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First kiss
Jeffrey Bernard
I have aimed too high too often and stepped out of my class on too many occasions not to feel a little sympathetic about the impending nervous breakdown and final crack-up homing in on Roddy Llewellyn. From the beginning I was handled, even by nannies, by people who were far too good, not just for me, but for us. At school it was the same. Evacuated to Herefordshire during the war I spent two years at a school that had all the trimmings — a ghost, a homosexual geography master, a mad headmaster's wife and, last but not least, Miss Browne. Even in those far-off days there were faint stirrings in my loins and although I didn't fully understand them I was sure that Miss Browne — history and English by the way — held the key to a positively aching mystery. You can imagine her horror when I literally threw myself at her about thigh-high. The horror of it was, of course, for me far worse. At that time I was totally unaccustomed to rejection and the slap that she gave me across my quivering little face — following closely on various allied set backs in the Middle East that the geography master had
been at great pains to explain —gave me my first taste of what it must be like to be in Roddy Llewellyn's boots.
I had no friends at that time who were capable of making an announcement to the press to the effect that I was close to the brink, in need of help, about to take a rest at Forest Mere or about to cut another single for EMI before rejoining a member of the Royal Family for a holiday in German East Africa. No-one came to see me from the Sunday Mirror and I had to bear the brunt myself weeping silently during scripture and botany classes and trembling violently as I puffed Black Cat cigarettes behind the gardener's shed.
Looking back on those early days the thing that really gets me is that most of my formative nervous breakdowns went entirely unnoticed. Even when I collapsed on an early morning run at my next school — thanks to Norma King — the matron simply gave me two tablespoons of malt every day instead of the one. Now Norma King was my first taste of the aristocracy and just about as near as I've ever been to Royalty except for the time more recently when I nearly tripped over the Queen at Kempton Park. Her father had a handle, Sir Norman King and I was as impressed by that as, say, a pop singer might be today at knowing a real King's daughter.
Norma was one of only five girls who were taken in at the school which was desperately short of money in the days when, as the homosexual Latin master explained in great detail, we were losing thousands of tons of shipping every day in the Atlantic. They were also the days when I was playing in goal for the 2nd XI because of the flask of brandy I had got in exchange for a tuppeny blue. When the field was up at the other end of the pitch I took furtive swigs of the stuff and that's how I got to kiss Norma. She was loafing around by my goal posts one afternoon while they were pounding the penalty area the other end and, loaded but unaware of it with Dutch courage for the first time in my life, I planted a kiss on the diplomat's daughter's lips. Two things I remember before my final crack-up. Firstly she tasted of Dolly Mixture. Secondly, she said, 'You dirty little guttersnipe.'
I can't remember just how many goals I let through during the rest of the season, but, as you can imagine, my second experience of standing in Roddy Llewellyn's boots went entirely unnoticed apart from matron's mutterings about 'self-abuse'.
Nowadays, of course, my nervous breakdowns do get a sort of limited recognition.
When the manageress of the local chemist shop made it quite clear that our affair.was over the other day by refusing to give me any more discounts on razor blades and Badedas, I damn nigh collapsed in the Black Horse. Mind you, as yet I haven't been interviewed by anyone on the Marylebone Gazette but I'm drinking like a fish when I'm not crying in front of the television and I hope to God it hasn't got that bad yet for Roddy Llewellyn.
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