Last Landlady Read online

  Laura Thompson read English at Oxford. Her first book, The Dogs, won the Somerset Maugham Award. While living in Newmarket she wrote two books about horse racing, followed by a biography of Nancy Mitford and a major study of Agatha Christie, reissued in 2018 in the US. Her book about Lord Lucan, A Different Class of Murder, was also reissued in 2018.

  Take Six Girls, a group biography of the Mitford sisters, published in the US in 2016, was a New York Times bestseller. Her most recent book, Rex v Edith Thompson, about the Thompson-Bywaters murder case of the early 1920s, has been longlisted for a CWA Gold Dagger award.

  By the Same Author

  Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford the Biography

  Agatha Christie: An English Mystery

  A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan

  Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters

  Rex v Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders

  ‘It was astonishing how significant, coherent and understandable it all became after a glass of wine on an empty stomach … One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance.’

  From Quartet by Jean Rhys

  ‘There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.’

  From Boswell’s Life of Johnson

  CONTENTS

  By the Same Author

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Acknowledgements

  Supporters

  Copyright

  I

  W hen I think of my grandmother, it is thus: seated on a high stool, her stool, in the negligent but alert position of a nightclub singer. Behind her, a cool brick wall, whose edges made little snags in the satin shirts that she wore loose over trousers. One of her hands rested on her thigh, not quite relaxed, holding a glass.

  Her hair was white but not a grandmotherly white. She went regularly to the salon on the top floor at Harrods, a fairyland pink parlour in those days, its air dense and shimmering with little starbursts of Elnett. She would come home with tales of her hairdresser’s love life (somewhat pitiable) and green and gold bags full of Estée Lauder cosmetics. From middle age onwards she disdained most products that were not by Estée Lauder, and there was never any arguing with her. The collars of her shirts were impregnated with Alliage scent, and the Re-Nutriv cold cream on her dressing table bore the marks of her fingers dragged across its surface, like little furrows in snow. She wore dark foundation and a deep red lipstick. Even now I feel that I am letting her down if I do not paint my lips.

  So here she is: a casual empress on her stool, a woman in late middle age with a brightness, an intensity of being, that still flares in my head. Mysteriously moving, to feel memory shaping her as I write … which reminds me quite suddenly of a camera that she owned, a huge thing with a blue flashlight on top. After the blinding click the photo would ooze slowly out of the camera, a hot square with a white frame around indeterminate dark blobs. My grandmother would clamp it beneath her arm, waiting for it to develop against the warmth of her body. If it didn’t flatter her, she would simply throw it away, ripped quickly in two, before anybody else could see it.

  Because of her instant culls, many snapped moments are lost, which I suppose is a pity, but I rather like it that way. Photos are finite and unarguable. I prefer the images that are stored in the mind, the precious surprises that they spring (which of course you are springing upon yourself), their magical areas of occlusion and sharpness. Quite unexpectedly I can see, for instance, the slightly pigeon-toed angle of my grandmother’s feet, looking older than the rest of her, placed upon the bar of her stool. I can see how she was framed, by the open wooden door to her left, and the counter on which she would lean her right forearm. I can see the texture of the counter, although I have no idea what it was made of (I might know now; these are childhood memories). It was shiny, orange-coppery in colour, hammered with tiny dents, wet where one least expected it to be. And it was covered with the evening’s ecstatic confusion: beer mats, glasses, a sturdy blue-green ice bucket, a couple of siphons, the large square ashtray into which my grandmother stubbed her Player’s untipped.

  Her glass, which was her own thick tumbler, contained whisky and soda. She loved alcohol with a respectful, tender passion, and nursed the glass rather as she did her little dogs (she owned chihuahuas, years before they became fashionable), although she drank from it only occasionally. Just a deep sip, now and again, to maintain her dégagée buoyancy. She had learned to phrase her personality, as a singer phrases a lyric; she knew the power of withholding, and of brief conspiratorial bursts of charm. People bought her drinks all the time, seeking to please, and she usually accepted them. She would raise her glass in thanks (‘Cheers, darling!’), put it to her mouth, and then throw the contents on the floor. A strip of carpet beside her stool was permanently damp with whisky. Although she did her drink-chucking surreptitiously, as she believed, everybody knew that she did it. It was part of her legend, like her stage whispers and her London childhood.

