Low life
Down the slippery slope
Jeffrey Bernard
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, usually at 3.30 a.m., I am woken up by the noise of the dust-cart clearing up Berwick Street market beneath me. Then I get up, go to the sitting-room, pour myself a drink and find myself wondering where and when it all started to go wrong. A psychiatrist at a dreaded drying-out clinic like the well- named but badly pronounced St Bernard's in Ealing would most likely say, when the booze first interfered with your work.
Well, that was in 1958. It was then that I got the sack from the Old Vic where I had been working as a stagehand. We worked in the mornings, matinees and evenings, but we usually had the afternoons off and it was a habit then to go and get drunk with Francis Bacon in the Colony Room Club. I did just that once too often and one night from the flies I put in the backdrop of a Churchyard from Much Ado About Nothing into the Rialto scene from The Merchant of Venice. So that was that.
I went on to six of the most boring months of my life working on My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and then had some fun with the Folies Bergere at the Winter Garden, where the dancing girls were very good to me. I kept my nose, at least, clean then until 1971 when I had broken into this lark and got the sack from the, Sporting Life. But it was somewhere between Francis Bacon and the Life that things got out of hand. Somewhere around then I began drinking at home. Up until then the licensing laws had acted as a sort Of brake and I passed the hours in Suffolk Cleaning my shotgun in readiness to shoot my wife with the left barrel and my landla- dy with the right. In those days I could hardly do anything at all without the aid of a drink but then it had to wait until opening time. But there were things I did do voluntarily but I cer- tainly couldn't do now and not because I am simply physically incapable. There was an enormous oak tree in my village of Chelsworth that fell down one night and I daftly (looking back on it, daftly) offered the rector my services to saw it up and cut it up with a felling axe. I found it hard to believe that I sweated for hours over that tree. Today, I would have gone on staring at it through the windows of the Peacock inn while sipping at vodkas.
The lack of a drink has men doing strange things, such as preaching sermons,
walking across the Antarctic and extracting other people's teeth. Some of them even take to editing weekly journals. But it was drinking at home, as I have said, that was the top of the slippery slope, and it was kissing Norma King in the rhododendrons when I was 12 that was the top of another slippery slope, not so physically ruining as Smirnoff but certainly psychologically dis- astrous.
Anyway, I have known about where and when this disaster started but perhaps it wasn't a disaster, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this wretched column in the first place. My mother sometimes gave me looks that signified that she was fairly sure that I was bound for hell. What she never guessed obviously was much worse, and that was that one day I would own a cock- tail cabinet. Actually, I haven't got a cock- tail cabinet. What I have got is a table and a kitchen and a bedside table and this flat sometimes looks like a pub in readiness at five minutes to 11 on a Saturday morning. It is only sad that the aforementioned Francis Bacon isn't here to be the catalyst for my getting the sack yet again.
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