Low life
Workload
Jeffrey Bernard
The unemployment figure is quite disgust. ing and now a doctor in the north country says he's discovered a new illness he calls 'fear of unemployment'. How times change. I can remember in my youth being quite terrified of work. Of course it was sometimes necessary when days weren't palmy and when bumming around in Soho came to a standstill but I can remember going to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid work. In fact the avoidance of work consumed more energy than work itself and my hands have been shaking with nervous anticipation since I left school and home at the age of 16. Looking back, the economics of those days were really rather odd. The first place I had was a bedsitter in Queensgate which cost £3 a week. This entailed borrowing — we called it borrowing anyway — 2s 6d from 24 people every Friday while keeping my fingers crossed in the hope that they'd forgotten the previous Friday. When all else failed I was forced into getting a job humping planks in a timber yard just off Greek Street. That paid £2. 15s a week which still didn't cover the rent but provided a few halves of bitter in the Pillars of Hercules which was placed conveniently next door. A half of bitter was 81/2d and I seem to remember that a fairly revolting risotto in a cafe around the corner was 2s. My ambition then was to become a copywriter since I knew one who earned the princely sum of £20 a week. A thousand a year. Really rolling.
As time went by I progressed to navvying which paid about 4s 6d an hour and occasionally the rent problem was solved by the moonlight flit. You had to travel light for that. The chap I frequently shared bedsitters with and I moved about with a portable gramophone, one saucepan, a frying pan and a carrier bag full of shirts. And still that £20 a week was like a distant Everest. At our lowest ebb we sat up all night in the Strand Corner House sustained by eating the strips from methedrine inhalers. What with that and smoking I must have been a physical wreck and how on earth I managed to take to boxing for a while I'll never know. That started in a booth in a fairground in Tottenham and paid lOs for three three-minute rounds. It was short, sharp and painful. Not that being whacked hurt much at the time but the bursting lungs and leaden arms and legs were rather depressing. The last pro flight I had was a four-rounder at Slough Town Hall. That paid £5. Out of that there came the return fare to that ghastly town, lOs for a second — I wasn't upright long enough to need or use him — plus 10 per cent for my manager. I had just enough to go halves on a bottle of gin which was shared on the train home with the loser of the 'top of the bill'. And so endeth the first lesson.
I suppose the first bread-and-butter job I had which wasn't too unpleasant was being a stagehand. That paid about 12s for a show, and it was boxing that got me the sack from the first theatre I worked in. I phoned the stage carpenter to tell him I'd got flu and went to Harringay to see Dick Richardson flight Ezzard Charles the `Cincinatti Cobra'. Cobra my arse. They were both disqualified for 'not trying'. Still, it was nice to get the sack. It always played on what little there was of my conscience to jack a job in but the sack somehow justified a few more weeks in the Yorkminster punctuated by the token visit to the labour exchange.
Then in 1957, in spite of the growing conviction that the world owed me a living, I made a heroic effort to pull myself together and got a job at the Old Vic which I held down for the eternity of two years. That paid about £12 and you could very nearly live on that if you stuck to beer and 2s each way doubles. After that I started to earn a little more and it's been fiscal disaster ever since. The economic rot can be blamed fairly and squarely on the discovery of taxis, whisky and the high outlay then required to offer any hope of sexual intercourse. Now, all these years later, I'm having an unsolicited correspondence with the Lord Chancellor's Department. I feel I almost know him. The thing is, as I've written before, I'd seriously consider 'dropping out' if it wasn't for the lack of a few home comforts on a park bench. Meanwhile a rather limp hustle for work continues in the hope that it materialises before this quarter's bills arrive.
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