  Around her shining silvered head – the beacon of the pub – the picture is vaguer. She was the person who conjured and orchestrated everything, so naturally the spotlight of memory follows her around. For example, I see again how, when the evenings were busy, she would slide unobtrusively from her stool in the public bar to the other side of the counter, and instantly take up the role of barmaid-in-chief. As she did so, the way in which drinks were served changed, became theatrical. She tugged at beer handles and shoved glasses under optics, hacked at lemons and ripped off bottle tops, all with an untidy, efficient grandeur that invested every drink with a particular potency. People would sip reverentially, eyes briefly closed. ‘Oh, that’s lovely, Vi.’ This may not have been illusory; the strength of her drinks was also legendary (her gin and French was akin to a knockout punch). Her horror of smallness, exactitude, led her to throw in extra measures of spirits, ice, whatever was going. Meanwhile the round would grow, it sometimes seemed exponentially, or possibly eternally, if the buyer was generous: people who had been served first would be finishing their drink while the round was still in play, so in theory this was a situation that could go on for ever. ‘You’d better have another one, boy, while I’m in the mood.’ ‘Go on then, boy, if you say so.’

  Oh yes, they’re good drinkers, my grandmother would say the next day, in a tone of the utmost seriousness.

  ‘Have you got one?’ ‘Yes, I’ve got one!’ ‘What about you, have you got one, girl?’ ‘Oh, I’m all right.’ ‘I know you’re all right, but have you got one?’

  The till behind the counter was a hefty chunk of Bakelite, grey and immovable, with a drawer that regularly jammed but could flatten your breasts when it deigned to spring open, and powerful keys that bore the symbols of numbers but did nothing so recherché as adding them up. Therefore alongside the lemons and cherries behind the bar were dank little notepads, on which the cost of a round might be calculated.

  This was not really my grandmother’s style. She had never gone to school, or so she said (in fact she spent several terms at a London convent, perhaps the only girl named Solomon ever to have done so), and she never got to grips with decimalisation. She could have done, but she could not be bothered. ‘55p’ for a shot of gin meant ten bob, sort of; thus the niminy-piminy increases demanded with every Budget were absorbed into her large-scale nature. Thus, too, the giant rounds that formed the climax of so many evenings were totted up and rounded down to a sum that she thought acceptable. ‘Call it a tenner, darling.’ ‘How do you make that out, Violet?’ my father would say, in a droll tone that added to the general delight at seeing her
legend in action. God knows how many Estée Lauder lipsticks she missed out on with these habitual underestimates. Often people would remonstrate with her, demanding that she take more money, forcing pound notes into her recalcitrant hands. These were the right sort of people, her sort, the kind who fought to pay more while she fought to take less. If the wrong sort came in to the pub, she could become surprisingly mean. In the early evenings she would lay out free food on the counter: the centrepiece was a huge wedge of Cheddar, stabbed in the heart with a cheese knife, surrounded by an overlapping necklace of Ritz crackers. Tacitly, it was understood that this was for regulars. Passing trade might take a sliver of cheese, a gherkin or two, not more. Every now and again some hapless person, who did not know the code of the pub, would order something like a lemonade shandy and hack away happily at the Cheddar. At such times my grandmother became concentrated and dangerous. She would scythe through the saloon bar into the public, seize the plate of cheese and take it into the kitchen. ‘Hungry sod,’ she would mutter furiously. ‘I’m not taking it out again till he’s gorn.’

  It was things like this that I didn’t understand, as a child. I simply absorbed it all.

