Low life
Below the
belt
Jeffrey Bernard
Ireceived a letter from a woman living in the Isle of Wight yesterday asking me to help her raise the money for an eight-year- old boy to enable him to have a liver transplant operation. Why can't the National Health Service pay for it? I can't see that there is much I can do but the woman says she can auction signed photo- graphs of `celebrities', perish the word, and can I get Peter O'Toole to sign a picture. I doubt that any of that will save the poor lad and so I shall start some sort of collection in the Coach and Horses where, after all, people should appreciate the value of having a liver which is in good nick.
I have read the letter about 50 times now and I find it disturbing. It would have been less upsetting to read about it in a news- paper, especially a tabloid — 'Toddler needs new liver to live' — but to become personally involved, and I have committed myself to become so, fills me with anxiety. The poor boy is doubtless jaundiced and his parents are in a state, as you may imagine. I shall go and see him. It all sounds wrong to me. How much does such an operation cost and why is the family not being helped by the powers that be? We should knew. At eight years of age his trouble can't be self-inflicted.
What a ghastly world this is. I am resolved to stop moaning about my own petty and trivial problems and I have been moaning to myself for three days now ever since Tom Conti and I were photographed by a man from the Daily Express. There was a time when I was vain enough to quite like being photographed, but sitting there next to a bloke as good-looking as Toni with cysts on my head and my face in ruins
made me feel acutely depressed. Who was it who said that W. H. Auden's face looked like a wedding cake that had been left out in the rain? It matters not.
At least my liver is working and I have paid the rent to date. I have even just paid for a case of vodka and there was a time when I couldn't have paid for a nip of the stuff. I recently got fed up with finding that I had run out of it at about three a.m. during bouts of insomnia. Cigarettes too. Yesterday, two men from the Vintage House in Soho humped the vodka up three floors to this attic. I feel safe. But what puzzles me is why did it take a second man to carry a carton of cigarettes which can't weigh more than four ounces up the stairs? Perhaps it makes the unemployment fi- gures look better. I wonder Mrs Thatcher hasn't been here herself to deliver the matches with which to light those cigarettes.
But it was good to meet Tom Conti again after something like 15 years. It was then that I wrote a piece for the Sunday Times about the making of Frederic Raphael's serial The Glittering Prizes in which Tom starred. It was a fun assignment only marred when the piece appeared by a silly attack on me one evening in Gerry's Club by the dreaded Miriam Margolyes. I had written that one of the actors was dreadful- ly nervous on the day of the first transmis- sion and the unprepossessing Margolyes screamed at me that I had hit him below the belt. How come? Is it hitting below the belt to say that an opening batsman, a Grand National jockey or a fighter was nervous before take-off? It is water under the bridge but I still remember her petty fury.
Previous page
