Last Landlady

by Laura Thompson

  On one unremarkable weekday evening, one of the regulars – a taciturn, unobtrusive, solitary man – left to drive home after closing; as the lights of the car fell across the window, a tremendous thud was heard. The remaining customers dashed to the door. Aileen was lying across the man’s car bonnet, all fifteen stone of her, unhurt and shouting her head off. In a fit of passion she had hurled herself at his windscreen. Nobody knew the prequel to this event; nobody had known that the silent man was her errant lover: it was a rare and remarkable failure of pub acumen. Of course it had seemed that customer lust was directed solely at the comely Marian, with Aileen untroubled by such considerations. As for the man, smiling secretly into his pint while his fellow drinkers hollered and joked and boasted, he too had been a surprise runner in the Casanova Stakes. Yet it transpired that he was an expert seducer of women such as Aileen, to whom he gave the full force of his sympathy and attention, while wearing the innocent mask of his physical plainness. Even the two wise women in the kitchen had been foxed by outward appearances. As my grandmother put it, savouring the vivd real-time proof of her remark: ‘It’s never the ones you think.’ Aileen and her beau returned the following night, as if nothing had happened. Nobody said anything (everything having already been said).

  This event, and the elements thereof – the astonishingly loud thud, the extraordinary sight of the large barmaid reclining and flailing on the bonnet, the amazement of the onlookers at the door, the greater amazement at how nobody had noticed this love affair under their very noses, the jokes about the car coming off worse in the slow-motion collision … all this became part of the pub mythology. So too did another event, which took place one early evening around the same time. A woman who was not a regular, but who visited regularly (these were different things), had swept in at speed and driven her car too far down the slope: it had hopped over the small stone wall that separated the car park from the orchard, and its front wheels were now poised neatly above the grass, like a cat over its feeding bowl. The fact that the car was hanging in a mere few inches of nothingness only served to mock the situation. It was utterly immovable, and the woman completely hysterical. As she was obliged to confess to my grandmother, choking and retching over every word, the man with whom she spent these regular early evenings at the pub was not her husband. He was, in fact, her lover. Her alibi was her son, who at that very moment was attending his Boy Scouts meeting nearby; unless she picked him up within the next hour the whole structure of her life would collapse; and all because in her excitement, or guilt, or sheer la-la-la-singing-along-to-ABBA thoughtlessness, she had forgotten for a moment to put her foot on the brake.

  My grandmother, stern but uncritical, became magnificent. She pulled the woman together with brandy (not Rémy) and exhorted every strong man in the pub to get out there and lift the bloody car. It took a long time. The lover was not among the party: ‘He was orf, boyfriend.’ Nor was the woman herself ever seen again, after she revved away to the blissful dib-dib innocence of the Scouts’ meeting. But the night when this unnamed, unknown person drove over the edge of the car park went down in the annals, along with the night when Aileen threw herself at the windscreen, and the night when my grandmother’s old suitor came prancing into the pub (‘oh fuck’) then crashed his car, and the night when one of the farmers had a fight outside with one of the town men (cause unknown; neither was hurt; afterwards they became the best of friends: all rather Women in Love), and the night when a very handsome regular, silently acknowledged as paramour of one of the town wives, was seen outside behind the cellar in a compromising embrace with the woman’s mother, and the night when old so-and-so fell in the fireplace and hit his head on a cauldron but was sufficiently drunk to use it as a perfectly acceptable alternative pillow, and the night when everybody had New Year’s hangovers, fit to die, but bugger me if they didn’t get started again … This was the oral history that is shared by all the people who went to the pub, and that is still occasionally retold, as if in affirmation of the fact that we were there, or we were part of something, or we were alive …

  Of course it was hallowed in retrospect. That is the function of collective memory, to endorse and enlarge, to encourage the communal spirit to sing. That is what the women were doing around the solo table, with their ‘do you remembers’ crooned into the dying Sunday light. Yet if the memories were false – because what memories are not? – they were also intrinsically true. Later I myself – for a very brief span – became part of the nights at the pub; I was there when some unexpected moment, some here-and-now explosion of humanity, held us all in its thrall. And I felt the joy of actuality, of there-ness: a heightened little flare of life. In so far as it is possible, a proper pub is where one lives in the present tense. Today, all too often, there is no present-tense living except in the act of recording it. Everything else is anticipating what will happen (‘It’s going to be so amazing’) and recalling what happened (‘Wasn’t it amazing?’). What comes in between is as nothing against those two monoliths; it might just as well never have happened, although social media bears witness to the fact that it did.

