Low Life

I never knew the old Soho, before the clean-up of the sex-trade, before the all-day opening hours that did strange and sometimes terrible things for the dynamics of drinking, before the blandification.

Sometime in my twenties, through reading and television, I started to become vaguely aware of Soho-as-cultural-epicentre: the Soho of Bacon and Farson and Muriel Belcher and what not.  But I was living in the North then and rarely visiting London.

A digression:  I did have a, personally very memorable, encounter with brash unashamed sleazy Soho way back in the 1970s.  I was nine or ten or so and I’d been in London for the day with my parents.  I think we went round Madam Tussaud’s but I can’t remember anything else about the day except that, as evening fell, we went into a café in Windmill Street.  My parents sat down with their backs to the window and I was opposite them, looking up at the, frankly, gynaecological image displayed on the front of the Windmill Theatre.  This was something of a revelation for me, in those innocent days when porn wasn’t just a few clicks away.  I recall trying to appear unconcerned and at the same time doing my very best to get a good eyeful so as I could properly tell the tale of my discovery at school on Monday.

It was only in the late 90s, by which time I was living on a major arterial road in an outer zone on the far fringe of the East End, that I began drinking in Soho on a semi-regular basis.  The French was my first pub-of-choice and I revelled in the half-pints and the gittanes and the theatricals that ensued whenever anyone had the temerity to wield a mobile phone.  With a gay friend, The Greek, I visited most of the pubs and bars on Old Compton Street, and wondered why they all seemed to have Red Stripe on draft.  I found my way across Oxford Street into Fitzrovia, to the Wheatsheaf, the Marquis of Granby and the Black Horse, and the company of the shades of Orwell and Dylan Thomas and Julian Maclaren-Ross.  Then there was the Coach & Horses.

It’s a shadow of its former self now, in my opinion.  The décor is the same. The gents is still pretty foul, and the transient European bar staff remain as clueless as ever.  But there’s a different, more self-conscious, crowd in there now and more tourists than ever before.  And they have sing-alongs twice a week...  

I count myself lucky to have caught it in the dying days when it was still populated, at least in part, by rogues and riff-raff and old soaks and interesting drinkers.   One day, seated at the bar, I found myself in conversation with a Moroccan tailor and a seedy little man who gave impersonations of the sliding doors on different metropolitan transport systems.  I offer this by way of a for instance.

Norman Balon was still in charge then.  A looming presence, even when not actually there behind the bar shouting at people to ‘get out of my fucking pub’, which seemed to occur on a more or less nightly basis.  Drunk, I left my bag behind once and rang up to see about it the next day.

<Sharp voice> ‘Hello?’

<Timid> ‘Is that the Coach & Horses?’

‘Yeah.  What have you lost?’

A recent Oxfam find was Low Life by Jeffrey Bernard, a collection of his columns for The Spectator.  An original Grumpy Old Man, Bernard’s mythos was intrinsically linked with Balon, ‘my friend, mentor and bank manager, Norman Balon, in whom we trust,’ and the Coach.

When you’ve had a hard, frustrating, unsatisfying day at work and you feel as if you’ve nothing to look forward to but more of the same tomorrow and the day after that, till death us do part, I find that a spoonful of spiced bile goes down a treat a bedtime.  At worst, you fall into the arms of Morpheus safe in the knowledge that you’re not alone in your ennui.  In that respect Low Life has cheered me up no end and I can do no more than offer up a random quartet of examples of Bernard’s sour musings.

‘If the age of consent was raised from sixteen to fifty, lunatic asylums would be empty.  I came to that conclusion ages ago and long before reading Monday’s Daily Mail , in which some young people agreed to be interviewed and express their idiotic opinions on such trivia as life, love, sex, marriage divorce.  Normally I wouldn’t dream of reading the opinions of pipsqueak teenagers but I was killing the longest half hour of the day, 10.30 – 11a.m., and someone had left the Mail on the table of the patisserie I use as a waiting room.’

‘For a moment I thought I was going mad.  There I was, sitting quietly in the Coach & Horses minding my own business and having my 11 a. m. gargle, when this man walked up to me and said “D’you remember Peter the Pole who worked in the dirty bookshop in St Anne’s Court?  You know, the bloke whose father is an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon in Warsaw?  Well anyway, he’s just moved to Hounslow.”   There’s no answer to that.  It has to be the most extraordinary address I’ve ever had aimed at me.  Not only do I not know Peter the Pole, have never even heard of him, nor care greatly how his father scrapes a living, I also have very little time for a man who moves to Hounslow and wouldn’t trust him an inch.  But what an amazing thing to walk up to someone out fo the blue and ask them that.’

‘I don’t know why, but recently I’ve been wondering what on earth it must feel like to be a guide dog.  I don’t much like dogs but I do love Labradors.  They’re the only digs that are kind, soppy, forgiving and kind to children.  I’d willingly guide a blind Labrador.  I had one once – a bitch – I called her Smedley and she was pretty extraordinary.  One day – during a period when I was desperately skint – she ate an entire weekend’s shopping when my back was turned.  A shoulder of lamb, some chops, six herrings, the lot – you name it.  I kicked hell out of her and she merely retreated to a corner and gazed at me with adoration, wagging her tail ever so tentatively and slowly.  You could half kill a dog like that but it’d still love you.’

‘It’s been another silly week, I’m afraid, and one punctuated with some very strange judgements.  On one day, I forget which, a woman who inflicted sixteen cigarette burns on the hand of her baby was sent to prison for six months.  On the same day, a man who stole £25,000 from his firm was sent down for four years.  And what is £25,000?  Pieces of paper.  Then there was the Miss World contest which I think may have been judged by blind eunuchs.  Miss Trinidad and Tobago, the one with the Cleopatra-style hair, was head and shoulders above her rivals but came nowhere.  But why stop at head and shoulders?  And why the hell should the result irritate me so much?  God knows, but it know how much the contest irritates some women.  It shouldn’t.  If I had the chance of winning £10,000 by walking around a stage wearing swimming trunks I’d jump at it and I’d thank the men’s liberation movement to mind their own business.’