Would a good pub be as devoid of consolation? I think not. Of course the general behaviour is very much as above: putting on a front, getting a round in when the mood threatens to darken, having a laugh; that, after all, is the point of going out (or used to be). One is not on a visit to a shrink or to one’s mother.
And yet, in a good pub, empathy is always implied. I am thinking of the sad trio on the settle in my grandmother’s public bar, towards whom people were brisk and cheerful and, without really doing anything, kind. It was the kindness that came with a lack of self-importance, with a constant awareness of there but for the grace of God … On occasion I would see my grandmother in some corner of the saloon, talking to one or other of the customers with an intensity of empathy – privately, albeit in public. Later – when I was old enough to divine the reality within these images – I realised that they had been talking about the things that lay beneath the smiling veneer: the breakdown of a marriage, the lump in a breast, the unrequited love for some man or other, the fear that a wife was playing around. Drink made confession easier, but so did the embracing chamber of the pub. So too did the disinterested flavour of my grandmother’s kindness, which was nonetheless absolute.
My grandmother thought a lot of herself, she knew that she was awash with personality, but she never thought herself too good for the pub. She too had the gift of ordinariness. Although she liked what she called ‘swank’, she had a sort of divine good sense, an earthbound quality that suited her so completely to the landlady life. It was bred in her, no doubt. It was the aspect that enabled her to cut to the heart of motive, and preside over the kitchen conversations with such omniscience. She could have chatted with just the same assurance about the people she encountered in a club like the Colony: ‘Well, he reckons there’s a few quid there, doesn’t he,’ or, ‘He wasn’t half showing orf to that young girl, I suppose he thought he was in,’ or, ‘They think they can drink, my old farmers would drink them under the table.’ This last was probably true. Some years later I took a boyfriend to the pub, a man who in London circles was regarded as a bit of a dasher, and we fell into an evening with the farmers, men who in their amiable way ate him for breakfast. He tried to fence with them, which was hopeless; he tried to drink with them, which was calamitous. As he sulked and swayed, so they remained alert, good-humoured, ready for more, and despite myself I couldn’t help but think the worse of the boyfriend.
Something else about my grandmother: she liked to be in charge. From the age of fifteen she had presided from behind the bar. She was dauphine, queen, priestess, on the whole the most interesting person around. In a club or (if Victor had had his way) a hotel, the balance of power is slightly different: she would have been up against the customers’ personalities, a situation that might not have been quite to her taste. In the pub she was within herself. At home.
I remember now another of her stories, told as usual as if I already knew it, about a pub a few streets away from her father’s, of similar stamp but less successful. The daughter of this pub’s landlord was a few years older than my grandmother, equally attractive although in pure English style. In youth she too served behind the bar and received the adoration owing to the dauphine; this, however, was not enough for her. She went to London, became a C. B. Cochran chorus girl, went to Hollywood, married one of the biggest film stars of the day and ended up the wife of an earl.
This landlord’s daughter was a pre-feminism feminist who used her femaleness as decorated armoury and believed that fate could be forged rather than accepted. Which sounds very much like my grandmother, who was no less bold and glamorous, no less dynamic; yet her attitude to fate was slightly different. In the mid-1930s, when she was about eighteen, a pub customer who worked in cinema invited her to spend the next couple of weeks filming at Elstree; an extras job only, but it was the sort of chance that the other landlord’s daughter would have grasped and shaped to her own ends. My grandmother got up at five, did one day on set then never went back. She simply didn’t want it. In later life she often talked about the girl around the corner who became a countess, and did so without a shred of envy; she was honestly, contentedly, merely intrigued by the progress of her parallel self.
The ordinariness of the pub, which is so integral, makes it singularly resonant as a setting for the extraordinary. Watson and Crick, announcing the discovery of the secret of life to the lunchtime drinkers at the Eagle in Cambridge. Lewis and Tolkien, ruminating on fantasy worlds in the parlour-like spaces of the Eagle and Child in Oxford. Ron Kray raising the gun to George Cornell as the drinkers at the Blind Beggar stared resolutely into their pint glasses. Lady Lucan running into the Plumbers’ Arms in Belgravia, barefoot and head clotted with blood, screaming at the sparse assemblage that her nanny had been killed. Ruth Ellis glimpsed through the window of the Magdala in Hampstead, where the Easter Monday drinkers would soon hear the sound of gunfire in the street outside.
