Climbing the Stairs

by Margaret Powell

  This Violet, she said it was a lovely life – jolly and lively. I daresay it was, but I couldn’t help thinking to myself that men don’t marry barmaids. She was an example. She was thirty-five and she wasn’t married and she was already beginning to go off, as you might say. Oh no, being a barmaid wasn’t for me.

  After I’d been there for about an hour Perce brought me over a cup of tea and then he said that they were going up to the pub for an hour to have a drink. Naturally I thought we were all going too. So I got up and he sort of hissed at me under his breath and said, ‘No, not you. You stay here.’

  I was infuriated at this. Stuck there with all these women while he went out to the pub. So I said, ‘I’m certainly not stopping here’ – hissing at him too under my breath. And he hissed, ‘Do you want to make me look a bloody fool in front of all my mates?’ Well, what could I do. I just had to let him go. But what an idea of enjoyment.

  My mum would never let my dad go out without her and I don’t blame her in the least. When you get married to a man you never want to let him go out without you because once he starts that he’ll do it for ever. When a woman gets married it’s her whole life – the man is her life. But to a man marriage is just another part of his life because he’s still doing exactly the same sort of work that he did before he got married. And he’s still got all his pals and he doesn’t want to give them up. So you’ve got to keep a tight rein on them.

  I remember when I first got married Albert, my husband, and I had always gone out together. Then I had the first baby. And when the baby was about a fortnight old Albert said, ‘I think I’ll go over the road and have a drink.’ I said, ‘Well, all right, I’ll come too.’ So he said, ‘What about the baby?’ ‘It’s your baby as much as mine,’ I said, ‘and if you can leave it so can I.’ I wasn’t having any of that kind of lark.

  Anyway Perce and the rest of the men poured out over to the pub and of course no sooner had they gone than a sexual conversation started, and amongst these females it was too terrible for words.

  The married women went into great length and detail. The act of sex might have been a private act physically but it certainly wasn’t private verbally. I’d never heard such things in my life. And the jokes they were telling.

  Mind you, it did make a change from The Ruth Elders. But doesn’t that show you the duplicity of people? That Perce must have known the kind of things that went on in the club.

  They say that women are complex creatures, but believe me you can’t beat a man when he wants to put one over on you. This was one of my first lessons but I have had many others since.

  After a bit this Violet got me on one side and said, ‘I wouldn’t waste any time on that Perce if I were you, because you’ll never get him away from his mother.’ She said, ‘He’s been coming to this club for the last eight or nine years and he often brings a girl but they never last long.’

  I knew it was true that you wouldn’t get him away from his mother. You couldn’t really blame her because there’s nothing stronger than the maternal instinct. They don’t think that they’re distorting their son’s life – that they’re making them not a real man. He had a feeling for his mother that he shouldn’t have had. I don’t mean to say that they had an incestuous relationship. Of course they didn’t, but a man who’s been living with his mother alone year after year, he’d be simply no good as a husband.

  To start with you can never measure up to their mother. And then they’re not the kind of men that are interested in sex because if they were they wouldn’t have tied themselves to their mother in the first place. The fact is that the maternal relationship is so big that they haven’t got enough left for anyone else. I mean, even if you went all out and got them it’d be more like living with your brother than a husband.

  So there was Violet telling me all this, but I already knew as much myself.

  She said, ‘The only time that you can ever get his kind up to scratch is if you get them half canned or if you put in all the spade work yourself. In any case,’ she said, ‘the end result isn’t worth bothering about.’

  So with her advice and my own experience I decided that night was the parting of the ways for me and Perce. What with his mother fixation, his ‘men only’ drinking and his Ruth Elders – even if I’d ever got him to the altar, which I doubt – I’d have had a scratchy sort of married life. For people mixed up with these strict religious sects the word sex is taboo and the deed of the four-letter word is something too terrible for them to contemplate.

  6

  THOUGH I WASN’T impressed by the working men’s clubs, I have always been a fan of pubs. You might say that I’ve known three generations of pubs. There’s pubs I knew when I was a child, there’s the pubs I knew in my early married life in London and elsewhere, and there’s the pubs that exist now. And the differences are vast.

  When I was a child, it was true to say that for the middle and upper classes the Englishman’s home was his castle, but for the working-class man the pub was his castle. It was a place where no do-gooders had the right or the courage to come as they did to one’s home where, for the sake of the charity they distributed, you had to listen to them and pretend that you believed in what they were telling you. Once you got in a pub you, metaphorically speaking, drew up the draw-bridge and there you were – lord of all you surveyed. And what you surveyed was lively, warm, and happy. It might have only been a superficial atmosphere and it could be quick to change. It often did, ending up in a free-for-all fight, but even those were enjoyable. After all that’s part of a castle’s life, isn’t it – fighting?

  When I was about seven or eight I often used to go into the pub on a Saturday dinnertime to get my mum and dad half a pint of Burton. The bottle and jug department used to be right next door to the public bar and the people who were in it were the kind of people that I saw every day of the week – people who lived round us – but you’d never have thought they were the same people. As I looked through they seemed to have changed their characters completely. The way they spoke and the way they laughed – they had come alive.

