Low life
Being beastly
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwas talking to a Jewish Ulsterman in the Coach and Horses the other morning who told me that he was bisexual. People and particularly strangers volunteer the oddest snippets of information. I couldn't have cared less what he was but if you hang around in pubs and get buttonholed you can end up being an agony uncle. Anyway, he then went on to tell me about a rather nasty game he played as a child. It seems he used to put a lump of carbide into a dead herring and then throw it to a seagull. The greedy bird would swallow it and the,n, when the carbide heated up, the poor gull would blow up in full flight. That prompted another man at the bar to confess that he used to insert a straw into a frog's bum and blow it up. She who would drown said they used uncooked spaghetti and not a straw at her convent. Listening to all this made me feel I was back in the bin. I don't under- stand it. I was always kind to animals when I was a boy but I did have a penchant for making explosives and an unconscious desire to blow up places and people. I burnt down my mother's summer house in an attempt to manufacture some ammo- nium nitrate and I burnt a large patch of Ladbroke Gardens. The barrage balloon that was anchored there was, sadly „I thought at the time, slightly too high to be infected by my flames. But the best jape of all took place at the now defunct London Musical Club in Holland Park. It was the end of the war and they were holding a ball in the big drawing-room there to celebrate. It was all very jolly with a band playing dance music and a roaring fire in the grate and me and my school chum felt slightly piqued at not having been asked. We peered through the windows and watched our respective mothers doing the tango. Then with a crash equalled only by the force of the apple that dropped into Sir Isaac Newton's lap it occurred to me that we might climb on to the roof and fire a couple of rockets down the chimney. I was told later while nursing an extremely sore arse from the beating I got that the rockets duly arrived in the grate and shot red hot coke all over the dance floor turning the tango into something of a quickstep. But I wouldn't have dreamed of blowing up a seagull or frog. In fact my pets always had ceremonial funerals. Mozart, a rather en- dearing white mouse, was put into a matchbox and taken to his grave on a Dinky Toy gun carriage. A mouse can't ask for more than that. But making gunpowder was my forte and what a doddle that is to make. The noise of the air raids deceived my mother into thinking that I was in my room gently reading Treasure Island. I was in fact trying to destroy Holland Park and in particular a newsagent called Mister Deverson who made the near fatal mistake of refusing to sell me cigarettes. There was another man in Holland Park Avenue called Starkey, who had the chemist's shop When he tumbled to the fact that I was buying sulphur to make gunpowder and cut off the supply we used to shout through his letterbox that he had three balls, one white, one black and one khaki. But harm a feather on a seagull's head or interfere with a frog, never. In fact I fell out with my chum when he shot a goldfish in its dear little bowl with an air gun. She, who is looking over my shoulder, has just screamed, 'What a liar you are. You're just about to go to Scotland to murder hun- dreds of pheasants.' I think the use of the word murder slightly over the top. And I'd very much like to know just how many murders took place in her frog-infested convent. I cull pheasants, I do not murder them. I think we shall have to cull a few of these women in Soho.
P.S. She has just threatened to insert the spaghetti into me. There's nothing so aggressive as a Green Peace woman.
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