Last Landlady

by Laura Thompson

  I had had a drink, of course.

  ‘ … a drunk man in a pub who suddenly embraces his neighbour, and then stands drinks all round, is nearer to the truth of things as they really are, to reality, than any thin-lipped puritan will ever be.’

  From Absolute Hell by Rodney Ackland

  ‘And is not my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench?’

  Falstaff, from Henry IV Part 1

  II

  My grandmother had to fight hard for her pub.

  In later life, towards the end of her century, she told me the story, speaking with the honesty that characterised her, as it does all truly confident people (what need to lie, when there is no need for shame or self-doubt?). If she didn’t remember something she would say so, and what she did remember was conjured with a soda-stream burst of quick clarity. I enjoyed her relationship with her memories almost as much as the memories themselves. Things were simply as they were, or as they had been, and she seemed amazed that I didn’t share the pictures in her head, which to her were as sure and immutable as a line of portraits in a gallery.

  She was also surprised that I wanted to have these pictures described to me. She didn’t really understand how somebody could be interested in a past that they had not inhabited. She had believed in pub life, ‘Oh yes, beautiful’: it was, after all, the life in which the rest of life congregated. But it was ‘gorn’, and like so many of her generation she was an emotional pragmatist (it is we today, dissatisfied within our self-importance, who fetishise the past). Such nostalgia as she felt lay meshed within the voices of Dinah and Peggy and Bessie, to whom she sang, woman to woman, as she cooked her resplendent meals with a wine glass of sherry to hand.

  But she liked my interest, of course. Why wouldn’t she? So in fits and starts she told me how she had come to the pub in the early 1950s, and what the pub had been like when she arrived there. It was not such a long time ago; nevertheless, the remoteness was humbling. She described a dull-lit, part-coloured world of dishevelment and discomfort, of ashy grates and a single rusting tap, of cold rotting wood in an outside privy, a world deprived not just of the ease that was her natural physical milieu but of the basic post-war amenities.

  She told me, too, that there had been no counter to stand behind in the pub. ‘Well no, there was nothing there. Just a shelf, you know, for the bottles.’ She mentioned this in passing, as if it were again something that I had surely known: yet this one detail, this central absence, was like a symbol of her unreachable past. I couldn’t picture the pub without the counter. No, I couldn’t see it. The pub, without that complexity of spark and sheen, that absolute of light, that unholy grail? My grandmother with no counter to frame her was like a Mona Lisa unhallowed by da Vinci. My grandmother’s pub with no counter was like her face with no lipstick.

  In fact counters are a relatively recent development, a nineteenth-century derivation from the long serving bar characteristic of gin houses. They are not necessary, having been conceived simply as an efficient way to handle large numbers of customers. Not necessary, but needed: like the pub itself. They give a pub its shape and heart. They are always, and consolingly, the focus of the eye. They are a stage within a stage, a demarcation zone, an altar, a framing device; a damp and friendly resting place for elbows, glasses, fags; a Rayist painting, a flashing Goncharova, albeit so much more nimble and alive then those studious grids of light on light … ‘No counter?’ I said. ‘Well, the brewery got one made, didn’t they, sharpish.’ My grandmother sighed, smiled. ‘You see’ – she made an effort, not mental but imaginative, to explain to this person who understood so little and who, for reasons that she did not fully understand, wanted to know more. ‘It wasn’t really a pub when I went there. It was – what could you say – it was like an inn. But it wasn’t even that, really. It was a couple of rooms. It was nothing. To what it became, when you knew it.

  ‘No, I suppose that was my doing.’

  Actually she should never even have gone there. The story of why she did so is, again, almost unfeasibly remote, and one that the women of today could rightfully march over (but this is not that kind of story).

  When her father died she had sought to take over his licence; to her this was the most natural thing in the world. For the previous ten years she had run the old pub, and she believed that she would continue to do so.

  She had become the old pub’s châtelaine after her mother’s death, at the start of the war. Her father was ageing. Her marriage was over before it began (she may have fallen for my grandfather, paying his court to her across the bar, but romantic love was not her thing), having effectively ended when her husband went off to fight. So she lived at the pub, her home, with her daughter, my mother; and she ran the show.

