Low life
Marked man
Jeffrey Bernard
where was I? Yes, after the pounding from the the Indian mini-cab drivers in Gerrard Street I decided to cross the road into Shaftesbury Avenue and buy myself a refreshing and curative drink. I always like to wind up after a hard evening's beating up. So there I was, sitting in this bar famous for its thespian members, nursing my eye and considering God with a slightly jaundiced other eye when a dreadful man began to play a record at the bar on his horrible little tape recorder. Noise is repellent in civilised drinking circles but this fellow insisted. It was the odious, physically repellent, North Country playwright and egomaniac called Colin Welland. I wasn't alone in thinking his noise-making objectionable in the circumstances and our lovely barmaid said to him, 'Don't make such a dreadful noise in here. Turn that thing off you stupid ' The jam-butty-eating twit from oop North said, 'I beg your pardon, what did you say?' Impatient for her reply I said, 'She said why don't you turn that thing off you stupid — ' With one bound — as Percy H. Westerman or Captain W.E. Johns would have said — he was across the room and trying to strangle me, his fingers around my old and scraggy neck. Eventually he was restrained by the delightful voice-over king, Bill Mitchell, and his equally delightful friend Kenny Clayton, the pianist, whose record, coincidentally, the disgusting Welland had been playing. And so ended the second lesson.
A few moments later, in a relaxed frame of mind, I began to reflect yet again on violence and the lack of love in the world today. Suddenly it hit me. The mini-cab drivers and the odious Welland were field workers for the Exit organisation who had picked me as a target for their practice. After Welland I confidently predict that Sir John Gielgud will try and snuff me with a plastic bag in Fortnum's next week. It's thugee time again and I suppose we'll all have to start walking about with T-shirts emblazoned with such messages as 'I don't want to die'.
What with the smoking and the playwright's fingers I decided to go for an anaesthetic throat-curing gargle the following rriorning to a pub in Chelsea and cry on poor Torn Baker's shoulder. It was there, talking to he guvnor of the pub, that I heard a story even beyond Mr Welland's tremendous imagination. It seems that the guvnor's father, a Durham coal miner some years ago, was a fanatic horse-racing punter and superstitious to boot. One day, after a lean spell in which the bookies had given him a real pasting, he cast his Sporting Life aside, leapt to his feet and cried, 'I know what it is, it's those fucking goldfish. Ever since they came into this house I've been losing. They've got to go.' With one bound — as Welland might say —he leapt across the room, plucked the offending goldfish and their bowl from the mantelshelf and rushed outside. Being a harmless man — he could have dumped them on the bonfire — he threw them into the pan of the outside lavatory. He flushed the old machine and waited. They popped up in a moment or two. He flushed the contraption yet again, and yet again they fought their way around the U-bend and reappeared. He decided to declare war. The family, his wife and seven boys would have to use the neighbours' loo until the fish were dragged out to the North Sea. This went on for days. Much to his surprise, every time he went on another flushing mission, the fish looked bigger. Unbeknown to him, his wife, a kindly and sentimental woman, had decided to feed them. She'd been going in every day and sprinkling fish food on the waters beneath. Now — and this really annoys me — I never heard the end of the story because at that moment in the narrative someone crept up behind me and tried to put a plastic bag over my head. Exit, if nothing else, is ubiquitous.
It's not new though. I can remember a brick narrowly missing Sherlock Holmes on one occasion during his hazardous life and I myself once had a wife who went out to work one morning leaving the window open while I was lying in bed utterly helpless with a harmless cold. No, these days one leaves the house in the morning and goes out with one's life in one's trembling hands. Bitter men snipe at you in the press, old friends forget, Christmas looms up again, goldfish are pilloried and if you're five minutes late for opening time the guvnor tries to make you a present of a hundred barbiturates and a quarter bottle of brandy. It's a hard old life — full of larks though — and this week I'm pretty sure that someone will whack me in the mouth.
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