  Perhaps that is why alcohol, rather than pubs, has now acquired such significance, because drinking allows us to sidestep the problem of how to be. In a proper pub, drink is central but not all. Today, too many ‘do you remembers’ are about the times ‘when we all got slaughtered – oh, it was great, it was blinding’: false memories, despite the indelible screen testimony, because if drink is an end in itself then the beginning and middle have no value, and nothing is being recalled except the fact of drunkenness.

  Pub ‘do you remembers’ are immeasurably different. Their unreliability holds a tender weight, a creativity and a mystery. Alcohol moulds these memories, but it does not make them: it is the pub that makes them, with its lambent and forgiving atmosphere, which echoes and blesses the mellow loosening that comes with drink. That is what I – we – are remembering, a particular quality in the light and the air, both magical and human. In fact, the stories that I recall, these absurd little moments of faiblesse and folly, are all about the same thing: the warm flame that surrounded them, that beautified them, that honestly made life worth living.

  Back in childhood, back in the sitting room, I sensed as at a great distance the world beyond the wooden door. I watched Top of the Pops and fondled the tennis-ball heads of the chihuahuas as the headlamps of cars entering the pub threw an intermittent yellow-pink flare across our cocooned comfort. At this hour I would normally have been reading, or doing homework, but such earnest activities seemed irrelevant in this little arena; I could almost hear the joshing, explosive ‘What the bloody hell are you up to there, girl?’ from the customers. At the pub, even at such a young age, I took on something of their casting-care-to-the-winds attitude. Now was what mattered, the everyday miracle of now. Tomorrow and its reckoning (hangovers; school) existed in another dimension. In this spirit I dined off Quality Street and, from the age of about eleven, lit an occasional experimental Dunhill from the silver cigarette box. If my grandmother noticed, she didn’t bat an eye: she was very pro-smoking.

  From time to time she would put a bright, Elnetted head around the door (oh, the pistol-shot crack of that handle, I can hear it still) and check that I was ‘all right’. If she was bored, if the pub was still in that effortful state in which alcohol was a drip-feed into the communal vein, and every imbecile remark, every ‘aah’ and ‘ah, well’ and ‘anyway’ resounded for long minutes in the near-silence, she might linger in the sitting room; not entirely relaxed, more as if waiting semi-energised in the wings. I became a quasi-customer with whom she rehearsed her part. She would pad lightly to and from the kitchen, offering sandwiches, heaping chocolate fingers on to a plate like firewood (so unlike the regimented rows at the homes of my school friends). If her attention was caught by Top of the Pops, she would respond in her characteristic way, in language that I didn’t always understand but found gloriously satisfying to the ear. ‘Clock the syrup,�
�� for instance, to Alvin Stardust (syrup of figs = wig); or her usual ‘Saucebox,’ to David Essex (a derivation from ‘saucy,’ meaning sexy in a self-conscious and slightly ridiculous way); or ‘That old Suzi Cointreau?’ to Suzi Quatro (this was a genuine slip, she didn’t make jokes of that kind). Most of what we watched was rendered deliciously substandard by her sharp and casual gaze, although she loved Mick Jagger, David Bowie, people who caught the light like the Hollywood stars of her youth. She was not a worshipper, but as a charismatic person she was naturally drawn to those whose charisma had been deified.

  When she opened the door to go back to the pub, the noise came in like a suddenly released stream. Then – door shut – it settled into a distant, underwater gabble. My attention was always half upon it; the television could not compete. I became instinctively skilled in tracing the development of the evening, the gradual gathering together of speed and sound and rhythm – headlamps, footsteps, door latch, till ring, laughter – and at last the connection made, the throb of an independent pulse. From my listening post on the sofa this process had an inevitability, like a litany or a love affair, although to the people in the pub it doubtless felt willed and contingent.

