Last Landlady Read online

  She never needed to self-mythologise in that way. Her own legend had arisen quite naturally and she let the customers bolster it, rather than doing so herself. Nor, despite her flamboyance, did she display vulgarity or gaudiness, in the manner of the cliché landlady (if such a person actually exists). She always held something in reserve. In style and demeanour she most resembled an old-style theatrical performer, a semi-retired Coral Browne or Hermione Gingold. ‘She should have been on the stage,’ my father used to say. In fact that wasn’t quite right. She had her stage already.

  For a pub is a theatre in which people are playing themselves. It is a public house, after all. This is a deceptively simple title, a perfect definition of the paradox that one is at home, but also escaping from home. One is relaxed, but bracingly relaxed. The proper pub is a place where people become their public selves, rather than their private; the division of personality that makes life a business worth engaging with, and that has all but disappeared into the deadly vortex of the smartphone.

  My grandmother, who had a lot of self to play, played herself better than most. She learned to do so at such a young age that it became innate; but she also saw it as a duty, and in her staunch, frivolous way she believed in duty. Put on a show, be fun, drown your sorrows, don’t be a bloody bore. Even as a child I understood, and sought to keep up a show in her presence. ‘Chin up,’ she would say, to a tale of playground perfidy; it was the pub code, which she embodied and I revered.

  Of course there were dead times in her pub: it wasn’t the Algonquin (although imagine how boring that must sometimes have been! – all that relentless wit). And of course there were lots of bores in her pub. If they clearly couldn’t help it, then that was acceptable, one had compassion, but she once actually barred a cocky, creepy man for being, as she put it, ‘a nuisance to people’ – in other words a bore. He didn’t mind at all, and was back within the week, striving and failing to be bearable; even he subscribed to the code. For my grandmother, meanwhile, the notion that one would go into a public arena and behave as one did in private – slumping, subsiding, staring at a screen – was as inconceivable to her as showing the world a face untouched by the sainted Lauder.

  In those days there were licensing hours, which placed a limit upon pleasure in a very English way. The twice-daily closing and opening was again, of course, exactly like theatre: lights up and down, make-up on and off, matinée and evening. Also theatrical was the separation between the bars, ‘out front’, and the living quarters: backstage. I was beguiled by this division between two worlds, this mystery, marked so simply by the discreet wooden door in the far corner of the saloon bar, which opened on to my grandmother’s sitting room. The tiny dark space in front of that door was the dead zone of the pub. It puts me in mind now of one of those music hall Sickerts, in which both performer and audience are visible. In one direction were bursts of vital, indiscriminate sound; in the other, an occluded humming near-silence.

  I lived mostly backstage, during opening hours at least. My grandmother, supremely broadminded but at the same time absolutist in her diktats, was very much against children in pubs. If it was cold then they sat in the car and their parents took them a bottle of R. White’s with a straw in it (some people, much despised, would stipulate the colour of the straw). If it was warm then they had the vast ‘orchard’ at their disposal, separated from the car park by a small stone wall, a downward-sloping expanse of lawn with a swing and climbing frame at the bottom. At the top of the hill was a flat plain, laid out with tables and chairs made of white wrought iron (regularly painted, like tennis shoes). This sunlit outpost was for people who were not really of the pub: healthful types like cyclists, wholesome types who liked views, couples for whom the view formed a third party, and families. If parents tried to bring their children into the bar my grandmother was quite capable of requesting that they put them out, like dogs – although dogs were very welcome. A complaint about the child-ejection policy was once made by an aggrieved father, but she was unrepentant. She was nice to children, but always in that vague, smiling, drifting way of hers, which signified an essential lack of interest. She could not accept the pub as anything but a place for adults, preferably men, although not the kind of man who wanted to drink with a three-year-old.

  I loved the orchard, not when customers were cluttering up the tables with their splayed bags of crisps and fingerprint-smeared bottles, but when it belonged to me alone. Oh, the three o’clock summer light of that garden. Running at speed from the flat plain at the top; I can still feel the sudden sharp dip in the earth, the ‘look no hands’ sense of the hill taking me down with it. Of course I remember it as bigger than it was. In later years I was honestly amazed to see that the space, though very large, was a visibly contained rectangle. Not that this changes at all the memories of hurtling towards the apple trees that gave the orchard its name, and then into the beginning of wildness, where the grass was not mowed and the early summer cow parsley reached my waist. It was a dreamscape, in which the pub became a magical house (my house) and the sloping lawn an unchanging, buttercup-studded paradise; I stood on the swing and pushed higher and higher to face the ancient woodland, lay in the grass and searched passionately for four-leaf clovers, told the time with dandelion clocks, absorbed myself in the present-tense eternity of childhood. This was when I was happiest at the pub, which is odd because I was doing things that I could do at home, so what made them so memorable? It was because afternoons in the orchard were not like ordinary afternoons. They were a parenthesis. Time was suspended but stolen; precious in a way that did not touch me, but that I recognised. Waiting at the top of the hill was the smoky palais that only masqueraded as an English country cottage, that winked slyly at the brilliance of its own disguise, that compelled me equally, and that made the orchard seem peculiarly prelapsarian: even then, I knew this.

