Low life
Reviewing the past
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwas taken out to lunch one day last week by an old friend who spends as much time as I do in the past and we remem- bered old faces, old friends and even the odd enemy. At the end of our meal he sur- prised me by producing a typed list of those we had known who had died in action who had been fixtures and fittings in Soho since about 1960, who appeared mostly in the French House and the Colony Room Club. It must have been one of the longest run- ning reviews of all time but, unlike most cabarets, there were plenty of parts for
straight actors and tragedians as well as tumblers and conjurers. Sadly, I have for- gotten most of the jokes and I feel less inclined to make any.
To put it another way, ever since collaps- ing in Morocco and now being on dialysis, death has lost its charm for me and I am now actually frightened of dying. I am sure that we will not all end up at a party in Heaven and that if we meet again it will be in a communal gathering of worms. Of the 20-odd photographic portraits on my wall, nine are dead and more are confined to photo albums. On one cheery little wall in the hall there are three photographs of three ex-wives who I see every time I leave my flat and then again when I return to it. I sometimes think what incredibly unsuitable couples we made but it is also fractionally consoling to think that I didn't put any one of them off getting married again. I wonder what on earth they thought they were get- ting on both occasions and even the one who once famously said, 'I thought you'd change and settle down,' what on earth did she think I would change into?
Looking at all those pictures again and again, I am surprised to see only one and a half suicides. The one being John Minton and the half being Eva, who went to bed drunk one afternoon with a cigarette and burnt herself to death. The most recent one to have left the show is Francis Bacon, beautifully photographed by my brother Bruce and a ghastly old paparazzi picture of Bacon and me taken in the Colony Room Club in 1971 when I had a hideous moustache and was trying to change and settle down for the umpteenth time.
But it isn't just old friends that I miss but places I have been to and I have an album of picture postcards that I collected over the years for the record book, so to speak. Now that I have to be within a 24-hour travelling range of a decently equipped hospital I doubt that I shall ever go abroad again except maybe for lunch in Paris on the Eurostar. Nearly trapped in this flat and can you imagine the hell of Barbados, the Nile or Bangkok with a liquid limita- tion. Even Ireland and in particular Dublin would be near meaningless without using its bars. Perhaps I should start writing obit- uaries of cities and countries and it occurs to me that it would be churlish of me to write unkindly about my one and only visit to Venice in March this year. It is the only city I have been to where there is no place or anywhere that I could find in which to
simply hang about, hang out, just drink or loaf about. Al fresco museums are not for me.
I suppose that seeing my friend's long list of the dear and departed was a little like reading the last page of a thriller to see what happens, but my trains of thought this week have been boosted as well by having been asked to review a new book, The Daily Telegraph Second Book of Obituaries. It consists of the obituaries of heroes and adventurers. I hope it is as good as their first book which was subtitled, 'A Celebra- tion of Eccentric Lives'. That was a hoot. If the life of the average man was the rule and not the exception then I would hang on to it like grim death.
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