  From time to time they came crashing backstage to use the phone, almost always the younger townspeople, importing a smell of cologne plus spirits that struck the senses as fiercely as an uppercut. They seemed like lumbering giants as they stooped to stroke the dogs (‘All right, little boys?’) and perched on the edge of my grandmother’s armchair, dialling purposefully, the men in their open shirts beneath suave jackets, the women waggling Dolcis shoes at the end of neatly crossed ankles. Their amiable tipsiness, the imperfect volume control of their voices, made the sitting room feel as unsteady as a ship’s cabin. I was very aware of the fact that here were the originals of the kitchen conversations. It was almost like being in the presence of celebrity. There was the same sense of duality, that these were people like anybody else, who could nonetheless generate such myths and fables.

  Occasionally, I might go into the bar and summon one of these people to the telephone (no mobiles then; it hardly needs saying, but imagine it). This didn’t happen when I was very young; somehow I must have been protected from it. But from the age of about twelve I would have done it. It created in me an irritable panic, because I never quite understood the barking, crackling person on the phone (‘Mike in tonight, love? Tell him Mike wants a word’) and I didn’t know the Mikes from the Bobs from the Steves, they all sort of looked the same and had the same way of talking, like chuckling Saturday-night comedians telling the same innuendo-filled joke that stopped at the salient word, and I dreaded their inability to behave in a straightforward manner. However much I told myself that winks and eyebrow-dances and twinkles were all part of the pub, and therefore to be welcomed, or at least borne, in my grandmother’s friendly if mysteriously dismissive way. I was not yet part of the pub and therefore found them excruciating, particularly when dressed (as I usually would have been) in my ultra-prim gingham school uniform.

  And yet: more interesting emotions lay beneath these girlish embarrassments. For instance I had a certain arrogance about my protected status at the pub; however much I didn’t want to go into the bars, I enjoyed the knowledge that I could, that as ‘Vi’s granddaughter’ the entire place was mine to roam. I was full of the sense of being coolly placed at the centre of a world that, to so many of the customers, was the centre of their world.

  There was also, most powerfully and alarmingly, an extreme excitement about entering the pub at the height of the evening: plunging onstage, a non-actor shoved into a crowd scene in a semi-lawless urban comedy – Jonsonian perhaps, with a Jacobean edge of threat – angling and twisting through the mass of people, whose arms flashed across the bar like swords and who shouldered between each other in that richly impersonal pub contact; feeling the sudden rough clasp of smoke, the steaming walls of flesh, the red warmth pierced by pinpoints and starbursts … It was so complete. The difference between this and the sitting room really was elemental, like the sharp dive from shore to sea: not exactly enjoyable, but still a strange kind of physical privilege, an experience that I would not have wanted to miss. The level of turbulence in the atmosphere depended, I now realise, on whether my grandmother was visibly in charge. If I could see her at the shining head of events, an earthy, swooning kindliness prevailed; if she had been absorbed into the evening, it felt harder, coarser. But certain things never changed.

  What I saw was not exactly glamorous, nor romantic. I had an image of adulthood – an ideal formed from the Crush Bar at the Royal Opera House – in which people were careful with themselves, held themselves at acute angles of sophistication, laughed in descending arpeggios at nothing overmuch, kept their necks swan-arched and their instincts under civilised wraps. The pub in full bloom was the obverse. It created nothing to which I aspired, but something that I nonetheless found as mightily compelling as thunder. Here, I recognised, was pleasure, so absorbing that people were scarcely self-conscious at all. No imaginary camera hovered to guide their movements. Their contact with each other, even when the pointer of sexual desire fell somewhere in particular, was essentially diffuse and imprecise. Their zest, their vigour, their defiance, was about nothing except itself.

