Again, the change was not sudden. Pubs had been remodelled as Berni Inns since the mid-1950s, and those steak-and-chips-plus-Chianti meals were a near institution by the late 1960s. Similarly with Aberdeen Angus ‘restaurants’. These chains surely influenced the way in which pubs evolved, prefiguring Harvesters – which started in the early 1980s – and their kind. But food in pubs was one thing; good food was another. This was the age of nouvelle cuisine, of Raymond Blanc as a semi-celebrity. The first intimations could be felt of what would become another obsession (was this, in fact, when things became obsessions?), but the gastronomic revolution had not yet gained momentum. Fifteen years later, the village pubs where I grew up would be offering ingredients such as roasted peppers (almost all of the seeds removed), balsamic vinegar, mascarpone, the usual suspects gathered together in herb-flecked groupings. At the time I am describing, the food on offer was rather more basic.
In preparation for the great Lunch Launch, my grandmother, mother and I visited another pub in the area – the White Horse, or possibly the Hope and Anchor – to see what they were up to. We had intended to be incognito, like spies for Egon Ronay, but my grandmother could not really do that. Barely had we got through the door before she was enveloped by wheedling, traitorous customers and a wary, perspiring publican. She batted away the questions as to whether she was retiring, or considering her own forays into food. She sat in her leopard-print coat, smiling with slightly alarming regality, opening her heavy gold compact to retouch her lips, as sweetly incompetent young waitresses hovered with typewritten menus and took down orders all wrong. The tables, near-weightless dark wood, bore a bowl full of semi-liquid butter pats and no cutlery. Up came the nervous landlord: ‘Got your irons, Vi?’ He meant knives and forks.
The food was unspeakable: my lasagne was swimming in water from defrosting. ‘Makes you feel a bit Billy, doesn’t it,’ said my grandmother, peering into its swampy depths (she meant Billy and Dick: sick). It later transpired that everything had been stashed in the freezer straight from the cash-and-carry store, a place infamous for its cheap spirits, which certain low publicans would decant into bottles of Teacher’s and Gordon’s.
The conversation on the drive home – more of a soliloquy, in fact – was characterised by its repetitions (‘Could you believe how/when/why …?’) and its rages (‘Did you see Laura’s?/I wouldn’t have given mine to the dog/Did you see old Rex and Sheila, looked a bit bloody sheepish didn’t they …?’). It proved one thing: that the visit to this other pub had not been wasted. My grandmother’s spirit had been wholly roused. If she had to give people grub, she would show them how it was done. She was a hostess, after all, and nobody west of Whitechapel made a better salt beef sandwich. ‘And those bloody menus …!’: she was referring to the typed sheets with their letters out of alignment, like clues in detective fiction. It was decided that my mother, who could do calligraphic writing, would produce elegant pages that would sit between leather folders. The ideas had begun to flow like fine wine. Irene would make pies and quiches. My grandmother would roast a piece of beef for sandwiches. Victor would shop for provisions, or perhaps my mother would do that better – you couldn’t trust old Vic to know a decent tomato, they’d be like little red bullets if she knew him. Sally, from the next village, who had been married to old Mick, might be asked to make puddings. Sally might be asked to help with serving. Yes, it would all work out, in the end.
I remember very well the transformation that was wrought upon the pub. I arrived one morning, entering from the backyard as the pub doors were still tightly bolted. Through the open door I saw that the tiny kitchen was draped in food like an altar at harvest supper: lettuces, cucumbers, softly subsiding loaves, bags of chips, a ham edged with firm freckled fat, uncooked pies decorated with leaves of pastry. A new coffee machine, whose mind was always very much its own, stood on the shelf beneath the window. Where before the air had crackled richly, dirtily, with fried butter and fiery inhalations, now it was shot through with the smell of spring onions and clean new bread. In the sitting room Victor sat silently, glancing through his Sporting Life, the new dog Tom II by his side; he inclined his head towards the saloon bar with a complicit, faintly weary air of ‘keep me out of it’. There, too, all was unfamiliar. The four tables had been laid with cutlery (irons) and on one of them my grandmother was ironing napkins with a heavy, pounding touch. Irene was by the counter, doing something with condiments. ‘What you doing over there, Rene?’ ‘Filling the salt – you want salt, don’t you?’ She threw a few grains over her left shoulder, just as my grandmother always did. The woman named Sally, a comely divorcée in her fifties, bustled in prettily from the car park with a tray: on it were two large foil-covered dishes. ‘Floating islands, Vi, and apple pie.’ ‘Oh darling.’ Goodness, it was different.
