Last Landlady

by Laura Thompson

  It occurs to me now that my grandmother loved luxury so passionately because of her sudden exile to the semi-derelict pub. She had always been adored, treasured, the sleek little girl protected by her brothers and her counter. Then this? ‘Yes, it wasn’t much.’ But her powerful pride forbade her to dwell on the realities of life without a bathroom; she didn’t like me to think of her as deserving of sympathy. ‘They did it up, you know! It wasn’t like that for long.’ The brewery had seen the potential – both in the pub and its landlady – and it made wonderfully quick improvements. A gang of London builders lived in the orchard, in a hut that they built for themselves then demolished. Such was the rightness of what they achieved, it was as if it had been that way for ever. Of course the essence of the place – the tiny windows cut pertly into the thatch, the low ceilings beneath which everybody except my grandmother stooped, the rooms shaped like tiny jewel boxes – was truly and richly old. Much of what was done was restoration, the ripping away of those layers of insulting concealment, the emergence of the beams, the interior walls of brick and stone.

  But what really changed is that a pub was created. It became a place within which my grandmother could conjure her spells, like a coolly benevolent shaman. A different kind of house: a public house, which to her meant home.

  Quite soon the pub was deemed so perfectly pub-like as to feature in a television advert for Mackeson. The film crew employed a stunt landlady, more fool them (naturally my grandmother had primped herself in readiness – ‘but they only wanted old Rick’: the advert included a shot of the dog trotting across the car park). Later the pub was used periodically as a location, either for itself or for the ancient woodland beyond. In the 1960s Peter O’Toole filmed there. A photo shows him leaning against the counter, fag held close to his exquisitely concave chest, brandy glass in hand, graceful profile sketched upon the familiar old wall – naturally my grandmother loved him. ‘Oh gorgeous man.’ But in the beginning there was Mackeson, and the sight of the pub emerging, aerial position permitting, from the crumbly black-and-white screen of the television, bought like so many for the Coronation and still holding something of the miraculous about it. To my grandmother, who always loved television, it represented respite. In the early years of the pub she sat watching it in the dim afternoons, her feet soaking in a washing-up bowl full of Epsom salts, easing the effects of the hours behind her new counter. She was up and running by then, the mid-fifties. She made money, although she was never good at saving. She thought it mean-spirited. Whereas her father had put his surplus earnings into jewellery, my grandmother simply wore her inherited rings and spent with the particular exhilaration of one who has truly earned their fortune. She spent on her daughter, of course, who was educated to a level considerably higher than her own (she shrugged away her lack of learning – which did seem to have left uncluttered the paths of her innate sense – but she was determined that my mother’s schooling should be different). A couple of years after the Beetle car, she traded up to a Karmann Ghia. She had a mink, as people did, into whose capacious pockets she would occasionally stuff her brassiere on evenings out, having removed it in the Ladies’ when she grew bored with wearing it. She had her hair done in Knightsbridge by ‘Mr Teasy Weasy’ Raymond; she owned clothes by Dior and Balmain; she took the first of several holidays in her beloved south of France, where she drank Campari in the Negresco’s ruinous bar. The mystery is that none of this ever seemed incongruous at her little pub. She, and it, met halfway, achieving not compromise but something larger and better.

  How did she pull it off? How did she turn a down-at-heel country inn into an establishment so vital, so essentially pub-like, that its legend still reverberates? How was it that just a couple of years after her sudden exile, the pub had become a place to go, a ‘bit of a thing’, renowned for miles around?

  She had help: from the brewery, which knew what it was doing; from Victor, in his semi-detached way, and later from Irene; from barmaids, some better than others; from the friends and relations who came in the early days, and lit up the place with their workaday resplendence; from the customers at the old pub, who arrived en masse in a hired coach to give their support. But the triumph was hers, no question. She did not offer any theory as to how she did it, and she was certainly not interested in self-glorification. She had done it for her daughter – there was a fierce attachment between them, although she was not a ‘maternal’ woman – and she had done it for herself. Actually she had done what she had to do.

