Traveling Light

by Bill Barich

  In the old days, most publicans owned their pubs, but that is no longer the case. The Fountain belongs to the Ind Coope brewery, a subsidiary of Allied Breweries, Ltd., and Page runs it for H. H. Finch, a management company, in exchange for a salary, his flat, and a share of the profits. Allied is numbered among the so-called Big Six breweries. The others are Bass Charrington, Courage, Scottish & Newcastle, Watney-Mann, and Whitbread Co. Over the past quarter century, these corporations have acquired the many small firms who used to compete for a share of the market, and they now dominate the beer business, just as Anheuser-Busch, Miller Brewing, G. Heileman, and so on dominate it in the United States. The British giants have gone their American counterparts one better by gaining control of their primary retail outlets—the country’s pubs. The Big Six now own most of the seventy thousand-plus pubs in Great Britain. In The Fountain, all the beers on draft—with the exception of Guinness, which transcends corporate boundaries and is carried everywhere as the stout of choice—are Ind Coope brands. In a Courage pub, the beers will all be Courage brands.

  The advantages of this scheme are obvious and enormous. British drinkers complain vehemently about it, but they are, on the whole, as lazy as the rest of us, and few of them will desert their handy local and walk an extra block or two to a pub where a preferred brand might be on tap. (In North London, Bass pubs are thought to have the best beer; Watney pubs are thought to have the worst.) Pubs that are still independent are known as “free houses,” and they offer a very good selection of premium beers that are unavailable in affiliated pubs. The beers come from little breweries outside the corporate world, and they are strong and well-made and have not been toned down to meet the bland requirements of an imaginary customer’s palate.

  The question of beer quality, or lack of it, is often discussed in pubs, even as the subject of the inquiry is being swallowed. In all my hours at The Fountain, I never heard anybody say that British beer is better now than it was in the past. Generally speaking, most beer drinkers seem to feel that since corporations own the pubs and have, as it were, a captive audience, their devotion to quality could be said to be non-existent. The most common evidence cited in support of this argument is the great keg beer scandal of the 1960s, which occurred shortly after the corporate takeover began in earnest. In pubs, the preferred draft is usually bitter ale, a copper-colored, unpasteurized, heavily hopped brew that varies in alcoholic content from three to five-and-a-half per cent. It varies in taste, too. Some bitters are tart on the tongue, with a sour underbite, while others are quite sweet. Bitter comes to the pub in casks and undergoes a secondary fermentation in the pub cellar, supervised by an experienced cellarman who monitors temperature, the action of the yeast, and other important factors. It is such a delicately balanced brew that it must be tapped at exactly the right moment or its flavor will be ruined. The beer, never carbonated, rises to the bar via a manual pump system. The barman or barmaid pulls a handle, and out it flows, a half pint per stroke.

  It takes time, care, energy, and a great deal of craft to make traditional cask-conditioned bitter ales, so, not surprisingly, the corporations decided to phase them out and replace them with more cost-efficient products—pristine keg bitters that would be filtered and pasteurized (longer shelf life), carbonated (less fragile and easier to tap), and brewed to be served cold (masks the flavor). Keg bitters would also have the advantage of requiring minimal care. An inept cellarman could knock over a keg, roll it around, thump it like a conga drum, and still not destroy the beer. Moreover, keg bitters, being uniform and widely distributed, would lend themselves to national rather than regional advertising.

  This sounds like the perfect corporate ploy, but the British public—habit-prone, raised on notions of quality—was not so easily led astray. Almost as soon as keg bitters were introduced, a massive revolt began against them. What was this thin, fizzy, foul-smelling, vile-tasting dishwater spitting from the taps? In joking protest, some drinkers banded together and mounted what became known as the Campaign for Real Ale, or CAMRA. Their primary demand was that breweries reinstate old-fashioned bitter and forget about this other swill. When CAMRA received coverage in the media, its founders learned that there were millions of disgruntled customers who wanted to join them in applying pressure to the Big Six. The Campaign started publishing an annual guide to good beers, which included a directory of the pubs that stocked them. Eventually, the breweries were forced to give in, and they scrapped their plans for dominion. Every decent pub in London now offers at least one brand of cask-conditioned bitter—real ale, that is. Keg bitters are still on draft, but they are ignored by all except the dull, the unrepentant, and the perverse.

