Village Christmas

by Laurie Lee

  It is difficult to define the exact nature of Sean Treacy’s effect on the extraordinary popularity of The Elms. He can often be absentmindedly moody, egocentric, intolerant, full of oaths, a man of bulk and noise and sudden shouts of laughter (usually following his own jokes). He is also a unique, warm-blooded and generous host; he draws people together and refurbishes their self-esteem, and most regulars will admit that when Sean is absent from the bar, a fire – metaphorically and literally – is out.

  The Elms itself, to put it mildly, is not noticeable for its distinction. There are any number of smarter, flashier, more comfortable, more elegant pubs around. Enter the saloon bar door and you are more than likely to knock over a wooden coat-stand covered with broken hooks. The floor is bare except for a rippled lino of an indefinable age and colour. The long curved counter is topped with a similarly mysterious, though somewhat brighter, substance. The place has a marked absence of cosiness and style. The only concession to chic is the collection of original Jak cartoons on the tomato-red walls and Sean’s valuable frieze of antique pipes. But what we all know – and this may be one of the explanations of its attractions – is that the Elms is simply a spacious and relaxed drinking area where the lions and Christians of the world, the hawks and the doves, take it for granted they can mix in temporary and bloodless armistice, as they might as passengers on the Ark.

  Something unpredictable has grown up over the years, the certainty and variety of what one will find there, under the unwritten guarantee of Sean’s presence. ‘It’s not the comfort, it’s not the service, it’s certainly not the prices,’ a regular will tell you. ‘I just reckon it’s the people you get.’

  ‘You know you’ll always meet someone you know, even if he’s only the biggest cad south of Tring.’

  The Elms is an arena, a general meeting place; or to put it another way, it has become the chosen drinking hole for several hundred divers types who know they can come here pacifically when the thirst is on them and enjoy its traditional, almost atavistic, protection before returning to the jungle to take up again their separate roles as predators or panic victims.

  For Sean Treacy’s customers must be the most varied and constantly evolving bunch ever to gather together under one tavern roof. They include diplomats, doctors, drifters, dukes, professional golfers, Fleet Street gossips, goons, cops and robbers, judges (two), painters and decorators, chair-menders, clerks, actors, poets, film directors, freaks, flamboyant princes of King’s Road boutiques, Russians, Basques, Nigerians, Zulus, musclemen, models, exquisite lesbians, spies, cancer research professors, professors of painting and sculpture, fashion photographers, chaps who’ll mend your car, your roof or your mind, and a sprinkling of local priests whose brief appearances are bright and jolly as Pentecostal flames.

  Behind the bar the paid help, busy among their levers and optics, can be as diverse as the customers, having numbered among them over the past few years retired Olympic swimmers, diminutive Corsican crooks, out-of-work pop singers, peeresses, bachelors of science and the law, whiskered Turkish sponge-divers, bare-bellied maidens and that mutton-chopped doyen of all barmen, ‘Laurie’.

  I suppose what is typical of most pubs, and is certainly true of The Elms, is that no night’s atmosphere is ever the same. The long cast of characters, with a few immovable exceptions, is not always present, thank God. The blend may, and does, vary, but strangely the essential feel remains familiar; blindfold, you would always know you were there.

  Go in early. The place is almost empty, the fire unlit, the three or four solitaires reading their newspapers. ‘No one here tonight,’ says the barman, looking up at the clock and sniffing. After the second half-pint you may think of moving elsewhere, even of going home. But this almost always is made impossible. The door pushes open and the first of the night’s outriders appear, shakingly sober, quiet-spoken, white-faced. A great deal depends, at this moment, on whether Sean arrives too and is able to stir up the others with a few aggressive provocations. If he is late, the night’s required celebration of gregarious amnesia may sometimes be sparked off by someone else, say by the loud hazy shout of a Fleet Street cartoonist who has been hard at it all day in the clubs, or by the emblazoned entrance of a temporarily idle actor, well known, well heeled and well lit. Then there is a slapping of backs, a sharp rise in temperature, and a glittering scatter of fairy gold.