  Rather enjoying the potential shock value of this statement, she later pronounced the war to have been the best time of her life. ‘Oh, without a doubt.’ She had been made for it, with her vigorous stoicism and stalwart glamour, the kind that is almost manly in its swagger; had her talent been slightly differently conceived she would have been out there entertaining the troops, keeping people’s hearts up like her beloved Vera Lynn (‘wonderful woman’). Instead she celebrated the primacy of pleasure in her own way, maintaining her standards – Max Factored brow, spit-in-the-black mascara, under-the-counter nylons – as two fingers to Hitler. The war magnified her personality, her attitudes. She would have liked the fatalistic good cheer, the jaunty nerviness (too much calm always bored her), the surprise element within customer traffic (a Pole! a GI!), the men keyed up to a pitch of do-or-die flirtatiousness, the human give and take of the black market, the constant sense of an occasion to rise to. She had what she craved – protection and freedom – and she had her pub.

  And then, when my great-grandfather died, the brewery would not give her the licence. The reason was very simple: she was a woman. To be accurate, she was a daughter. A wife would have been allowed to take over the pub. But then so too would a son.

  I can’t quite imagine what my grandmother thought at this point. She made nothing of it in later life – victimhood was not her thing; she would have been far more dramatic about a bad hand at solo. In her shrugging way she accepted the fact that femaleness, so often her trump card, had let her down. Of course she knew this was wrong. She was always on the side of women, and anyway she knew that she was as good at her job as any man (better, was what she really thought). She graciously accepted the vehement outrage that I expressed on her behalf. ‘Oh yes, it was a bad thing.’ Yet when she uttered throwaway remarks of that kind, which contained so much more than they expressed, I was aware of a depth of experience that I could never plumb; she had fought, truly fought, in a way that I could not grasp, and I was back in the sitting room at the pub, listening to the whispers among the coffee cups, in the unreachable world of the grown-ups. My grandmother was always sceptical, or perhaps realistic, about the sacred notion of equality. To her, gender was a swings and roundabouts issue, and that was something that laws would never change.

  The brewery had her straight out of the pub. ‘Well, that was their right.’ Within the period of a few weeks she had lost her father and her home. And she was a single parent by then: she had divorced just after the war (appearing in court on the same day as the film star Jessie Matthews, who livened proceedings by fainting as her own marriage was severed). Again, she made nothing of the lone mother status, which in those days was not a recognised condition alleviated by governments. She had friends, she had relations, people who joined hands to help her – that was how she saw it, the networks of her life tightening to protect her – but it must have been frightening. Pubs were not merely her life, they were her livelihood. Yet here she was, denied the right to continue in her profession – the only one she knew, at which she was, incidentally, greatly gifted.

  What to do, in a country where the hangover of war still hovered and there was no longer a bright-lit bar to make it all better? To be chucked out of a pub, that sanctuary, at such a
time, was exile indeed.

  For a year she camped with one of her brothers (she had five, all older than she; as the last child of a forty-year-old mother she always called herself ‘the scrapings of the barrel’). She took her daughter, her black Labrador Ricky, and not much else. Most of the family furniture had to be sold – some wonderful things, hard not to lament: vast mahogany wardrobes fitted out like mini-shops, a lacquered Chinese cabinet that would probably now be worth a fortune. ‘Um, but what could you do, going from a great big pub into a room?’ The sitting-room piano lodged with Irene, who many years later grudgingly returned it. Also sold were the pub’s green leather bucket chairs, deep in their embrace; the gleaming black settles were kept in storage, awaiting a future like my grandmother.