  I spent much of my early life at the pub. My grandmother was a babysitter, of sorts. This was a time when adults led their own lives, rather than fretting around those of their offspring, and my parents went out a great deal. My father was a racing man, which meant thrice-weekly nights at the dogs (to which I was sometimes taken); also, not infrequently, the horses. In those days of the 1970s, big races like the Derby were run during the week. My grandmother would pick me up from school in her dark blue MG, which she drove dashingly and badly, with much angry wobbling of the gearstick. Her face would be half-done for the evening, her hair in curlers under a Jacqmar headscarf. If I found her waiting for me, she would be peering in the car mirror, quite possibly with tweezers in her hand. She looked superbly incongruous, sitting there among the neat spillages of uniformed pupils. She would have watched the racing on television, and had her bets, and remembered the Derbies she had seen ‘before the war’, watching from a bus in the centre of the course; and that, elliptically, is what we talked about on the drive to the pub. ‘What did you do at school today?’ was not in her repertoire of remarks. Unlike her daughter, my mother, she had no interest in even simulating an interest in the world of childhood, and I completely accepted this.

  I felt a sweet apprehension as the MG rounded the bend in the long village road and I saw the inn sign, swinging high in the air on its gallows. Even then, I realised something about pubs: that they were home but not quite home. They were as dear and familiar to people as home, but they were also the place where people escaped from home.

  The pub, situated in the rural Home Counties, was very small, very old and extremely pretty. To me it seemed enchanted. It had a trimly thatched roof, shuttered windows, white walls with a wobbly grid of black beams – the works – and its classic English chiaroscuro was splashed, in summer, with profusions of colour from hanging baskets that dripped with water (the principle of ‘a good drink’ extending to the flowers). It looked like an artist’s sketch upon the landscape, framed by hills that hovered calmly in the distance. Across the narrow road, seeming at times to overspill its bounds, was a towering tangle of ancient woodland. The village was set on a steep incline, and so too therefore was the pub. Everything sloped, giving a tumbledown feeling to the stone-paved courtyard outside the front doors, which was set with a couple of tables. The large garden, always called ‘the orchard’, rolled sharply away towards fields that my memory sees as infinite.

  So: a near-perfect specimen of the country pub. Like all the best pubs, however, it was completely un-twee. Held within its quaint exterior was a red-lit world of sophistication, sentiment, vulgarity and warmth. This came partly from its communion with my grandmother, who was not quaint in any way, and not good with the kind of person who asked jovial, pedantic questions about her ‘ales’ or was liable to use the word ‘hostelry’. It was easier to imagine her serving Reg Kray than, say, a group of map-clutching ramblers (although these did occasionally come in, fresh from the ancient woodland in which I once had a close escape from a pervert. I was shaken but not shocked: my pub training).

  Indeed she was, on the face of it, an unlikely landlady for this dear little place, which looked like the home of a traditional blacksmith, or of a countrywoman with geese and a herb garden. With her Harrods hair and gold ankle chain, my grandmother should have been as out of place as a showgirl running a WI cake stall. Yet somehow this was not the case. For a start she was never out of place, in the sense that she never worried about such things (she would have remained entirely herself if transported to Holloway jail or Buckingham Palace). And then, she imprinted her own personality upon the pub: such was her power as a landlady. She bestrode the bars, she infused them with her style. At the same time, again like a great landlady, she knew what not to do. She respected the pub, rather as she would have respected a man. She allowed it its natural vigour. For all that it looked so picturesque, it had a kind of steel in its soul: it too rejected the implications of its appearance. Georgie Pillson might have turned up to paint it, but he would soon have fled in terror. It was rooted in a village of farmers and butchers, it was a mere couple of miles from a town of committed gin-drinkers and adulterers; in sum, it was robust and real and belonged to life, not to an image of what a pub should be. It had stood for almost 550 years, and age had given it complete assurance. It had the almost sunken air of a place that knew exactly why it was there; and never more so, I am fairly sure, than in the years of its alliance with my grandmother.

  As was obvious from its roadside position, it had originally been an inn. An old photograph shows a sign offering ‘stabling’. Such was its antiquity (it had listed status) that treasures had been unearthed from it – a painting was removed to the National Gallery. Typically, my grandmother’s recollection of this was vague. So too when historical societies visited the pub. The members would enter in a polite, bright-eyed, expectant mass of tweed jackets and dirndl skirts, smiling blindly into the dour faces of farmers, then gather in front of a plaque in the saloon bar. They would repeat in obedient whispers the words that I knew by heart, that the inn was an ‘ancient monument’ built during the Wars of the Roses, that some of its beams were original, etc., etc. If my grandmother chanced to float through the bar, they would pounce, asking pleasant, historian-type questions that she could not answer (she would have breezed over this, ‘ah well, ma’am/sir, nobody really knows …’ but she never liked being at a loss). Not that she was indifferent to the provenance of the pub. She was fiercely proud of everything about it. She simply saw things, including the past, in her own way.

