Last Landlady

by Laura Thompson

  Seen through the class prism, Mr Prest is common. But Patrick Hamilton, who understands perfectly the social structure as clung to by many of his characters, is offering another classification system, one that sweeps away tormenting anxieties such as those that beset Ella the barmaid. There are two basic categories of person in the England of Hamilton’s novels: they are not placed above and below each other, but en face. They are, quite simply, the closed and the open class, or the mimsy and the robust class, or the narrow and the broad-minded class. Within those categories, any of the more familiar types can exist. In his novella Unknown Assailant, Hamilton portrays an aristocrat free of all snobbery and an ex-gamekeeper who thinks of nothing else. Then there is an Ella, naturally open of mind, trapped into pettiness by the limitations of those around her.

  But it is in The Slaves of Solitude, set in wartime, that the undeclared war between the two classes is laid bare. The boarding house, which cringes old-maidishly from the tired, battered, adult, pugilistic-looking Mr Prest, has no idea that what it disapproves of is:

  the very backbone of his culture: that his own upbringing and manner of life, his music-hall history, his achievements, his traditions, his friends, the fact that he had been associated with and could still call by their Christian names many well-known stars both of the past and present, speaking, if he went to town, their liberal and racy language in public houses … that all these things were to Mr Prest reasons, not for faint opprobrium, but for complacence and pride.

  On certain happy days Mr Prest leaves the town where he is presently unhappily housed, and goes to the West End, there to fall into felicitous company and spend the day with his old London acquaintance. He returns ‘full of drink, certainly, but fuller still of the day behind him … of the humour, humanity, spaciousness and grandeur of that manner of life’.

  And there, if you like, is the spirit of the pub. Not every pub; not everything about the pub: just the pub.

  My grandmother was nothing like Mr Prest, but she belonged to the same category of person. In a way that now seems to me very important, if life is to be valued, the pair of them represent the same thing. When I was growing up, wonderfully ignorant of the class system that might view a landlady as being ‘not quite nice’, I was nevertheless aware of my grandmother as a member of the robust class, the kind who poured spirits into a decanter then glugged the surplus from the bottle, as against people who were of the opposite class: certain of my friends’ parents, for instance, whom I now recognise as the kind of people who might write to the newspapers regarding a change to the broadcast time of The Archers.

  People of this kind – some of whom were extremely nice, as well as ‘nice’ – might have thought that a landlady was a declassée profession, but the fact is that when any of them met my grandmother, they collapsed beneath the insouciant weight of her personality. Looking back, I can think of nobody who was not impressed by her. They may have got her wrong – seen her as a ‘character’; believed her to be an Ida, which she most definitely was not – but they always responded to her, to that old-style breadth of being. She was not just a landlady, after all. She was the supreme landlady, with all that was best in the breed writ large upon her. And in the usual English sense of the word ‘class’, she was simply impossible to categorise. Unlike Mr Prest she never looked common, even in her most flagrant leopard-print/ankle-chain ensembles, while her speech was a mixture of posh locutions (‘weskit’ for waistcoat, ‘gorn’ and ‘sod orf’) and the frankly demotic (‘Goodbye, Mrs Big Tits!’ she would mouth from the window, waving at a well-upholstered customer waddling off to a car with Playtex-ed zeppelins aloft).

  She was classless, in fact. Through and through. Nothing to do with class bothered her. She was as indifferent to its niceties as it is possible to be, just as she was to those of political affiliation, race, sexuality, all the things that now fill us with such tremulous angst. If a person was the right sort – which meant the large-spirited sort, ‘liberal and racy’ – then that was what mattered, over and above anything else: better a dustman who fought to buy his round than a duke who slithered out of doing so. (One must be honest here, a duke who bought his round would have been even more welcome.)

