Low life
Room at the top
Jeffrey Bernard
Ishould have known I would end my days in an attic. It has been uphill all the way. Years ago, when I left home, my first bedsitter was in a basement and now by dint of sheer hard work, self-discipline and the limited licensing hours I have raised myself to these lofty heights from where I can gaze into the wards of a genito-urinary hospital.
What is good is that it is wonderfully warm and cosy here. On the one hand I am cut off and on the other I am smack bang in the middle of the West End. There is a very good atmosphere here and there is something vaguely Dickensian about it. For example, it is a suitable room in which to toast muffins. Chatterton wouldn't have been seen dead in it. But, as I sit here chain-drinking cups of tea and eating some chocolate cheesecake Norman gave me, I do wonder how they are going to get the coffin down the stairs. Slide it, probably.
What worries me most, though, is what happens when my friend and landlord's lease runs out. If we all have to leave, that is. Depending on the financial situation the only alternatives I can see are beachcomb- ing in Barbados and taking an overdose of sugar-cane or moving into the Muthaiga Club and becoming the resident bore.
Meanwhile, my Maltese man from the Coach and Horses has done an excellent job putting up bookshelves for me — a simple thing that most people bodge — and tomorrow I shall be reunited with my books, pictures and bed. I expect the bed will look at me reproachfully for having played away matches for a year, unless it too mercifully has amnesia. The removal people are to charge me £25 per man per hour. I think that's quite a lot but I wouldn't want to hump anything more than a tea-bag or bottle up here. While they are at it I might get them to tie a rope around the chimney-stack and dangle it to the ground outside my window. If there was a fire downstairs I'd be cooked. And I would prefer to be pickled.
And now my Malteser has just arrived to rewire the place. Monica, the typewriter, will have her very own socket. She didn't like working off car batteries in the park. What I haven't yet told her is that she is going to write a book. How do you break such awful news? She doesn't mind short, sharp bursts but a page a day for nine months isn't a pretty pregnancy. We have been trying for so long to have a baby. If it turns out to be black I shall be rather annoyed.
Be that as it may I have finished the cheesecake, run out of tea-bags and the door bolts are sliding back all over Eng- land. Time to go to work. The trouble with this job is that you don't get any holidays. Can you imagine having to talk to Nor- man's mother about the weather for 365 days a year? People work in coal mines to avoid that. Which reminds me, I got a letter out of the blue the other day from a man I worked with in Handley Deep pit years and years ago. I don't remember him because they all look the same down there but it's nice that people like to keep in touch across the years. If Arthur Scargill catches him reading The Spectator while eating his snapping he could be shot-fired. That pit, incidentally, closed now, was 3,000 feet deep, so one has come up in the world: 3,060 feet.
Those were the days of drinking pints of draught Bass. Sir Stanley Matthews was playing down the road for Stoke City and 'How Much is That Doggie in the Window' was top of the pops. I often wonder what became of the lovable, drunken Poles I lived with in a hostel. They're probably all passed out in the Polish Club in Kensing- ton now if they aren't permanently under- ground. And whatever became of the big black Jamaican called Winston Churchill who beat me up in the lamp shed one day?
It is pondering such trivia that drives me down and out of this eyrie for fear of permanently jamming the brain in a time warp. You could end up lying on a bed with a few drinks, reminiscing for the rest of your life, and that is why I shall now go and discuss the seasonal rainfall with Nor- man's mum. Anything to break this mould of introspection. It is horribly addictive and we are surrounded by things addictive from the very moment we are born. Most of them deadly.
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