‘Hells Angels invaded – dad saw them off with a shotgun’
Growing up in a pub taught writer Rowan Pelling everything she’d ever need to know
My equivalent of Proust’s madeleine is the heady aroma of beer, fag ash and Pledge cleaner wafting from a drip mat on a bar counter. It’s a rare medley since the smoking ban hit pubs in 2007, but if you’ve ever scored a lock-in with unreconstructed bar staff, the scent of the 1970s soon wafts back to you. Or, at least, the scent of my 1970s. It conjures up the Big D nuts girl, the pub equivalent of a Pirelli calendar: a busty blonde whose cleavage was exposed as each pack of peanuts was pulled from the display.
My parents were tenant landlords of a small inn in rural Kent, the Fox and Hounds, Toys Hill, and I was born just after they moved there in 1968. People often say it takes a village to raise a child, but in my experience a public house will do the job just fine. To this day, there’s no place I feel more at home and nothing I’ve missed more during lockdown.
Some choice moments from the Fox include an invasion of Hells Angels and dad brandishing his shotgun to see them off (not a great idea when you have cataracts). Or the time a middle-aged regular declared love for a barmaid, setting his car on fire when she turned him down. There were the brewery’s attempts to evict us in the 1980s, due to dad’s age, leading to a customer-led battle and reprieve. And an elderly Romeo dropped dead on a first date, just after he carried a half of shandy back to his old-age Juliet.
My family knew pretty much everything about our locals’ love lives, divorces, politics, boundary disputes and even, on occasion, their criminal pasts. We announced births and deaths via notices on the pub door.
The best pubs take their personalities from those who run them; often individuals of great charm and eccentricity. Norman Balon at Soho’s Coach and Horses, “London’s rudest landlord”, used to yell, “You’re banned!”, as a welcoming gambit. The legendary “Kim” De La Taste Tickell banned T-shirts, hippies, lefties “and women playing with candle wax” from Cambridgeshire’s Tickell Arms. He also played Wagner at full-pelt, which was not to everyone’s taste.
Landladies tend to have a subtler approach. My mother was like a secular vicar, hearing confessions, offering comfort and advice. I’ve long remembered her saying that a 60-something couple who visited every Wednesday lunchtime were “definitely having an affair”. Mum said: “He looks into her eyes and asks what she’d like to drink, whereas married men say: “She’ll have… .” Mum made customers feel they were being folded into a wider, warmer family. And that, it seems to me, is what people seek from a good local above all else: belonging. Long before the drink driving laws became ferocious, my parents confiscated car keys if anyone looked blotto.
I heard a wonderful story the other day about the late cocktail maestro Dick Bradsell. A woman said she once made an attempt, when young, to keep up with some legendary Soho drinkers at Dick’s Bar, at the Atlantic Bar and Grill, and was amazed she never fell over. Dick informed her later he’d started filling her glass with low-alcohol booze to save her health and dignity.
Let’s hope we all find such kindly stewards of our drinking habits: a pub that acts as pleasure palace, debating society and sanctuary. An alternative homestead that returns us to our own hearth uplifted, more at one with our fellow beings. As James Boswell wrote: “There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”