Learning the year's lessons
Jeffrey Bernard
By no stretch of the imagination, liver or wallet can this past year be described as having been a vintage one. There were odd moments when Taki's and my paths met and crossed but, by and large, a shortage of readies, a lack of moral fibre and a surfeit of horses seemingly unable to stay a yard beyond seven furlongs helped to keep me in mY place. And although the place itself Changed geographically I took the gutter With me when I moved to the country at the end of May. But to go back to the beginning, I got off to a terrible start when, on 16 January, I got the sack from the Daily Express. That sMooth-talking, charming man of culture and letters, Sid Jameson, came into the Office one morning like spring sunshine and said something like, `Cor blimey, are you Still ,„ 'ere? Didn't you get my bleedin' note? !mere finished up mate.' They gave me a tinfoil handshake and I cried all the way to Vino. What was fascinating for me was to discover subsequently that I'd got the bullet because Victor Matthews was told that I wrote for Private Eye, an organ that had been battering him over the head for some time. But I expect I've got it all wrong and have been misinformed. After all I wrote a dreadful Saturday column for the paper and they are Nlery decent people deep down. Very deep down. After that, about a week after, I awoke °Ile morning with something far worse than a hangover and that was the realisation that the time had come to work. I looked through the pages of the Sporting Life to .rind a more agreeable alternative, but hurdlers and steeplechasers were running in a completely haywire fashion. Incidentally, 1978 has turned out to have been a real '1(39kmakers' benefit year. The weather 111, ore than anything has made punters look 'origer faced than I've seen them since Psidium won the Derby in 1961 on concrete-like going. Anyway, I ground on relentlessly toward a disastrous Grand National, utterly unable to find a morsel of aPplication, and the only bright spot was a letter from Miles Kington of Punch, who summed it all up with his one sentence note Which simply said, 'Dear Jeffrey, Are you going to write the fucking article or aren't You?' It's for editors like Miles Kington who have a crystal clear awareness of what's ping on out there in the ghostly flats of hacks that I'd lay down my typewriter. could see only one way out of my awful Predicaments — working.and money ones — and I've seen it twice before. When all else fails there's always the country. rin not 9ulte sure how the idea was originally implanted in my head but I've always had the ridiculous idea that close proximity to thatch, honeysuckle, log fires, a squire, duckpond and two or three village idiots leads straight to the happy completion of the best-selling novel of the century. The truth however is a shade nearer an unheatable, tied, falling down cottage owned by a psychopathic farmer and built onthe edge of a village comprised almost entirely of 1930s council houses populated by people very nearly as unfriendly and avaricious as the French.
As you can imagine, this sort of atmosphere can lead away from the typewriter and straight to the local. But this year I think I cracked it. Around and about Lambourn in Berkshire is a very different matter to those rather affected seams of art and letters that ripple through East Anglia. In that part of the world, which I've had a basinful of, you get the left-wing, tweedsuited, knitted-tied nit who's reputed to have been 'something quite important at the BBC'. The wives go in for pottery, home made bread, sunflower seed oil in everything, nude sunbathing and an overpermissive attitude towards their children which results in the occasional dinner guest having to wade through a sea of faeces on the rush matting to get from room to room. But, as I say, the racing mob in Berks are a little better.
Of course they're revolting too, but they earn more housepoints in my book because they do actually have a sense of the absurd. The worst two things about them are their very boring singlemindedness about racehorses and their political attitudes, slightly right of Hitler's. So far, in the second half of the year I've been there, the only rows I've had with my locals have concerned their revolting anti-semitic attitudes or their appalling arrogance in boasting of the fact that 'I haven't read a book for ten years,' or in saying 'Why don't you pop down to Barbados in January for a couple of days to see us?'
The thing that offends me about the offer of some hospitality in the West Indies for a day or two is that it's proffered by people who are completely and utterly out of touch with reality to such an extent, in fact, that they remind me of bailiffs, bank managers and even women. On the other hand it's greatly in their favour that they sometimes give the impression that they've been accidentally dumped in the sticks straight from the West End. That's to say that they have an awareness that there is something over the next hill, which is unlike the countryman born and bred who seems to think that life ends at the bottom of the lane.
The trouble is, I do miss those London lunches that fizz and sparkle and keep you on your intellectual toes. Not since April, when I sat in a Chinese restaurant for three hours with four people discussing the merits of drinking saki and the demerits of being self-employed, has the mettle of my wit been tested so near its breaking point.
The other things that I'm sure I'll miss next year are the really big gambles that were taken by some of us in 1978. There was the time when Rushmere won at Sandown Park at 12-1 and there was the occasion on 15 May when Ms Ashley met me at Marylebone Registry Office to solemnise our tentative relationship. The paradox is that Mrs Bernard is still running and that Rushmere passed the post some eight months ago. Nevertheless, Ashley is still paying the most fantastic dividends in spite of the fact that I regarded her dowry with some suspicion at first. She has brought into my life a cheerful smile and a wisdom that passeth all understanding. Not until that fateful day last May did I realise just how silly it is to scuttle along life's sleazy passages pausing only for the odd drink or bet. I now know the tasks that lie ahead in 1979. I can state with quiet but sure confidence that the book will be written. The lawn will be mowed. I know what happens when these things are left undone. A publican told me and who can know more of life's secrets and mysteries than a publican? This particular one leant over the bar and took a sharp intake of breath. The sharp intake of breath is an audible and visible sign that heralds wisdom and down-to-earth no-holds-barred advice to come.
'Shall I tell you something, Jeff?'
. 'Yes, by all means do, George.'
'Well Jeff, I've always maintained that you only get out of this life what you put into it.' I pondered these mighty words over a few more large vodkas and then said, 'George, I think you're absolutely right. In fact, I'll go further than that. I'll hazard a guess that the devil finds work for idle hands.' George sucked in his breath loudly again, lifted his glass and said: 'Cheers Jeff, and a Happy New Year.' Well, it will be, won't it. I think we've all learnt the lessons of 1978, haven't we?
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