Pubs, teachers, and what pubs can teach us
I spent three weeks at that pub, three years at university. I'm struggling to remember what I learned at university.
Itrust Christmas was all you hoped and the family wasn’t all you feared. My own Christmas couldn’t have been happier, thank you for asking. Just me and the dog playing spin the bottle, and the memories are already fading, as they have for all but three of my 60 Christmases. Of those three, one was food poisoning, another minus 40 degrees and the third was 1976. I was 19, just started at university and working in a pub.
I loved pubs from an early age. After playing cricket my father would park me outside the Eight Bells with a bottle of pop and a packet of crisps.
Every so often the pub door would open to emit a Vesuvius of smoke laced with the smell of beer and the deep rich laughter of men. It seemed to me that pubs held the secret of happiness. And when I stepped through the door myself a few years later I found that they did.
The pub that employed me that Christmas wasn’t much of a place, a suburban local owned by a middle-aged drunk.
Every lunchtime and evening he would make a bravura two-hour appearance at the bar, besuited and brylcreemed, loud and funny, the performance landlord, before withdrawing to his quarters upstairs to wrap himself round a half-bottle of vodka, leaving me to run the place.
I loved it. I won’t say the experience was formative because nothing much is formative after the age of 3. But it was informative.
At 19 the adults I’d had most to do with were teachers. And teachers were like the minor characters in a Dickens novel. They had never been young. They did not have private lives. And they were identified by a single characteristic, a stammer, irritability, bad breath. In short, they were comic.
But here in the pub I had a cast of nonteaching adults to serve and observe. And my first observation was that they were creatures of routine.
I would be pouring Doris’s port and lemonade even as she pushed through the door at noon. And Doris was delighted. ‘‘You’re a gem, you are,’’ she’d say, as I popped the drink in front of her, ‘‘a real gem.’’ Doris, as we all do, loved to be recognised, even if only for predictability.
The pub was a place the regulars belonged to, a tiny society where each was known. Big Roy was typical. He had never married but every year he went for his summer holiday to Zakopane in Poland where he had a girlfriend no one had seen but who had supposedly put the shot at the Olympics.
Because of this Roy was the pub’s acknowledged expert on both athletics and the Cold War. When Roy went into greyhound racing, he called his first puppies Zakopane Fred and Zakopane Bill. Both got mange and had to be put down.
Poland gave Roy status. And the men in the pub craved status. They played darts for the status winning gave. And they liked to boast, were keen to impress even me.
They boasted to me of the husbands they’d cuckolded, the professional sports teams they’d tried out for, the fights they’d won and the fortunes lost. And if I nodded and tutted with wonder and did not ask too many questions, they bought me beer and told me the same stories the next day.
The women didn’t boast. They sought connection. The older ones liked to mother me, and competed for my attention. But they also, and I found this remarkable, confessed to me. Though a woman might be three times my age, it was as if the bar imposed a formal distance between her and me, and late in the evening she would become the penitent and I the priest. And what she’d tell me was not reinvented to her credit like the men’s stories. It was raw, and sad.
Doris, for example, told me she’d never loved her husband. He was dead now, of the smokes, and she didn’t mind. But at least, bless him, he’d given her a son, ‘‘six foot tall and ever so clever’’. But, and here Doris’s voice faltered, the son had gone to Australia.
The pub opened even on Christmas Day, and almost all the regulars came and went at their usual times. But Doris stayed away, ‘‘in case my son rings’’. At noon on Boxing Day she was back. ‘‘Well,’’ I said, as I put a port in front of her, and I was about to ask if the son had rung. But then I looked at her old eyes and didn’t.
I spent three weeks at that pub, three years at university. I’m struggling to remember what I learned at university.