When a friend got in touch with me recently to talk about the legendary Soho landlord Norman Balon, who died last week at the age of 99, she added what I thought was an extraordinary statement: “I didn’t know he was Jewish. Did you?”
I thought this extraordinary because for a long time, I considered him to be the most Jewish person I had ever met. Not through any acts of piety or observance; just because it was part of him, as obvious as the sunlight his regulars at the Coach and Horses hid from. He was already larger than life, so his Jewishness was large, too, as large as his powerful frame, which only seemed the larger because of, not in spite of, his stooping gait. His was a particular kind of London Jewishness: not of the higher professions, the lawyers, doctors, and businessmen I was familiar with, but adjacent to gangsterism, not by any means a criminal but knowing how to deal with them. One messed with him at one’s peril.
A landlord ought to be larger than life, and in this he completely fitted the bill. The pub he ran, for what seemed like countless years, served a clientele of what may be unkindly but accurately described as a bunch of Soho wrecks: mostly alcoholics, on the periphery of fame, bohemian in spirit, bored and in terror of boredom, flailing against the world and revelling in their semi-pariah status.
Their presiding genius was Jeffrey Bernard, writer of the Low Life column in The Spectator: he would sit balefully at his regular seat at the bar, nursing a succession of vodka-and-sodas, chain- smoking, of course. Everyone chain-smoked, apart from Norman, who was also teetotal.
I had plenty of time to observe them all, and Norman, because for most nights every week between 1984 and 1989 I was sitting at the bar with them, drinking in the atmosphere as well as the surprisingly good value large whisky highballs that taught me how to drink without becoming (too) obnoxious.
I went there to escape the suffocating life of the parental home in East Finchley; and I soon learnt that the fascination of the Coach and Horses centred on Norman Balon: he was the most interesting person there, a fact tacitly acknowledged by everyone.
Even Bernard was scared of him, and he wielded great power: with the words “you’re barred!” Balon would expel his children from their Eden, usually because of some drunken outrage (they were ten a penny at the Coach); sometimes, it seemed, on a whim. But these people would always come back, sheepishly, a few days later; and with a roll of the eyes, he would let them back into the fold.
He was very much the Hebrew Bible divinity: the ultimate authority who could not always be understood.
“Worst lay in Soho,” he once said, describing me, to a young woman I was trying to impress. And he knew whereof he spoke, for I had gone out for a while with his head barmaid, Debbie, who lived above the bar; and for a while, I lived there too; it was like heaven.
I suppose he became a kind of father figure to me, for I was young, and easily impressed; I suppose this is why we got on.
He revelled in his reputation as “London’s Rudest Landlord”, and he could be very rude, having to deal with a bunch of sots who all considered themselves great wits; at the end of the evening only coarse insult could get through to them.
But I learnt his great, guilty secret, as I got to know him better: he was a kind and soft-hearted man.
I saw this side of him when we met after I’d stopped being a regular: every few months, there’d be another funeral, hardly surprising given the self-destructiveness of his regulars, but they saddened him more than you would have thought.
The more self-aware of the regulars knew they were doomed: a few of them advised me to get out of there while I still could. I took their advice, but every so often I would go back, hoping to catch Norman’s eye.
“What the f*** are you doing here?” were his words when I first came down in the morning after a night with Debbie; he was sweeping the floor behind the bar.
He used the same words, exactly, when he saw me at my first Private Eye lunch a few years later; and it became his default greeting to me whenever I ran into him, but he always said it with a smile. (That was another thing about him: he could be very, very funny.)
I last saw him about three years ago, when a play was put on about his custodianship of the Coach; he was very old, of course, but still hale, his stoop maybe a bit more pronounced.
But he remembered me, and by that I was charmed; for he was, ultimately, a very charming man.
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