Low life
King for the day
Jeffrey Bernard
Ihave always made a little too much of a fuss about my birthdays. I have another one — quite miraculously — this coming Monday, and I say miraculously because my brushes with mortality have recently become more frequent and a lot closer, so to speak. What fuss I do make about them is a hangover from long ago when, as a schoolboy, I looked forward to them so much because I couldn't wait to grow up. I am still waiting for that process. But it was one hell of a treat having a birthday years ago. My mother, a rather bad and irregular letter writer, always sent me a parcel con- taining a cake, some sweets and three or four shillings. And that was a hell of a treat in those days of rationing and in particular sweet rationing.
Of course, 27 May always fell in the sum- mer term but this little depressive was always king for the day. After school I best remember my 18th birthday since it legally entitled me to go into pubs which I had been doing for two years anyway. That was in 1950, and I kicked off celebrating my licence to drink in the Black Swan in Not- ting Hill Gate in the company of the poets George Barker and W.S. Graham and the two painters of the day, the Roberts Colquhoun and McBryde.
My mother had that morning given me £3 which was indeed the widow's mite but serious money to me. We were joined later by the bullying Roy Campbell, but I had a row with him and we left him to spend a weekend walking and drinking on the downs near Lewes where the Roberts had a house.
On my 21st birthday, John Minton took me to The Venezia for lunch. In 1966, Alan Hall who was then writing Atticus for the Sunday Times, somewhat facetiously gave me his wife's dressmaker for a present. Dear, oh dear. We got married not much later and thereby hangs a story that started with a walk into the sunset and out into the usual storm.
It was round about that time that a man who used to take bets on the York Minster jokingly made me 5-4 favourite to be the next person in Soho to die — that being the time that I first had an attack of acute pancreatitis. It was his idea of a joke but I never shared it, and it has rankled ever since, and it is another reason for me to feel just a little triumphant on Monday. And it was then that a registrar at St Stephen's Hospital told me that I would more or less drop dead if I had another drink. So each birthday becomes a plus in other ways than arithmetic.
But it is always possible that I might have been through the end of the affair anyway, since it occurred to me the other day that we have all died anyway and that this is hell.
And an odd thing happened when I was in hospital a couple of weeks ago. One of our leading newspapers contacted me to say that they were destroying my obituary which they had commissioned some time ago and had got someone to write a new one. The old one had been written by a contributor to The Spectator and was fairly bitchy in parts, and they asked me would I, as a joke of sorts, add 500 words to the new one myself. I believe that hasn't been done before by anybody, and I don't know whether I should or not but I feel vaguely flattered by the request. I have resisted the obvious joke which would have been to ask the obits editor when the deadline is.
I did write a joke obituary in this column about six years ago, and I didn't like doing it because I felt incredibly superstitious about it. But now that I always keep a rab- bit's foot in my pocket and my fingers crossed, I don't give a damn. Anyway, I'm getting paid to do it.
But how to resist those marvellous clichés that appear in obits? I have been known to have had my convivial moments and I have never suffered fools gladly, but I wish there was a polite way of labelling myself as having been heterosexual just as homosexuals are pigeon-holed as 'he never married'.
It has been said about some people that when they were alive they hated cant but my brother wants to have written about him: 'He hated Kant' and I can't pinch that from him. Vera and I will be going out for afternoon tea on Monday to celebrate. Until then, I am hanging on like grim life.
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