diary

christopher howse

Jeffrey, it was only the odd postcard or invitation, as we saw each other so often.

Soaking up the Atmosphere

John Heath-Stubbs was blind and carried a stick, but not a white one. It was more like a cudgel. One July day, thirty years ago, fearless of street excavations and dogs on leads, he walked with three of us from the French pub in Dean Street, Soho, over to the Coach and Horses. And as he walked, he sang.

I’d found him in the French pub by chance that morning, with his friends Canadian Jo, as we knew her, a legal shorthand taker, and Brendan, a postman. It happened to be his seventieth birthday. He mentioned he’d first been to the French fifty-four years before, which would make it 1934 and him sixteen. He’d have been one hundred this summer.

Walking down Romilly Street, John sang ‘Champagne Charlie’, unselfconsciously. We had been enjoying some champagne, which the French regularly sold in quarter-bottles. But in those days it sold no food. At the Coach, the food that day turned out to be cheese sandwiches. John said it made him feel like the rat in John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk.

Paired in my mind with John Heath-Stubbs in the literary axis of the Coach and French in the 1980s is David Wright. Together, at the invitation of T S Eliot, they had edited The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Verse, published in 1953. David was completely deaf. He refused to let that isolate him in the raucous pubs of Soho, where people went for conversation – or for flaming rows. He had no illusions. ‘It is important not to embarrass people with one’s disability,’ he wrote in his impressive book Deafness, ‘or you find yourself a drag on people’s enjoyment.’

He lip-read, though he remarked that it could lead to slapstick misapprehensions. To a lip-reader, the words ‘baby’ and ‘paper’ are indistinguishable, so once when his wife asked, ‘Where’s the baby?’ he replied, ‘I put it in the dustbin.’ Anyway, he couldn’t lip-read me, because of my beard. So we spoke by means of conversation books, as Beethoven did. They were just gatherings of paper. I wish I’d kept them.

Considering the subject of Soho in the Eighties for a book, it seemed to me that the place displayed a radical democracy: anyone could join the conversation if they paid the entrance fee – a half of bitter. The only enemies were bores. If King George II really did say, ‘I hate all bainters and boets’, he wouldn’t have got on in Soho in the Eighties.

It was in part an oral society. Often you wouldn’t know how someone’s name was spelt. Indeed, Mick Tobin (the stage carpenter whom Lucian Freud portrayed in Man in a Check Cap) thought it better to deal only in nicknames, to thwart in some measure the forces of the law. That was fine if your nickname was the Village Postmistress or Ian the Hat, but less than satisfactory for the man known as Brian the Burglar.

I received frequent letters only from the eldest of the three Bernard brothers with whom I found my life so much entangled. That was the poet Oliver, who lived in Norfolk. From the middle brother, the photographer Bruce, and the youngest,

I spent more time in Jeffrey Bernard’s company than Boswell did with Johnson.

But Jeffrey was his own Boswell, writing a memoir in weekly instalments in his Low Life column in The Spectator, where I worked in those years. His talk in the pub, and it was very good talk, acted as a sort of rehearsal for the column, as long as he could remember it.

He often wrote the column in the cold dawn of press day, Wednesday, shaking with his daily hangover. He used a portable typewriter nicknamed Monica (simply the brand name), which he placed on a desk in the room let to him by Geraldine Norman, the widow of his old friend Frank Norman, the author of Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T ’Be, a smash hit musical in 1959. On the other side of the desk stood a bust of Nelson, one of Jeffrey’s cast of heroes. The Spectator had special paper printed for him, with margins in feint. With two sheets filled, he’d done enough. There were seldom mistakes or changes.

What made Low Life so popular? Jeffrey thought it attracted people who were fascinated by a life of drink, failed marriages, homelessness and unemployment but didn’t dare cut their own moorings of convention. James Michie, the publisher, identified a practical attraction: when you began reading, you wanted to go on to the end. This was partly owing to the conversational style, partly the narrative force mobilised by the storyteller. Reading that, one winter, when horse racing was off because of a hard frost, Conan Nicholas had invented cat racing in his flat in Battersea, you were curious to know what happened next.

Jeffrey was a good photographer. I have in mind an image in the book he produced in 1966 with Frank Norman, Soho Night and Day, of a butcher, standing in Hammett’s ornately tiled shop in Rupert Street, slicing with a cleaver down through the carcass of a pig suspended by hooks in its rear hocks all the way from the tail to the ear. But I think Daniel Farson was a better one. I made the mistake of telling Dan he was really a photographer more than a journalist or writer of books. That set him off into a rage like a Pyrenean thunderstorm. He was one of those drinkers who, after an equable plateau, suddenly turns.

After two or three large gin and tonics he would be all affability. His chubby cheeks and well-moistened mouth made his smiling remarks all the more buttery. ‘I do like the things you write. It’s such a change to find a little intelligence in the papers,’ he would say. Then – click! – he would swing round and yelp, ‘I loathe you. I can’t bear you. You’re so clever, aren’t you? I can’t stand the way you write. Don’t talk to me. Of course you wouldn’t want to buy a drink, would you? Oh no. It’s no good offering now, I wouldn’t take it from you. So patronising. Don’t speak to me. Ever.’

We did speak again, each time he made a raid on London from his Devon lair, until he died aged seventy, just after publishing his autobiography, Never a Normal Man. He was a monster, like so many in Soho in the Eighties, and I miss them greatly. r

august 2018 | Literary Review 1