Slowing Down (16 page)

Much as my doctor disapproves – she called me incorrigible on my last visit – I too still drink, most of the time Irish whiskey, mostly of an evening and especially at the conclusions of gigs, particularly if the band and I patronize the hotel bar. If I haven’t eaten before the concert (it depends on the time available between the sound-check and the first number), it’s usually a small Italian restaurant (I love those huge phallic pepper grinders), Chinese or Indian. If Italian, I usually settle for spaghetti bolognese. I prefer the long variety wound round a fork held against a spoon (dead common, so Andrée’s posh Italian communist friends told her: the
bottom
of the plate should act as the fulcrum). I also tuck in my napkin to save spillage down my shirt, tie and lapels. (I’m usually wearing my band suit by this time.) Most people, if I’m dining
à deux
, find it vaguely embarrassing. My excuse, uttered like a ritual, is, ‘Like a Belgian senator’. I don’t know, in fact, if Belgian senators do this at all, nor where the phrase comes from.

This position saves me constantly grovelling under the table to retrieve my elusive napkin which immediately slips to the floor if spread across my knees. Is it my shape? I feel it’s akin to my inability (no hips and small buttocks), even when my stomach was enormous – my great and long-time friend the painter Maggi Hambling claimed that my gut, which she loved, entered the room long before I did – to keep my trousers up without clip-on braces.

I’m quite thin now, which just happened recently. I didn’t resort to nibbling a single lettuce leaf washed down with
Brecon water like a supermodel. On the other hand, I do eat much less, quite often only one meal a day, and if I order something substantial even then I often can’t finish it (‘Delicious, but I’ve a very small appetite’). I can, however, always manage a pudding, having like many old people developed a sweet tooth. Still, my jowls have vanished, replaced by modified turkey-like wattles. Looking at photographs taken only a couple of years back, I see I was quite neckless and my face was almost circular like a child’s drawing of the sun. In fact, people who haven’t seen me for some time tend to say, ‘You
have
lost weight’ in that mildly worried tone of voice that suggests I’m about to tell them some bad, perhaps fatal, physical news. I reassure them, and relieved they add, ‘You are looking well, though,’ misinterpreting my whiskey flush as the reward for early nights, a sensible gastronomic regime and lots of fresh air.

Some of my favourite foods are denied me. For example, I had a bad oyster years ago. When I tried some again recently, they had a disastrous effect. The ageing stomach seems to have developed an elephantine memory and, however long the gap, reacts instantly. The same is even more the case if I gobble down
moules marinières
, an old favourite of mine. Other foods may be harmless in themselves, but if they coincide with a bad attack of the trots, I cross them off my OK list. Bacon for one, and I love it, especially when crisp in the American manner, although cooked like that it can splinter and jump, justifying the Belgian senator’s precaution.

I have developed fairly recently an almost pregnant woman-like passion for bananas. They do me no harm and have a unique flavour, if correctly ripe. My obsessive love
of neatness is satisfied by the way they are so neatly contained within their skin (only the egg is their rival here).

Citrus fruits, tomatoes and especially strawberries are forbidden as provokers of arthritis. I sometimes, guiltily and in a very restrained way, break this taboo, especially in the case of fried tomatoes, preferably on fried bread, part of every Thursday’s cooked breakfast in my childhood, although the fried bread tends, like American-style bacon, to bombard my Belgian senator’s apron.

That’s about all to report, except the big-toe nails which during my psoriasis days were pushed out of shape and discoloured. Whereas I can clip (just) the smaller nails, especially when the outside ones start to catch my socks, the big ones need the chiropodist with her astounding collection of scissors, which look like a medieval dwarf’s instruments of torture.

That’s quite enough, probably far too much, about my current health and needs. Don’t, by the way, put any of this reporting down to physical vanity. I’m long past that and today, peering into the enlarging side of the shaving mirror, I agree wholeheartedly with what my mother used to repeat constantly in her last decade, ‘You can’t tell me that old age is pretty!’ Too true, Maudie!

