Low life
A farewell to arms
Jeffrey Bernard
Ihave had a lot of female visitors to this flat recently and I suppose I would feel intensely flattered in normal circum- stances, but being so closely in touch with reality as I am I feel no more moved than does the stone and the bricks of a muse- um, an old church or an archaeological site well known to the preservers of antiq- uity. That would be bearable in itself but the tourists who come to this flat some- times have a triumphant air about them or at least give off the feeling of a relief of sorts at the sight of me stuck to my sofa.
When I was about ten years old, and during the second world war, a party of us schoolboys were treated to an outing to look over a German bomber, a Junkers 88, that had been made to make a crash landing. It was thrilling and at the same time eerie. I can still remember the some- how different smell of foreign paint and metal, and there it lay empty, beached and harmless after having frightened us so much during past nights. The wartime noise I remember best, apart from air-raid sirens, was the ominous throbbing in the night of German bombers and it occurs to me with some chagrin that I too once throbbed ominously in the night. No won- der my visitors look me over pleased to see me not well but shot down, so to speak. It was just a little later after having looked over that German bomber that I got to know a couple of German prisoners of war who worked on a farm nearby, and it was good to see them too with their dis- tinguishing blue patches on their tunics and not in field grey. Occasionally our get- togethers are as .seemingly pleasant as the filmed meeting I once saw between Dou- glas Bader and the German ace Adolf Galland. But they probably reminisced without a shred of rancour, whereas remorse and recriminations are frequently served here along with the drinks and light refreshments.
I did get a birthday card three weeks ago with a long note attached to it, which was from certainly one of the greatest aces I have ever crossed fingers and then swords with. It moved me damn nigh to tears and I don't exaggerate. She wrote that she never regrets for one minute the time we spent together, and that came as a real surprise, and to cap it all she even said that she con- siders herself lucky to have met me. She is either dreaming or she must have encoun- tered some truly ghastly adversaries in the history of her love life. After Bader had been shot down and taken prisoner they flew his legs over to him, dropped them and the Germans allowed him to have them back. It makes we wonder whether, in a sense, she will ever let me have my balls back.
But how time goes by, and memory with it. Last week, for the first time in an age, I went back to the Groucho Club feeling rather like a relic in the Imperial War Museum, and spotted a nice looking mid- dle-aged woman in a corner and actually couldn't remember whether or not we had ever been locked in mortal combat. Peace- time doesn't really suit me. I never liked war very much but I did enjoy some of the battles, and perhaps my tactics were better than my strategy — which seems to have laid waste to rather a lot. But, as I say, I sit here and contemplate that it wasn't all fun being a desert mouse.
The film which goes out about me on 30 June (Channel 4) is disappointing to me if for no other reason than because the direc- tor did not see fit, interesting or necessary to invite anyone who I once fought with or against, so that I could seem in these columns to be talking about ghosts. Per- haps not one of them would have been will- ing to appear had they been asked. Who knows? I wonder just at what stage it is or just what it is that one does to make people either forget you or unwilling to own up about it. I have a hunch that both the film and my new book of collected pieces might end also up-end like that Junkers 88 which missed the school and ended up in the mud. Most people only watch motor-racing in the hope of seeing a crash. I am trying to avoid one, and being in this flat has been my longest pit-stop on record or maybe it is a farewell to arms.
Put me down as being pro Europe . . . '
Previous page
