Low life
Rocky rides
Jeffrey Bernard
The girl I am dictating this to is about to go to university to read English. I can't think of anything more boring, except for reading physics, than to be force-fed on the likes of Virginia Woolf or even Thomas Hardy.
Once upon a time, I regarded going to Oxbridge as the acme of a young man's life, but then I was still under the influence of A Yank at Oxford, starring Robert Taylor as the all-conquering undergraduate, athletic, handsome and a dab hand at sticking chamber pots on the top of church steeples. I thought it was all punting down the river through the waterlines and scor- ing a century at Lord's in the Varsity match. Work never crossed my mind and, anyway, I wouldn't have had the self-disci- pline to do much of it, left to my own devices. Thinking about it now, I have a hunch that it might be more interesting to read anthropology than Henry James. I don't know of much work more tedious than reviewing a book that one doesn't want to read in the first place, but it is use- ful work and cannot be turned down.
And today could prove to be hard work as I have to entertain an American ex-girl- friend who I first met on a freebie trip up the Norwegian fjords on a luxury cruise liner. She was the only American on the ship without a blue rinse and the only one not so greedy as to queue up for a second breakfast. That sort of thing explains why so many Americans have got excessively fat arses. She said I first came to her attention because I was just about the only passenger to be seen sitting in the ship's bar. She said the same thing again a year later when she cleverly fixed up for us to have four days going up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Memphis, Tennessee, on a paddle- steamer. Before that I stayed in her house just outside Boulder, Colorado, where we had some great screaming matches that must have been heard from one end of the Rockies to the other.
Most of my biggest and best rows have started in the kitchen and not, as you might think, in the bedroom. One day she got quite hysterical when I ground out a cigarette with my heel in the middle of a field and, somewhat over the top, she screamed that I could set the entire state of Colorado on fire. On another occasion, there were screams and tears when I react- ed to being called an English pig because I don't like my bacon to be crispy as all Americans do. In the end, she would drive me into Boulder, deposit me in the bar and leave me there all day until she was ready to collect me in the evening. We only had one row in New Orleans and that was thankfully drowned by the ubiquitous jazz. Looking over the battlefield at Vicksburg I had another row, this one with the woman guide who, like a lot of other Southerners, described it almost as a confederate victo- ry, and it took an Englishman to put her right about one of Ulysses S. Grant's great- est victories. Some Americans are still fighting that civil war, particularly red- necks. Ten years ago, she came to visit me in London. She could barely afford the return fare and I was yet again in the Mid- dlesex Hospital, in and out of comas and suffering from pneumonia. The temporary impotence that caused me annoyed her far more than me not liking her crispy bacon in Boulder, and we ended up having yet another row. And now this morning she phoned me out of the blue and is coming here for a third-rate lunch that would not satisfy a greedy American.
As it is Rory Knight Bruce is here to inspect my flat for the Evening Standard. The sainted Vera has only to have left the premises for five minutes and it is some- how like a flat in which the IRA have thrown a party. When the American lady appears later I shall be able to find out whether or not these walls are scream proof. But she is a good woman and she turned the boredom of that giant mud slick called the Mississippi into something of a private party. It was good for a while to be called a Huckleberry Finn.
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