  How fortunate she was, to lack introspection! What use, after all, is such a quality to a great landlady? No more than to one of the theatrical turns, the old-style purveyors of shimmer and stardust, whom she so much resembled. Just as they, the Hermiones and the Gerties, commanded the Palladium or Ciro’s or the Talk of the Town, so she imprinted the pub with her personality: she was not an artist, but something of the same magic was at work. Therein lay her success, defiant in the last resort of analysis.

  Personality is one of the few mysteries left to us. It is a beautiful thing, the divine spark of honest self, which in some people is written in italics – as an ineffable largesse, a bright resolution of complexities. And it is all the more precious because it is now hard to find. Facsimiles abound, but we are so self-conscious, so afraid of judgment; and our proclamation of the right to be ‘ourselves’ is oddly timid, beneath its vehemence, so in thrall is it to contemporary orthodoxy. This is another reason why we are so beguiled by the past: its different freedoms. My grandmother was free in a way that I am not, just as she was constrained as I am not. She was self-absorbed, right enough, but in another way she never gave herself a thought. Imagine that today. She simply lived, covered the expanse of her life without heed and hesitation. Fear did not occur to her. What was there to be frightened of? No culture of constant criticism, that’s for sure. You did your best, and people liked you, and if they didn’t they could sod orf.

  She was inestimably lucky, because her personality found its perfect expression in her way of life. That is very rare; now as well as then. And perhaps it was a good thing that she had to start all over again. The old pub was a known quantity: she and it were as one, comfortable as a married couple. When she moved she had to recreate it, which in the end meant sparking the creation of something new. The pub to which she moved was a force of its own, a different theatre with a different audience: it had to be reckoned with. What she made of it, as she breezed through the little bars in all her capable glory, turning on the lights, the music, the tabernacle flame, was a life’s work indeed.

  I wonder now if she ever contemplated failure. Practically speaking, it had been far more likely. The early years of the pub were before car travel as a matter of course (oh, the carefree years between the Beetle and the breathalyser), which meant that people had to walk to the pub, either out of desire or necessity; and walk to that pub, rather than the rival establishment at the other end of the village, where they could easily have gone. There could have been parochial ill feeling towards this newcomer, this divorcée and single mother with the painted nails and the flash urban ways. A couple of years later the townspeople would come, houses would be built along the village road, but at the start my grandmother was stranded among the farmers: Flora Poste with a large gin and vermouth in her hand.

  Yet the country people liked her. They had liked the landlord who preceded her, because he was an old boy and they didn’t have to worry about him, but they liked her more, because they recognised qualities in her that went beyond the wearing of jodhpurs. They were on her side. She had changed her home, but she remained in her element.

  She was a landlady, the real thing. As such the pub instinctively embraced her. ‘Um … well, I was a bit of a novelty. A woman in charge. Not bad looking, I suppose. People came to see me, type of thing.’ That was my grandmother’s idiom, and on the simplest level it was quite true that being a landlady was her weapon. The trump card of her femaleness was restored to her. Word gradually got around t
hat this glamorous creature was running her own show, not half a bad show, and people came to see her doing it; thus her clientele grew. Does this seem unbelievable today? Not really, if one is honest. Should it? No. It is the way of the world. My grandmother knew as much. She accepted it and was amused by it. She turned it to her advantage without hurting anybody, including herself, which is as good a way as any of being a woman.

  But there was more. She was moving into her prime as a landlady, and as such, like all proper publicans, she touched a deep and peculiarly English nerve.

  Of course pubs are not solely English. The whole of Britain and Ireland has a love for them, and they have been exported, theme-park style, to the streets of New York and the beaches of Málaga. However, it is the English who particularly crave them. The pub is – or was – a delicate reflection of our national character: the stoical humour, the craving for clannishness, the relish for a downbeat kind of glamour, the jokey attitude to sin, the sentimentality, the rebellious obeisance and the fleeting aggression.