Restaurants remain a pleasure, but today a much more occasional one. They come under my list of ‘treats’. My friend Venetia thinks of them as a ‘celebration’ and expects everyone rich and fond of her (or even not so rich) to demonstrate their fondness by the simple, if increasingly expensive gesture of taking her for a meal.

Now she has a title (her late husband was a viscount). I

‘You can’t tell me that old age is pretty!’

always mention this when booking on the telephone. Head waiters and managers love it. ‘’Er Ledysheep ’as arrivée’, they tell me if she’s early or I’m late.

Jim Godbolt, an old friend, past agent and sparring partner of mine, has many prejudices, among them a hatred of public schools and a suspicion of all those who were educated (or mis-educated) there. He also detests the idea of chic restaurants. So to tease him I sometimes say, ‘I must rush because…’

‘A little dinner, is it, George?’ he asks. ‘All the flim-flam of West End eating?’

Well, if by flim-flam he means good service and delicious food – yes. But in fact I also enjoy the ritual of it, almost religious at times, and Venetia’s gossip about many of the other diners which would be thoroughly enjoyable if I could still hear her. As it is, if I ask her to repeat it, she hisses at me in exasperation, ‘I can’t shout.’

My Uncle Fred took me, as a child in Liverpool, to the State Grill Room for what I thought he called ‘Chicken on the gorilla’, which amused him. I, exploitative little sod that I was, also asked for ‘suggestive biscuits’. ‘Isn’t he sweet?’ grown-ups would coo.

The State’s interior décor was amazing. Arts and crafts I’ve always supposed, but in its late and decadent period: huge medallions on the walls throughout, mostly sea-faring in subject, but seeming modelled in wax and then heavily varnished. The rest all fitted in: heavy silver cutlery, gleaming glass, big napkins (this was, however, long before the Belgian senator was helped into his chair) and ornate plates.

They greeted my Uncle Fred warmly, who obviously took his business clients there, and I was impressed by that too.

Strangely enough, some time in the seventies or eighties, John Chilton and I played the State, temporarily a jazz club. It seemed in no way changed, although ‘the Gorilla’ was extinguished and Uncle Fred too.

In the lobby stood a very pretty be-jeaned blonde with that faint accent typical of Liverpool suburban girls. Immediately, she made it quite clear that she fancied me. Despite some wavering at the end of our second set, we eventually went back in a taxi to her place, a small, chaotic bedsit. The truth of ‘the certainty of hazard’ was at work again in that it was round the corner from the pub where my father used to drink with his circle and the street where my mother and, come to that, her mother, used to shop.

In my new friend’s messy room were posters of rock stars and local footballers and a number of cuddly animals. She told me her boyfriend was out of town for some weeks and that she worked in the office of a big firm in the city centre. As we drank our Nescafé she added that at a fixed time, both morning and afternoon, she went for ‘a ciggy and a wank in the office lavy’. Mulligan called this sort of revelation ‘hot chat’ and its effect here was to guarantee me a very horny night, all the more so because it was bang in the middle of an area buttered with memories of my childhood and adolescence.

In the morning, after she’d gone to work (‘Christ, I’ll be late for werk!’), I, though knowing it to be absurd, couldn’t resist tidying everything up. (Venetia used to be driven mad by my tidying. She is an untidy woman, and she took to calling me ‘Winnie’ and pretending I was her Edwardian lady’s maid.) I made Carole’s bed (a possible Turner Prize entry), sorted out the LPs and rock mags and let myself out.

I found myself immediately in Lark Lane and began to walk towards Aigburth Road to catch a bus (how I regret the passing of the tram, or ‘car’, as it was known) to the digs where the band was lodged near the Adelphi. The ‘certainty of hazard’ hadn’t finished with me, however. Just a few yards down Lark Lane was an elderly upholsterer at work outside his shop on the webbing of an easy chair. ‘’Ullo, George dere,’ he said, ‘I used to do werk for yer mother.’