Ruth Ellis shot her lover, who had treated her abysmally. Today she would almost certainly have been tried for manslaughter. Sixty years ago she was convicted of murder and became the last woman to be hanged. The man who executed her, Albert Pierrepoint, had another trade: he ran a pub in Oldham called Help the Poor Struggler, acquired with the proceeds from despatching Nazi war criminals. By all accounts he was a good publican, full of bonhomie. But imagine the deployment of power by such a landlord (people knew who he was, although he did not discuss it), a man who in his secondary career executed more than 400 people, pulling pints with his deft hangman’s hands; let us just say that any masochistic tendency within his customers would have been peculiarly stimulated.
Not that public opinion – therefore pub opinion – was necessarily against what Pierrepoint did. For instance there was little sympathy for Ruth Ellis, my grandmother told me, shaking her head in a characteristic mixture of dismay and forbearance. The trial had taken place in the summer of 1955, when the pub was truly hitting its stride, filled with bands of airy sunlight through which the dust motes glinted and danced, with short-sleeved customers who over-spilled to the outside tables, forming little concentrations of warmth and delight. Ruth Ellis was discussed, naturally, by most of these carefree drinkers. She had run a club, one of the loucher type, and her rouged and varnished demeanour – which she maintained, hostess-style, at the Old Bailey – hid her vulnerability from view. It was as if she herself had wanted it that way. She had her standards. She didn’t try to incite pity for the miscarriage that her lover had brought on with a punch to the stomach, she didn’t rat on whoever had given her the gun. It was about pride, in a man’s world. But the attitude to Ruth Ellis exposed the fragility of status for women in her kind of job. ‘They all thought she was a tart, you see,’ my grandmother explained. Which she had been, in a manner of speaking; although she might have been labelled one, whatever the truth of the matter; take a woman away from the mise en scène of the bar, and the adulation of men could turn at speed into condemnation.
My grandmother’s own attitude, I sensed, had been one of solidarity, warily expressed. There could be no outright identification of herself with the wretched Mrs Ellis (which, oddly enough, was her own name); that was not the landlady’s job. But she would have paid glancing tribute to both the woman (‘poor bugger’) and her adherence to the ‘chin up’ philosophy (‘she’s got some pluck’). She would have behaved in the same way at her own trial, had she been in that position, which she would not have been.
Conversely, she remembered sympathy for a local man who killed and dismembered his wife during the war. This was not entirely about gender. In part it was simply because the man was known to people. Also the crime had almost certainly been committed without premeditation. Despite the dismemberment, which was attributed to panic, this man was regarded with a measure of compassion – more so than the apparently ruthless Ruth, who admitted the intent to kill; but also far more than the wife-murderer at my grandmother’s pub, who would later plead provocation with such remarkable success. O
f course in the 1940s the shadow of that cheery Lancashire publican, Pierrepoint, loomed over the local murderer. A petition was placed on the counter and, as my grandmother recalled, most customers were falling over themselves to sign it; the death sentence was indeed commuted, although these reprieves seem to have been more a matter of luck than anything else.
This was at the old pub, in the town-dark public bar, where men screwed a Player’s Weight into their mouths and said go on then, pass us a pen, I’ll sign for the poor bastard. There but for the grace of God.
The old pub is now renamed, rebuilt, its former incarnation completely forgotten except for what I am about to write, which comes only through the memories of my grandmother. As ever, she seemed unaware that she was telling me things I could not possibly know. This was history, folklore, the template: to know any proper pub was to know the old pub. I had realised that, surely?
