Bloody Sunday
Jeffrey Bernard
The old barmaid in the Lambourn Lion dished me out some very lyrical stuff the other day which set me thinking. She was talking about the good old days v. the present day. It's a controversy that sportsmen all too often drag out and I hope I don't have to suffer many more publichouse discussions as to the comparative merits of Jack Dempsey and Muhammad Ali, Gordon Richards and Lester Piggott. The barmaid had different things in mind, which made a change. After five minutes of the desultory stuff that the first customer is usually served with she went on to say that, what with spring being around the corner, we could soon expect to be enjoying getting up and being conscious at an early hour. She enlarged on the subject.
'When I was a young girl, in the nineteen-twenties, the mornings were altogether different. We'd get up ever so early and go out to the fields to pick mushrooms and then we'd come home and cook them for breakfast which we always ate outside. In those days the mornings were always so cobwebby. You always saw beautiful cobwebs. Of course, that was before they had combine harvesters. When they used to get the harvest in in the old way the bees used to buzz. They don't buzz so much now, do they? They'd stop for lunch in the fields and cut lovely pieces of cheese with their penknives and drink cider and sometimes they'd fall asleep. It was lovely.'
All that from the mouth of Ho I found partly touching, but a bit depressing even at that early hour. A picturesque string of horses walking past the pub didn't lift the gloom and the gloom increased as I thought how even low life' has lost a lot of its charm. Take Saturdays. Now Saturday was always play day in London .'Everyone was in town and Saturday nights nearly always ended up very happily in tears. All that stopped when, as I remember it, people took to renting, buying or staying in country cottages for the weekend. That was about twenty years ago. You could be dead in Soho on a Saturday now and hardly notice the difference.
I knew the rot had set in for sure when they knocked down the old tavern at Lords and replaced it with a lump of modern hospitality — a mess of concrete — dispensing sloppy onions and fizzy chemicals. I should have seen it coming though years before when Jack Solomons's gymnasium in Windmill Street closed down.
That really was a very rum set-up. On the first floor there was a billiard hall extraoriinary and then the gym above. It was the rearest you've ever got to being in New York without the air ticket. But the billiard hall — revived in rather an anaemic way now — was something to be savoured as much as were pubs like The Highlander and Black Horse and Dog and Duck.
What made the billiard bit so odd was the complete nut-case who ran it, or at least managed it then. He looked like Boris Karloff. Not dangerous, just oddly menacing, and when I used to creep up there at 7 a.m. after a nasty night in the Corner House, he'd always greet me with bizarre and criminal insinuations.
'I'm here all alone this morning,' he'd tell me, 'and, d'you know, there must be at least £500 in this till. Just think about it. I mean it's not nice, is it? Anyone, anyone like you in fact, could walk round here, hit me over the head and take it.' I used to agree with him that it was a possibility and then he'd turn the back of his bald head on me, a head that was so rotten the freckles merged with what must have been nicotine stains that had somehow miraculously appeared with them, and I knew he was silently imploring me to mug him.
People are all together straighter Row. Only last week someone went beserk in the Helvetia and stabbed three men and the barman only said, 'Black Hussein had four stitches put in his head, Freddie got off even lighter and Mary was cut on the arm.' Flo was right. The bees don't buzz so much any more.
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