  Of course not everybody in her pub was that type of person. Some were mimsy but kind, so it didn’t matter. Some were downright small-minded, not in the way that precluded going to pubs but in other, nastier ways. That too had to be accepted. Nevertheless, one of my grandmother’s finer moments came when a young black man came into the pub with his white girlfriend – an unusual sight at that time, in that rural location – and not-quite-inaudible mutterings emerged from a couple of the less attractive regulars. They were good customers, but she wasn’t having it. She bustled them into the courtyard outside the pub and went coldly berserk. I also recall a gay friend of mine, meeting her with his partner when she was in her nineties, and saying to me afterwards how wonderful she had been; I could see that he had feared that an old country woman, which ostensibly she then was, might be prejudiced against homosexuality. I didn’t tell him about Lot and Lil, the gay couple who had drunk at her father’s pub, to whom she had lent her black velvet evening gowns for parties. During the war (probably around the same time the forces of law caught Ivor Novello for ‘petrol coupon fraud’) one of the parties was raided, the men were arrested – wearing the black velvet – and doubtless jailed. ‘I never got the dresses back, no.’ She had lived through that era; she lived on into the age of virtue-signalling, and throughout it all she remained unchanged. This was part of her genius.

  She was a pragmatist, not a paragon. There was nothing politicised about her liberalism (indeed politics was another subject to which she showed a professional indifference; other than when people ‘had a bit of a moan’, it was off limits in the pub). Although what she hated more than anything was meanness of any kind, her generosity somehow went alongside her self-absorption; it had a dispassionate quality. It was essential to her landlady’s gift but it was also innate, more like an instinct than a choice.

  She was a natural bohemian, really. Her soul was forged in a world that for better or worse no longer exists, that centred upon London. My grandmother left the city as a young girl in the early 1930s, when her father took on the licence of the old pub, situated in a Home Counties town some twenty miles away. I suppose London pubs were hard to come by. But they were always London people, and they brought that to their pub. My great-grandmother would sit by the window in her new home and watch the Green Line bus on its road to smoggy paradise. My grandmother also remained a London person. I remember one of her last outings, a visit to the Royal Opera House for her birthday; how she had stared silently out of the car window at the Mall, the Strand, the dirty gold streetlights dancing on the dusk.

  From the early days of the pub that I knew, which by the time the brewery had done its work looked the very ideal of the country establishment, she would take a day off every week and go to London. These days, these sacred Tuesdays, she spoke of later with something almost like emotion. Sometimes she drove herself, chain-smoking Passing Clouds as she negotiated West End streets that would now seem shockingly empty, devoid of signage and regulation, on her way to shop for all the things that her new life lacked: clothes in satin and taffeta, perky little hats, food with a taste of the foreign, scent of a richness to pierce and fill the country air, lipstick to brighten the dim saloon, sleek and blackened hair. All this meant either Knightsbridge – green and gold bags, Mr Teasy-Weasy – or the austere opulence of Bond Street, where she would park for an entire afternoon without fear of penalty. These were female outings, with a girlfriend and later my mother. On the way home, always on ‘A’ roads (the motorway being one of the few things that alarmed her), she would stop at the Sea Shell on Lisson Grove to buy fish and chips.

  But the more truly precious occasions involved Victor; not so much for the man himself as for the possibilities that only came, in those days, with male accompaniment. Victor meant the shows,
the first night of My Fair Lady, cabaret at the Talk of the Town – where the mirrored interior reflected an infinity of red mouths and bare shoulders, where Pearl Bailey beckoned Princess Margaret from the audience to be the foil in her sublime act – and the Palladium stars who scattered charisma like fairy dust. Sometimes these West End evenings were shared with another couple, pub customers, who were of apparently similar type: sophisticates without cynicism. My grandmother and Victor would dine with this pair at the Caprice, until the friendship became a bore, and for a curious reason.

  A particular table was used by Princess Margaret (her again). The couple regarded it as a point of honour to eat at this table, and would wait it out for long ravenous minutes at the bar until it became free. My grandmother and Victor were not like that. They had nothing of the mindset that worships celebrity and seeks a kind of osmosis with it. They had too much humour, too much self-assurance; ‘always thought I was as good as anybody else’ was one of my grandmother’s shrugged phrases. So they gradually extricated themselves from ties to the Caprice couple. Generally, I think, they were happier à deux. Not because they longed to gaze into each other’s eyes, but because they sought and found the same things in London. Their experience was shared, not in the sense that it co-mingled, but because it was so similar for both of them.

