Low life
The suffering classes
Jeffrey Bernard
Tony Blair isn't the only man who is off beggars. I have disliked most of them for about the last ten years and it was about then that they lost their good manners and until then I had to be on their side, having very nearly trodden the same path myself throughout the 1950s and 1960s, leaning very heavily on friends and acquaintances in Soho in those days.
But even my very clear memories of being flat broke and on very few occasions even hungry broke I never plummeted to such discomfort and despair as during the couple of phases that I went through of being homeless, and it is the homeless today who have my sympathy more than any other of the suffering classes, with the possible exception of the cold and hungry old.
I remember once having an awful arrangement with a friend who had a bed- sitter in Bayswater. I used to snatch two or three hours sleep there every day, while at night he slept there and I sat up in one of the Lyons Corner Houses all night, sus- tained on coffee and amphetamine. The squalor of the people one met in the Cor- ner Houses in those days was quite inde- scribable, but 1 don't think that they were somehow quite as cruel and lacking in com- passion as the dregs of low life are today. There were some very unpleasant fist- fights and even fights that involved cut- throat razors but they were invariably between villains and there was no danger then of simply being beaten up and robbed as there is now. I always remember being in the Strand Corner House one night when a small nasty man and his followers came in and sat at the next table. He was Vic Her- man, and earlier that evening he had won the world flyweight boxing title. You would have thought that after such a fight he would have cleared the air a little, but he started an argument with a prostitute and hit the girl so hard she flew across the next table. Charming.
In those days you would still see a lot of what were called toffs whiling away the dawn hours and they had usually been thrown out of night clubs which closed at about 4.a.m. For our amphetamine we used to tear open Benzedrine and Methedrine inhalers and eat the paper contents inside which were soaked in the stuff. There were cups and saucers brim-full of dog-ends, nicotine-stained fingers, filthy finger-nails and clammy, shaking hands. Then, thrown out of there into Trafalgar Square at dawn it was always freezing and I would be shak- ing with fatigue and the thousands of star- lings would scream hysterically and we would go looking for warmth and refuge in the form of a café that opened particularly early for the likes of Covent Garden porters.
It is extraordinary come to think of it now how my dreams managed to survive but they did. You would think that sleeping on someone's floor under an overcoat smoking re-rolled dog-ends and scratching one's scabies would be too harsh a reality, but perhaps it was the dreams of better things that got me through it. Not that it lasted that long because in the end one would be driven to working on building sites or making the changeover from Cor- ner House customer to Corner House dish- washer only a few yards away. But, as I say, people have forgotten how to ask nicely. Even winos were friendly and more like the balloon-holding revellers depicted in Punch cartoons and on the stages of music-halls.
What gets me down now are the home- less who are quite simply defeated. You can't get a job unless you've got somewhere to live and vice versa and so on, and you can't go to work — not navvying — on an empty stomach. My dream then was to earn £20 a week, what a dream that was.
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