  Now in the great doglegged space of the saloon bar the night’s mazed pattern begins to emerge. Jeans, jewels, T-shirts, furs, Austin Reed suits, and donkey jackets, the customers wander, gather, clot in groups, dilate, contract, spill over. A girl slips her hand from one to another’s. A retired warrior orders a triple brandy. The street door opens again admitting warm waves of erotic air as more girls arrive with their bushy men. Couples meet, melt, accuse, forgive, endlessly exchange permutations.

  Suddenly the sad empty lino, the flickering fire, the bored barmen are overwhelmed. The Elms is filling, is full, elbow-to-elbow, wall-to-wall, topped by a sea of open glistening mouths. The famous, the lonely, the suicidal, even the bores are now joined in a marriage of careless minds. This is the time for extravagance, wit, generosity, intrigue, time for vast vegetable loves to grow. With returned exiles from Malta groping for the names and knees of old girlfriends. Amateur Mafia stroking each other’s fifty-quid shirts. The solemn spoof players joined in their ritual circle; and the friendly psychopath in the corner, watching. And always, in spite of the noise, of arguments of novelists from the Bronx, dancers from Melbourne, scuba-divers from Tripoli, you will observe, occupying some of the few red seats by the windows, and gazing at each other in silence over their minced beef and lager, an assortment of beautiful creatures one has never seen before, who have blown in like drifting summer seeds, and will drift out again soon and never be seen again, but will be almost exactly replaced tomorrow.

  One may have meant to leave early; but the door is a revolving trap. One is caught by a stream of continuous entrances, by friends airborne from earlier parties. ‘You’re not going. Nonsense. This is Elsa from Oslo. Come over here. You’re putting on weight. They tell me you still cheat at billiards. Reggie Bosanquet’s livid.’ One is drawn back into a warm and whisky-fumed womb.

  As it grows late, Sean Treacy will have gathered round him now all the chance potpourri of the evening – perhaps a composer, a footballer, a policeman off-duty, a couple of actors, a hall porter from Kensington. Head down, bullish, his drinks lined up before him, his conversation ballooning with oaths and laughter, he is pulling his friends together with a series of sidesteps and retreats, knowing that it is up to him to bring the curtain down. ‘Should have gone home hours ago. Jan will bloody well kill me. Have one for the road – my turn – the last.’

  The lights flicker, go off, come on again. The crowded bar begins to sort itself out. Sean tells one more story. About Lester Piggott and the Pope. We’ve heard it before; no matter. We have reached that peak of desperate relish for each other. There is no movement towards the door. A theatre critic suddenly begins to blunder about like a blind and livid beetle. He is followed by a retired general with that measured poise of one who knows his eyes are crossed and his legs are going.

  The final lights go down, accompanied by a sort of sigh of withdrawal, an exhalation of energy, appreciation and regret. Something artificial yet unique is about to be switched off, our intravenous feedback to adolescent euphoria and power. What we’ve known tonight at The Elms we have not known elsewhere, could not have known elsewhere, and may never quite know again.

  To the uninitiated, all public houses are alike, but few are without shades of difference. Indeed, many are the specialized haunts of like-feathered birds – journalists, actors, sailors, city clerks, the blue-jeaned and beaded brethren. The Queen’s Elm is probably unlike any other in that it scoops in all types at once. It is also a rallying place and a rendezvous, a point of departure and return. Known faces will disappear from years – to Zanzibar, Belize, on cryptic trips to the Oman or th
e Atlas – and when they come back they’ll consider their return scarcely official until they have first made a call at The Elms. A girl will make a good marriage, be swept away to the shires, then suddenly turn up without warning, quietly and plumply divorced, ready to start out her life again. In the stormy seas of many, The Elms floats like a carrier, to some a refuge, to others a launching pad.

  The pub, more recently, has developed a valuable sideline in providing a kind of market for its many writers and painters. This shoot of the business may have sprouted casually and unnoticed in the poor old days, some fifteen years ago, when the late Paddy Kavanagh and I, in an upstairs room, used to swap our poems for tots of whisky. Later I exploited this ground by going round the bars at Christmas and flogging my books from a carrier bag. In this way we discovered a curious but obvious truth, that people who would never dream of going into a bookshop were quite happy to buy several volumes over a drink. A bookshop may properly complain that it is not licensed to sell beer – but there are also a number of other things not in its power to provide: geniality, coal fires, often the company of the author, and the opportunity of buying your Christmas presents, over a slow pint of Guinness, late on a Saturday night.

