his hair at the bar. I think whistling should be an out- door activity as practised by errand boys and milkmen some 40-odd years ago. Worst of all is tuneless whistling. No, it isn't. I once saw a man cutting his nails sit- ting at a bar. That was rock bottom. I also once watched a man picking his nose in a bar. I asked him, 'Did you pick a winner?' He didn't get it. He must have been mind- less. Maybe I am too to go into these places.
Previous page
