Low life
Rover's return
Jeffrey Bernard
T took myself away from the well beaten ltrack last week and dilly-dallied in Chelsea for a couple of days. It's well known that the Kings Road died some years ago when it was taken over by jeans shops and so called trendy young people obsessed by pop music but the cancer is spreading. There isn't a pub or restaurant in the entire street worth going to with the possible ex- ception of the Man in the Moon which is physically a very pretty pub. Further north the Fulham Road isn't quite so bad. At least it's populated in the main by middle- aged people whose world-weariness is such a refreshing change from the youth who think that entertainment consists of throw- ing bread rolls at each other over dinner.
But the Fulham brigade, centred mainly in the Queen's Elm, Finches and the Chelsea Arts Club, are an extraordinary bunch, all of them caught in a sartorial time warp. Most of the men are greying, wear roll-neck jerseys, jeans and desert boots and you know damn well they sculpt or paint and have just missed the boat in both departments. The more solvent ones pro- bably have teaching jobs, studios and common-law wives they first beheld in a life class. Fulham must be the last outlet for manufacturers of corduroy. The place is also chock-a-block with women painters and I think they're very brave considering that what women are far and away best at is writing novels. They are so good at it in fact that I find it slightly uncanny. Colin Haycraft of Duckworth says their writing novels is a substitute for life, but his wife Anna, the excellent and delightful Alice Thomas Ellis, says it's like playing with dolls' houses. You move people from room to room and wonder what you're going to do next with them. Another strange inhabi- tant of the Fulham Road is the man who supports Chelsea or Fulham football club and who you'd think would have more in- telligence than to do so. There's an awful sort of snobbery about football, and local thespians and television persons suffer from it the most.
But, when all's said and done, the strip 'twixt the Arts Club, Queen's Elm and Fin- ches is still one of the better villages of Lon- don. I have some pleasant memories of it anyway. The 'Master', as we used to call the poet George Barker, kindly gave me my first experience of amphetamine in the Queen's Elm when I was 18 and I once worked behind the bar there for the guvnor, Sean Treacy, who very understandingly one evening gave me five minutes off to hit one of his more boring customers. The Anglesea, down the road has fallen off disastrously, being full as it is of Hooray Henrys, but you can catch a glimpse from it sometimes of Miss Ava Gardner walking her dog. I did live there once, albeit under the enormous thumb of a paranoiacally jealous woman who thought I'd been to bed with someone even when 1 popped out for five minutes to buy some cigarettes — five minutes! l ask you — but l'd quite like to return to the area had I £1 million to buy a flat. As it is, the disgusting Soho is a mere 12 minutes walk away and Soho is going to become even more disgusting soon. A sure sign of Gaston Berlemont's imminent retirement from the French pub is that he called in the £20 I owed him last week. I think we can all guess just how Watneys will refurbish the place.
Which reminds me. The Queen's Elm, the French pub and the Coach and Horses were the only pubs I came across during the festive season which did not have any Christmas decorations. A very good sign indeed. The printed card wishing all its customers a happy Christmas, either in shop window or pub, is a shabby hypocrisy as is the ill-disguised advertisement on scaf- folding announcing that McAlpines apologise for any inconvenience to the public. Bollocks. But, as I say, the con- templation of London villages has become something of a permanent fantasy. Charlotte Street has a lot to recommend it, good shops and activity, but with sufficient loot I could settle for spending the rest of my life in a hotel, preferably Browns or the Ritz. I'm very fond of room service and in the Park Lane Hilton you can get more than a chicken sandwich and a drink sent up to your room. In the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin the staff have real wit and cun- ning. I'd just moved in there one day and was having a clean up in the bathroom stop me if you've heard this — when a little bell hop knocked on the door and squeaked, 'Mister Bernard, I've a message for you.' I shouted out, 'Slip it under the door.' I can't, sir,' he said, 'it's on a salver.'
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