Low life
Scratched from all engagements
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwas amazed and deeply touched last week by a visit from Peter O'Toole himself. I never thought the great man would both- er but he appeared on Wednesday after- noon all smiles and with a bottle of Bollinger in case, as he put it, I was in need of a bubble. An old windbag, a hip replace- ment patient — why do these people talk so much? Perhaps they are not ill enough to shut up — introduced herself and start- ed talking to Peter. At the end of her chat- tering she said, taking her leave, how thrilled she would be to be able to tell her friends that she had met Richard Harris.
Peter insisted on coming down to watch me in the gym being put through my ago- nising exercises by the physiotherapist. He seemed to be very curious about my strug- gles at hopping along between parallel bars and he asked the physio some most techni- cal questions about amputations. My stump seemed to interest him although the sight of it makes me feel deeply depressed. When we came back to my room a young woman from the University of East Anglia presented herself and me with some beau- tiful lilies which must have made quite a hole in her student's grant. She said that she had always wanted to meet me because she is a reader of this column, and mean- while Peter persuaded her that he was my brother. She swallowed that and would have taken any other bait flowing about that day. The next day I came back down to earth with a ghastly visit by ambulance to the Charing Cross Hospital in Fulham to be measured up for an artificial leg. They took a cast of what is left of me, which they said was pretty good going on a first visit since it showed that I was healing well and quick- ly. These legs I saw looked to be fairly cumbersome and I am sure I will make the most awful clumping sound when I learn to stagger around my old haunts again. But at the moment I sit here thinking, as I chain- smoke and stare out of the window, that I will never ever return to those places. It has taken years, but at last I think pubs bore me. It is a pity that half the member- ship of the Groucho Club — more than half in the evenings — bore me too. So perhaps home really is where the heart is and always was.
I was reminded of it last week by a visit from my last wife and it made me think what else I have thrown away apart from an old leg. And now the council want me to reconstruct my bathroom so that I can manoeuvre my wheelchair in it. This will cost me an arm but not, I hope, a leg. And I get no grant from them, in fact a private surveyor is going to charge £40 an hour to look the place over. I shall now sit in a shower when once I lay soaking in hot baths nursing ice-cold vodka and orange as I simmered away. That wretched blister I got on my foot some three months ago will have cost me dear by the time Derby Day comes round again, and by that time I will have been, as my trainer might say, `scratched from all further engagements'. Which reminds me, if a horse had to sur- vive on what I eat it wouldn't win a lot. There is a limit to how much mincemeat and scoops of mashed potatoes a man can swallow. But at least I have been given per- mission to have the odd night-cap. I would like more than the odd one, but the idea of facing the gym and my physio with a hang- over of sorts is too much to bear the thought of. Completely legless is something else.
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