Low life
Back again
Jeffrey Bernard
By the time you read these nervous lines I will have committed yet another act of gross folly. I will have addressed the sixth form of Sevenoaks School in Kent at the invitation of its masters. At the moment, I haven't a clue as to what I'm going to talk about. It would help if I knew what schoolboys actually wanted to hear, but I imagine that whatever one says nowadays it's simply a matter of standing up to be shot down by a series of pertinent and impertinent questions none of which one has the answer to. When I was at school we greeted guest speakers with a bored, stoney and contemptuous silence but I should think that present-day receptions are slightly more aggressive and noisy. After all, it's not only women that have been liberated now but anyone Over the age of. say, twelve — and thank God for it.
The speakers and lecturers that I gazed at with loathing—their very presence meant an hour away from luxurious delinquency — always, in my memory at least, rather faded, and scholarly young men lately returned from the Far East. They might have had . walking-on parts in Somerset Maugham short stories and they certainly had an endless supply of the most incredibly boring collections of lantern slides all of them of views of teak forests in Burma. Well, I won't be quite that dull but I fear being dumb-struck since none of my colour slides seem to me to be suitable for school viewing. I have slides of the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, slides I took when a guest at a freeload in a bodega in Jerez, but I couldn't even focus prbperly in New York.
So, what to talk about? When I accepted the invitation —not for reasons of vanity you understand, but to increase the sale of the Spectator in Sevenoaks —I did express fears on the subject or lack of it and I was sent an understanding reply from a master who suggested that I might talk about Soho, racing, tippling and what my editor files in his mind's eye under the heading of Low life. Someone once reprimanded me, saying, 'An unhappy childhood is not a fit subject for conversation,' and I don't really think that a bright collection of sixthformers, all of them future successes in the computer, banking. real estate, medical and legal professions. I'll bet, want to hear the old hat about Soho in the Fifties and Sixties, or how I. like countless thousands, had a drink with Dylan Thomas and then went tumbling, trembling down the sack-sad, hatter-mad, girl-mad road to the Mandrake Club in Meard Street. No.
What does dampen my spirits. though, is that the visit to Sevenoaks will be my first return to it since I was an eleven-year-old resident there in a prep-school that had the extremely misleading name of the New and ambitious parents must have felt realt a new beacon heralds a bright, clean, t future and who would have thought.thajf within the walls of the New BeaconItse.,5 and, deep in the throbbing bowels of. dormitories, there dwelt a swarm of 1:itites ink-stained, Marmite-smothered f41";d and self-abusers presided over by a IT -it ex-Major? We were a jolly bunch att.': a came as something of a relief. alb°. .0 tearful relief, when my mother came clOte, from London one day and took rile„t tea at the Royal Oak hotel to tell me. a!--t the last cake, that I'd been expelled not itisa for persistent bed-wetting, but for ben1 bad influence as well. I should like to that I had some influence at that age but doubt it. There are other things about Seveno91:5 11 which fill me with a sort of dread. The tor:fli.: of thought goes, Sevenoaks — Know le — Vita Sackville-West — Virginia VV0°,1' Sunday Times review pages — reviewt-us pseudo-intellectual cults. And God sav,7,e4 all from that. No, my message, I've dem', to the boys of the sixth form will be t° Oft the game but with certain reservations' ti doesn't do always to own up. volunteer. 0,1 open the batting. As C.J. would say. get where I am today by v attenflT!ng class, not talking after lig hts-out, cold showers, the pledge and the And where am I today? In bloody Se”' oaks again. sured by the name of the academy'. A fter„ani ,
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