Does it matter? It does, yes. It is a slipping away, a seemly pressing between the pages of history of something that was once so tough, so proud, like the buoyant stride of Max Miller on to the stage of the Kilburn Empire, or the roar of the Harringay crowd when the traps opened and the dogs grabbed the turf with their greedy paws, or the beyond-delighted whoop of Brenda Lee going up the lazy river; so many things that were about a way of life, but more than that were about the engagement with that life, to which people never really gave a thought, which makes them lost to us.
I know what my grandmother would have said, that what was gone was ‘gorn’, but in defiance of her creed I returned to her pub, about fifteen years ago now. I had driven past it many times, of course, observed the changes that were inflicted upon it: the window shutters painted yellow, a chalkboard advertising fish and chips on Thursday nights. I still felt a memory of sweet apprehension whenever I approached it. I still had a sense of ownership, of what the hell was somebody else doing in there, treading the familiar boards.
Meanwhile my grandmother, who talked about the pub quite often, did so in the prosaic present-tense manner of the kitchen conversations. If, for instance, she saw a former customer in Morrison’s, she would set off on a detective trail of ‘Now who did she go orf with?/So who went orf with old Steve then?/Looks bad, doesn’t she, well that’s drink for you.’ These people – who could never have suspected such verbal treachery, so ecstatic was she in her greetings – would still fall at her feet when they saw her: it was extraordinary. Having accepted their homage she would, however, express a certain contemptuous amusement. ‘They all swore they’d never set foot in the pub again, didn’t they, after I went? Bloody liars, they were straight back the next bloody week, weren’t they.’ However much she had valued it, she was quite unsentimental about the relationship between customer and landlady. She knew its fakery as well as its sincerity: a pub remained a pub, with or without its presiding presence; nobody knew that better than she did. When I mentioned en passant that I had been back there, she took it completely at face value. I had gone to the pub, what was more natural than that?
Such strange things that my memory had moved to meet. The crunching, rolling sound of the tyres on the gravel. The slope of the stones on the courtyard outside, the feel of them under my feet. The tiny little step before entering the public bar. It had to be the public bar – I had envisaged drinking in the saloon, but what I didn’t know until I arrived was that the pub had taken an anxious plunge into the world of dinner, as well as lunch, and the little saloon was now filled with people eating – elbows almost jamming into their neighbours’ mouths as they lifted their forks – and with the dull miasma of warm food. The landlord looked fraught, shimmering with tension beneath his smiles, far more comfortable serving his regulars than grappling with corkscrews and Sauvignon. A woman, who had a wifely air, occasionally strode up to him and whispered something into his sideburns that he didn’t want to hear. As I came out of the Ladies’ – still pink-lit, still so astonishingly the same that the smell of sodden Camay bloomed briefly inside my nose – a young waitress was bustling through the wooden door that divided the pub from backstage. It was then that I saw the dining tables, three of them, neatly packed into my grandmother’s sitting room. Three couples were eating their chicken in the space where the sounds of adulthood, timeless in their possession of the there-and-then, had trailed across the dusky air and through the crack in the staircase door, my slender observation post on life.
There were about ten people in the public bar, mostly drinking alone: it was a number that made it both full and not full enough. People had to be friendly, but they couldn’t get friendly enough to get going. Without the settle against the wall, the seating looked to me somehow makeshift, as if in a slightly overcrowded waiting room. And the glass shelves behind the bar seemed to have lost their intensity of depth and colour – no bottle of Green Goddess; no stacked packs of Dunhill – but perhaps that was me, with my child’s memory, which held a near-infinity of gleam that had never quite existed, although for me it had.
A couple of the customers knew who I was; I have no idea how. They were generic countrymen, undoubtedly related to one or other of the farming clans, and they nodded sagely at me as I waited for my drink beside the fireplace. Something did seem different there, as though a couple of items were missing. Of course the cauldron and brass poker were now at my parents’ house.
I am trying now to think how I felt about it all. I felt something, strongly, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was looking around me: at the door that led to the cellar, at the golden bell above the bar, at the wall-lamp that had glowed above my grandmother’s head, where in her day the flame had been a warmer red, and had always looked to me both adult and innocent. It seemed significant, this little room, what it held, the things that had changed and the things that were immutable. Significant of what? I had begun to ask myself.
The man with whom I was drinking was slightly bored, as I had expected. His expression made his thoughts perfectly clear: the place I had talked so much about, romanticised, as he didn’t quite say, was no more or less than a pretty little pub with a somewhat droll clientele of yokels and petite bourgeoisie. Which indeed it had always been, if one looked at it that way. That, I understood, was the judgment of the world to which I now belonged, the knowing metropolitan world that regarded pubs as symbols rather than realities: as subject matter. I accepted it, with my grandmother’s wry shrug, although I remember that after a couple of drinks one emotion did emerge, clear as only the right amount of alcohol can induce. What I wanted, quite passionately, was for that world of mine to fall away: for the landlady to stride out of her sitting room and put it firmly and good-humouredly into its place (‘Fancies himself a bit, doesn’t he, poor old Bill’) and to be standing once more with her at the bar.