  There were some good-looking people among the customers, but by this stage of the evening – a couple of watchful young women aside – that particular awareness had transmuted into something earthier. Faces glistened and crumpled, cotton wrinkled around muscle and gut, crimplene and terylene gave off a telltale hum; none of it mattered. Conversation came in fierce, repetitive bursts, meaningless yet full of its own meaning, in which the country accents sounded like horns interspersed with the thinner, bending notes of urban piccolos. ‘What you having …?’ (G and T, just a single …) ‘Better make it a double, he looks a bit thirsty …’ ‘Go on, get this bugger one ‘n’ all, he ain’t a bad old sort …’ ‘Don’t want one? What’re you at, man …?’ (Well, all right, one for the road …) ‘Didn’t have to twist your arm, did I …’ ‘No ice? Give him the bucket, girl, let him do a bit of work for once …’ Laughter – huge and thunderous surges, exploding into firecrackers of hilarity – had a life of its own, quite independent of whatever remark had caused it. People were drunk, of course, in varying measure, but that was not quite the point. Drink was the enabler, the encourager, the softener. It was the elixir that allowed the pub to work its spell: to become a place where humanity could expand, where everything mattered less and more, where the outside world was kept at bay, where life was bold and safe and affirmed. And fun. That most elusive of qualities, which can be neither predicted nor contrived, which stubbornly refuses to come out to play when everybody most wants it to, but which the pub – not always, but often enough – could coax from its mysterious lair.

  Time, too, was different from elsewhere. The subliminal desire for things to be over, which afflicts so much of life, was turned on its head. In the pub, people wanted time to go on for ever. They wanted it to be suspended, exquisitely held … and, as the evening got going there arose a poignant, communal belief that this might actually happen, that perhaps time need never move on … Except that nobody really believed it, of course. They knew that time was circumscribed. And in a way they wanted that too, because therein lay the significance of their present-tense living, its depth and texture. So the evening pushed and pulled, pushed and pulled, until the accumulation of noise and energy sounded, from the sitting room, like an organic force, strong and wild enough to transport everybody away from normal life – all those ones-for-the-road became so many what-the-hell ripostes to tomorrow, with its thick-thumbed fumbling for the Alka-Seltzer, its strip-lit grappling with the VAT return, its trolley-pushing round Tesco, its this, its that … How much better to stay here, in this warm-lit room, with the fairy-lit bar, and send everything beyond it up the Swanee! And yet, all the time, the anticipation of the bell, the last round, the encounter with the real and lo
veless air, and the knowledge that this was as it should be, because it was, after all, a law of nature that the evening’s glorified rhythms would lessen and falter, that the state of euphoric mellowness would snap and shrivel, that it is impossible to maintain a continuum of happiness, nor should it be tried – that pleasure is more pleasurable for being framed, legitimised, bounded …

  The acceptance of an ending is implicit within the proper pub. There are no delusions of prim immortality. At my grandmother’s pub, every sip and inhalation said as much. We are only here for a span.

  Nevertheless, the first few rings of the golden bell were ignored. To leave obediently would have been inconceivable, in fact an insult to the pub. Very occasionally a lock-in did take place. I remember being present at one. It was broken up when a sprightly young policewoman stepped into the public bar (a terrible, terrifying sight, akin to the appearance of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni) and marched around, on little clockwork legs, asking everybody in a friendly, cheery, ghastly manner what they were doing there. My grandmother dealt with her, and must have convinced her that it was a private party, because the evening continued. But the mood was shaken – the relief that we were not all under arrest held the vibrato of hysteria – and the policewoman became the sole topic of conversation (the general judgment, that she had ‘fancied herself’, a wobbly, indignant attempt to reassert pub values).

  As a child, I was in bed by chucking-out time. Not asleep. That too would have been inconceivable. From above the public bar, I experienced the pub with such clarity that I could plot the patterns of people’s movements: with eyes shut and mind intent, I could trace the precise disintegration of the evening, almost picture the strands detaching themselves from the mass of noise. The crack of the door – a different sound when people were leaving – came with steady and resigned frequency, the laughter in irregular little shudders, shot through occasionally with bravura – I’m not gone yet! A couple of people always chanced their luck (‘Go on, stick one more in there’), pushed the evening to its limit. I waited with the same impatience as the landlady for the final lift of the latch and rev of the engine. At last, like the closing of a giant eye, the lights of the pub darkened outside the bedroom window.