  When the stage was empty, I got to know almost every corner of it. In the early mornings – before school, or during holidays – I would go, as one entering a secret chamber, through the door into the saloon. Straight ahead, down a shallow step, insultingly adept at tripping up drunkards, was the door into the public bar. All was dark brick, fretted with heavy wood, humming with silence.

  The saloon and public bars were almost identical, except in atmosphere, although at that hour atmosphere was in hibernation. One knew that it had been there, and that it would be there again, but for the moment it was holding itself in abeyance. The air was grey and uncertain, ghostly with dust, streaked with lines of smoke. A thin trail of day eased its way between the curtains; the dust motes danced where it fell, and a crazy solar system of circles gleamed on the tabletops. A brisk clearing-up would have taken place the night before but a few things lingered, like clues in a bad detective story: a couple of sodden beer mats (one perhaps with a phone number on it, never to be rung), a last defiant Embassy stubbed into the ashtrays lined up for cleaning, a shifty glass oiled with whisky dregs.

  The bars were tiny. One was more aware of this, oddly, when they were empty. It seemed quite impossible that so much life could fit into them. The ceilings were low – the heads of tall men always seemed to be negotiating with them – and the spaces between the beams were dirty-mellow with nicotine. Seats were pushed up hard against the walls: black settles from the ‘old pub’, with backs curved like shields and smooth slippery seats. A pub is never truly light inside – there is always that interplay of glint and dusk – but on sunny days, with the old sash windows behind them, the settles shone like the coats of young Labradors.

  The shimmering look of those early pub mornings, poised between hush and promise … only memory can reproduce their nuances of shadow and clarity, infinite in their imprecision. And memory also holds the hovering quiet, broken by the tentative creaks of the floor, the drip of tap or optic. It holds textures: the beams solid and splintery to the touch, and the stone surrounds of the giant fireplaces rough and cold. Hidden behind these surrounds were shallow seats, ledges built into t
he stone. These were a great delight to me, although (and despite my obsession with kings and queens) I never pondered the fact that people must have sat on those ledges since the time of Henry VI. The history of the pub was a feather in its cap, no question, but the historical-society view was somehow irrelevant. The plaque in the saloon bar described the pub as an ancient monument. For sure it never behaved like one. Like my grandmother, it revered its past but absorbed it into the present; in a good pub, the accretions of memory are palpable, but all time is the same.

  At the heart of the pub was the bar itself. The coppery counter, which formed an L-shape, faced the public bar and looked sideways on to the saloon. Behind it, in the pungent little space that would barely hold three people, I would serve pretend rounds and put my nose – later my appalled tongue – to the different drinks. Here, I knew, was the alchemist’s headquarters. I can remember every detail: to my right hand were two beer pumps – Tankard and (far less popular) Trophy – plus a pump of Heineken, with plastic trays beneath that constantly overflowed. When the barrel was changed the pump was as lively and spiteful as a tiger cub, the first pint an explosion of what looked like whisked egg white. Beside the pumps was a wrench for removing bottle tops, above a rusty tin box into which they theoretically fell; there was also a pedal bin, but that too was a hit-and-miss receptacle. When the pub got busy, and the banknotes were waved and waggled by a towering criss-cross of hands (always male hands), nothing mattered except getting people served: rubbish could pile up at one’s feet, cigarettes could shrivel to grey tubes, the sink could block, the very world could end, but old Mick would get his large Bell’s, ‘When you’re ready, duck …’ The sink was at the front of the bar, beneath the counter. In the course of an evening it became murky with slops, and the water level rose to dark and alarming levels. The square of dark red carpet was soaked with spills and scored with ash: everybody smoked behind the bar. Occasionally a customer would hold up a glass to show a drink flecked with grey-black. ‘Cheeky sod,’ my grandmother would say, meaning that she disliked having been caught out. On the lower shelves were rows of bottles: mixers – R. White’s, Britvic, Schweppes (you know who); Guinness (is good for you), Double Diamond (works wonders), Mackeson, Bass; Cherry B, Babycham, Moussec; and at the bottom, dusty and terrible as bottles of strychnine, the fearsomely strong White Shield and barley wine.

  The shelf beside the till was always damp and slimy. Here were the lemons, oozing pips on their little chopping board; the sticky cherries speared with cocktail sticks; the pads and pens; the silver drink measures, which my grandmother thought embarrassingly inadequate and basically ignored – also more arcane items, Angostura, Lea & Perrin’s – and what would now be item-in-chief, a sole bottle of white wine, which then held almost no interest at all. Wine was what one drank, possibly, with dinner. One female customer, splendid as a shire horse, would ask for what she called a ‘double wine’, meaning two glasses poured into another, much larger glass; otherwise the scented Liebfraumilch in its flowery bottle took its humble place beside the Stone’s Ginger Wine (for a whisky mac) and the Bols Advocaat (for a monstrous concoction known as a ‘snowball’, in which the thick yellow stuff was puffed up with lemonade like a soufflé). There was also Rose’s lime juice, which might be dashed into lager for a cost of 5p, although one customer found this a bridge too far. ‘A pint of lager,’ he would say, and pause. ‘With some lime,’ meaning as an afterthought, an adjunct, for which payment was unnecessary.