By this time I was preparing for my A levels (I was fifteen, but my adorable school took little account of things like age; I had been two years younger than everybody else when I arrived, and simply continued to be so). Having failed at ballet and musical theatre, I was being encouraged, in a consoling spirit of ‘never mind, you can always be clever’, to try for Oxford. I was at the pub quite a lot in the summer holidays. It was around this time that I made my debut behind the bar. The legality of this was never questioned. I did it for money, but more importantly because I wanted to inhabit my grandmother’s legend; I could scarcely wait to preside and glow as she had done.
I had not reckoned, until then, with the gulf between image and reality. What she presented, that imperishable extroversion, was something that I had absorbed without understanding. I had no idea what it felt like to be her, and no idea how to be as she was. Behind the bar I did not transmute into a smooth, gloriously capable, womanly avatar; I was me, full of the outsider’s unease that was in fact my prize, my future, but that served me very ill in the face of professionally lecherous men, narrow-eyed women whispering discontentedly into their husband’s jackets, spluttering beer pumps, barrels that needed changing at the least convenient moment (oh the dread of it, like a car hiccuping out of petrol), glasses that wobbled perilously as I reached them down from their high shelf, incomprehensible orders for things like ‘a splash’, sharp characters who eyeballed me as they said, ‘No, I gave you a tenner, love,’ when I handed them their change for £5, lairy characters who asked for a half in their pint glass in order to say ‘put a bit more in than that, love’, brain-freezes that prevented me multiplying £1.55 by three, and above all the sense that I was letting the side down.
But then, the morning pub was letting me down also. Serving for the occasional half-hour at night, as both my brother and I might be prevailed upon to do, in return for being young people with a pub at their disposal (a bit of a gift, frankly) – that was another thing altogether. It was fun. A divine light-heartedness overran the whole business, led by the farmers and their robust, ‘What the bloody hell have you given me here, girl?’ when I poured the wrong drink (‘Go on then, hand it over, I’ll try anything once’). Regulars like the man who tried not to pay 5p for lime in his lager, or the man who liked to recount his traumatic experiences, filled me with the ridiculous joy of seeing their myth in action. Outsiders – those who asked querulously for straws, or more ice, or a tray – also made me hilarious, surrounded as I was by insiders, people who were clocking it all and on my side. ‘You should have bashed him over the head with that tray, girl. Christ, how many bloody hands do you need for a couple of drinks.’ And of course I had reached an age at which every crack of the door latch had become peculiarly exciting, because at any moment somebody might walk in and fall madly in love with me, as my father had fallen for my mother.
But mornings were not fun. They were not pub-like. They were not lost in themselves. The sign outside the pub, reading BAR FOOD, did indeed cause an instant increase in the number of customers: the success was remarkable, almost absurd in its predictability. ‘Well, they said it would happen, didn’t they,’ said my grandmother, shaking her
head in unhappy satisfaction, as if over a grimly accurate Tarot reading. In fact it was entirely her own doing, just as it had been when she first arrived at the pub and created a clientele out of almost nothing. The food that she offered was simple yet sumptuous; quite soon the pub was listed in guides; the four tables in the saloon might be used by three different sets of customers in a morning session, and the public bar also began to demand its share of sandwiches. Although Sally was waitress-in-chief – wafting Floris scent as she passed lightly through the bars – I too dashed back and forth, watched carefully by the little woman on the settle, who would say ‘Speedy Gonzalez’ or some such thing as I passed by. She did this every time, and I found that I lacked the pub kindness to acknowledge her. I also found that I disliked playing servant to those whom I did not like, which was most of the new customers. I lacked the insouciance that could make the words ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ into semi-ironic courtly flourishes. In fact, although I did not think of it in these terms, our old friend class had entered the scene; as a member of the middle classes, I resented having to dance attendance upon members of the mimsy class.