  This side of The Elms’ booze-and-book-industry was formally consolidated by Sean Treacy himself when, a couple of years ago, he too broke into print with the publication of his memoirs: A Smell of Broken Glass. He keeps a large stock of this work in the wine cellars from which he regularly replenishes the saloon bar shelves, standing them in rows among bright bottles of Jameson and Jack Daniels together with the latest works of other Elms regulars – Marshall Pugh, Maureen Duffy, Digby Durrant, Peter Smiley, paperbacks by Jak, and by myself.

  Moreover, the room upstairs, neglected for years, is again being put to good use; people come and go talking of Michelangelo, of Liz Frink, Gerald Scarfe, Robert Buhler, Bill Thomson, Trevor Willoughby, Norman Stevens and others, selections of whose work are regularly on show there, regularly on sale, or both.

  The Elms wastes nothing, for upstairs there will also be, from time to time, meetings for the preservation of real beer, for author’s lending rights, for the exchanging of medals by foreign governments in exile, meetings for visiting stock-breeders, and of course book-launching parties – one of which should celebrate any day now the publication of Sean Treacy’s scurrilous new novel, Shay Scally and Manny Wagstaff.

  Sean Treacy is not bog-Irish, stage-Irish or even saloon-bar-Irish; he is too complex and unclassifiable for any such labels. He was born in Galway, of stern but intelligent parents, and was brought up in the small crossroads village of Glenamaddy. In his youth he took part in shebeens, wakes, duck-shooting, fist-fighting and other such west Irish pleasures of forty years ago, and was later reluctantly educated at St Jarlath’s College.

  For five years he was a pilot in the Irish Army Air Corps, where he earned a reputation for unpredictability, dandyism and bilingual raciness in English and Gaelic. Finally he broke free and grounded himself to start a career in pubs, beginning as a learner-barman in a tough Cockney-Irish house in Shepherd’s Bush, where the lean blond good-looking young man so quickly caught on to the nuances of pub-keeping (a blend of conviviality, sharp-eyed realism and the ability to quell riots without shedding of blood) that within a year he was managing the famous Fulham Road Finch’s.

  The Queen’s Elm is the only pub in London which, to my mind, serves as a true, thoroughly comprehensive Rialto. Where else, in one evening, could you be greeted by your Irish landlord with a Gaelic insult and a double scotch, consult a doctor, tussle with your bank-manager, drink with a TV comic, arrange a poetry reading and tickle a nurse, then be invited to supper by a Jermyn Street nightclub owner and finally leave the bar with more money in your pocket than you went in with, to the ringing farewells of the pub-manager, Sliwo, a Babylonian Christian from Baghdad?

  The Magic of Water

  I discovered water at the age of four, at the mouth of our cottage pump. I remember it not as a thing merely for washing and scrubbing, but as a plaything with a brilliant life of its own. One could pump it in pure blue gulps out of the ground, and it came out sparkling like liquid sky. It broke or ran, or quivered in a jug, or weighted one’s clothes with cold. I found you could drink it, draw with it, swim beetles across it, or fly it in bubbles in the air. You could bury your head in it, and open your eyes, and see the old bucket buckle, and hear your caught breath roar, and smell the sharp lime from the ground. It was a plaything of magic, which you could confine or scatter, but never burn or destroy.

  Perhaps none of us lose that early passion for water, for we are bound to it by ancestral cords. The sight and sound of it cures our minds, and most of our pleasure seems to be ordered around it. When we wallow in our baths, is it just to get clean, I wonder, or is the pleasure something deeper than that, an indulgent return to the weightless peace of the womb, or to the warm shallow lapping of those primeval seas where all life is said to have begun?