  …

  The real ale I most often drank at The Fountain was Burton, a rich, soothing beer named in honor of the town of Burton-on-Trent, which has been a brewing center for hundreds of years. Ind Coope moved there in 1853 after acquiring the famous Allsopp Company. The Allsopps had been making ale since the Crusades. The water in Burton-on-Trent is special, with a high gypsum content that’s ideal for pale, sparkling brews. Ale produced in the Burton style is sometimes called India Pale Ale—a relic of colonial days.

  I still remember the first glass of Burton I ever had, on that first night I peeked into the public bar. The homey radiance of the place drew me in. I hung my coat on a knob of polished brass and claimed a vacant stool. Right away, a bushy-haired man who’d been doing some kind of puzzle in the Evening Standard jumped up from a chair behind the bar and asked me what I wanted to drink. This was John, the cellarman. I say “cellarman” rather than “barman” because John always made that distinction when he talked about his job. He wanted people to know that he had responsibilities beyond the mere drawing of beer. A meticulous person of twenty-eight, John had a vaguely military bearing that manifested itself in a desire for order. Often, he wore a short-sleeved shirt with epaulets, and when he marched from tap to tap, or descended into the cellar to check on the pressure of his kegs, the huge bunch of keys that dangled from his belt loop rattled like the notes of a martial air. An empty glass never lingered on a table when John was around. He’d grab it up and wash it before it had the slightest chance to offend. It was John’s dream that Page would someday recommend him to Ind Coope as a potential publican, so he was dedicated and loyal and worked hard to see that The Fountain was congenial and well-run. Like Page, he was quick with a quip—annoyingly so, if you happened to be nursing a sore head and preferred a dose of silence with your beer. Also, he bore an uncanny physical resemblance to his boss. For a while after I started coming in, I assumed he was one of Page’s sons. “Not likely, mate,” he snorted when I asked him about it, but I think that secretly he was pleased to have an attachment—however tenuous—to family.

  I told John that I’d like a pint of bitter. “Try the Burton,” he said. “It’s going very nicely.” I watched as he drew my pint—eighteen-plus ounces of beer. (The pint measure derives from an old measure for corn.) He filled the glass right to the top, as required by law. The glass was tall and had no handle. It looked a bit like a Coke glass, although it was twice as big and not quite as nipped in at the middle. Pints are also served in squat, dimpled mugs with handles, but such mugs are thought to be on the sissy side of life, and some men won’t accept them. Ordering a half pint also smacks of effeminacy, since custom dictates that half pints are for women.

  I sipped the Burton. It didn’t remind me of any of the other bitters I’d sampled on my rounds. It was softer and milder, with a complex flavor that kept developing nuances on the tongue. The prevailing myth about British beers is that they are served warm, but this isn’t true. Pub cellars are cool, particularly in winter. The Burton was not as icy as an average American draft, but it wasn’t tepid, either. “That’s sweeter than Taylor-Walker,” John said, referring to the other real ale that Ind Coope makes. When I tried Taylor-Walker a few days later, I thought it was thinner-tasting than Burton, with more bite.

  Four other drafts are
available in the public bar—Double Diamond, Long Life, Guinness, and Skol. Skol is billed as a lager, but that’s deceptive. It has none of the clean crispness of German lagers, nor any of the soda-poppy effervescence of American brews. Instead, it’s thick and syrupy, conspicuously lacking an edge. For me, it held all the attraction of thirty-weight motor oil. Some people like to spike it with a jigger or two of Rose’s Lime Juice. The concoction is known as lager-and-lime, and it is even more sludge-like than unadulterated Skol. Draft Guinness moves slowly at The Fountain, but those who enjoy stout support it vociferously. Stout is stronger than bitter or lager—higher in alcohol, almost black in the glass, and topped with a scurf of foam that tastes healthy when you lift it to your lips. (In Nigeria, where Guinness is revered as a potent sexual elixir, the company slogan used to be Guinness Gives You Power.) Bottled Guinness is an entirely different brew, and it attracts a different constituency. It is even thicker and blacker, yielding up a medicinal bouquet. People who swear by it avoid the draft variety on the grounds that it is an inauthentic product. Both Double Diamond and Long Life are examples of the notorious keg bitters that were supposed to sweep the nation. They are not as bad as the British pretend, but they do not compare in any sense to Burton or Taylor-Walker.

