Low life
In the mood for romance
Jeffrey Bernard
Until now I always thought that Mike Tyson would end up in a mental hospital. Who probably will end up in the bin though are the poor souls who will have to share a cell with him. They will be well advised to start brushing up on their syco- phancy. If he went to the electric chair he would blow the fuse. It is good that the delightful Vicki Woods got out of his bed- room in one piece but then she probably frightened him as much as she did me some years ago when we first met on the Radio Times.
I first thought Tyson might be fractional- ly unbalanced when he boasted that the best punch he had ever thrown in his life was the one that connected with his wife's jaw. Mugging old women at the age of 12 doesn't earmark a lad for a life of quiet 1 haven't forgotten what it was like to be a child, you know.' contemplation, and the sixpenny pieces I removed from my mother's handbag still weigh heavily on my mind. Although I have become slightly disgusted with boxing on occasions I hope that not everybody thinks all fighters are cast in the same mould as Tyson. Most of them are pretty amiable when they are not 'working'. Witness Henry Cooper.
How good it was after all the talk about rape and the revelation that Paddy Ash- down has caught Parkinson's disease to hear a story of true love. It was told me by a charming woman, a well-known writer I met last week in the Groucho Club, and was a case of love at first sight. Many years ago, when she first clapped her blue eyes on the man she is still happily married to, he was driving a flock of geese over a bridge in the North Country. He then climbed a mountain, as was his habit, and after his descent made straight for a kitchen and made a mountain of prof- iteroles. I can picture the three incidents in my mind's eye. How much more attractive than meeting your love at a boring cocktail party. I particularly like the picture of a man driving the geese over a stone bridge across a stream. Alas, in this day and age he was probably driving a Land Rover.
I have never met a wife in any remotely romantic setting. I met the four of them in a café, a canteen, a pub and a wine bar. There is a progression of sorts in that sequence but it certainly doesn't smack of Thomas Hardy. I remember vaguely that when I was a boy most couples seemed to have first met at a dance. What happened to dances? The last one I went to was at a Butlin's holiday camp in Clacton where Mike Molloy had sent me for three days to write about it. He must have been punish- ing me for something or other. I remember one of those awful redcoats saying to me, `Cheer up, camper. Smile'. There was only one answer to that: 'F— off.' But the only enjoyable thing there was a dance floor reserved for older people and ballroom dancing. They made Brylcreem for men in those days and the women smelled of tal- cum powder.
Mike Molloy came into the club yester- day with Keith Waterhouse and Peter Tory and they kept me awake for two pleasing hours. That doesn't happen very often and I wonder if the bar staff usually lace my after-lunch vodkas with Mickey Finns. And I wonder who Mickey Finn was. We shall probably never know, just as we remain in ignorance of Reilly, the man whose life I would like to emulate. I would guess he was an Irish remittance man domiciled in London a hundred odd years ago at about the time the O'Hooligans lent their name to the language. They hailed from the Ele- phant and Castle and it is unlikely that Reilly led his life there.
But it is odd how names originate. What was a Waterhouse? Was it a stationary water wagon? At any rate it sounds forbid- ding to a would-be Reilly.
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