THEBOHO INSOHO

Our critic sipping absinthe with Francis Bacon and a crook who burgled Mrs T. Bets on who would be next to die, vile lifestyles, and even worse insults. A bibulous history of the reprobates who put...

You know you’re getting really old when a history book covers a period after your own. My own Soho days were back in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Christopher Howse must have arrived three or four years later, in the mid-Eighties. By then, Soho had already begun its descent into trendiness – the slick Groucho Club, still a haven for fashionable media types, opened in Dean Street in 1985. Meanwhile art students dressed in black were descending on the surrounding pubs like ravens. By then, this part of London was already losing its contrariness; its shabby, worldweary cynicism was under threat from bright-eyed can-do yuppies. These days, the area is awash with PR offices, fancy restaurants, film-editing suites and coffee bars offering 17 types of skinny latté.

But, broadly speaking, Howse’s experiences seem to have been much the same as mine: in fact, I was reassured while reading this book that the same people I had mixed with had still been there, drinking away, grumbling about the same sorts of things, and presumably standing in the same spots, when Christopher Howse came along.

‘I’ve never laughed as much as I did in that decade,’ he recalls. But the humour tended to be of the blackest sort, so bleak that innocent newcomers would have been unable to recognise it as humour at all, and may well have considered it closer to misery. A typical example of Soho wit concerns the photographer John Deakin, who is said to have named the painter Francis Bacon as his next-of-kin simply because he knew how much Bacon would hate seeing his dead body. When the time came, and Deakin died, Bacon was led into the mortuary to look at his corpse. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen Deakin with his mouth shut,’ he remarked, drily.

Back then, Soho was, says Howse, a radical democracy, open to rich and poor alike. He lists the inhabitants of the French pub in Dean Street on a typical day: ‘Painters and writers, ex-boxers, failed publishers, working prostitutes, old models, old poofs, stagehands, grocers, pornographers, photographers and a retired lamplighter.’ But worldly success held no cachet. No one was ever permitted to play King Pin in a world where the only permitted greeting was an insult.

Francis Bacon’s own pre-eminence as a painter did nothing to shield him from abuse. Howse remembers seeing the foul-mouthed proprietor of the Colony Room Club, turning on Bacon one afternoon: ‘“You can’t f ****** paint!” yelled Ian Board in a voice like a cheese grater, as he grabbed an umbrella hanging from the back of his stool and started to belabour the artist about the shoulders as he left by the dark, precipitous twisting stairway, with a volley of ballpoint pens bouncing off his leather-clad back.’

As you can see, Howse has a sharp ear for the type of conversation that was commonplace in the Soho bars. ‘If you had to eat someone here, like those people in the air crash in the Andes, who would you start with?’ asked the journalist Jeffrey Bernard, a one-and-a-half-bottles-of-vodka-aday man whose long-running autobiographical column in The Spectator was once described as ‘a suicide note in weekly instalments’. Bernard went on to dismiss the suitability of most of the regulars: ‘Not Richard Ingrams. He’d be like a bit of burnt toast.’

Soho in the Eighties was a far cry from Camberwick Green. It was aggressively unsentimental, and fuelled by alcohol. One French pub habitué took bets on who would be the next of the regulars to die, with Jeffrey Bernard the 6-4 favourite. As it turned out, Bernard lived much longer than expected, though when it came to the end, he’d had a leg amputated and was on dialysis. The kindly Howse visited him in hospital, and, after an hour, said that he had better get going. ‘Just go then,’ said Bernard. ‘All you did was keep looking at your watch anyway.’

Others have romanticised old Soho, but it is a danger that Howse does his best to avoid. He objects to the myth of the fun-loving prostitute, for instance. ‘The retired prostitutes that I came to know were not happy people. A quiet drink with one woman who generally presented a cheery face to the world always ended with helpless drunken tears and confused accounts of childhood abuse.’

And any Soho novice would have to steel himself or herself against the prevailing smells, not least those emanating from my shabby old friend, the poet Paul Potts, who created a yard-wide cordon sanitaire of empty space around him, even on a crowded lunchtime. Howse says of one club, the Kismet, that ‘it was like drinking in a badly run public lavatory’, and of the upstairs room at the Coach and Horses, where for decades Private Eye held its fortnightly lunches, ‘it had an unconquerable air of desertion as though it was part of an abandoned house in a war zone’.

He is accurate, too, on how disgusting most of the food was. The sandwich shop he used to frequent served ‘large, strikingly pink slices of foreign sausage folded with slack lettuce; cold batter-coated bits of veal hammered into flaps. Like carcases on a Smithfield trolley, these pressed their sides against the walls of the glass display counter.’ At the Colony Club, Ian Board refused to serve slices of lemon in drinks – ‘Dirty, stinking, rotten fruit bobbing around. What’s the point?’ – largely because he couldn’t be bothered to go out and buy lemons from the market, just two streets away.

Delicacies were few and far between, and often more revolting than the sandwiches on offer. Joe the barman once invited me up to the out-ofbounds

kitchen upstairs at the French of a grea pub with the promise gour met delight. The delicacy in question turned out to be a bright red, cold coxcomb, sliced in two, with vinegar poured over it. It tasted red and rubin bery, like plasticine.

But where else the world would you ever be offered a cox comb? The pleasure of Soho lay in its unexpectedness.

I also remember one quiet morn ing when the saintly proprietor of the

into a world uncommon in crime fiction: the predominantly Asian London suburbs of Southall and Hounslow. His engaging hero, a beer-drinking Muslim called Zaq Khan, has just been released from prison when he’s coerced into finding the runaway daughter of a powerful Sikh family.

Only To Sleep Lawrence Osborne Hogarth €18.19

Osborne’s brilliant innovation is to show us Philip Marlowe as an old man in the late Eighties, retired to Mexico. Marlowe’s got one last job: looking for a man called Saul Zinn.