My first post was 7th November, the anniversary (which always seems the wrong word) of the Lord Lucan murder case. I had a handful of subscribers so thank you, so so much, to everybody who has helped raise that number to respectable heights - and indeed to those who have stayed with me throughout. At the risk of sounding faux-humble, and although I’ve been writing for half my life, I never cease to be delighted, and a bit amazed, that people actually read my words… and, in some cases, pay to do so. A special thank you to my paying subscribers. It means a great deal.
Thank you also to the fellow writers who have recommended this Substack. I’ve read so many marvellous people on here (see my own recommendations), so thanks for that pleasure too.
Proper writing, generously received and shared and appreciated. Who knew?
(Although I’ll just lament the downside to Substack’s intimate immediacy… the way in which, when you post something that you tremulously consider to be quite good, you actually lose subscribers - and with alarming speed (as if, I’ve read TEN WORDS OF THIS TRIPE now get me out of here). My last piece, the one about on-screen overuse of the Eff word, lost me so many that I wondered if lots of people either a) don’t want the word mentioned at all; or b) disagree with me that it is mentioned too often, and in fact want it mentioned far more.
Eventually subscriber numbers are restored, along with amour propre. But there is a brutal honesty to the way in which one can watch them sink (The Dashboard Doesn’t Lie). If a reader picked up one of my books in a library, flicked through then decided not to borrow it, I would be in blissful ignorance, but here…)
Nevertheless. Substack is heaven, a place where one can read proper brilliant stuff and write without fear or anxiety or the wrong kind of pressure.
So: my second post, post-Lucan, was about pubs, and what follows is a version of it. I wanted to revisit the subject because pubs, as happens periodically, have been in the news over the bank holiday. Unusually, the pub news was good news. On the radio I heard about a community pub in north London, run by people who refuse to let their local succumb to those strange beasts, invisible yet ravening, known as market forces. Then I read that the retail arm of Heineken is spending almost £40 million on reviving some 600 pubs. Part of the thinking, apparently, is that these would prove appealing venues to people who are ‘working from home’, ie down the pub. Except of course it wouldn’t be that sort of pub. It would be a modified alternative to Starbucks, a convivial setting in which one can set up a laptop from late morning onwards. A perfectly reasonable idea. I myself like to write longhand in my local (two doors down, do admit): I find the fact of being at work, in a place where others are pleasantly occupied with leisure, peculiarly productive, although the thought of doing this at any time before 7pm is inconceivable to me.
But pubs, as we know, are not what they were.
This is what I wrote in my book The Last Landlady, first published in 2018 by Unbound.
There is no mystery as to why this has happened, why the pure-breed pub is dying. It couldn’t be simpler to understand. Things don’t stay the same. A process of evolution made the pub, and that process has not stopped. People have changed, the nation has changed, laws have changed. The advent of the breathalyser in 1967; the smoking ban in 2007; the availability of alcohol in every outlet, from corner shops to garages; the cheapness of supermarket alcohol; the sexual revolution that has rendered quaint, at best, the notion of the male drinking arena; the primacy of children; the attendant notion that most outings should centre upon the family, rather than its adult members; the demographic shifts that have created a plurality within the national culture; the upward mobility that has led people away from familiar social spheres; the new physical puritanism; the all-conquering phenomenon of the coffee chain; the fascination with food; etc.
Thus listed, these read like good things. They are good things, on the whole. Progressive, civilizing: improvements. Pubs still exist, after all, but they have evolved to survive in a different world. And anyway, who would prefer to drink in a place of fug and beermats, dining off peanuts, tracing dot-to-dot cigarette burns in the red velveteen, seeing their reflection swoon in a green-spotted mirror, when they could be in a low-lit interior with bleached beams, surrounded by happy groups eating at scrubbed wooden tables, with a wine list of well-sourced complexity and an olives menu?
Oh, I don’t know. I would.
My book is a homage to pubs. It is the story of my grandmother Violet, the first woman in England to obtain a publican’s licence in her own right, ie not as a wife. It is also a sheaf of memories - mainly formed during childhood, thus with a child’s bedazzled intensity - of the pub that she created in the Home Counties, a picture-perfect country inn with an Old Compton Street soul, where she presided like a casual empress on her stool beside the bar.
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.
Violet was the daughter of a publican, whose large town pub she had run during the Second World War. That establishment was what she called ‘the old pub’, which I think gleamed in her memory with the same shadowy richness as hers still does for me.
