Low life
Publicans' holiday
Jeffrey Bernard
There's a splendid woman who is the landlady of a good pub in Islington and who always has something a little odd to tell me when I drop in to see her. Last night she told me that she had recently been on a trip to Florida with 200 publi-
cans. I can't think of anything more awful at the moment. Pass the bottle. Yes, they took over an aeroplane for themselves. They told the airline to stock up with plenty of extra booze, which they did, and in spite of that the aircraft was dry one and a half hours before it landed at Miami. Then they all stayed in the same hotel. Shambles, wouldn't you think? Here we go, here we go, here we go.
But what was remarkable was that they went sea fishing one day and her old dad, a retired publican, hooked a blue marlin twice his own size. He is blind. What an incredible sensation it must have been for him to fight against an unseen strength like that. Take a blind ex-publican from Chapel Street market, well into his sixties, push him out into the Atlantic and you have the real old man and the sea. They asked the old man if he would like the marlin to be stuffed so that he could take it home with him but he said no, he didn't want to pay the excess baggage money. What annoys him most about being blind, it seems, is that he can no longer read the form. His wife, poor thing, has to read it out to him every morning and not long ago he won just over £1,000 with a mere 50p yankee. If he fell down a drain he'd come up holding a fiver.
Anyway, as soon as they got back to London the landlady, Janet, had to throw a wedding party upstairs in the pub. She told me that it went on until 3.30 a.m. I asked her if there was any trouble. (You under- stand that her customers, though domiciled in Islington, do not read the Guardian.) She said,. 'Oh no, my customers are all very kind.' My italics. Then she went on to say, `Funny thing, though. My mum went to a party at the Savoy last month and there was a terrible punch-up.' Well, some of them can throw punches as well as bread rolls, I told her. Then she bought me a drink as she always does. She just takes your glass away and tops it up without saying a word. How I wish that pub and she could be transported to Soho Square.
Then, the next day, I bumped into another face from Islington, dear old Char- he who once had a stall in Berwick Street market. He is very much missed in Soho by some of us. Me anyway. He gave me a tremendous hug, something I don't want from many people, but it was oddly very moving. He isn't embarrassed to show affection. What a strange man he is. He has had only sufficient education to enable him to write out a betting slip, he is an ex-con and tearaway, and yet he has a pretty profound knowledge of and insight into the human condition. On the other hand he was daft enough, when I first met him, to think I was an intellectual because I own a tripewriter. We used to creep off to the Piccadilly Hotel to drink when we got bored with Soho and he'd give me what he considered to be a playful punch in the ribs and say, 'So how's all your intellectual friends then, Jeffrey?' That was only three years ago and he had an awful mistress then. He used to take her to a hotel in Bloomsbury most afternoons, which cost him £35. He also always took a bottle of champagne with him, plus a present for her and a bag of his rather dubious fruit. An expensive hobby, and when you think of the amount of vodka he drank before the bubbly a miracle of medical science too. I must be getting too sentimental in my old age but when I think of the greeting he gave me I feel very touched. Friends are more valu- able even than books. I suppose the awful thing about sentimentality is that it stems from self-pity. Even Hitler liked dogs and children. How very English of him.
Previous page