  Soho, for instance, where to walk the streets was to traverse the blatant, secretive, gleaming bars of an outdoor pub, whose ceiling was the blue-black sky. Victor was ‘known’ in Soho. He flourished, became a relaxed and worldly man rather than my grandmother’s faintly de trop courtier, moved easily from place to place with a memory of glory still swirling around him. The musicians in Denmark Street offered him their hands; he had been one of them, had played guitar with ‘Lewis’, whom on one occasion he took my grandmother to meet backstage (she remembered Armstrong as dignified, remote, one hand busily staunching a lip that bled from his exertions). Then there was Berwick Street Market; the French House pub that my grandmother always called by its original name, the York Minster; Wheeler’s on Old Compton Street; Isow’s on Brewer Street … all of this was what my grandmother brought back to the pub, trailing the hallowed vestiges of London: of sharp, wry shouts; doorways glowing dirty red; quickly dispensed drinks slid with neat aplomb onto tired wooden counters; tables shaded and angled with intimacy; the sense of the unpredictable, the infinite, the impossibly energetic; of life played out amid the floodlights; of the Windmill Theatre and its inexorable winking reminder that it never closed; of a night that was ephemeral yet carved in some dimension of time upon the dark air …

  These evenings could not have existed without alcohol. That was not, however, the point of them. Victor was a man of moderate appetites (except for cigarettes), one of those naturally spry and trim-waisted Londoners; also he had his Daimler waiting faithfully on Lexington Street. Driving wouldn’t have prevented him drinking, but he wouldn’t have overdone it. And my grandmother had a business to run the next day. Sometimes she and Victor would call time after Wheeler’s, from which they took lovingly parcelled-up cartons of mussel soup (in later years this would be inflicted upon my parents, holding the fort at the pub and dreading the soup). Sometimes they would have a row, which cut the evening short: on one occasion Victor threw a tantrum when a waiter did his ‘more black pepper, madam?’ routine with too much feeling. For all the easy habitude of their relationship, its terms were essentially dictated by my grandmother, and from time to time this ripped through the cloak of Victor’s urbanity.

  Sometimes, however, they would decide that the night was still young. My grandmother was young, by today’s standards – not yet forty – although a photograph of her dancing at a Licensed Victuallers’ ball shows a definitely mature woman, with an unabashed adult glamour that no longer really exists. She looks like Gwyneth Paltrow’s mother, figuratively speaking, but she also looks sexy in a deep, lived, knowing, fearless way.

  Despite her bond with the pub, she resented the idea of returning when it might still be open. Indeed, if that happened she would sit in the car and wait until everybody had gone. So she did usually move on to a club, occasionally the Colony Room, where again Victor was ‘known’. This powerfully atmospheric hole on Dean Street was of course much favoured by artists (and hangers-on), among them Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. According to my grandmother’s legend, she once observed Bacon scrawling a drawing on a napkin, or a tablecloth, or a bit of paper, I was never sure about the details, which was then left lying around; she could have picked it up with the greatest of ease, surrounded as she was by semi-catatonics, but she did not do so. Nor, it seemed, did she regret the omission. ‘Oh, well he was such a terrible drunk.’ This was one of her familiar contradictions: the reverence for alcohol and the loathing of drunkards. ‘Falling over – you know, deliberate-like.’

  In fact the Colony was not really her milieu. She would have coped with it, and liked the idea of it (the club was still relatively new at that time, having opened in 1948, so it had not had the chance to become a parody of itself). But she enjoyed the push-pull of subverted decorum more than the ‘evening cunty, who’s she been fucking today’ idiom, which anyway wasn’t shocking because there was nobody shockable present. She perceived the conscious theatricality of a Bacon, playing to a gallery that knew pretty much exactly what to expect. Again that wasn’t her style. Her own play-acting was merely a heightened version of herself, done not to impress but because it came naturally. Putting on a full-blown act was almost always done with the aim of impressing, as often as not by people who had no need to impress. Nerves, she would have said.

