Low life
Explosive mixture
Jeffrey Bernard
Ishould have known that breaking my foot was on the cards when I dropped two lamb chops on the carpet that morning. Usually God's little warnings come by my dropping toast on the floor, marmalade side down. But that Monday was black. At the time of my fall I didn't think much of it but when I woke up in the morning and saw a foot like a purple balloon I was not a little scared wondering whether or not I had got the dreaded diabetic gangrene.
A friend took me to the Middlesex Hos- pital and even those battle-weary people tut-tutted a bit at the sight of the awful pedal extremity. Anyway, it doesn't pain me any more and I can hobble to and fro from the kitchen dropping chops and chicken legs on my pristine carpet. My new and expensive sofa too is suffering from toast fall-out and cigarette ash and Vera seems like Canute when she brings out the Hoover.
On the way back from the Middlesex my friend and I stopped in the Groucho Club for just the one and after we had sunk that
'Young people today have such appalling posture.'
he walked round the corner to Old Comp- ton Street to get me a taxi to take me the two blocks home. He found one, rather unusually driven by a woman these days, who said to him, 'If it's for that Jeffrey Bernard and he's drunk, I'm not taking him'. Now how on earth could she have guessed it was for me since I was a hundred yards away and well out of sight? It is a mystery to me, as was the fact that I over- tipped the old harridan at the end of our brief journey. Since then I have been con- fined to barracks, so to speak, and have come into my second childhood or dotage.
Thirty years ago when I had a long spell on the wagon I took to making model aero- planes to while the time away and I have started again. The other day I asked my friend to get me a Fokker DR I triplane. He somewhat cynically remarked, 'From fucker to Fokker', but he got it for me. And now I find that I can't put it together because it is so small and my hands shake too much. It should be red like Baron Richthofen's Fokker but this one is grey and is the model of the triplane flown by Werner Voss, whoever he was. It doesn't matter anyway since my friend was daft enough to forget the glue. What with these shakes I must stick to monoplanes in future and today I shall send him out to buy a Fly- ing Fortress or a Thunderbolt or Spitfire.
If this flat were bigger I would buy a train set and if I could walk I would go to the park to sail model yachts. During the war years I took a particular dislike to a boy who sailed very posh yachts on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. I vowed to sink one. To this purpose I designed a torpedo. The warhead was a 12- bore cartridge with the shot removed and with a small nail directed at the firing cap and it was to be fuelled by sodium. Theo- retically it seemed sound and if it failed I could always hit him over the head with a brick when our nannies weren't looking.
Unfortunately sodium is tricky stuff. It doesn't burn from rear to front when con- tact is made with water, it blows up willy- nilly and anyway is extremely hard to buy or obtain. I had exactly the same trouble when I tried to make nitroglycerine to blow up the London Musical Club in 1944. The nitric acid was hard to come by and anyway you need some fairly sophisticated equip- ment to remove the residual water from the mixture. I had to make do with firing rockets down the chimney whenever they held parties or dances.
On one magnificent and for all I know spectacular occasion, which I couldn't see since I was on the roof, one of my rockets shot red-hot coke all over the dance floor, sending the slow foxtrot into a quickstep. Oddly enough my mother grassed on me to the police. I think I was a little angry about something in those days and the mood is returning what with my imprisonment here. I may send out the home help soon to buy me some iodine crystals, aluminium filings and ammonia.
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