Low life
Dangerous ladies
Jeffrey Bernard
Those foolish young men, members of the Dangerous Sports Club, who jump off the Clifton Suspension Bridge on the end of elastic ropes and who try the Cresta Run blindfolded or drunk or both, don't know the half of it when it comes to real danger. I do. I once had an affair with a girl who worked for Spare Rib. On another occa- sion, while becalmed on this voyage to the grave, I got the wind up by going out with a Woman who worked for Cosmopolitan magazine. The subsequent nervous twitch- ing on the right hand side of my face plus the grey hair are the result of domestic shellshock. The woman on Cosmo had all black eyes, no iris all pupil, so intense was her single-minded ambition. And what, you may ask, did she think she could get out of this tired sack? Well, would you believe it, she thought I could introduce her to famous people. I suppose I could have done but I wonder just what the hell she thought the likes of Lester Piggott could do for a hack virago. With seriously dangerous women you can hear them thinking in the dark. Some- thing you did or didn't do the day before festers and it's like fermentation. And I don't like suddenly being whacked in the dark. They should put the bedside light on before throwing a punch. The first woman from that mould I ever met was the matron of my last prep school. She was a matron with a double-barrelled name — almost obligatory to work for the Spectator — and she was the dreaded Mrs Spencer-Payne. I was wetting the bed quite a lot then and whenever I did she used to slap me across the face really hard. Of course that only escalated the bed-wetting so then, after we had queued up for our tablespoon of malt — do they still make it? — she'd whack me over the head with the spoon. Looking back on it, I suppose she didn't much like small boys. I can see her point now but it was all rather alarming then. There was also a mistress who taught French and not a lot got learned. She distracted me, being as she was something of a knockout. When she walked past my desk I would drop a pencil on the floor in the hope that I would be able to look up her skirt when I bent down to pick it up. At first she thought I was plain clumsy. Then she twigged and hit me over the head with a fairly ample dictionary. My French has been lousy ever since.
In those days I thought that all women must be like schoolmistresses, plain nasty and dangerous, but it wasn't until the first time that I fell in love that I realised that most of them are mad as well. The object of that love and lust actually stabbed me. Only in the arm but it was extremely painful. So I moved out of that pad and got myself a bedsitter in Queen's Gate. The landlady there was a Pole and she was full of menace like distant thunder. I never got caught taking girls back — strictly against house rules after 10pm as if you couldn't do the deed in daylight — but another tenant did and as he left the house she dropped a chamber pot on him from the second floor. If it hadn't just missed it probably would have killed him. It was time to move again. The next landlady was a hideous thing called Mrs Shillibeer. Late one night, feeling rather frustrated about something or other, probably the other, I punched a hole through the plywood door of my wardrobe. She fetched the police. That was my first meeting with them although my mother had threatened me with them when I was about 12 for putting bangers through neighbours' letter boxes. (I drew the line at putting them into empty milk bottles as my chum did.) So I had to move again.
God knows how many landladies I had when I was a teenager but I lived in dread of them. The word landlady still gives me a shudder and the powers that be could well name a nuclear deterrent the Landlady. I used to place objects in my bed-sitters in very precise positions before going out to work or play and I would find that they had invariably been moved when I returned. They snooped around like dogs. I wouldn't know now, thank God, but I suppose they have changed with the times. They prob- ably chuck you out now if you don't bring a girl back at midnight. I would be homeless. I wouldn't know what to do with a girl now at that time of day.
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