Eenie,meanie..
Jeffrey Bernard
The thought for the week in my pub has been that of meanness. Why on earth we should have been going on about it I'm not quite sure. Perhaps it's because none of us.
are particularly mean ourselves and that's why it's perhaps something of minor fascination. Anyway, we spent an hour or two re counting famous meanies and I must say a few of them were quite extraordinary. One accepts that petty meanness, for example the devious methods used to avoid buying someone a lousy half of bitter as well as the less recognised examples like insisting on paying back someone a sum of money like 2p, shows a meanness of spirit that goes right through the person, but what interests me is the hard, pathological nut case of a meanie.
Take Johnny. He's an exile. Tax, breaking the law and being a general crook. He's left the country and lives with no less than £7 million in his current account. His pad on a coast of the Mediterranean has to be seen to be believed. But the fact that he cleaned up in Soho several years ago and now sits on this platinum nest egg of £7 million does not preclude him from being the tightest fist.' know. Even when he had a flat in Mayfair he never visited a public lavatory without stealing a roll of lavatory paper. In the same district he would hang about a poshish pub — I believe it was the Audley Arms — after a rain storm and then ask the barman, Did I leave an umbrella in here last night?' The barman would show him a selection or maybe just one and our man would say, 'Yes,ithat's the one.' Worse still he so coveted the table lamps at a West id hotel that he determined to nick one of them. He went in one day with his horrendous Kraut mistress armed with a pair of scissors, sat down at his table, ordered his and her usual cocktail and then cut the flex of the lamp. He fused every light on the ground floor of the building. The manager, not daft, spotted the operation, walked over and said, `If I'd known you wanted one of those lamps so much, I would have given you one.I've a cellar full of them.' I'm still wondering how it was they weren't both electrocuted.
But he hit the depths of meanness, I think, with his cash and carry operation.
Using the same raincoat with the poacher's pockets that he used to nick the loo paper he would go into a store armed with a small knife, slit the edges of the large packets of fruit and nuts and empty as much as he could into the aforementioned pockets.
Then there was 'James the Shit' ,whom a friend and I spotted, years ago, in the York Minster. In spite of the fact that my pal and I were pretty broke, we decided to see just how far he could push us. 'Have a brandy, James,' we said. He said yes and we went on and on from opening time to closing time. 'I must go,' he'd keep saying and we kept saying, 'Just another, James.' He got through the licensed four hours without buying us a single drink which must be some sort of record I suppose.
But I think my favourite — and it serves me right for being a greedy teenager on the make — was the queer curator of a famous museum I met when I was a lad. I spent a bizarre weekend with the old fag, stuck to the premises and bored and rather nervous after I'd found out his predilictions. At dinner, the first and last night of my stay, the butler presented us with a beautiful bowl of Heinz tinned spaghetti. My host turned round to me and, speaking with a Noel Coward accent, said, 'I want you to be simply ruthless with the food.' The next morning, following a night of having had the most peculiar and obscene but girlish notes passed under my door, I took my leave. I asked him for the fare from his university town to London and he gave it to me to the exact penny. Serves me right for leading him up the garden path.
What's so ghastly about the whole business is the utter lack of style on the part of these people. The times when I've gone 'dutch' with people on a lunch and have had t‘o put up with arguments afterwards like I3ut I had peas and you had french beans, so mine's 30p less than yours' have been enough to make me want to choke on the bloody meal. The only compensation about it a • Is the knowledge that beggars can be Ch IS
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