  The publican, meanwhile, is – or was – the presiding presence, the orchestra leader and impresario: setting the tone then setting people free. In the days before pub managers and chains, the days when a pub stood quite naturally at the centre of its community, a publican had power. From the moment of entering an establishment, a customer was aware of the atmosphere that was being created.

  This was not always comfortable or pleasant; pubs are more complicated than that. The lesser publicans thrived on their power, to the point where they might lose sight of the fact that they were supposed to be attracting and serving people – as with ‘Tarc’ (Tarquin), landlord of The Bible in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, an exquisite example of the power-crazed publican who, having wilfully lost the sense of how to be normal, veers unaccountably between looking as though ‘he had suffered a bereavement earlier that morning’ and suddenly becoming ‘almost friendly for a moment’. ‘Dear, dear, there’s a character,’ says one of Tarc’s regulars, which, of course, is the aim of the lesser publican. To be, in some way, a character: a deliberate oddball, an ‘old sod’, a bestower of capricious bonhomie or a theatrical misery-guts, a dictatorial creator of darts leagues or domino schools, a wayward waistcoat-wearer, a decorator of the bar with a personal obsession such as angling trophies or Scottie dog figurines or Leyton Orient memorabilia … or some other variation upon an essentially bullying theme, to which a surprising number of customers respond with hysterical delight (‘Did you hear what the old sod said to me last night? Ha ha ha …’).

  The Coach and Horses in Soho’s Greek Street made a selling point of Norman Balon, the ‘rudest landlord in London’, with his whimsical chuckings-out and sneering refusal to meet the plaintive eye of the drink-orderer. Soho is a little different, of course. Staginess, in whatever form, is pretty much required behaviour. Still, it is the case that being a publican was a perfect potential vocation for a misfit who would otherwise have nobody to speak to: there is a paradox inherent within the job, which is that it can be carried out with some success by a person who is socially inadequate. The bar provides a safety zone, and the customers – whose natural urge is to be ‘in with’ their landlord – do all the work.

  There was just such a publican in my extended family. He ran a country pub (until forced out by the gargantuan rent increases of the 1990s) and was greeted quite openly by all the customers as Moss, as in Miserable/Mean Old Sod. He stood at one end of the bar, jabbering and fretting about depredations to his profits as his charming wife offered an occasional drink on the house. Yet he was, in some way, part of what the customers liked. Had he not been there, grimly selecting accumulators from his Racing Post and ignoring people unless they were offering him a Bombay gin (‘Eh? Yeeeah … go on then’), the pub would not have been the same. The fact that it would have been nicer is not quite the point. The English love of ‘characters’ often leads us into these sweetly mistaken identifications, in which a person of dull ghastliness is hallowed for their eccentricity. Perhaps such people make the rest of us feel better by comparison. Perhaps they unite the rest of us in a joke. Perhaps it is simply a national streak of giggly masochism; the French have their rude waiters, but French customers don’t enjoy their rudeness the way that we do.

  Publicans of this kind are absurd but harmless. Unlike the proper publican, they are judgmental, but not in a serious way. There is, however, a more extreme version of the type, whose job is to judge – openly, not secretly – for the express purpose of keeping the pub the way that it is ‘supposed’ to be: that is to say, free from those whose faces do not fit. Such establishments are not pubs, in the true sense of the term ‘public house’. They are meeting places for gangs. Sometimes for actual gangsters (there have been many such, although the most famous will always be the 1960s incarnation of the Blind Beggar on the Whitechapel Road, where Ron Kray shot George Cornell). Or they might be pubs filled with less successful villains, such as the one in which I once unwittingly agreed to wait for a friend, which had a dartboard punctured like St Sebastian and seats with thirty years’ worth of ready salted crumbled deep between the cushions, where I was offered a drink by a procession of grinning, snaggle-toothed regulars while the landlord watched inscrutably, as one who had spent his life preparing to deny all knowledge to the police. Or the pub in which the man with whom I was drinking got punched in the Gents’ for an alleged slight against Chelsea football team. Or even – a very different beast, yet mysteriously similar – a pub such as the one in a genteel village near my childhood home: from the outside a picture-book idyll, but within a chaos of carved-up little bars filled with ageing twerps in rugby shirts and tight-lipped women like extras from Midsomer Murders, where the landlady could shoot death rays even as she served the blood-heat Pinot Grigio …