  She was vague about how she found this, as always when asked anything too factual. She must have talked to people, bustled hither and thither with her smile lipsticked into place, ‘putting herself about’ in her own phrase, trusting not in God (she was a militant atheist) but in the rewards that she was surely owed. ‘Chin up,’ was her mantra, and unlike most philosophies it was one by which she actually lived. Eventually a big brewery granted her a licence. She was always deeply grateful to them; also to one of her friends, a rich local businessman, who had put in a word for her. Having perceived an injustice, he used his influence to right it. He had no romantic intent (although my grandmother would doubtless have inferred one, had the recipient of his kindness been somebody other than herself), and his disinterested favour may have been the origin of the phrase ‘you’ve got to have a man’. Which in this instance, at that time, was true.

  And which makes it all the more intriguing that she did not carry her argument to its logical conclusion, and get married again. Victor had asked her, when she was still running the old pub. He had it all planned out; her acceptance, as he thought, in the bag. He had found a hotel for sale on the south coast (Hove? Worthing? – she couldn’t remember); took her down there on an ostensible ‘day out’ and suggested that they run it together. Recalling this event, she conjured the gesture of Victor’s hand sweeping out toward the hotel façade, as one who offered her the world on a piece of Royal Albert, and smiled with a trace of kindly pity in remembrance of his excitement. ‘Yes … poor feller.’ As far as I could see, she never regretted turning him down, not that she went in for regrets.

  She told him that she could not leave her father, that she had to think of her daughter, but it was more complicated than that. She had a calling, which did not involve playing wife to Victor’s master hotelier. How surprising it sounds to describe the landlady life in that way. A calling is for nuns, or ballerinas. But something, some unacknowledged desire to be mistress of her own destiny while remaining true to her treasured upbringing, kept her dedicated and self-absorbed.

  According to my grandmother’s myth, which grew up around her and apparently without her volition, she was the first woman in England to be given a publican’s licence in her own right; that is to say, as neither a wife nor a widow. I have found nothing to contradict this story. Beyond doubt she was the first in the area, and as an independent female operator she remained a rarity for years. And what she took on was huge. The first pub that the brewery offered to her was a fairly smart town place, but it had no spirits licence so she turned it down. She was right to do so, although she was also brave. Even she may have doubted herself when she arrived in Victor’s Daimler at the little thatched barn that was to become her pub and a ring of farmers – faces the colour of beef carpaccio, pint and pipe held aloft in either hand – turned slowly to look at her.

  In the memory that she gave to me, the men were gathered on settles around the great fireplace in the saloon bar. That, in former times, was how people had sat in the pub. In the public bar they used a couple of benches, and thickened the sawdust into paste with the muck on their boots. These customers were the fathers, uncles and grandfathers of the country people whom I later knew. Old Gus, old George, old Dick, old Percy. The landlord was among them, also with his pipe and his beer, making semi-conversation. ‘Well, he was an old boy, wasn’t he.’ He was popular enough with the locals but the public aspect of the house had scarcely signified to him. It was a house with an open door through which certain people came in to drink, which is how pubs were, in their earliest incarnation.

  Similarly, before the arrival of this landlord, the pub had belonged to a widow who lived there with her daughter. So my grandmother was not the first female to have charge of it, although the set-up could not have been more different. The former landlady had owned the place, with no fear of being thrown out: she was truly in charge in a way that my grandmother could only replicate illusorily. Such was the luck that came with a free house, one of those rare establishments that were not ‘tied’ to or rented from a brewery. The previous pub’s owner was rather well-off, in fact, although she didn’t appear to be (unlike my grandmother, who was a great believer in what she called ‘swank’ and could not possibly have afforded a free house). After selling up to the brewery she remained in the village all her life. ‘Nice old lady.’ When she had owned the pub it was a home, really, a dusty and hay-strewn country cottage; it had the merest hint of a public dimension. When one of the locals came to visit, the daughter would go down to the cellar – that oubliette, with its perilous stone staircase – and fetch up a jug of ale, for which a small amount of money was charged. That was it.

  And then: my grandmother. Black-haired, bejewelled, bohemian. Probably resented by the landlord (whose retirement had no doubt been encouraged by the brewery; he could not possibly have made them any money). She had never lived out of a town, and had never been anywhere more rural than Epsom Downs. Moving to the country was almost like emigrating. True, she had a Labrador, as did most of the farmers; but for a somewhat different purpose (keeping camp beds warm rather than retrieving pheasants). One of her first moves was to buy a pair of jodhpurs. As an attempt to fit in, it was uncharacteristic. Her sense of self was essentially unassailable, and it almost immediately began to weave its powerful spell.

