Low life
Thank you for the days
Jeffrey Bernard
Inow consider my odd days at home as being on leave from the Middlesex Hospi- tal, where I have been for the last month with just a couple of days break. Last week I had another one of those infections I am very prone to and they wouldn't even let a couple of visitors in to see me. I looked so awful, apparently. I'd like a polaroid to see just what that looks like. I suppose it is grey faced and out like a light.
Sadly, too, I have two friends in there at the moment who are both suffering from cancer, one of the colon which is particu- larly nasty and the other, a dear old friend, who has it in the neck. He and I used to work together years ago in the theatre. He was a stage carpenter and I was his flyman. I can't remember what year it was but we first took out Expresso Bongo on its provin- cial tour before it opened in London and it starred Paul Scofield and Hy Hazel.
We had a pretty riotous time of it but it was very hard work as well. I remember crawling about in the gantry with a hammer in my hand seemingly miles up making sure that some extremely heavy flats that flew did so securely, and during a rehearsal one morning accidentally lowering a chandelier on to an unpopular stage director's head. For that the company took me out for a drink, as though I hadn't had enough already.
The next show we worked on together was a fairly common and tatty mess of a production of the Folies-Bergere from Paris at the old Winter Garden in Drury Lane, but that was fun. The chorus girls' dressing-room was way up on my level on the fly floor and I got to know the girls very well. On occasions they would line up before the show and allow me the slightly farcical treat of sticking sequin stars onto their nipples which I did with a rubber solution called Copydex. I got to know some of them better than that and it was also the first time in my life that I earned enough money to give up drinking beer and switch to throwing back whisky.
As far as booze went it was the begin- ning of the end, but it was something of a riot for us. I remember a man coming up to the flys one morning to ask me for a job not working full time but just doing the shows, and he seemed quite a nice ordinary man, so I took him on. During the matinee the next day the police came up to the fly floor and arrested him. It seems that just before I had taken him on he had mur- dered his wife, but then perhaps murdering a wife might be a fairly ordinary thing to do. Looking back on it God alone knows who I might have taken on — a few villains who worked in Covent Garden market just for the evening shows that's for sure.
Anyway, poor Mick has now got cancer and he was once fighting fit, so much so that at one time in the 1940s he got as far as the finals in the Royal Navy's mid- dleweight boxing championship and only lost on points to Randolph Turpin who was to beat the great Sugar Ray Robinson in a professional world championship in July 1951. I remember the broadcast of that very well since I listened to it locked up in the guard-house for overstaying my leave from my awful tank regiment while suppos- edly doing my National Service.
But there is a cockney expression describing someone as being so severely thumped that they were 'punched up in the air'. Mick could actually do that in his day. I once saw him land a hook on an electri- cian backstage who had been asking for it and the silly man's feet actually left the floor before he became parallel to it prior to hitting it.
When I asked Mick yesterday on the telephone what he'd like me to bring him he said some bread, cheddar, tomatoes and a bottle of Guinness. Back to simplistics. And to think that when we took shows out on provincial tours we would take on other couples at snooker in local billiard halls for what seemed fortunes, and I remember now that during one game in Leeds we heard the excellent news, for us anyway, that Mr What had just won the Grand National.
Looking it up now I see that was in 1958. They were hard days in many ways but at the end of every one of them they seem now to have been extremely entertaining. And I also remember that I had the added bonus of being married to a lovely actress who had a flat in Chelsea and that one day there Lucian Freud told me to back the Irish mare, Gladness, for the Ebor who obliged doing hand springs at 25-1. Sad that such good days should come to this, but at least we had them.
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