Nor, despite the immediacy of her triumph, was my grandmother finding much joy in it. Certainly she was not making much profit. She was unable to resist overloading each sandwich with enough innards and decoration to constitute another meal; then, when customers queried the price (which they often did), she would go berserk. Her rages were instant, as they had always been, but now they also had staying power. ‘Little tight-wad bastards,’ she would say, cutting with quick, vicious thrusts through a couple of tomatoes. ‘They’ve got best bloody beef, enough to feed a regiment, they’re getting best butter, that’s half a Cos on the side, and they don’t want to pay eighty pence for it?! … What is that, Rene, in real money …?’ ‘Sixteen bob, Vi.’ ‘Sixteen bob, well, Christ. I know what they want, though. They want something cheap and nasty, out of a freezer, full of bloody water. Let ’em sod orf, then.’
And so it went on. It was summer, the broad burning stripe of the sun lay across the kitchen, and it was mayhem. Did health inspectors ever visit, I wonder? They surely must have done, but how the place ever passed I have no idea. My grandmother despised hygiene, and her longevity suggests that she had a point. Nevertheless, officialdom would have been perplexed, sorely so, by the flypapers that still fluttered within the dank larder, long orange strips pasted with winged raisins; by the ancient oven that blasted like a ship’s funnel; by the Breville sandwich toaster edged with black crusts, removed periodically with a jabbing knife; by the cardboard boxes in the yard, steeped in oil, dumping grounds for leftovers; by the cloths soaking in opaque greenish water; by the bowl on the floor that contained Tom’s chicken (also best quality), to which he pattered while on the alert for other nutritional possibilities. There was no dishwasher, no protective clothing. My grandmother wore a hairnet, but that was to keep her rollers in place. Her huge diamond rings, butter-smeared, left an imprint on the bread when she pressed down to cut it. Smoking was done outside the back door, but not if it was raining.
How did she manage it? I ask myself again. Again, she had help: Irene, Sally, sometimes Marian, my mother – who did indeed buy the provisions – and me, I suppose. But a person in their sixties was older then than today, and the work was relentless. The women shoved each other into all available crevices as they sought a few square inches in which to cut and prepare. The steaming air was streaked with heat haze, like a mackerel sky. Irascibility was the emotional starting point, revving up to panic, thence to despair; yet at the same time a strenuous good humour prevailed, so unnatural as to be more alarming than ill temper. It came, I realised, from Sally. Because of her sunlit smiles and constant ‘jokes’, my grandmother and Irene were obliged to block the culverts of their self-expression: sarcasm, speculation, thinking the worst. Only when she was out of the room could they relax and whisper comfortably together. If she was there, the conversation tended to revert to the same theme. Every smashed plate, every sliced finger oozing deep scarlet on to white bread (‘No, I can’t serve that, can I’), was met with a girlish cry of, ‘Oh, Vi, are there any nice rich men out there to take us away from all this?!’
There probably were, as it happens. The new customers were mostly business people. But Lord were they dull. The smokeless air of the saloon was as still and flat as an official photograph compared with the colour, carelessness and ceaseless reactive energy in the kitchen. The atmosphere around the tables was calm, filled with the sounds of discreet munching and office jocularity. Ponderous considerations of the menu could go on for minutes. Sometimes one had an odd sense of antagonism, as if the new customers knew that they were not really wanted and sought to impose themselves in a muted, middle-management-style revenge; as when they queried prices, or on occasion the food itself. ‘Ha, my goodness, I’m not sure I ordered quite that much fat on my ham!’ The implied grievance was never pursued, merely established. If Tom the chihuahua scuttled out into the saloon, as he often did near closing time, occasionally aiming a flurry of barks at a random luncher, he was acknowledged with a tight, embarrassed bonhomie. ‘Wouldn’t get much of a sandwich out of that,’ was a murmur that I once heard, from a man in a group of powerfully suited chartered surveyors: they were the new regulars. At the bar they cocked their heads like budgerigars and treated me to their best lines (‘Well then, what do you recommend for some starving males? – don’t answer that …!’). When accompanied by a female colleague, however, the script was rather different (‘Hang on, love, that’s got way too much head on it, hasn't it …’; ‘I’ll have the same again, love, in a clean glass this time …’).