  Water has a thousand pleasures and a thousand faces, and it is the most versatile of all the elements. Fire is masculine, monotonous, blundering, crude; water is feminine and far more subtle. It can offer the heaped-up power of a murdering ocean, or the miniature frolic of a municipal fountain, the pitiless sledgehammer of an annihilating flood, or the bucolic vacancy of a summer duck pond. Water is the puddle just big enough for a small boy’s boot, the thundering curtains of Niagara Falls, the star in a snowflake, the mist on a cobweb, the protective arm round an ancient city. It is the sting on the lips from a hill-cold spring, the chisel that cut out the shape of Britain, the singing spout of a kettle, the last cry of the man in the desert.

  Water is all things to all men, and most of them good. Most of all, it is a great healer and pacifier. We do not go to the river to fight or make trouble, but to sit and gaze at it, or splash about. Man makes a special noise when he gets near water – you hear it at the seaside and in the bathroom – a kind of wordless, ageless, happy yell, the cry of a child in the arms of his mother.

  Water is the great innocence left on earth, something which no one so far has spoiled. Our littered lands may stretch right to the coast, but no one has yet put a scar on the sea.

  The Lake District

  It resembles from the air a kind of rough-cut jewel hanging from the narrow throat of Scotland, a jagged cameo of crumpled green with blue slivers of lake. It is a unique and ancient part of Britain and was forged by fire and ice. Its primeval slates, washed from lost Atlantis, were split open by giant volcanoes, convulsed by earthquakes, scarred by glaciers, folded in fells and valleys in whose landlocked pockets gathered the lakes and tarns still fed by the Atlantic rains.

  The result is a landscape of miniature perfection, a thirty-mile circle of silence, a small, closed world neither Scottish not English but quite separate from the country around it. By its nature it remains a fortress region and has developed distinct and alone. Ancient Britons lived here, Roman troops passed by, even the Welsh once tried to colonize it. But the people who made this district their own were the Vikings from Scandinavia. In the mountains, forests and long, still lakes, they saw reflections of their northern homes. So they settled here and wrote their language across the landscape. Study the signposts, with their becks, fells and dales, and you are reading a Norseman’s lexicon. The dalesmen themselves, with their craggy faces, their dialect gritty as rock, are for the most part living descendants of Vikings.

  But the Lake District is something more than names; it is a place of subtle details, of shifting light and boiling rain clouds, of skies seen in endless mirrors. Of old granite bridges humpbacked like sheep, of stone-walled rocky lanes, of whitewashed cottages, ruined mills and gaunt farms full of hot-eyed dogs. It is a region of mystery and ancient marks, giants’ caves and holy wells, of standing stones raised to forgotten spirits, of British forts and Roman roads. Here was once a rough and simple living, with farming, pig-keeping and sheep, with mining, quarrying, weaving and spinning, split
by occasional outbreaks of violence. Signs of that human life remain but are overshadowed by those other presences – the round-backed fells, silent as gods, bearing the sky on their many horizons, and radiating from them the lakes, like petals changing colour every hour of the day.

  Until 1800, this was unvisited country, save for the occasional Scottish raiders. Then the poet Wordsworth, himself a native, gave the spirit of the Lakes to the world. What he and his fellow poets saw remains to be seen today – the march of light across lake and mountain that gave man a grandiose new vision of nature.

  The Lakeland is like a spectacular sunset – you must simply see it for yourself. Most of the fells can only be reached on foot, but the reward of this travail is a cloud-pressed pride, a memorable sense of achievement and such great gulps of air and distance and serenity that you will never be the same again.

  To visit the Lake District with some system, it is best to make plans beforehand. Enter by Kendal, on the Carlisle railroad, and from there go to Lake Windermere. A passenger steamer will carry you to Ambleside in the very heart of the region. With a pair of stout shoes, a good staff and a compass you can climb to the top of Old Man. Then later to Ullswater, over the Kirkstone Pass, with the mass of Helvellyn around you – from the peak of which you can see into Scotland and out to the Irish Sea. Next, to Wordsworth’s Grasmere, then north to Keswick (commanding Skiddaw) and Derwentwater. Finally south through Borrowdale, over Honister Pass, brushing Great Gable and Scafell Pike, to make your own way down to the pine-woody shores of Buttermere and Crummock Water.

  The district is not exclusive to mountain climbers; there are good motor roads for those without legs. There is also bicycling, camping, sailing and fishing – even cockfighting (though this is illegal).