I saw Carole only twice more. I met her by appointment in the Bluecoat Chambers, a beautiful classical building, the front a courtyard and on the right-hand side a club called the Sandon, of which my parents were enthusiastic members. It was connected with the arts and at the back of the main block were studios. It was badly bombed in the war but luckily the damage was confined to the interior, leaving the beautiful façade unscathed. Faithfully and immediately reconstructed after the armistice, it now housed a coffee-bar, and it was there Carole and I met about midday – and her mother came too, a very nice lady.

Then, many years later, when we were doing a concert in the pub in the reconstituted Albert Dock (the Tate in the North, the Maritime Museum, expensive apartments and rather better than usual souvenir shops) the organizers told me there was someone to see me, and it was Carole, a decade or so on but looking wonderful. She seemed touched that I remembered her, but how could I have forgotten her?

11. ‘Alas I Waver to and fro’

A woman is only a woman

But a good cigar is a smoke.

Rudyard Kipling

The quotation is, I’m sure, anathema to political correctness, and, resistant as I am to that finger-wagging, holier-than-thou bullying, even when I agree with its aim I still resent its obligatory surveillance. Any road, it is not my object here to dive into those troubled waters, but to describe my almost lifelong love affair with tobacco, even though at times I have tried, none too successfully, to dump it.

I have, of course, tried cigars, preferably little ones in tins or cardboard boxes, and I have fairly often accepted a large one. But I found the Whiffs and Hamlets not up to much, and the Corona Coronas and their Cuban competitors, very agreeable for the first puff or two, then became sodden in my mouth to the point of disintegration. So, despite the fact that Churchill and many tycoons favour them, it was back to gaspers for me.

For a time it was believed that, like pipes, roll-ups were less harmful than ‘tailor-made’ cigarettes, but lately these comforting myths have lost any credence.
All
tobacco is now officially bad for you. I’m sure it’s true, so what am I doing lighting up? There are, I’ve noticed in passing, two principal classes who still smoke: teenagers, for whom it’s a
defiant gesture, and the old, who have always done it. As to class in general, smoking is less rejected at any age among the working classes, whereas the middle classes try and usually succeed in giving up.

As I’m not a teenager and, at seventy-eight, now puff away without guilt or inhibition, I must of course try to justify myself. I think a lot of it has to do with my adolescence and youth. It may be difficult to imagine it now, but in the twenties and thirties, or in my case the forties and fifties, to smoke was to appear glamorous and sophisticated. My maternal grandmother was mildly addicted to Gold Flakes, and her sons also. My father preferred Black Cats or Craven A, the latter of which was actually advertised as ‘kind to your throat’. I don’t think anybody, including doctors, believed that smoking was in any way life-threatening.

There were naturally class factors concerning what brand you smoked: full-length expensive ones for the bourgeoisie, short, cheap ones for the workers. The former usually filled their gold cigarette cases before leaving the house to dine out in the evening; the working classes usually favoured Wild Woodbines from the packet (and a very attractive packet it was, like a green and gold, art nouveau-ish, Turkish tile).

Most middle- and upper-middle-class households had large silver boxes, sometimes engraved with the names of their golf club and lined with a veneer of some scented wood, kept full of cigarettes for the convenience of guests. There were ashtrays, mostly of cut glass, on every table, including in the bedrooms.

Advertising of cigarettes was in all the newspapers and on many billboards. There was one brand named after Du
Maurier, the then famous actor whom my mother admired for his ‘throw-away’ effects. ‘He could turn his back to the audience,’ she’d tell me, admiringly, ‘and you could tell what he was thinking.’ The brand Du Maurier recruited famous figures of stage or screen with such slogans as, ‘If Ivor Novello offered you a cigarette, it’d be a Du Maurier.’

Somebody expressed surprise that they hadn’t chosen Godfrey Winn, the hideously sentimental and highly paid columnist. Noël Coward, who loathed ‘Winifred God’, as Winn was frequently nicknamed, mostly for his legendary meanness, intervened. ‘If they did that,’ he said, ‘they’d have to change the wording to, “If Godfrey Winn offered you a cigarette [pause, no doubt perfectly judged] it’d be a fucking miracle!”’