  At eye level were the bottles of spirits, hanging upside-down in front of a mirror. The prices stuck untidily on the optics – 50p, 65p – were changed after every Budget: always a black day, on which the plate of cheese was temporarily withdrawn (‘can’t afford to do that now’). On the glass shelf above was another level of bottles, rarely opened although even more gorgeous and glittering, their contents the colours of jewels: curaçao, grenadine, Drambuie, Green Goddess, Parfait Amour, and crème de menthe (‘tart’s drink’), for which ice had to be crushed in a little mincer. Cigarettes were stacked in rows, and the cellophane-shiny colours of Dunhill, Benson & Hedges and St Moritz gleamed beneath the golden bell for calling time. On the high shelves around the front of the bar were the inverted tumblers and goblets (so demure in size compared with those of today), which my grandmother polished every morning in her carelessly capable way. Pint glasses swung from hooks in the shelves, catching stray diamonds of light. A couple of white drying-up cloths flopped across the counter in an attitude of exhaustion. In the dark sink below, a gathering of what had once been lemon slices lay around the plughole in a shallow pool of spume.

  At this hour, the bar was drained of colour, its sheen dimmed, tired and unlovely like the morning bodies of the people it had served the night before. Yet throughout the day it would take on warmth and light, to the point when – to those who could not see the overflowing beer trays, the sink full of foaming water, the litter of bottle tops and fag ends – it became luminous, configurative, the gleam of glass and mirror and electricity so much refracted as to fuse into an absolute of light. It was a shining cave of plenitude, a lucent vision that a child might dream, that offered a promise and haven of the most adult kind.

  In the public bar was the door to the cellar. From the outside this looked like a thatched wooden barn attached to the pub, sloping downwards along with everything else. The giveaway was the low double-door, opened when the barrels were changed (a sadistically noisy business, like an industrial blood transfusion). The ‘barn’ stood above the cellar proper. It had been built by the brewery in the 1950s, when my grandmother was not long at the pub, and its chilly interior was like a large cell. It contained my grandmother’s accounts, one of the few things that could make her panic; stacked boxes of Walker’s crisps, behind which I once surprised a semi-dressed couple; and the ice machine. Ice: what a tyrant. Perfectly nice people became touchy if they felt that their drink did not contain its full quota (there were also those who, fearing any weakening of the drink, would sternly forbid its presence). Busy evenings meant the frequent crowd-surfing passage of empty ice buckets to whoever was willing to fill them – sometimes a good-natured customer – and every night held the unspoken prayer that nothing should go wrong with the ice machine. I remember its arrival, the wonder of all those cubes. Before that there had been a constant filling and disgorging of ice trays. As a girl, my grandmother had wheeled a pram every day containing a miniature glacier (from the local tannery) back to her father’s pub, where it would be chipped at like a sculpture.

  The cellar at the old pub – paradoxically, a much newer establishment – had run underneath the whole ground floor, and served as an air-raid shelter during the war. At my grandmother’s pub, the cellar proper was a true medieval oubliette, big enough for nothing but barrels, a grey hollow reached by a twisting staircase of rock-like steps. Before the barn was built, one opened the cellar door and was launched straight at the staircase; enormously dangerous, although nobody thought that way. In the early years of the twentieth century, jugs of beer were filled straight from the barrels. Down and up went the bartender, down and up the treacherous grey steps.

  What with the wildly thrumming barrels and the juddering whirr of the ice machine, the cellar always seemed to shake, and it smelled fiercely of beer and cold stone. Smell, of course … the pub in the mornings had an acid, weary smell that I can still conjure, bred from the coupling of booze and smoke: a smell of aftermath. Cleaning was not the answer, what was needed was more of the same – a fresh new pint pulled, a pristine cigarette sparked up, the hair of the dog principle as a guide to life; nevertheless, by 8.30 a.m. the beer-fag miasma was penetrated by a powerful stream of disinfectant from a tin bucket propped against the door of the Gents’ in the public bar. Within I could hear Mrs Brennan, the cleaner, banging around with her mop, singing wheezily, ‘yew were meant, for me … and ay was meant, for yew!’ She had hair permed to a crisp and an Embassy glued to her bright pink lower lip. From the open door came anothe
r smell, unspeakable, winding its way through the Jeyes fluid. I was nervous of the Gents’, and never once went inside it. The Ladies’ I loved: a lush Camay-scented cave.

  Later Mrs Brennan would polish the dark red tiles around the edge of the floors, then tackle the carpets. Every morning they were newly dank, swiped with commas of ash – some of it Mrs Brennan’s own – and posing the intractable problem of the sodden strip beside my grandmother’s stool, where whisky and cleaning fluid fought for supremacy, and an unhappy mingling of the two ensued. It was not until the evening, when my grandmother was re-established in her pitch, that her rich cosmetic scent took possession of the air; although she would then recreate the original problem by throwing yet more whisky onto the floor.