Low life
Catastrophic
Jeffrey Bernard
T have just received a rather moving letter .1.from an old horseracing friend called Rufus who is an awfully nice rotter. For some 20 of the severest winters he has managed to survive on the legacies of relatives. Although he has managed sever- al stud farms in his time the legacies have been essential to keep him in Havana cigars, whisky and sports cars. His banker bet has always been his aunt Kate, known as El Gordo, and at the age of 98 she has at last dropped off the perch and is 'weighed in' as he calls it. Rufus writes, 'She left me a lovely chair, a painting and £500. She also left £279,000 to a fucking cats' home.' He then goes on to say that he rang up his solicitor to ask how much time he could give him to form a cats' home but he was told it was too late. Poor old Rufus. He is now managing a stud in Wiltshire and it is situated, he says, between the two worst pubs in England. He ends his letter saying, `Looking back, I miss the endless piss-ups I enjoyed with you over 15 years. What a colossal waste of our time and my money.'
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It struck me, reading this letter, that what he should have done was to dress up in a pantomime cat suit when his aunt Kate was alive and it also struck me that Rufus has had some really bad luck with cats. I remember when he once ran a stud near Lambourn for a really mean old bitch who hardly fed him. She fed her two cats, though, on fresh salmon and smoked sal- mon. When Rufus and the cats heard her put down the saucer on the kitchen door- step it would be a race to see who could gel there first. The cats always won and now Rufus is kicking his wife's cat to kingdom come. He finishes his letter with a rather odd postscript. 'I am told that if you can have sex, laughing is almost as good. D° you fancy a trip to the Grand National on the Orient Express? Call in any time for a vodka.' Rufus is temperamentally very akin to Toad of Toad Hall and I like a Ma" who can be possessed of new enthusiasms when he's up to here in it. He's quite likely to try to drive the Orient Express to Aintree but you can keep the Grand National. For me t strictly a race to watch on television. I stood by the Chair one year — it's the biggest fence in the country — and they rather surprisingly all popped over it with- out any trouble. The only thing that Would drag me to awful Liverpool would be to have a drink with Alex Bird. I have Just been sent a copy of his ghosted autobiogra" phy and it is full of the sort of stuff that the Rufuses of this world dream about. For the most successful punter of modern times to have chosen the Grand National as the medium for his first major gamble is remarkable in itself and Bird won E70,17, 7, on Freebooter when he won the race 1950. Four years later he missed winning £500,000 by a neck. Mill Reef's career w°11 him £123,000, and so on. it is all quite fascinating but it does come over as a terrible swank. Onceyou have conveyed ta, the reader that you have a penchant Jo' champagne, oysters, Havana cigars an travelling in private aeroplanes he has the message but Bird does go on a bit. It hadn't got better things to do I'd count thIse number of times the word 'oyster' mentioned in the book. One can't go (3° being impressed for page after page. AnY" way, I was smoking my father's Havana5 when I was six. But what bugs me most Is the fact that Bird keeps saying that of doesn't lend money. I cannot for the life L: me understand how people announce thi,s as though it's a virtue. Perhaps he has" got any friends or perhaps, like man! people I have met in the underworld, he thinks you lose face if you want to share the cat's dinner like Rufus. Fear is at the root of these people. But still, millionaire's . have other problems too. At the end of Ins book Bird says he can't get a window cleaner for the hundred or so windows 01 The Old Hall where he lives in Cheshire," In my Lambourn days I remember David Nugent had a related problem when his Wife sacked the butler. He couldn't find anyone to put the lemon in his gin and tonic. I suppose we are all in it in our various ways. I can't find anyone to put the vodka in my soda.
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