  When I finished my pint, John drew me another. He wasn’t very busy that night. There were only about six customers in the public bar. I asked him if The Fountain was usually so quiet, and he said no—the lack of traffic could be directly attributed to the distance that several regulars were from their next paychecks. Money was tight in Britain, especially among working people, and the Thatcher government seemed determined to tax most stringently their simple pleasures. In the past, anybody with a job could afford a pint or two at the local, but that had changed radically in the last decade. Beer wasn’t cheap anymore. Burton went for sixty-four pence a pint, or about a dollar fifteen, and Guinness was ten pence higher. Liquor prices were altogether outrageous. The government insisted that spirits be sold in a standard measure of one-sixth of a gill—about half an ounce. The price of an ordinary whiskey, gin, or vodka was about the same as that for a pint of bitter. John told me that most drinkers of liquor just ordered a double shot instead of mucking around with the singles.

  There was a TV in the public bar, mounted near the ceiling, and I asked John what customers liked to watch. Soccer games and horse races, he said. John himself enjoyed a show called “Doctor Who,” a science fiction program about outer space types and their intergalactic intrigues. Occasionally, when he had a few minutes to spare, he switched on the set to catch a little of the BBC news. John had a real respect for time—for making the most of it instead of letting it slip away. He often used his free moments behind the bar to do some reading—tales of adventure, detection, espionage, and, of course, sci-fi. One night when I came in, I was shocked to see him reading a paperback copy of John Fowles’s The Magus. “Pretty heavy business, this is,” he said, shaking his head. A week later he was still plugging away, but he complained that Fowles demanded too much concentration, that The Magus was dicey in ways that did not necessarily complement the diceyness he had to deal with on the job. Soon enough, the book was laid to rest, consigned to the shelf marked “good intentions.” John replaced it with a mystery novel, and, before long, the furrows went out of his brow, and his air of jollity returned.

  That John was basically a cheerful person (the English never whine) became clear to me as I drank my second pint. The puzzle he was doing in the Standard required him to make as many words as possible from a group of scrambled letters, and he paused every now and then during his cogitation to compliment himself on various acts of deduction. “Take these four letters,” he said, showing me the scramble. “N-A-V-E. That’s a word, isn’t it? Like in a church?” I couldn’t resist the challenge, so I copied the puzzle on a bar napkin and went at it. If I hadn’t already drunk two pints, I might have been upset at tally time when John proved to have a much higher score than I did. “It’s important to have a good vocabulary,” he said in a voice that smacked of barely suppressed self-congratulation. He recommended that I have another pint to soften the blow. I protested that a third Burton would push me perilously close to terminal relaxation, but my protest was overruled, and John delivered another draft. “Cheers, Bill,” he said. “All the best.” By the time I finished it, I was calm and full and ready to tackle any puzzle that might present itself, including the riddle of existence. I said good-bye to John, stepped out into the night, and rolled down Inglebert Street toward the fortress of St. Mark’s and the sweet, baffling peace of Myddelton Square.

