This was life in the mid-1930s, communal pleasure as defiance against economic depression, the threat of war; and in the midst of it all my great-grandfather, an ageing man by then, but doing his bit to cheer the civilian troops. I believed my grandmother when she told me about his popularity, his straightforward standing within the community. It is only now that I wonder about that surname, Solomon, in the context of the times (Mosley was already on the march when the family left London). One of my great-uncles was uncomfortably aware of it. But my grandmother – and by implication her father – were far too confident to care; she knew all about anti-Semitism, as indeed how could one not in the 1930s, but she would have disdained it with the same breezy, oddly piercing contempt that she did all expressions of petty-mindedness. As a person who liked most things about herself, she very much liked her Jewish blood (which was on one side only; her mother had none). Although without religion, she gravitated to Isow’s restaurant and Grodzinski’s of Golders Green with something like instinct – which sounds outlandishly shallow, yet was not. At the very end of her life she had her father’s face, the ancient Semitic lines emerging as the female trappings fell away.
Sometimes her memory unfurled for me with ease. What the men drank in the public bar, where they stood on the tiled floor and sat at workmanlike square tables: Black and Tan, Brown and Mild, Light and Bitter, Double Diamond, Mackeson. What the women drank in the carpeted saloon, from within the firm luxury of the green leather bucket chairs: Gin and Orange, Gin and Pep, Gin and Lime, Port and Lemon, Egg Flips, Green Goddess. What people smoked: Craven A, Passing Cloud, Du Maurier, Chesterfield, Woodbine, Albany, Black Cat, Capstan, de Reszkes, Player’s Navy Cut, Player’s Weights, Player’s Perfecto (so desirable and smart that they could be bought singly from vending machines). The games the customers played: darts, shove ha’penny, dominoes, bar billiards (for a shilling a time). On occasion, a small band of ‘novelty’ darts players would turn up, like an intimate music hall act, and throw treble 20s with long nails or screws. Yes … and did people play cards, I asked her, like you did – solo, brag? No, she said, because you couldn’t play for money. Nothing for money, not for years (1961, in fact, was when the law on gambling changed). Like you couldn’t have a bet on the gees, which everybody wanted to do – well, you know that. Yes, I did know that. No off-course betting until the first bookmakers opened, 1961 again … but of course, my grandmother said, it went on. I mean old Woodbine Minnie, the bookie’s runner, she’d come shuffling round taking the bets …
Woodbine Minnie in her hat and hairnet was one of the very few women who entered the public bar, where the drinks were cheaper and beer was served in a straight glass. In the saloon it came in a tankard. This distinction still existed at my grandmother’s pub, although by that time there was no class element. Tankards were the norm but there would always be somebody who would insist severely on a straight glass, as if a tankard might contain some residual poison, just as there were those who wanted gin in a small bowl glass and others who could drink it only from a tumbler – it was a means whereby which the customers asserted themselves. As for those who had ‘special’ tankards, including one man whose tankard was so special that its silver handle was in the form of a naked woman … they were another category altogether, the kind that my grandmother referred to as ‘proper soppy’.
And then, she told me, there were the other bars in the old pub, the secretive ones that stood at either end of the long main room and were entered by the back street. One was the jug and bottle. This had a hatch, opening on to the counter and screened by a row of opaque ‘windows’ suspended above the bar at eye level, so that faces were obscured. When the customer wanted a drink they would twist one of the windows and hiss the order into the gap. Discretion was all, in the jug and bottle. Women, often elderly widows or spinsters and therefore unable – in their own view – to drink inside a pub, would come with their own receptacle and have it filled with beer. Before they walked home, clutching their takeaway, they might sit in the tiny bar with its delicious fire, and have their palms read by my great-grandmother. She didn’t particularly know what she was doing; it was just a kindness. Like my own mother she was not a pub person. Her domain was the living quarters, the two floors upstairs with their giant, incongruous spaces: a ballroom with splendid windows overlooking the road, a sitting room with a balcony above the huge backyard, where she would serve tureens of steaming stew to local tramps (the pub as sanctuary again). There is a photograph of that yard, dating from when the family first moved to the pub and were assembled for the camera. A good-looking bunch, on the whole, although there was a mysterious stony-faced cousin with the aspect of an escaped criminal (one of the unmarried Adas or Ivys who was always staying at the pub. They lent a hand but the favour was really to them; ‘surplus women’ did not have an easy time of it). My great-grandmother, clutching a marvellous roguish dog, had a face of mellow curves in which I could divine a faint look of my grandmother. She, meanwhile, doll-like beneath her cloud of black hair, had an aspect that I had never thought to see in her: she looked childish. At that point, she was still the girl who had truanted from her convent. I have no idea what she dreamed of doing with her life at that point.
