Low life
Absent friends
Jeffrey Bernard The speed at which friends are being flung out into the void seems to be accelerating. If I believed in life after death I would say that there must be a hell of a party going on somewhere out there. And there's room for more. This week it was the turn of Dennis 'Pip' Piper who was a dear chap and a friend since 1949. He was a designer of great gift and until recently he was art director of the Economist. He was also, for the last 15 years or so of his life, a non-drinking alcoholic which was a condi- tion he coped with quite admirably. He wasn't a poacher turned gamekeeper as such people so often are, he was simply a retired poacher without any traces of self- righteousness or evangelical ambitions which are common among sometime mem- bers of AA.
He wasn't a withdrawn and miserable teetotaller and his rate for buying a round of drinks never decreased. Abstinence suited him and when his cancer was di- agnosed he didn't find it necessary to go back to the first and last resort of the anxious and frightened. I can hear his lisp now and the way he prefixed his sentences by saying, `Lithen man . . .' Five of us once went to a ridiculous amount of trouble to manoeuvre him into Wheelers so that we could hear him order the first course. It came out as, 'We'd like thixth muthel thoupth pleath'. He then immediately tum- bled our childish design, turned to us and said, 'You bathtardth'. But he was amused, which was more than I was by the awful advice he gave me just before I went up for my medical for National Service. Having been an armoured car (Dingo) driver himself he said to put down for a tank regiment, the theory being that I wouldn't have to go on any route marches. How wrong he was. For years until now it made for wry smiles of recrimination from me and guffaws from him.
During the 1960s we ate hundreds of lunches in the Trattoria Terrazza together with other ghosts like Frank Norman. (Pip designed our book, Soho Night and Day.) That was when the drink really got to him. He ate less and less and he used to actually pick at a quail, leave half of it and wash that small amount down with vast quanti- ties of Calvados. Then he cracked and the medical profession didn't help him a lot by overprescribing tranquillisers and electric shock treatment. It says a lot for his fortitude and sense that he survived to be as unscrewed up as he was. He never had another drink. But he had his jazz. An enormous collection of it and an encyclo- paedic knowledge of it. He bought jazz records like other people buy newspapers. He told a mutual friend not long ago that when he died he would rather be men- tioned in this column than be the subject of a Times obituary. I wish it was a pleasure to oblige.
Pip brings the total number of deaths of friends over the last five years to an unacceptable amount. To an outsider one may seem to be very matter-of-fact about it, but that isn't so. It is just that the death of friends is no longer surprising. After 50 not much is. Thirty years ago, when John Minton committed suicide, it should have been obvious that he was the thin end of the wedge of death that we've all been nibbling at. I used to think about him a lot and also my first wife, Anna, who killed herself too. Now months go by without a thought for them or a glance into the driving mirror, so to speak. Now, Pip's death sadly revives memories of all of them who are not to appear in today's matinee. Elizabeth Smart, Jeremy Madden- Simpson, Eva, and Peter Dunbar, Pip's predecessor at the Economist, have gone recently. It is a crazy play and the under- studies are understandably reluctant to go on.
And just for once I shall not go to a friend's funeral. I am sick of the cautious and embarrassed looks the survivors give each other and there is nothing much to say anyway. People don't want to be made to feel guilty about being alive and it may be coming to that. For once I feel grateful for being lower down in the batting order than I thought I was. I was going to spend a weekend in the country with Pip the other day and opted out of it. That would have been good just as his company always was. It is all of it a crying shame.
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