Low life
Trickster
Jeffrey Bernard
After obituaries it's the latest wills column in The Times that catches my eye in the mornings. It's not that I'm expecting a legacy but, like the child looking in to a sweetshop window, I'm fascinated "&y the amounts of money I'm never ever going to sink my teeth into. Incidentally, the sums left by seaside resident widows and rural spinsters seem only to be surpassed by East Anglian farmers. Presumably they kill off so many husbands, families and pigs that they can't hope to get through what they've got. But what's got me thinking about wills at the moment is one that I saw last week. It said that a Lancashire chemist by the name of Arthur Skelton had left something in the region of £110,000 and if it was the Arthur Skelton I knew then I want to know where the hell my dividend is.
But it just can't be. We all knew my Arthur Skelton as 'The Pox Doctor's Clerk' and that's how you must have known him if you were bumming around in the Charlotte Street area some twenty five years ago. I don't think that Arthur did actually ever render clerical assistance to a genitourinary specialist but he had one of those unfortunate faces that made you think he might have if you happened ever to think about that sort of thing in the first place. He was refined/shabby which made him look as though he might have pushed a modest pen, but, he was also grubby so that you wondered where on earth he might be doing it, added to which he had the washed-out eyes of a man who was up to here in it. No, he could never have accumulated £110,000 although I know he dabbled in abortion.
Anyway, my Arthur, the Charlotte Street one, was a remarkable man. When he first arrived in the Soho area he'd just been released from prison having served a three month sentence for an act of gross indecency committed on Blackpool beach on an August Bank Holiday. He was something of a showman in his modest way you see. The trouble though with Arthur was that his sights were always set so terribly low. As a confidence trickster he lacked one vital thing — self-confidence. He couldn't see beyond the next ten shillings because, like a lotiof bums, money didn't really suit him. I doubt very much whether he could stand the terrific pressures of life at the bottom today but that's by the by. What I meant to tell you about was the Middlesex Hospital incident which just about summed Arthur up and which makes me sure that the one mentioned in The Times's wills must have been yet another Arthur.
I'm going back a bit now to the days when it was sometimes necessary to work and Arthur was showing willing for a week doing a spot of portering at the Middlesex. Wheeling food trolleys and corpses about, I suppose. Anyway, during the week he worked there he made a number of spectacular if bizarre appointments with people he hoped to extract trivial sums from. For this purpose Arthur 'borrowed' a green' surgeon's gown, mask and boots — all the trimmings in fact and then arranged with his would-be creditors that they should Ineet him at a side entrance of the hospital. Faced by the extraordinary Arthur these people would be told, 'Look, can you let ine have ten bob immediately? I'm in the mid. die of performing a very important brain operation and I've only got a moment. 11 pay you back tonight in the Black Horse.' A truly amazing bit of nonsense and one that raises a few interesting points as to the gullibility of some folk and the richness a a man's mad fantasy life. In the first place I'm fascinated by the word 'important' as applied to a brain operation. Can there possibly be such a thing as an unimportant brain operation? SecondlY does one pause during a brain operation for tea or a smoke, never mind an attempt borrow money? Thirdly, what manner n' brain surgeon needs a paltry ten shillings? It seems that neither the incredible Arthur nOr his stupid victims questioned such matters. Of course, had Arthur moved on to take up residence in some North Country /10spital or even abroad in an American hospital, I suppose he just might have accumulated enough ten bobs to be the Arthur Skelton who left £110,000 according to The Times. In that happy event I think that at least I might be mentioned in someone's will. After all, I was very good t° Arthur. I bought him cups of tea when .11e was skint, but I drew the line at allowing hull to practise on me.
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