  It is quite usual – traditional, even – for a drinking establishment to regard ‘outsiders’ as suspect. Ben Jonson wrote that, when an unknown customer entered the Mitre at Cheapside – a tavern, thus a familial precursor of the pub – the regulars would ‘all stand up and stare at him, as he were some unknown beast brought out of Africk’. My grandmother’s pub was far from guiltless in this regard. It did, frequently, have the aspect of a private members’ club. But then a local is always liable to become a club, of sorts. And it should have a character of its own, else what is the point of being there rather than anywhere else? It is a question of harmony, of the balance between regular and outsider and publican. In a good pub one does not think about this, one simply gives in to it, yet it is a delicate and intricate thing.

  Despite their show of power, the publicans in charge of the most uncomfortably club-like establishments are not, in fact, in charge. They are doing the bidding of their customers, who want the place to themselves. Proper publicans will not quite permit that kind of thing. Naturally they will respect territorial tendencies, the regulars who always take up the same position, and God help the outsider who inadvertently occupies it (‘Oh Christ, he’s only got old Ivor’s seat’ – I can still hear Irene’s whisper, gleeful with foreboding, as a hapless unknown perched innocently upon a sacred stool). At the same time, the proper publican stands no nonsense. Alongside the deference – to the regulars who take possession of a particular corner of the saloon, to the regulars who play their hands of brag at a particular table, to old Ivor and his seat – there is an understanding of who calls the tune; and when all is said and done it is not the customer, but the publican.

  Proper publicans are subtle, smiling creatures. They are far too comfortable being themselves to become ‘characters’ (occasionally people would call my grandmother a character, which to my mind always implied a lack of worldliness; she was not a character, she had personality). Nor are they interested in playing sadomasochistic games with their customers. Power goes to almost everybody’s head in some way, but proper publicans deploy it with the elegance of emperors. They give and withhold, are welcoming yet elusive, warm yet cool. If they put a foot wrong – my gr
andmother, fondly bestowing the wrong name upon a customer throughout an entire evening – they betray no awareness of it. And they cannot be bought, despite the innumerable, plangent, ‘go on have one’ offers of drinks (my grandmother’s chucking of said drinks onto the floor was a further demonstration of power, with which nobody dared to remonstrate). They are controlling libertarians. Figures of authority, authorising pleasure.

  This is tremendously important, because the English – of which I am one, therefore ‘we’ – are not at their best with unregulated pleasure. It goes to our heads. On the whole we do not naturally understand how to enjoy ourselves, nor how to stop when enjoyment is over (I blame the class system: it has dulled the autonomous instinct, and its effects are still with us however much we say otherwise). The glory of the proper pub, with its implicit code emanating from its proper publican, is that it gently solves this existential problem. It gives us what we innately crave: a licence to pleasure.

  And when it is a woman issuing that licence, the presiding presence is all the more delicious. Why are pubs in popular culture almost always run by a landlady? By Annie Walker, Jolene Archer, Peggy Mitchell? Because the landlady is better theatre than the landlord. She brings to the role an added dimension and gleam. Power is more fascinating when filtered through femaleness (this may change with time and custom, but by then the landlady will be a long-gone species), when streaked with the possibility of vulnerability. If the little pouter pigeon Peggy threw customers out of her pub, she was being physically courageous. If a hulking great Al Murray does the same thing, he is being a bloke. And there is a further simple ambivalence about the landlady. She has the barely challenged authority that is generally granted to a man, yet she wields it in high female style: with a festive celebration of hyper-womanliness.