Low life
Down by the riverside
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwent back to Lambourn last weekend and it still possesses characteristics that are really heartwarming. Apart from the race- horses and the small people who look after them there are one or two good men who deserve to be mentioned in dispatches from the front line of the fight against Asti. Action on Alcohol Abuse, jogging, health food and anything else that is destroying the fibre of this once great country. Irish Tom excelled himself on Saturday night.
He had just the 15 or so and won £400 at pool and spoof. At closing time he decided to walk home and just before he reached it he felt a sudden and agonising necessity to evacuate his enraged bowels. As he was walking along the banks of the River Lambourn he thought what better place and so walked into the water. Once he negotiated mid-stream he began to un- dress. Lesser men would have simply lowered their trousers but Tom is very fussy for an Irishman. He wanted to do a proper job. So first he removed his shoes and one can only imagine that to be quite difficult in a river at night after just the one never mind 15. He then took his trousers right off and did his business. While that was being transacted his trousers, with the £400 in the pockets, floated off down the river. I spent all morning up until opening time the next day on the river bank between his house and the pub looking for them. I hoped that they might have been snarled up on a rock or a weeping willow but no such luck. They are probably in Newbury by now and heading for the Thames.
I think you will now understand the high regard in which I hold Tom. What I do wonder about though is what his wife's reaction was at being confronted by a very viet man naked from the waist down apart from his socks which were probably full of tiddlers as well as feet. I don't think in the circumstances an explanation was required. I. certainly couldn't think of an excuse which Is what a wife wants to hear. At a lunch Party the following day I noticed that she didn't laugh at a single one of his rather good jokes. She may, of course, have memorised his repertoire after 25 years of Marriage but she most likely deduced from his midnight appearance that he had been 0a public house. But there are not enough men like Tom and we desperately need reinforcements. And gentlemen in Eng- and then a-bed when Tom had his torn tit Shall think themselves accursed they were not there. Hopefully.
The river along the valley is very pretty and it attracts all sorts. It may well be a
Lambourn Triangle. When I lived there With my fourth, last, most sainted and angry wife there was a bloodstock agent he drove deliberately into the river in his rairly posh car. He said it was a warm and
numid summer's evening and he simply wanted to cool off. You know it makes sense. It is a useful river too. A vet from West Ilsley once gave me the skull of an
ex-Grand National winner that subse- Vently broke his back in a race at New-
, nrY. He had boiled it but when he gave it to me in a sack it was still pretty gungy and s,lnelled awful. We put it in the river and left it there for two or three weeks. The
worms did their job and when we pulled it ?nr it was shining white like polished ivory. Lr was an extraordinary objet d'art on our Mantelshelf until I went mad and gave it away. Then there was the time when a
traveller in the Swan at Shefford asked the guvnor if there were any fish in the river. He replied that yes there were and threw a line out of the dining-room window which overlooks the river. In less than a minute he hauled in a trout. I suppose those lunatics the animal rights activists would have burned the pub down had they been around. And there was the obligatory pub bore — handyman, poacher, ex-Desert Rat, you name it — who amazingly stitch- ed up some American tourists one day. He told them that the river was so full of trout that he didn't need a rod and line. He told them he just used to put a frying pan on the bank and the trout would jump into it. We were not told whether there was a fire under the pan and butter in it at the time but the Americans swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Yes, it would be lovely to live by a river. So soothing and water lilies are my favourite flowers, but we must buy Tom a life-jacket.
Previous page