  Still, the Colony was something. My grandmother was not indifferent to the stature of Francis Bacon and, although she never claimed to know her, she would have respected (not feared) the club’s presiding presence, Muriel Belcher, who ran the place for thirty years. She would have known what it took to be a Muriel, that daily effort made by the true hostess, who gave of herself without stint (even when being vile, caustic, vicious, terrifying – it was all part of the show). ‘Hostesse’ is a medieval word for what we would today call a landlady – Mistress Quickly is described as a hostess – although with the development of pubs the two terms split into slightly different meanings. But with a landlady such as my grandmother, a large personality in a small and club-like establishment, there was scarcely any difference at all.

  So would she have done better – I now wonder – to have been a hostess proper, in charge of her own London club? Was she, indeed, circumscribed by class in the conventional sense of the word, by the fact that her father had to work his way up to the status of landlord, and that acquiring his own establishment represented the ultimate in achievement, that he was a man with every advantage of personality and none of birth? However suited my grandmother was to the trade that she inherited, had there ever been much choice about it? Except marriage, of course: a man like her suitor Nat Tennens, owner of the Kilburn Empire, represented the real choice in those days, but she had had no desire to take it.

  I can see her, yes, in the dark glow of a Soho club, accepting the ironic homage of the members. I can’t see her encouraging their more hysterical excesses. She disliked the lack of control that spilled over into anarchy and, for all her bohemianism, she was deeply respectable. She preferred the taut flirtation across the saloon counter to the frank exchanges of the Brighton hotel room. The more sordid connotations of the word ‘hostess’ would have appalled her. But there were different kinds of clubs, just as there were pubs; they did not have to be drunken or disreputable. She could have run somewhere plusher, more Mayfair, more salon-like, and I am sure that she would have done it wonderfully well.

  Nevertheless, there is something not quite right about the image of this parallel universe. For a start my grandmother herself loved pubs. If she entered a good pub, she inhaled and expanded, emanating not exactly pleasure but the animal sense of being restored to her rightful habitat. There were things that the pub lacked, most assuredly, of the cos
mopolitan and the chic. It could be rich in tedium and terrible conversations (‘How are you tonight; not three bad’), its customers could try the patience of a far saintlier woman than my grandmother (‘Well they’re not the ticket, are they, some of them’). But it was precisely this humbleness, this street-corner accessibility, that gave the pub something that the club did not have. Pubs were loved, in a way that is not quite possible with clubs. With its innate selectivity the club creates a self-conscious hauteur, a sense of belonging quite different to that of the mongrel pub, where everybody is allowed to belong, unless informed otherwise. Nor does the club camaraderie generate much warmth, but perhaps warmth is a provincial thing to expect from a night out … That extraordinary play by Rodney Ackland, Absolute Hell, has it about right. It is set in 1945, in a Soho establishment run by a boozed-up hostess who includes among her regulars a failing writer, a lesbian literary critic, a film producer with an ill-treated acolyte, a good-time girl, a GI out for a good time: the usual suspects, in fact, but the play goes deep beneath cliché. It reeks of spirituous atmosphere, it is Hamiltonian in its feel for the rhythms of drunkenness (‘I’m going off the boil,’ somebody says, meaning, ‘For Christ’s sake, top me up’), and it understands how the club becomes a willingly entered prison to the people who need it. None more so than the hostess, Christine, who gives her all to the place and gets remarkably little in return, perhaps because there is interdependency but not much kindness. People talk as they do in Chekhov, in a vacuum. They parade their vulnerabilities like desperate party pieces, as a way of singing for their liquid supper, although the offer of a large whisky is as much as anything a means to get them to shut up. They want love – impersonal love as much as the other sort – and there is not much of it to be found.