Life and times

The author and journalist on long afternoons drinking in the Coach & Horses in Soho

Telegraph journalist Christopher Howse

BY DAY I CHEERILY say ‘good morning’ to down-and-outs on my walk to work. There are a lot about because I live near a railway terminus, Victoria in London. Generally they answer more cheerfully than I could in a similar position. At least, in wishing each other a good day, we are on a level of equality.

The walk home from the office late at night, though, is sometimes ghastly. It is not going too far to liken it to a scene from Goya’s The Disasters of War .Idon’t mean one of the atrocities committed with sword or musket, but more like No hay quien los socorra (‘There is no one to help them’), in which a standing figure covers his face, while around him lie the starving or dead on the bare land.

Once, on a chill, rainy night, I saw a man sitting in a wheelchair waving the fresh stump of his leg, from which bloody bandages were unfurling. This was scarcely credible. Something had to be done, and luckily someone else rang for an ambulance. I left them to it.

But I was caught another night when a young woman – tall, thin, dark-eyed and nervous – asked me for money and kept following me, repeating the request. I said I would not give her money. I told her she needed more than a handout. ‘Will you give me a car?’ she said. ‘Then I could sleep in it.’ She persevered until I reached my front door and opened it with my key. I closed it and left her outside.

MY NEW BOOK, Soho in the Eighties, has a subordinate theme of awkwardness. This was typified during my first visit to the Coach & Horses in the parish, when I settled down to a pint of Burton ale in a nice thin glass, and as I pulled a chair in at a little table, it jarred against the legs, sending a wavelet of spillage over the black Formica surface. The chair was just a little too wide to fit.

This awkwardness seemed to flow from the character of Norman Balon, the landlord of the Coach, a lanky man who looked like a heron. He performed a high ritual of awkwardness each time he came from behind the bar and unlocked the cigarette machine on the wall near the lavatories. He would then pull off the whole front section between his outstretched arms, lugging its weight over to let it rest on a nearby table.

Inside, the machine was almost entirely of wood, pale and clean. Columns of cigarettes towered above drawers released by the right combination of coins in the slot. Strings and pulleys wove up and down. There was a lot to go wrong.

Norman would empty the coin boxes on to the table where, at lunchtime, people from Private Eye ate their daily bread and brie. He would sit at the old settle by the gas fire to count the money into little plastic bags for the bank, pulling coins across the tabletop in pairs with his index and middle finger. Sometimes the phone rang or the barman announced that a barrel in the cellar needed changing, and he would lose count.

I think this needless awkwardness attracted Richard Ingrams to the Coach, which in the early days of Private Eye almost became its office. He had an affinity with awkwardness in places and people. Soho in the 1980s was such a heap of awkward people thrown together that it resembled The Raft of the Medusa. Apart from Richard Ingrams and Norman Balon, they all seem to have drowned.

IT HAS BEEN A GOOD season for mosquitoes in central London. With the window open a crack and the duvet pushed aside in the heat, I found that my arms and legs became a nocturnal feedingstation. I have developed no signs of malaria yet, though I don’t know why not. Soho in the Eighties, by Christopher Howse, is published by Bloomsbury, £20

Soho was such a heap of awkward people thrown together that it resembled The Raft of the Medusa