  Kids used to be allowed in the bottle and jug department – it didn’t matter how young you were. I think there was just some peculiar rule whereby it didn’t matter about your age if you got it in a jug but you couldn’t have it in a bottle with a screw top. Why – I don’t know. Whether they thought you might drink it out of the bottle – but I should have thought it more likely that you’d do that with a jug. Mind you, I never drank any of my mum and dad’s half-pint of Burton – if I had my life wouldn’t have been worth a tinker’s cuss. Dad used to measure it out – to him it was liquid gold – and if there was short measure I had to go back with it. When you could only afford half a pint you saw that you got it. Then it used to be measured out fairly between Mum and him.

  The life that used to go on in the pubs was as good as a variety show. Some nights my mum and dad used to let us stand at the doors and we’d be fascinated by it all. Publicans allowed hawkers to go in selling matches, bootlaces, toys, scurrilous ditties, and a sure cure for the clap. Not that we knew what the clap was then, but it used to sell well – the cure I mean.

  In our pub there used to be a man: on a Saturday night somebody would buy him a pint of beer and he used to balance it on his head while he slowly undressed as far as the waist, and if he could get everything off without spilling it he could drink it for free. And sometimes after this he’d try dressing again for another wager but it was much harder and many a time he upset it and it’d go to waste.

  I know a lot of people used to think it terrible leaving kids outside a pub. But my parents were very good. They wouldn’t leave us there when it was freezing cold. If they could see we were getting fed up they’d bring us biscuits or a bottle of lemonade between us. But generally we didn’t worry; there was so much going on. Today I don’t like to see it – but only because I reckon the kids might die with boredom.

  There was another man who used to come in who sai
d he had a performing flea. He used to call this flea Algernon and he’d hold a matchbox in his hand, then open it a bit, and say, ‘Would you like to see Algernon do a somersault?’ And then he’d talk to this flea and say, ‘Come on, Algernon, show them how clever you are. There, did you see him do it?’ And then back to the box again and he’d say, ‘Would you like to see Algernon do a double somersault? Come on Algernon, alley oop.’ Then he’d lose Algernon and he’d cry, ‘Oh, he’s lost. Algernon’s lost. He’s fallen in love – I think with you, miss, or you, sir.’ But nobody got panicky; nobody worried about a flea loose because fleas along with flies were the thing that you had in your home. For fleas, as I’ve said, we used Keatings powder and for flies those terrible sticky things you hung from the ceiling. My mother used to put one up sometimes on a Saturday dinnertime and by Sunday there wouldn’t be one space left – they’d be two or three deep, you know, and it was horrible if you hit it with your head. So nobody worried that Algernon was roaming. Then he’d say, ‘Look lady, he’s on your coat.’ And he’d go to pick him off her coat and he’d lose him again. And then it would be, ‘There he is on the wall.’ And everybody would stand gaping, their eyes going all round the walls. But the thing was, there never was a flea – it was an imaginary Algernon. But there would be the customers following imaginary Algernon, until at last it struck the landlord what money he was losing because while they were looking they weren’t buying any beer. So eventually either the customers would buy the man beer to console him for the loss of Algernon or the publican would eject him.

  Another person we used to watch was an old man who stood outside holding his hand out with a ha’penny in it waiting for someone to add to it. Perhaps when someone went in they wouldn’t contribute but when they came out they were feeling far more mellow so they’d cough up.

  Then he’d dart into the pub – have a drink – then come out again – put his hand in his pocket for another ha’penny and start once more.

  Sometimes this happy jolly atmosphere would change and instead of the sort of friendly swearing a hard note would creep in and it would be swearing in earnest – and then the fighting would start. But the publicans didn’t mind. There weren’t many barmaids, mainly barmen – great hefty fellows who also acted as chuckers-out. We’d stand away from the doors and out the troublemakers would come, thrown on to the pavement covered in sawdust and beer. We used to think it was marvellous – as good as going to the pictures – and free too.

  Some twenty to thirty years after this, when I was married and Albert and I used to go into pubs, they were different. Or at any rate they seemed different. Most of them had three bars – public, private, and saloon – and people seemed to keep to their particular definition. The type of customer was different or dressed different. In the public bar would be the working class. Working class, that is, who never dressed up at any time, never changed and wanted the bar to be just spit and sawdust, darts and dominoes. Then in the private bar would be the kind of people who didn’t want to go in the public bar where the language and the people were too strong and salty for them, but nevertheless didn’t want to mix with what they thought were the snooty ones in the saloon. The saloon bar was a mixture. You’d get the working-class people who when they’d finished their work would dress themselves up and go there as well as the well-to-do who used it as a matter of course. We used to go in the private bar during the week because it was cheaper, but at a weekend we dressed ourselves up and always went in the saloon. It was a sort of class and dress consciousness.

  Although they weren’t the same kind of places they were still friendly and cheerful. Full of people, especially at weekends, and they’d still got the mahogany and mirrors and brass beer handles – the impedimenta of a pub. Barmaids were in the ascendancy, and to have a barmaid instead of a barman made a vast difference. They were bright, cheerful girls, often peroxided or hennaed which was all the go in those days, and with the beer or spirits they dispensed a fund of good humour. They’d listen to you; if you had a hard-luck tale, they’d be sympathetic, or if you told them a bawdy story they’d screech with laughter. They were all things to all people and they added sort of another dimension to the pub.