She was enrolled in the high school, but there is no education like growing up in a pub. For instance, there was the interesting truth about the other back bar, at the opposite end to the jug and bottle. On Friday evenings a uniformed copper would make an entrance at the pub, striding through in his clattering boots and tall helmet, no doubt getting a kick out of the change in atmosphere – from merry to wary – that he instantly created. This done, he would sidle off and drink the pint that was waiting for him in the private cupboard-like bar, known as ‘the policeman’s’.
The fact that an officer of the law had a craving for a little of what the pub offered, the fact that he could be a hypocrite, putting the fear of God into everybody while dreaming of his foaming tankard – this was the sort of thing that my grandmother saw. She also saw the pub tarts: Queenie, the plain little woman who sat demure and immobile in the saloon – ‘I couldn’t understand it, you know. Nice-looking men, some of them, and they’d go orf with her’ – and Nell, starched and upright as a Sunday schoolmistress. She saw the pub villain, Kingston Jack, who deployed wiles and winks and got friendly with would-be shrewd saps like the butcher, who, as it happened, had some savings to invest … ‘He turned him over, oh yes.’ She saw the man whose older sister was revealed to be his mother, and the ripples of intrigued compassion that formed around him as this truth disseminated itself, pub-style. She saw the division between the public and the saloon bars, so eloquent of the English class system that pubs could otherwise obliterate. She saw the discreet illicit movements beneath the round saloon tables, the adulterous interlinking of hands, the tentative nudge of a stockinged ankle. She saw the bob and weave of the men as they boasted and shoved each other, teased and played power games with each other, bristled and squared up to each other, smiled and tolerated each other, and when the evening had reached a certain pitch fairly loved each other. She saw Lot and Lil, the gay couple; the actors who came in from the theatre, including the very young Richard Attenborough; the theatre manager, who would later turn up with his friend Nat Tennens, my grandmother’s most eligible suitor; the dog men from the nearby greyhound track, with their rueful losers’ shrugs; the men who had suffered from the dire diseases of that time – polio, TB – and were left halt or frail, with dragging legs or caved-in chests, but who still turned up and counted out their pennies for a pint; the boxers whose fights were staged at a nearby venue, one of whom would fall beneath her lush spell; the bay rum-scented factory owners in their bespoke suits and finely tilted hats … she saw it all, the same scenes that I saw but painted in deeper, sootier shades, and she was shrewder about it than I. Although I have a reverence for female wisdom, I do not innately possess it; she, perforce, did. I saw it all through a kind of haze, but she picked out the patterns with t
he confidence of a code-breaker.
Of course I had another life. For her the pub was life, the all and only.
When she first arrived at the old pub, she was not officially ‘out’. She wheeled a pram through cobbled streets to the local tannery, collecting the block of ice from which pieces would be chipped and put into drinks. She carried a great bag of coppers, £5 worth and ‘sodding heavy’, to be exchanged at the local bus station. She helped to pack crates for the draymen, who still came with their magnificent horses. She took a regular jug of mild to an old lady who was unable to walk the half-mile to the pub, and who would present her on arrival with a steaming baked potato. She sunbathed on the balcony with her friends – girls like Irene, Margot and May, the solo school of later years – and threw cherry stones at the men on their way to the Gents’. The roguish dog, lurking in the yard, was also a hazard on that journey. On one occasion a customer came marching in, pulled down his trousers and said to one of the Adas: ‘Look what your bloody dog’s done to me.’ How many lawsuits might that lead to today – the wayward animal, the negligent owner, the lewd customer – but what actually happened was that the man sighed, resumed his trousers and ordered another drink.
