By Mick Scully
I have been reading Darren Coffield’s book, Tales from The Colony Room Club – Soho’s Lost Bohemia. Wonderful – spending 300 pages with Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Jeffrey Bernard. For fifty years this private members drinking club in Dean Street, opened and run until her death by the legendary Muriel Belcher, was the meeting place of artists and writers. It has become part of the mythology of the golden age of Soho.
In the fifties and sixties it was Bacon, Freud, Frank Auerbach. Crazy Nina Hamnett begged drinks in the club, so hard were the times upon which she had fallen. “I was painted by Modigliani,” she used to tell everyone. And she was. “He said I had the best tits in Europe.” George Melly loved the place.
In the nineties, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume. All packed into a room no bigger, Coffield says, than an average living room. Dark green walls. Small lamps. So, not a bright space. And everybody pissed. Drinking on a spectacular scale. And the conversation – witty, bitchy, viciously cruel sometimes. About art. About life. About each other.
I wonder what Francis Bacon would have made of lockdown. Stay at home. No less than 2 metres apart. You know what you can do with your 2 metres, darling. Now, where’s the champagne? Bacon quaffed the stuff prodigiously. Champagne for my real friends, he would chant filling glasses. Real pain for my sham friends. But perhaps the word pandemic. Perhaps the death toll of Londoners, recited nightly on the news. And all that talent of his. Perhaps he would have stayed in his studio and just worked. Another beautiful, terrifying painting.
Francis Bacon, 1971
Perhaps Freud too would have worked. Locked-in for the duration with a model – he could only ever work with a live model, unlike Bacon who used to get John Deakin – another larger than life Colony character, another piss-artist – to take photographs of his models and work from those. Perhaps Jeffrey Bernard would have worked on a novel, or a memoir, or a play. But I fear that he may have become unwell.
Sitting in the garden that is quite lovely in the late spring sunshine: tulips, bluebells, creamy-green clematis – and the birdsong, suddenly so much birdsong. That is a blackbird – certain. A robin – definitely. Some sort of tit – I think. Or possibly a chaffinch. What does a chaffinch look like?
Sitting in the garden I return to Coffield’s book. Re-read favourite passages. Look at the photographs. Artists. Writers. Geniuses – some of them. Their acolytes. Most of those photographed are dead now. For the majority it is just these photographs of afternoons in The Colony Room that are left. These and a few memories, anecdotes of wild nights and witty repartee that are recorded here, that live on. Others, a very small number, will leave fine novels, poems, magnificent paintings that are now scattered across the world. Work that it was worth being born to produce.
Living in London in the sixties, I too was a Soho regular, going at least a couple of times a week to the Golden Lion or the French House, both in Dean Street. Gaston Berlemont, the proprietor of the French, bought me drinks, and there aren’t many who can say that. I knew of The Colony Room, knew where it was, knew its reputation, believed it was dangerous and exciting, another world, a world of artists and writers; a world I probably yearned for at that time. But I never had the nerve to mount those steps and try to get in. If I had, it is likely, that I would have been greeted with the tirade of foul mouthed abuse Muriel reserved for those who weren’t either members or their guests. Told to fuck off.
I met a man in The Golden Lion called Theodore Stock who told me he was a member and would take me there – Theo the sock, people called him – but he never did.
Bar Italia, Soho 1960s
She chose VE day to come. Cheryl. Afternoon. Hot. Sunny. There was a bang on the door that echoed through the house. And there she was. Standing at the end of the path, waving a union flag and singing We’ll Meet Again. Quite beautifully actually. I applauded. A man in a mask eyed us from across the street. “I have left messages on your answer machine,” I shouted.
“I know. I know.”
“Where have you been? You’re supposed to stay in.”
“Shopping?”
“I’ve rung three times.”
“Or walking. We can go shopping you know. We’ve got to eat. And take exercise. How are you anyway? I came to see how you are. On my way to the shops.”
She came round the back, through the gate and into the garden. I made tea and we sat well over two metres apart.
I saw that she was uneasy although at first she had claimed everything was fine. “I like the peace and quiet when I wake up in the morning. The birdsong.”
“How are the boys?” I asked.
Both of Cheryl’s sons are in prison. Drugs offences mostly. It was then that the mask slipped – fell away completely really. Her voice trembled. “I’m just so worried. I can’t visit obviously. I haven’t seen Danny since January. He’s been moved to Wolverhampton. Oakwood. He rings. They’ve given them phones. Can you believe that? So he rings every day. But there’s not a lot to say. Covid’s in the prison, of course. He says he’s alright. But,” she took a deep breath, “he would wouldn’t he? They are in their cells all the time by the sound of it. Meals in the cells. Toilet in their cells. So you eat where you shit. Lovely. Sometimes they get exercise – but not every day. And showers - two last week. One the week before.” She spits the word, “Inhuman.”
“And Joseph?”
“He seems okay. He phones, every now and then. Doesn’t tell me much. The thing is,” she leaned forward, but still well within the two metres, “you just don’t know what the hell is going on in there. Anyway,” she got up and walked over to the clematis, “this garden is lovely. You are so lucky to have a garden. And the colour of this.” She touched the clematis flower.
When we had another cup of tea I told her about the Colony Room book. Then read her a few funny bits. We talked about Lucien Freud’s paintings. In the seventies we had gone together to his exhibition at the Tate. She said she had always liked the picture of a man in a raincoat standing alone in a room with only a huge yucca plant.
“It’s called Interior in Paddington,” I said.
“Alright, Cleverclogs.”
My favourite is probably his portrait of John Minton. Another casualty of the Colony Room. Or of the art world. Or of life. He committed suicide at the age of forty. So talented, yet believed he was a failure. I love that sad picture.
When she left through the back gate, the same way she came in – she was carrying Coffield’s book. “I’ll let you have it back in no time. I’m a fast reader.” I smiled; I don’t suppose I will see that again. As I collected the tea cups I saw that Cheryl had left her union flag.
The next morning on my 6 a.m. walk of the neighbourhood, I am startled from my thoughts about eccentrics and rule-breakers, about those who live their lives on the edge, about the artists who live their lives catastrophically close to that edge. People like Minton and Modigliani. And then there are those like Hockney and Hirst who can accommodate a certain familiarity with the edge but without ever getting close enough to risk falling. These are my thoughts when a runner charges round a blind corner into me. Not quite felling me to the ground and breaking bones, but panting spittle all over me. We look at each other. Who has invaded whose space? But he runs on.
6 a.m. It seems like they run all through the night round here.
Mick Scully is a writer of fiction. He has had stories published in a number of anthologies and magazines. His collection of linked short stories, LITTLE MOSCOW, and his novel THE NORWAY ROOM are both published by Tindal Street Press.