Low life
A paw for Mr Webber
Jeffrey Bernard
Ihave just received a letter from an inmate of HM Prison, Cornhill, Shepton Mallet, Somerset. The convict in question is S.J. Webber (NJ0735). He is, by all accounts, desperate to have his name in The Spectator. So there you are, Mr Webber.
The letter, itself, would fascinate Sher- lock Holmes and he would probably learn a damn sight more about Mr Webber than I can. In the first place, his handwriting is that of a well-educated man but, at the same time, it is very affected. He says he misses The Spectator but that it is beyond his present financial means. Although I am addressed in the beginning as 'Dear Mr Bernard', he goes on to call me 'my dear' all through the letter. He ends by saying `and so to bed, but without my teddy bear who is in Brighton. Such a bundle of charm. Goodnight, sleep innocently. Yours etc.' By the way his resolution for 1995 is to get hold of a copy of the book of collected Low Life columns. Not a very ambitious resolution and I'm not sure I trust a man who can be separated from his teddy bear for longer than a three month sentence.
I have a teddy bear myself — a present from my niece. He arrived one day in the post with a label stuck to one paw which read, 'My name is Byron and I want to be your friend.' Heaven forbid that I should go all the way to Somerset to cheer up a man who for all I know might, as his hand- writing suggests, be fairly bright, he might also be a psychopath and might be serving time for abusing teddy bears. The original Byron might even have welcomed it but his namesake will remain safe overlooking my bedroom. I fear that my other contact who was a resident of Ford Open Prison, which he referred to as the Country Club, might have renewed his membership. God knows why. I see no excuse or very few indeed for going to prison. I can't think of one crime I could commit that would improve my lot here which is a prison of sorts. The Middle- sex Hospital seutenced me to a life term nearly a year ago and although Vera some- times lets me out on parole to push me to the Groucho Club I am, for the most part, banged up here with just my new fish to look at and Byron to talk to.
I have been watching my fish for a while now and then and they are slightly different although they are all brainless. Every pub has its bore and maybe every aquarium has its bully just like every school. My resident bully I have called Sally after a female writ- er with the same mental disorder. But a strange thing I have never noticed before, which I should have noticed on a fishmon- ger's slab a thousand times, is that fish have no eyelids. So perhaps they never sleep but go into a sort of floating trance like the ones I love in hospitals which are produced by injections of that marvellous painkiller, pethidine. This being England, of course, only a third of the fish and the plants that I paid for in advance have been delivered. Apart from their love of queueing, the English of whatever trade have a nasty habit of making you wait in all day for a repair or delivery and then don't turn up.
The exception in this flat is the Collector of Taxes who I am far too nice to. I wonder if I could claim for him on expenses. The last time he was here I went to the trouble of making him both tea and toast and, needless to say, burnt myself doing so from my wheelchair. I ought to get a stove made for midgets or dwarves and I am assured that there are such appliances. Ideally I should be living in a doll's house and I am quite used to people staring in at me just as I am used to the banal and stupid gossip about me that goes back and forth between the old residents who sit around inside the front door of this block and who I refer to as the 'committee'. I suppose that Si. Webber (NJ0735) is the subject of as much gossip in HM Prison, Cornhill. Thank God the committee downstairs simply regard me as a drunk on the wagon. But a drink with a teddy bear called Byron would be too much.
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