‘Showing orf, I suppose, in front of that little broad,’ my grandmother said. I had left Sally to take the interminable order. The kitchen conversations, when they were allowed free rein, were the only thing that made the lunch customers tolerable to me. As soon as I heard the familiar rhythms of my grandmother duetting with Irene – ‘Well, they’re having a carry-on, aren’t they,’ or, ‘Did you see the tip? I should have told him to shove it up his you know what’ – I would return to the bar with a sense of being restored to myself, as if a slug of champagne was dancing cheerily down my veins. When I went back I saw that the woman in the surveyors’ party was looking up at Sally, pulling a face so bizarre that I couldn’t imagine what had provoked it. Her lips were turned down, her eyes mournful as a clown. In the voice of a five-year-old she said: ‘No quiche today?’ Then, turning to the men: ‘But oo pwomised Jilly quiche!’
This was too much even for Sally. I followed her back to the kitchen, ostensibly to get the black pepper, and heard her imitating the woman: ‘ … so if there was weally weally no quiche, she would have to make do with a beef sandwich.’ At that moment a slice carved from the joint fell to the kitchen floor, and was briskly raked by Tom’s teeth before Sally could retrieve it and put it on the counter. ‘I should make it with that bit, Vi.’
*
It was the lure of sandwiches that had brought the public bar back to life, yet as the summer wore on it rediscovered a more pub-like quality, or the insubstantial echoes of it. The trio on the settle watched it all, their faces almost featureless in the light that burst through the window behind them, throwing their hunched little bodies into blackness.
As my grandmother had done before me, I acquired a few admirers, although I felt them to be deeply inferior to those at the old pub. But there was one, a history student, from a well-to-do family – which earned me a certain respect in the kitchen conversations – who one morning behaved in a way that became part of the pub legend. He had told me, during our first chat, that he had in his possession a genuine shepherd’s cloak and crook. I had no idea what ‘genuine’ meant in this context, nor can I recall how this subject arose. As the pub had taught me, however, I feigned flattering interest. A couple of days later he turned up wearing the cloak, which trailed imperially along the ground, and carrying the crook, which was higher than the pub ceiling and h
ad to be propped at an angle. A scion of one of the farming families was seated by the fireplace. ‘What you got there, boy?’ If the young man had thought to impress with the cloak and crook, it quickly became clear that he had failed. Instead of leaving, or removing his disguise, he stood sulkily at the counter and began ordering barley wine. I had never heard anybody do this before – the dust on those bottom-shelf bottles had remained undisturbed, as far as I knew, since the three-day week – and I was aware of the drink’s reputation. A flurry of giggly alarm spread around the bar as he ordered a third, then a fourth; through the shadows I could see the little woman on the settle nudging her neighbours with agitated elbows; by some osmotic connection the news of this unprecedented event reached the saloon, and when the young man placed a hand firmly just an inch from the edge of the bar, collapsing into his cloak as he requested a fifth, so Sally popped her pretty head through the hatch and hissed: ‘Vi says no more barley wine!’
The farmer took charge, sending Sally to order a taxi and coaxing the young man out of the pub. From the window I watched him stalk off towards the orchard, trip on the cloak and disappear down the hill. By the time he re-entered the car park, the taxi had arrived. There was a brief tug-of-war with the crook, but eventually I saw the farmer insert it into the young man’s car, with its end sticking out of the window. Both car and crook must have been reclaimed at some point. As I recall I stayed away from the pub for a few days, trying to live it all down, which was quite impossible with the farmers. ‘Where’s that boyfriend of yours? I’ve got a few old yowes he could help me with …’
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