Low life
Middleweights
Jeffrey Bernard
Alittle bit of business with Barclays took me up to the City last Monday and what a ghastly place I find it. Anything east of Blackfriars or Holborn Circus fills me with gloom and I've yet to discover a decent pub or restaurant in the City. God alone knows what people who work there do in their lunch hour: Even a substantial and imaginative man like Charles St George admits to staying in his office with a sandwich. In the bank, two young 'execu- tives' in a queue beside me discussed their carburettors — do these people have cars instead of genitals? — a cashier talked to a customer about going to Benidorm for Christmas and there was muzak playing in the pub I went into for 'the one' before getting the hell out of there., I felt like weeping. What have we come to? Or at least what have they come to? Back in the sanity of the Coach and Horses someone told me that 'toilets' was an anagram of T. S. Eliot and Norman barred me from the pub for life for the third time this week. So good to be home again.
At closing time I went round the corner to a cheap place I know for a steak and found myself sitting next to an old sparring partner from way back called Billy Colulais whom I met at Jack Solomons College, Soho University, in 1949. Like most mid- dleweights he was and still is something of a nutter. He wasn't a good boxer but he'd take on a steam locomotive and he could hit extremely hard. I was 17 at the time and the scales used to sneer at my 8st 12Ibs but I used to spar with him chasing him around the ring, the idea being to speed him up a little. Of course, like all fighters, he was too nice to take advantage of me. Anyway, at that time this country had just been blessed with the arrival from Nigeria of an animal David Attenborough should have liked to examine called Joe Hyman and billed as the 'Human Tank'. He was unstoppable and for a while promoters were scratching their heads as to whom to feed to him. Eventually they threw dear Billy to him in the Albert Hall. It was as stupid as trying to feed Norman to a crocodile. Billy knocked him spark out in the first round and hit the 'Human Tank' so hard he had to be carried back to the dressing room.
So there we were in the cafe talking about old times as washed-up people will and Billy was shovelling spaghetti into a slit beneath what's left of his nose and I asked him, 'What are you up to now?' He allowed a blob of bolognese to run into the man-made dimple in his chin and said, `Transcendental Meditation.' There's only one answer to that and I gave it to him. `Ah,' I said. And people wonder why I haven't got a nine to five job in the City! I tell you this is where it's all happening. Anyway, Billy went on and told me that another old-time middleweight and one- time hero of mine, Jimmy Davis of Bethnal Green, now works as a faith healer. What extraordinary things life may have in store for us yet, I reflected as Billy drank his tea. When I met Jimmy Davis he was boxing rings around some of the best — a real craftsman — and when he wasn't fighting he worked as a porter in Spitalfields Market. He had the reputation of being something of a powder-puff puncher but I walked into one of his feints one day sparring with him and I had concussion for three days and, like now, couldn't remem- ber where I'd been or what I'd done. Liice back-seat drivers and riders in the stand a lot of ringsiders haven't a clue as to what's really going on in the ring just what it feels like.
But what with Billy meditating and Jimmy healing what can this ageing ex- featherweight be heading towards? Palmis- try? Homoeopathy? Actually, no. I'm off to America today. First to Boulder, Col- orado, then to New Orleans and from there up the Mississippi by steamboat to Memphis and then on to New York to have a drink with Rocky Graziano, my all-time favourite middleweight. This trip is what is known as a freebie but, of course, I've had to raise quite a bit for pocket money. Nothing is free. At the end of my Barbados trip I got a bar bill that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and it's not a pretty neck in the first place. I also once paid a bar bill in Beirut and then had to go to the gents to be sick. But while I'm away, dear reader, do try to be good. Keep on with the jogging and the high-fibre diets. Keep your carburettors clean and turn up the muzak. I shall think of you as I slip into a terminal coma on the Mississippi.
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