And then it was time, for my grandmother, for the eyebrow pencil and the dressmaker around the corner, for the Max Factor lipstick and l’Aimant by Coty. I too was fifteen when I first served behind the bar, but her debut was completely different: it was in earnest. She was an instant hit. ‘Um … well, I suppose I wasn’t a bad looker. Knew how to pull a proper pint. Men always like girls behind a counter, you know what men are like …’
She was sensational. Later she became immensely smart and attractive, but in youth she was a beauty. Glorious. I like to picture how she must have looked, at the centre of the long counter, with her high-gloss silent film star colouring, caught in the starbursts of the pub lights. She had such a style – raven-black Eton crop, neck choker, sleek satin blouse beneath what looked like a man’s dinner jacket, vanilla ice-cream shoulders rising out of floor-length velvet: assured beyond her years, with a cool tang of the exotic … And yet. Again, the photographs of my grandmother aged fifteen are so familiar to me that I hadn’t looked at them properly for years. Now, remembering her anew, I saw something beyond and beneath her astonishing image. Thoughts of my grandmother never moved me – she was such a tough one, always – but suddenly I was moved, by a glimpse of uncertainty in her eyes, a yearning that she covered thereafter beneath her gallant, restless swagger. This was part of my grandmother’s legend, the girl with the Louise Brooks allure who went behind the bar and never really left it; yet I felt – still feel, can’t forget the bend in my heart – as though I had perceived the small shift that she had made, so early and so willingly, to be the person she became.
Then the war: and the great fiery consummation of the affair between my grandmother and the old pub. She lost her mother and her husband – not to the bombs, as happened to Margot, but to cancer and the army – and yet, how she loved that decade between the Battle of Britain and the death of her father! The town was somewhat in the firing line. A couple of factories were targeted. But the air-raid shelter was right beneath her feet – the pub’s huge cellars – and into the bunker of safety came the pub customers and the neighbours, sinner and churchgoer together, sitting with their backs to the acrid barrels, in front of them a bottle of whisky and a box of dominoes. To feel the spell of the pub exerting itself in the dark, as the unearthly wail danced above, was an intimate, dreadful excitement. It was ordinariness, the accoutrements of the known world, but enclosed, deepened, reduced to a this-is-what-we’re-fighting-for essence. Back in the bars after the all-clear, the ephemerality of pleasure had become more than abstraction. Every minute at the pub mattered, hedged about as it was with metaphorical barbed wire, beyond which lay the unknown.
More prosaically, the pub was a focus for slightly hysterical activity. The saloon bar was a meeting-place for the Home Guard, who planned their manoeuvres at the round tables: ‘Oh, they were lovely. They were the posh old boys. Old Aubrey, he wore a black patch …’ Old Aubrey, old Fitzroy – there was always this element, just as there would later be in my grandmother’s own pub, of men with big houses and drinks cabinets and club memberships, who nonetheless went for their pint, who craved that stopping-place of sanity in their day. They wouldn’t have gone to any old pub – it had to be a good house – but still they wanted to go to the pub. One of them, a married man emboldened by the opportunities that war created, began an affair with a younger woman while the pair were on fire-watching duty. She fell pregnant, which was a catastrophe, war notwithstanding. Fortunately an escape route presented itself: the girl was a twin. While she holed up and waited for the man to extricate himself from his marriage, her sister assumed her identity and took over the fire-watching. A story that one would be ashamed to invent but that nonetheless happened, and that even ended happily ever after, except for the wife.