She was ninety-six when she died. The regime of her last years was, in most respects, contrary to received opinion about how to achieve old age: she breakfasted on toast with great quantities of butter, spent all morning cooking a splendid lunch while drinking her sherry and listening to the gramophone, sunbathed in a sarong for the rest of the day if it was hot – she had acquired a reptilian tolerance for heat in the south of France – and retreated to her armchair if it was cold.
She still came to life for social occasions, although afterwards she might spend several days in bed. A couple of years before she died we had a summer party at the house. I saw her standing outside with one of her special glasses (which could accommodate half a bottle of champagne), surrounded by a circle of wide-eyed admirers, taking a drag from a friend’s cigarette. She was never diminished, not a whit. If nothing else, pride would have forbade it. If she wasn’t up to amusing people, she preferred not to appear. Otherwise what had they all been for, the years of cascading her personality like confetti? She had always believed in the profundity of putting on a show, and she kept the faith with herself. As she was driven away to the hospital, a couple of weeks before she died, she waved at me through the window then made a comic moue and turned her thumb downwards, like a Roman.
They were all there at the funeral, the pub people, friends and relations, the ones who were still above the ground. As befitted her ferocious atheism, it was not a particularly sacred occasion. Harry Nilsson was played in the crematorium (‘another bride, another groom’). I had placed a bet and, back at home, absented myself briefly to watch the race, where I was joined by a couple of similarly interested parties. The horse won, and for a quick hallucinatory moment I heard her offering me her admiration, assessing whether or not my winnings would buy a round (this had always been her measure of money: an inadequate amount always dismissed with ‘that wouldn’t buy you a round of drinks’). At her implicit suggestion, I had a large gin. ‘Oh Christ, how bloody beautiful.’
As the afternoon sky turned aquamarine, and the funeral party thinned, I grew melancholic in the rich, luxuriant, pleasurable, spirit-drinking, tomorrow-de
fying way that came, by stealth, with the approach of closing time. I was not sad, except for my mother. That had not been the nature of the relationship with my grandmother. I had thought her superb, difficult, admirable, alarming, wise, self-centred. Without ever saying as much, or even realising it, I had regarded her as an ally in the business of being a woman. I was and still am somewhat in her thrall. I was not close to her, exactly, because she was a performer, an extrovert, a landlady. She was the last landlady, for those of us who knew her.
She would have been unsurprised by the coda to her funeral. By the time that darkness had claimed the sky, I was finished; I was never what she called a ‘good drinker’, and a gin haze had risen in my head like the swarming of tiny bees. Yet the handful of guests who remained were, I saw, returning to dogged life. There was even, in one quarter, a hint of late-mid-life dalliance in the air.
So what might she have said, in one of her famous stage whispers, out in the kitchen with the sunken vol-au-vents and the sweet molasses sound of Dinah Washington? ‘Well, course, he was after her years ago, wasn’t he’; ‘Um, well, she’s got in the mood, hasn’t she’; ‘Can’t blame ’em, you’re only here once.’
I had gone outside with the dogs. I looked at the black velvet sky, thought of the dresses lent to Lot and Lil at the old pub, and blessed it. When I went back into the sitting room there had been a further change of atmosphere: it had shifted, brightened, was charged with a kind of stoical anticipation. The handful of remaining people were hitching themselves up, putting on lipstick, retouching, rebuttoning, readying themselves like soldiers for their last posting at my grandmother’s pub.
It’s only right, they said, we’d better go and have one.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to two wonderful books for some of the factual content in Part II:
Shakespeare’s Local by Pete Brown (Macmillan, 2012)
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd (Chatto & Windus, 2000)
I am also grateful to Little, Brown for permission to quote from Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton (Constable and Robinson 1947).
Other brief citations are as follows:
Absolute Hell by Rodney Ackland (first performed as The Pink Room, 1952)
The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis (Hutchinson, 1986)
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (Heinemann, 1938)
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, a trilogy by Patrick Hamilton (Constable, 1929–34)
Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton (Constable, 1941)
Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse by Patrick Hamilton (Constable, 1953)
The Strings are False, an unfinished autobiography by Louis MacNeice (Faber & Faber, 1963)
The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, ed. Charlotte Mosley (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996)
Quartet by Jean Rhys (first published as Postures, Chatto & Windus, 1928)
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