  Her history was enough for her, and the past, to her, meant pubs. She was born, a century ago now, in Paddington Green. Her father, who always worked in pubs, later ran his own establishment. So too did some of her relations and most of her friends, ‘old Jim and Hilda at the Star and Garter’, or ‘old Bernard at the White Horse’, or whoever it might be. She spoke as if everybody, me aged six included, should know who they were: as if publicans were a famed species. On a drive she would always peer at any pubs she passed, rather as if they were her personal responsibility. She even gravitated to a pub inside Harrods, the Green Man, a delightful little anomalous dark hole in the basement beside the men’s hairdresser, where she would sit at her observational post, feet covered in green and gold bags, and drink a schooner of dry sherry. Long gone, of course.

  Yes, she saw the whole of life through that particular prism, which was in fact a large and enlightened one. Pubs, to her, were not just a job. They were more like a calling. A way of being. A touchstone, a symbol. There was nothing mystical or delusional about her love of them; she knew perfectly well that they could be tawdry or nasty or criminally dull. But her greatness as a landlady came from the fact that she believed, with a true faith, that a proper pub was a beautiful thing.

&nbs
p; At the time I am describing she had run her own pub for some twenty-five years. It was her remarkable creation, her life’s work. Yet she defined herself, or so it seemed to me, by her father’s pub: the ‘old pub’. This was the place that had shaped her, to the point where she and pubs became as one, and the rhythms of pub life as instinctive to her as breathing. The landlady was not merely a persona that she assumed. From an early age it had become indivisible from her nature.

  Had her formative years not been spent in a pub, had she been the daughter of a solicitor (for instance), she would obviously have grown up different. How, it is impossible to say. It is also absolutely impossible to imagine. A housewife? An office worker? How would those lives have encompassed her? Without the demanding refuge of the bar, what would have happened to that bohemian soul of hers? I think that she would always, somehow, have displayed the true pub qualities: the toughness, the bonhomie, the spaciousness of spirit, the commonplace daily courage, the refusal to judge alongside the implicit steadfast standards. But because of her environment, these qualities were set free and writ large.

  I have no idea if she herself thought this way. She was wonderfully free of introspection. This was key to her character. She did not analyse, and she did not dwell on things. Her memories of the ‘old pub’ were not nostalgic, exactly; rather they helped her to keep the past fused with the present.

  Above all – and again this was what pubs required – she had a tireless ability to push her personality outwards. She did this willingly, with an effort that was also an instinct, even after her life at the pub was over. It was extraordinary, really. Nobody who met her was resistant to her. What a force she was! Aged ninety she would prowl through our local Morrisons, a small, powerful figure in her loose leopard-print coat (bought in Beauchamp Place in the late 1970s), slow but full of restless energy, fingers twitching with the old irritable urges to shape her surroundings, bestowing herself upon the boys who sullenly stacked apples and peaches (‘find us a few nice ones’), cascading a glamour through the aisles that was utterly indestructible. One of the reasons why I am bored to death by the modern obsession with female ageing is that I grew up watching my grandmother, not so much defying her years as completely untroubled by them, apparently believing that whatever age she was at the time was the right age to be. Actually she is the reason why I am bored by all modern female hang-ups, including the fact of being female itself. ‘Always thought I was slightly better than a man,’ was one of her throwaway remarks. She was the most confident woman I have ever known, Lawrence’s Anna Brangwen transported to a faintly louche and gleaming saloon bar. And she could cut away at self-importance with one good-natured sweep. My mother and I once took her to a London restaurant, much cooed over in magazines, run by a deeply silly ‘legend’ of whom most customers professed to be in awe. ‘Got a nice lobster, duck?’ asked my grandmother amiably, one host to another, as the famed maître d’ loomed over our table.