It was true, that my grandmother’s pub contained the soul of this other unknown pub along with its shiny black settles, its brass fire tools with their honey gleam, its Royal Albert and squat decanters and a handful of its photographs, which held the occluded gleam of memory itself. In externals the two establishments could scarcely have been less alike, although in essence this meant little. But whereas my grandmother’s pub was the perfect specimen of the rural inn, so the old pub was supremely of the streets, with its stern dark wood and dull gold fittings, its inn sign of black glass and gilded calligraphy, its swing doors with their quick yielding creak and flap of air, its windows etched with ghostly writing – SALOON, FINE ALES – and its interior light, striped with the yellow glare of street lamps, sharply shadowed, briskly mysterious.
It was an enormous place, fronting on to one street and backing on to another. Beside it was the church, and every which way there were shops: a grocer, a cobbler, a butcher, all run by and filled with pub customers. When my great-grandfather took it over in the 1930s it was fairly new, built after the first war (to which a couple of my great-uncles absconded, adding to their ages as boys then did, and for a wonder surviving). During the war, dreams of relative temperance had flowered again: the 1914 Defence of the Realm act restricted opening hours to five and a half each day, and beer was proudly diluted. Two years later, pubs in three disparate areas – Carlisle, Cromarty and Enfield – were taken into state management (a few remained so until 1973). They had no incentive to sell alcohol, as there was no profit to be made on it, and food became a central feature; the idea being that the wholesome pie or turnip bread or roasted marrowbones would mitigate the demon drink. This was very much like the Refreshment Association quasi-pub conceived by Bernard Shaw.
The desire to make pubs about eating, rather than drinking, was a policy urged by the temperance movement in the early twentieth century – by which time it would have realised that outright prohibition was never going to happen – and the war made it a great deal easier to foist upon people. I now realise that this was why my great-grandfather so vehemently opposed food in pubs. He was Chestertonian in his belief that the state was a bloody nuisance (my grandmother took a similar view) and that the pub was a place where one could thankfully ignore its nonsense, while incidentally doing some of its job. The idea that drinkers should be forced to eat – with the authorities acting like an almighty dinner lady, pushing pies into the mouths of people who simply wanted their pint – would have outraged him. ‘A pub’s a pub, not a bloody cayff’ (he meant café). Food in his establishment consisted of arrowroot biscuits and Smith’s crisps – plain only – kept in a tub on the counter with a screw-top lid. People sprinkled their crisps with the little bag of salt inside the packet, then threw a couple of grains over their left shoulder ‘into the face of the devil’. My grandmother did this all her life.
She also maintained her father’s suspicion of food. Cheddar and Ritz crackers, gherkins and olives, crisps and peanuts – these were not food, they were merely punctuation within the smooth paragraphs of drink. Later, at her own establishment, she treasured the remark of one of the courteous, remote men who would descend periodically from the brewery to cast a cool eye upon their showpiece; he inhaled as he entered and said: ‘How nice to come into a pub and not smell food.’ He preferred the adult essence of beer and fug. Today this would seem perverse in the extreme, but not so, not so long ago.
This man from the brewery was endorsing my great-grandfather, in fact, and that pleased my grandmother because she had worshipped him. However much she loved her sweet-natured homely mother, it was her father whom she ‘studied’ (as she put it) and sought to become. There was something almost mythic in her sense of herself as the Publican’s Daughter. It was strange, really; she had five older brothers, all of whom worked at the pub before marrying and moving on, but felt that it was she who should carry on the tradition. She believed that she had the strongest calling. She also had the old-fashioned daughter’s sense that she should not leave her parents, not that she wanted to.
So when she married, not long before the outbreak of the second war, she clearly thought that she was acquiring a future co-publican as well as a husband. Had she not divorced, she would of course have automatically inherited the old pub’s licence, although my grandfather may have had other ideas. She once told me a story of how, during the brief span of her marriage – spent in the pub’s enormous upstairs quarters; the imminence of war meant that they never even started to find a home – the family had been having tea together and suddenly her husband had upended the whole table, cups and cake and all. She was a little stirred by the memory; also amused and comprehending. ‘Well, he was fed up, you know. With me, I suppose.’ She knew that she had been a poor proposition as a wife. She had fallen in love, married, had a baby, but had wanted nothing else to change. She had believed that my grandfather would slot obediently into the pub, and he had had a moment of frustrated youthful rebellion against the whole pint-pulling lot of them. I understood it too. Both him and her. Mainly her. I have never been the marrying kind, although once or twice I thought that I should try to be; when she told me this story – elliptically, vividly – I felt as close to her as it was possible to get.
