Low life
Money matters
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwas sitting at my desk last Sunday morning, idly flicking through the papers, when I came across the most extraordinary news item. It was the piece about Cather- ine Cookson having done a deal with Bantam books which will earn her £4 million. After a while I came to. I must have been staring with glazed eyes out of the window for half an hour. My mouth was open and dry. The ice in my vodka had melted and it was by then tepid. A dentist could have crept up behind me and ex- tracted my remaining molars and I would have been none the wiser. £4 million. I woke up last night at 3 a.m. thinking about it. Mind you, she has to write ten books for it but she has already written eight of them. She says she lives, breathes, eats and probably drinks writing. And what's more she has simple tastes and told her inter- viewer that the night before he spoke to her she and her husband had had fish cakes for supper. I have nothing against fish cakes and I sometimes make them myself, albeit from tinned salmon, but what a remarkable and wonderful woman. She is actually sitting on the eight books she has already written and hasn't even bothered to send them yet to her publisher. He says he just knows they'll be all right. Christ Almighty, I'm not even sitting on more than eight sentences and they're not up to much. What's more she has given a lot of her money away to worthy causes. I know it is rumoured that Jeffrey Archer lashed out on a poppy last Remembrance Day, but Miss Cookson is something else. She is now .trying to think of more Ways of spending her money well and I wish to God that I was a worthy cause. Of course it is all relative. Last week Punch asked me to write a couple of pieces for them and I only had bubble and squeak for supper. Keep both feet on the ground! always say.
But thinking about it again it isn't so much the £4 million that staggers me — although as George Eliot wrote in Middle- march, 'It is rather a strong shock to one's self-complacency to find how much of one's right-doing depends on not being in want of money,' — it is Miss Cookson's compulsion and pleasure in continual writ- ing. People who suffer from acute and chronic lexicographitis aren't as a rule that hot at writing although the authors of potboilers think they are. Miss Cookson, though, is not an author of potboilers. She is a very good writer and deserves what she is getting. I wonder when Harold Robbins or Shirley Conran last had fish cakes for supper. They say that fish is supposed to be good for the brain but I have never seen any evidence of it. Certainly a few trips to Wheeler's would negate that theory. But I went to prep school with a boy called Brill and he was streets ahead of us all in every subject on the curriculum from knitting to Physics. Brilliant, in fact. The masters said we would all hear more of him. He isn't even in the phone book and no one has to wait 40 years to get connected.
Apart from Miss Cookson's diet, though, I am afraid to say that her success is largely due to hard work. I don't know a single man with serious money —• except for the odd few who inherited the stuff — who hasn't made it without working like a dog. I find it rather galling to ponder the fact that someone like Sir Charles Clore never spent a single minute of his entire life in the Coach and Horses. In last Sunday's Sunday Times the dreaded Nairn Attallah actually said that not working made him feel ill. I wonder what trauma could have struck me in the nursery to make me hate it SO much? I think maybe a sufficient amount, or even a surfeit, of bollockings from masters at school to the effect that I was a twit made me give up wanting to work. First of all, those of us in that same boat found solace and refuge smoking cigarettes behind the bicycle shed and we know all the things that leads to. Anyway, apart from the exceptions to the rule of brains and industry so apparently going hand in glove with fish, as in Wheeler's, there was one other good example, the Marquis of Hastings who lost £102,000 on the Derby of 1867. He breakfasted on herrings cooked in gin. He died at the age of 26, broke and utterly destitute. He made his last racecourse appearance at Newmar- ket in a wheelchair so dissolute was he. Fish cakes yes. Herrings in gin, no.
Previous page