  I don’t know how they stood socially. It sounds terrible to compare them to prostitutes – they weren’t of course – but just as there is a type of man who likes prostitutes and prefers them to anyone else, so there was a type of man who liked barmaids. But never in a million years would they ever have dreamt of marrying them. They loved them, called them ‘sweetheart’, told them things they’d never have told their wives, shared their business troubles, their office jokes, and you know how obscene office jokes are, laughed with them and teased them and often bought them presents. They treated them I suppose as a wealthy man might his kept woman, and they expected the same things from her, except of course the sex bit, but marry them – never.

  Christmas in the local used to be like the old childhood Christmases. The decorations, Christmas trees and a spontaneous kind of gaiety. The landlady would come round with the gin bottle for the ladies, and the landlord would dispense free beer to the men. In the local Albert and I used in Chelsea it was a mixed kind of pub – rich and poor – but all knew each other, and although Albert and I didn’t join any of the large parties it wasn’t because we wouldn’t have been welcome. It was just that we didn’t accept from people drinks that we couldn’t afford to return. And people respected that. But you could talk to anyone in there. You didn’t feel ostracized because you weren’t in a position to buy a round. And the talk was interesting and friendly. You could either pass the time of day or have half an hour’s intelligent conversation – so that for very little money you could have an enjoyable social evening.

  I suppose pubs really started to change after the last war, and that change is now almost complete. Occasionally you’ll come across one of those pubs that’s still got the glass, the mahogany and a whiff of the old atmosphere, but you are made to feel an alien – an unwelcome stranger. I suppose the landlord doesn’t want you because the pub might become popular. Then he’d have to employ staff, the brewers would raise the rent, he’d lose the regulars he’s used to and the way of life that suits him. And the customers think on the same lines. They’ve seen what’s happened in other pubs and they don’t want it to happen there – and who’s to blame them.

  I think that television was the beginning of the end of pubs as we knew them, as television has been the death of so many things. I remember when it first came in how the pubs tried installing television in the bar. That was an absolute disaster. If you’ve ever been into a pub in the early days of television you’d know what I mean. The bar would be full of people all watching. And apart from the noise of whatever programme was on, it would be as silent as the tomb. You’d go in and ask for your drink in a whisper. And if you didn’t want to watch the thing, which we didn’t, you’d start a sotto voce conversation. Then the heads would flash round and shh you like snakes. Oh, it made a real jolly evening out. It didn’t take long for publicans to realize that installing television was no answer to this falling trade, because the people watching television spent very little money and the people that didn’t want to watch were so bored that they gave up coming into the pubs. And that I think was the beginning because people lost the habit. This doesn’t apply in the City and the West End of London. There, pubs are lovely places to go to, particularly at dinnertime. You get food, drink, and conversation. No, it’s the provinces that seem to have given up trying.

  Some people blame the decline of pubs on the influence of women. I don’t agree of course. To my mind the presence of women has done away with a lot of drunkenness. Whereas men on their own didn’t care how they got – the kind of disgusting condition men can get into left on their own, over-indulging in foul jokes and things like that – when they’ve got a woman with them or near them they’ve got to not only moderate their language, they’ve got to moderate their drinking too. Because the money’s go
t to do for two people instead of one. No, I think women add a great deal to pubs. Surely a pub is a place for social intercourse. Well, if it’s only going to be exclusively for men, they’ve got very little conversation, because men are inherently lazy about using their brains. They’re not interested in talking about anything but their work, dirty stories, what girl they’ve been out with or what girl they hope to go out with, and what they’re going to do to her when they get her out. Women have changed this. So I think they’ve done a lot for pubs.

  In any case with the equality of the sexes rearing its ugly head, as men put it, why shouldn’t women share in the social life? When you marry a man you don’t expect that your domain is going to be just the home, do you? An example of what it used to be like is this. About eight o’clock at night the man says, ‘Well, I’m off to have a drink. Cheerio. I shan’t be late. Have my supper ready for me when they close.’ What the devil did he think you were? He could’ve waited till the cows came home for his supper as far as I was concerned. And when he came back he’d have found I was out too. That’s what so many working-class wives had to put up with. They were nothing but unpaid housekeepers. I wasn’t and I never intended to be.

  What I think has changed pubs, and what may eventually almost destroy them, is ‘nationalization’. Because that is what is happening. They’re being ‘nationalized’ by financiers.

  Instead of having any number of local breweries, family concerns, owning a few pubs in a small area – we’ve now got four or five industrial giants run by accountants and computers from boot-box blocks of offices dictating what the public will drink. The pubs are managed for them by the faceless civil servants they now choose as landlords, tenants, or managers.

  In the days of the small brewers they knew about local tastes and interests. They studied their customers. If it was thought that something was wrong with the beer the brewer would come round and find out what. I’m willing to bet that half the people who brew the stuff now have never tasted it in their lives.