  …

  So The Fountain became my local pub. What was it that made me so fond of the place? I think in part its very ordinariness. It was local in the deepest and truest sense, a fixed point on the neighborhood compass. Beer was served, but so were news, gossip, attitudes, and opinions. If you were a regular, you stopped in at least twice a day just to keep up with things. These stops were not open-ended for most regulars. They knew in advance how long they’d stay, give or take the odd pint, just as they knew when the fresh scones would come out of the oven at the bakery or when the betting shop would have the results of the late greyhound races from White City. Pubs, with their tightly controlled hours, encourage a rigorous approach to drinking. The midafternoon closure has its roots in the Defence of the Realm Act, passed by the government during the First World War to prevent workers at munitions plants from getting too soused at lunch. Let fumbling fingers aid the Kaiser? Not likely, mate. That DORA is still law seventy years later can be counted as yet another tribute to the British love of the habitual.

  The hours at The Fountain could be carved into a granite tablet, so strictly do Page and his staff adhere to them. During the week, the doors open at eleven in the morning and close at three, then open again at five-thirty and close at ten-thirty. On Saturday, the evening opening is pushed back to six o’clock, with a similar half-hour adjustment on the other end. On Sunday, even the grimiest public-side customers dash their cheeks with cologne and put on church suits in anticipation of an alcoholic blitzkrieg that only lasts from noon until two-thirty. Because time is short, drinking is fast, with pints being downed so quickly that Page himself has to pitch in. Luckily, an enforced period of recuperation follows. The Fountain doesn’t open again until seven, and its windows go dark for good at half-past ten.

  Although I thought of myself as a Fountain regular, I seldom dropped in on weekday afternoons unless I was planning to have lunch—a sandwich from the bakery, or a slab of steak-and-kidney pie that Mrs. Page cooked in her upstairs kitchen. If I had a pint on an empty stomach, as many regulars did, I always wound up staring out the window at the blowing flakes of snow, and I’d remember how cold it was out there—the coldest winter in thirty-one years!—and my hand would begin an involuntary ascent into the air, poking around for John’s attention. The refill he brought always ruined me. It undermined the possibility of any reading or writing when I got home and suggested instead that I take a nice cozy nap under a down comforter. Even if I went into the pub with steely resolve, swearing a silent oath to have one pint and no more, I got trapped sometimes by other customers who’d treat me to the second pint before I could refuse. Pub etiquette dictates that the favor be returned, and I’d be stuck. I was afraid I might end up like the Irish bad boys who stayed at The Fountain until the last second and then walked over to A. R. Dennis and killed the sodden hours until the bar opened again by fooling around with Maureen. She seemed to appreciate the break they gave her from the tedium of betting slips and a world-view conditioned by the mesh cage in which she sat.

  The restraint I imposed on myself during the day made me ravenous for beer by early evening. After a quick swim at the Merlin Baths, which created the illusion that I was building up my body faster than I was tearing it down, I bought an Evening Standard from the poor frozen Indian woman and proceeded to the pub. If John was on duty, he’d raise an empty glass and ask, “Pint of
Burton?” and I’d nod and find the pint resting on a coaster even before I’d hung up my coat. Things did not go as smoothly when Colin was the barman. He was a dreamy lad in his thirties who worked the public side when John was in the saloon bar or taking a rare night off. Colin had been a travel agent once, and he still seemed to be suffering from residual jet lag. He was a friend of the Pages, so he claimed that he wasn’t really employed at The Fountain—he was just helping out. He had other contrary ideas as well. “I don’t really smoke,” he’d say as he slipped a cigarette from somebody’s pack on the bar. “It’s just to keep my fingers busy.”

  Colin’s lackadaisical style was in marked contrast to John’s, and it provided a nice change of pace—although Colin could be forgetful sometimes. One Sunday night, for instance, he forgot to open the pub. I got there at about seven-fifteen and had to join a queue of regulars who were knocking on the locked pub door—rather vehemently, I’ll admit, since we were cold and thirsty. Colin finally answered the knocks. He was sleepy-eyed, tousle-haired. He told us he’d fallen asleep on a banquette while watching an old movie on TV. Later in the evening, after Colin had the bar under control, we had a chat about these missed connections. “Amazin’, isn’t it?” Colin said, smiling and scratching his head. “You get to doing the one thing and you forget all about the others.” This was as much a statement of philosophy as a confession of regret, and it endeared Colin to those of us who shared his aptitude for dreaming.