She was not a typical ‘landlady’. There was nothing Barbara Windsor or Bet Lynch about her. She defied class definitions, and other such petty English follies. She was a small, very good-looking woman, replete with personality, utterly comfortable with herself, mysteriously grand like the Brangwen woman in The Rainbow. She adored the pub that she maintained with casual, careless pride and efficiency, and was fond of many of the regulars, although she always hankered after London. Her long-term boyfriend, who in a former life had played guitar for Louis Armstrong, was au fait with Soho and Le Caprice, he knew Vera Lynn and her musician husband, he could get tickets to Danny Kaye at the Palladium or Pearl Bailey at the Talk of the Town, and once a week he and my grandmother spent an evening in the West End, taking in Wheelers and the French and even the Colony (where, according to her legend, she failed to retrieve a napkin on which Francis Bacon had scrawled a drawing) … years later I inhaled the flavour of her imprecise recollections. What a world! And somehow she had brought it to the little ancient inn, where the splendidly robust local farmers understood her completely, her largeness of spirit, and where on Sunday afternoons she played ritual games of solo in the saloon bar with women of her own fine vintage, who knew her from the old pub.
Her soul belonged to pubs. For all her glamour she had no self-importance, and was entirely at home in the world of the ordinary, which is what a proper pub celebrates. She regarded the publican’s role reverently, as a vocation. And she ran what she would have briskly called ‘a good house’, but which now seems to me an arena of everyday magic, of secular sanctuary, of ‘chin up’ and ‘go on then, if you say so’, of blessed sanity, of transgression and forgiveness, of commonality, of adulthood; a place where human frailty was embraced with a cackle and a raised glass. A Public House. Where one is at home, but escaping from home; relaxed, but bracingly relaxed; oneself, but one’s public self.
Community… the word now has to be expressed. A community pub. But then a pub was a community, the two words were as near as dammit synonyms. And at the head of the community, of course, was the publican, the proper publican, whom I described thus.
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 grandmother, 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.
By the time my grandmother left her pub, in the early ‘90s (she lived another twenty years), she knew perfectly well that her magnificent heyday was done. Around half of Britain’s pubs closed during her lifetime. And for some time she had been recreating the past, the old pub, with the generous landlady gift - the willingness to push her personality outwards - that managers and chains were rendering obsolete. She had also held out against pub meals, which she regarded as decadent - turning a pub into something that was not quite pub-like - but which in the end she did supply. With typical shrugging fatalism she viewed this, and the very different clientele that it attracted, as the beginning of the end.
Now, the end is a great deal nearer. 383 establishments closed in the first half of 2023; the same number as in the whole of 2022. The sadness of this is incalculable. Pubs are part of our social history, our streets, our villages, our national life, our national character. And they are dying, yet nobody wants them to die.
So the news about investment - both community and corporate - into a reimagining of the pub, is hopeful; although this, in ambivalent conclusion, is from my book again.
Save our pub, people say. What do they mean by it? Are they dreaming of a new pub culture, a local clothed in the loose disguise of the pub: a place in which to meet, eat, drink beer flavoured with coffee and gin spiked with thyme, use a library, buy milk, tend allotments between lattes, play Monopoly, have a sing-song? The examples of ‘community pubs’, of pubs reclaimed and remade by the people who use them, are very much like that. They are smiling, friendly, family places, in spirit not unlike George Orwell’s Moon Under Water, which was perhaps conceived some seventy years ahead of its time. As with the restaurant-pubs, some of which are undeniably delightful, they represent an evolution that makes societal sense. Customers want them, they take shares in them and put their best selves into them. This may not be enough, financially speaking. Nevertheless they represent a continued life for the pub.
And I am so glad that all this exists, that there is a will for it to exist. These places are a defence against the deluge. They are not, incidentally, my own idea of pubs. They are simply too nice. I always liked a slight tautening in the diaphragm before entering a pub, even my grandmother’s. And I suspect that others share that view, almost without recognising it; that their attachment to the pub, their pleas for its salvation, lie elsewhere; in something more numinous and mythic, in fact in a series of images: of sodden beermats, foaming pints, velveteen seats the colour of week-old rioja, dark wood pierced with a clean sliver of sun, dust motes rising to greet the morning’s first customer, a shaft of shadowy promise seen through an open door, a bar like a shining dressing room mirror framing a landlord, a landlady. And those images, in reality, would no longer mean what they once did, because the reality around them has changed.
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, which is what makes them lost to us.
Cheers, lovely subscribers.
I loved your piece on the over-use of the eff word in screenplays, and laughed out loud at your skewering of Diana Mosely in Peaky Blinders; which - like you - is also not quite my thing. You often say what I think but better, which is why it's a joy to subscribe to your posts.
Happy six months Laura, minimise that dashboard and keep soaring! Loved this.