  But the pub! It was a broken-down stable, apparently semi-refurbished by Barry Bucknell, the celebrity DIY man who in the days before cornice-worship would go on television and speedily hammer plywood over any available period feature. Thus, in the pub, the magnificent splintery old beams were covered beneath layer upon layer of wallpaper: ‘this thick’, my grandmother told me, holding thumb and forefinger a quadruple whisky apart. Although the saloon fireplace was in use, its public bar equivalent was nailed up behind a fake wall. That is the sort of thing that people then did to these marvellous old buildings.

  The beer pumps were beside the walled-up fireplace, spirits stood on a shelf, and bottles were stashed in a shallow cupboard. There were no Ladies’ or Gents’ loos, just an outside privy. An Anderson shelter still stood in the orchard. A few tumbledown sheds were filled with stock; these were eventually demolished to make the large car park, plus a garage for my grandmother’s Beetle. She had no car when she arrived at the pub, as was then the norm (there were fewer than 3 million cars in Britain at that time, less than a tenth of the number today).

  The sitting room was uninhabitable, with its hole in the ceiling later filled with the bathroom. Naturally there was no phone. A couple of years on, my grandmother would share a line with the fearsome farmer who banged on the counter with his stick, but before that she had staggered off, on her languid London legs, to the far end of the village, where a solitary telephone box stood opposite the pale grey church. Sheep wandered across her eyeline as she rang the brewery and gave her drinks orders.

  Upstairs at the pub, the bedrooms were connected by a low door. There was no landing, and no private staircase. A set of wooden steps in my grandmother’s room took her straight down, with an end-of-a-fairground-ride momentum, into the public bar. There was no kitchen.

  So the hours of closing time were spent around the gramophone in the saloon, where the black settles from the old pub
shone discreetly in the half-light, where hip baths were filled, where the fire was stoked by a brass poker (which my grandmother would – I can’t explain this, but I remember it – dip briefly into a glass of Guinness to make the contents sizzle). Meals were cooked on the oven that stood beside the giant fireplace: a remnant of the days when the pub was an inn, providing food and accommodation to travellers. That was its original function. Like so many country pubs it had been a medieval hotel, in this case on the road to London. People could stable their horses, stay the night – in a communal bedroom on the first floor, or perhaps in an outbuilding. Some 400 years later, when horse travel – or, by then, coach-and-horse travel – was rendered obsolete by the railways, that purpose was lost and my grandmother’s pub retreated from the main stage. It became enfolded within the calm rhythms of the rural seasons, of days measured by the sun; its customers were people who lived and died within walking distance of their ‘local’.

  The pub always had the air of being part of the landscape. A photograph from the late-Victorian era shows it also as part of the village, a little house like any other except for its quarter-open door, which even in that primitive form hinted at the eternal invitation of the pub: the shadowy triangle, glinting with motes of daylight, leading to a ruby-dark interior and the promise of kindly transgression. The building was brick-faced in those days, the white stone of my grandmother’s time a distant decorative dream. A low fence separated it from the winding lane – later the road – along which skipped a carefree quartet of Tess Durbeyfields in smocks and caps, village girl contemporaries of the lady who later sold the pub to the brewery. She was recorded as living there in the 1920s. A valuer wrote an assessment, describing ‘poor accommodation’, a kitchen-cum-scullery on the site of my grandmother’s sitting room, and three unused pigsties. Trade was listed as three-quarters of a barrel of beer every week. One bottle of spirits was sold in four months (four hours was nearer the mark in my grandmother’s heyday). A final drifting question was attached to the valuer’s report: ‘Does a little trade in teas?’ Thus an image is conjured of the countrywoman and her daughter, collecting blackberries in the orchard, bubbling and steaming them into jam in the tiny space that was later filled with the smells of Rémy Martin and Players’ untipped.