Low life
Sprinkler system
Jeffrey Bernard
If anyone who had spent their life in an English village, a clearing in a rain-forest,,a cave in a mountain or even a lunatic asylum were to walk into the Coach and Horses at any time after six p.m. they would be astounded at what they would hear and see. Even frightened. The scene can be quite alarming as well as boring.
The bickering, the shouting, the crying, the anger, the abuse and the spite make for a cacophony of Muslim-like intensity. It isn't the moon — we had a new one this week — it could be infected foodstuffs; it isn't the result of unhappy childhoods and I think it may be that alcohol is a little more toxic than I had previously supposed. Or perhaps insanity is contagious.
On top of all that the pub has become deeply attractive to very horrible young people who pack the place so that it is hard to get served never mind throw a drink in a friend's face. But in spite of the simmering violence of a sort it is the women crying that gets me down the most. I don't mind a teardrop coursing down the channels of a Powdered cheek but I draw the line at your actual sobbing at the bar. People should sob into pillows. (What is even worse, though, is to wake up in the middle of the night and to realise that the woman next to You is silently crying. That's reproach for you and you just have to get up, go to the kitchen and make some tea.) We have a woman in the pub who howls. A howl is louder than a sob but it is too ridiculous a noise to be touching.
I wonder how all this behaviour would go down in Annabel's or a tough East End pub. Last week a barmaid threw a jug of water over a man because he swore at her. Fair enough. In the East End he probably would have been killed. You have to be awfully careful. Some years ago in the Colony Room Club I told Ronnie Kray not
to be such a f bore. I didn't know who he was at the time. But, like all gangsters, he was a bore.
Another thing that happens after six P-rn. in the pub is that visiting hooligans drop their chewing gum on the carpet, Where it is eventually trodden in by the disgusting hordes. Only Test cricket bats- men facing the quickies should be allowed to chew gum. An ugly habit. I wonder if the women could chew gum and cry at the same time. There was a lovely secretary at the Daily Mirror 20 years ago whom I inadvertently made cry quite a lot and she could type letters with tears streaming down her face, although Mike Molloy said she couldn't and would I therefore leave her be. She got married and settled down. Sadly it is a little late for that for the Weeping ladies of Soho. Oddly enough, I have not cried since I I'as married. I admit to some moistness When I last saw The Railway Children on television but otherwise I have to keep splashing water on to my face so that I can Open and shut the eyes. They are as dry as Islam. Speaking of which, I asked Norman this week to bar Muslims. Before six p.m. anyway. He won't and he says he'll take any currency. To be fair, though, I also asked him to bar Rushdie. The fact that the shortly-to-be-smoked Salman is a member of the Groucho Club is causing me grave concern, and I mean grave. I do not want to be blown up while I am toying with my
afternoon tea or contemplating the man- ageresses' legs. I have yet to see any women weeping in the Groucho but the time could come.
Blowing up the Coach and Horses would make very little difference to the place. Incendiary devices would be put out by tears anyway. And Norman is probably insured way beyond the hilt. He took his mother out for lunch last Sunday, Mother- ing Sunday, and apparently she got through five courses, which is not bad for a woman of 93. In fact her age is in dispute. Neither he or she is quite sure how old she is. I suggested to Norman that to cheer her up he should send her a telegram on her next birthday and sign it Elizabeth R. 'Waste of bloody money,' he said. More to the point is that it would probably make her cry.
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