And what would have happened, had the war not intervened and saved my grandmother from making a decision – the pub or the man – I really cannot imagine. But after her husband joined up, tacitly ending the relationship, she seems to have decided never to be susceptible again. Perhaps, having watched from behind the bar the idiocies and shenanigans caused by passion, she deliberately called time on romantic love. Not on men, whom she always adored, but in the idea of a man as the point of everything, a solution to life.
No: the man whom she most valued was always her father, the charismatic little charmer crackling with wry vitality. She talked about him constantly, in that litany-like way of hers: repetitive but never boring, because enigmatic. He died many years before I was born and I know little of him, except a handful of his sayings, such as the toast to wives and sweethearts, may they never meet; or no place like home, when you’ve got nowhere else to go; or (at the prospect of something unpleasant) I’d rather sleep with a dead policeman. I know what he looked like, from the photograph that hung in my grandmother’s sitting room: kindly of eye, immaculate of collar, cigar held steady in his mouth, Jewish ancestry nobly apparent. The image was so familiar to me that I held the imprint of its faded black and white on my mind’s eye, although I had never thought about it. Now I think, as I do about all true publicans, what a force he must have had: the young Paddington ‘cellarman’ of the 1901 census, born soon after the legislation that finally created the pub, who rose to become the architect of a proper house, a house with a name, a beloved house, the spirit of what that law was all about. I know what he must have been like, because of how much my grandmother emulated him.
Also among her small collection was a photograph of the old pub itself. It was a close-up of the bar, nothing more – in Hulton Getty tones, not quite sepia, more a sombre maroon-brown – but it thrilled me as a Sickert
would have done. So rich in recessive depths, within which lay something so meaningfully, so meaninglessly, ordinary: just the world as it was when the pub was so intrinsic as to be scarcely noticeable, simply the screensaver to one’s life. How I craved entry to that photograph, for one evening! To smell the wax polish on the wood, the overflow of beer beneath the pumps, the nostril-burning cigarettes – and to be unaware of it all, to be. Behind the bar stood a couple of my grandmother’s female cousins, snoods on their hair, capable arms, smiles fixed momentarily for the camera but otherwise without self-consciousness. They had no image of themselves. Nor did the man caught in the corner of the photo, leaning on the bar with his shoulders slightly humped and hat brim low, hands cradling a glass. It was the age-old stance of the pub customer, seeking an oblique comfort. To me it looked configurative, symbolic, all the more so because eighty years ago the man himself was just standing there.
Beyond that tableau, what did the old pub look like? I can only piece it together: the image is incomplete, a sensory muddle of businesslike jostle and sponged suits and snoods and dark tints and low jovial shouts plaiting the thickened air. I realise now that it seems to me pub-like in a way that my grandmother replicated but could never achieve so unthinkingly, because the old pub belonged to a world so at one with it.
I realise, too, that I have never actually been in a pub like this must have been. A huge town place, with unusually long bars, the public and saloon joined together in an extended oval that was separated by the counter. A veritable chorus line could have stood behind that counter, working the multiplicity of pumps, keeping the beer engine stoked and revved. In shape it was not unlike the Midnight Bell off the Euston Road, which was created by Patrick Hamilton in 1929, not long before the time I am describing, and whose saloon was ‘narrow and about thirty feet in length’. How could such a place exist today? How could a room that size be kept alive, quite naturally, without the false hilarity of extreme drunkenness? Yet this one was. Footsteps turned constantly towards the old pub, just as they did the nearby dog track, or the large Victorian theatre (later a bingo hall, later still derelict) where Gracie Fields and Todd Slaughter went to give their respective shows, Sally from the Alley and Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber.
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