Although, she may have been enjoying her own bit of wartime mischief. Many women were. Irene, before she married the spiv publican Stan, was up to all sorts (in my father’s phrase, ‘a bit scarlet’) and had an actual colonel in tow. Married, of course. Meanwhile the bachelor Stan was paying flagrant attentions to my grandmother. None of this war behaviour was ever mentioned in later years, when the two women lived together, although it always somehow formed a subterranean stream beneath the conversation. My grandmother had absolutely no interest in Stan; Irene probably bore more of a grudge over that benign indifference than if there had been an actual affair, but I am not sure, anyway, that my grandmother went in for affairs. Not until Victor, who was anyway more like an ally than a grand passion. I would never have wanted to ask her, it wasn’t my business, and I liked her mystery too much. Certainly her natural stance was to be the recipient of favours, to be besieged: her counter was the equivalent of the high tower in a medieval tale of courtly love. After her marriage that was the way she liked it – protected and free – with the war holding her in a kind of pub limbo.
But who knows? She never needed men – too sure of their attention for that – yet beyond a doubt she revelled in the masculine variety that stormed like a force of nature into the pub, broad-shouldered its way deliciously to the bar and paid its revved-up homage: there were the Poles, and then there were the GIs. ‘Oh, the Yanks. Oh yes – they were out of this world.’ Like many people who grew up in the heyday of Hollywood, my grandmother was fascinated all her life by America. The films that she saw at the Odeon – the screwball comedies, the early musicals – had created for ever an image of the country as a miracle of space, height, cleanliness, success, newness, Art Deco frontages, girls supple with sass, men whose ranch-reared pectorals could be divined beneath their Brooks Brothers’ suits. Part of Victor’s appeal was that he had been to New York. And now here were actual Americans, from the land of tobacco-chewing cowboys and Clark Gable, who came to the pub bearing an apparent infinity of gifts, occasionally fighting each other in the public bar, dancing to the gramophone in the saloon bar, singing along with Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters (‘you’ve got to accen-tuate the positive …’), flourishing their calcium-rich dentistry and rapacious chivalry. Even the timid Miss Roach, in Patrick Hamilton’s Slaves of Solitude, has ‘her’ American during the war, with whom she goes to the pub and discovers the delicious joys of gin and French. Unreliable though he may be, he is a gateway that leads to something bigger than the boarding house. My grandmother was infinitely worldly by comparison, yet the sensation of seeing and hearing the GIs in her father’s pub was always one of her strongest memories, the gorgeously alien within the dear and familiar, a symbol of the confidence and extravagance that came with this time in her life, the movement towards what she believed to be her prime.
There had been unexpected plenitude. Not just because of the Americans, but because the pub was a social treasure, a great trading power (no whale meat or stocking seams drawn on with charcoal for my grandmother
), above all a friend. As soon as the war was over, the privations began. Beer shortages led to fisticuffs over the slops; cigarette shortages meant that the prized packets were kept beneath the counter, only available to the favoured. The fires in the long bars struggled hard against the dire winters of the late 1940s. But still, it was the pub. For those who had made it home, it was the not-quite-home of which many of them had dreamed – a pint! at a counter! served by a proper landlady! And my grandmother, moving ever closer to that status as her father retreated quietly to his sitting room, was the everyday dream made flesh.
Not long after that it was closing time.
‘Once our beer was frothy, but
Now it’s frothy coffee …’
From Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be
by Lionel Bart
‘My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage, Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age, But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth, And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death; For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.’
From ‘A Song of Temperance Reform’
by G. K. Chesterton
III
T he old pub is now a featureless box. It is flattened and neutralised, one of those buildings that moved with the times, only to be left behind by them. Nevertheless, it is, as they used to say, lucky to be in the band at all. About half of Britain’s pubs have closed in the past century, and a quarter since the early 1980s. According to a 2016 estimate there are some 52,000 in existence, although this figure will already by too high: between twenty and thirty pubs close every week.
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