Low life
Brief remand
Jeffrey Bernard
Face to face with that awful essay at the beginning of every term at school, 'What I Did In The Holidays,' my mind felt as numb as it is at this very moment, and last weekend was like a holiday, not from school, but from this prison in Berwick Street. I saw the country for only the sec- ond time in the 13 months since I had my operation. I stayed with Richard Ingrams and was taken and pushed for a two mile walk which reminded me a little of bygone days. It must have been the sound of a real old-fashioned aeroplane, not a jet, and the sound that a garden gate makes when it is being opened or closed. And dogs barking and a skylark singing. Something of a delight on a clear, nearly spring day. Noises evoke as much as smells and if I was frac- tionally more eccentric I would buy an old- fashioned motor lawnmower and I don't mean a flymo. I rather fancy buying one with a seat like the ones that mowed count- less cricket fields when I was a boy.
John Mortimer and his wife came over for Sunday lunch and what an entertaining man he is. Also, with the Mortimers, was a woman friend who I last saw 30 years ago. I had been very apprehensive about seeing her again after all that time, and she still looks stunning and I was sad to say good- bye to her when they all left. The pointless guilt and remorse and thought of what might have been are as a shadow which lengthens as the years go by, and as the shadow of a tree lengthens at the end of a summer's day. I take things too seriously and find it harder to laugh at absurdities than I did even just ten years ago. She was one of the better things in what were the summer holidays between the ages of 20 and 45.
During the second world war my mother sometimes left me at school for the holi- days because she had to tour with the the- atre, and school is a large place to be almost alone in, even if you can break every conceivable rule. I feel a bit like that here in Soho now, even though I can do much as I like with nobody to answer to. When I suffer a little from melancholy I think that I even miss the sound of toast being scraped — a sound that heralds the imminent finish of an affair or marriage. The only louder noise is that of the slam- ming of a door as somebody leaves the premises, wherever they may be, in a strange vehicle called a huff. Old friends turn me into ashes.
And now, this morning, the District nurse came to look at the ulcer I have on my so-called good foot and she eyed it as though she would rather sweep it under the carpet than dress it. She said that she thought that the skin around it is necrosed and that my toes, which I can't feel, were stone cold.
I have never taken a lot of notice of GPs who seem to have enough of their own problems, like divorce and alcoholism, to pay much attention to diagnosis and prog- nosis. I think about that a lot as I try to plan a holiday. I have been told to take a friend — someone who could push me 'twixt bar and beach, but who would put up with those shadows that I mentioned at the end of the day. But who could I find suffi- ciently ugly so as not to fancy, and at the same time not be driven by boredom to the beach and bar?
Twenty years ago on the Greek island of Serifos I met only two Germans and a Canadian nurse whose only luggage was a double sleeping-bag which was her hotel on the beach. We made fires and we cooked by moonlight and by firelight and we spit- roasted goat; but lurking in the night sky there were hornets which I was and still am terrified of. The great thing about Serifos is that hardly anyone, except for a handful of Greeks, have ever heard of it so it is a sun- drenched blank with hardly a tourist to be seen unless you get lucky and find your own Canadian nurse. I suppose that it would be a good idea this year actually to employ a nurse to push and pull me about; her only qualification, apart from the strength to pull a wheelchair, would have to be the strength to put up with a cantan- kerous old invalid much given to snapping.
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