‘I was a teenage barmaid – and there’s nothing like a good lock-in singalong’
Writer and broadcaster Libby Purves measures her life in glorious pub memories
There is a sigh of relief when you settle into a good pub. It’s a “public house”, combining the best of both worlds. You are free to be solitary or sociable.
I have been both, singing along in Irish pubs when I was a summer barmaid, carousing in the odd lock-in, and for 10 years organising the “Seawords” evenings above the Trafalgar Tavern at Greenwich, where we heard marine poetry and sang shanties and invited celebrity guest stars to read. Almost anyone could be lured by their fish and chips.
But pubs for me have often meant moments of quiet sanctuary. I often dive into city pubs to read or write. Mr Fogg’s in Covent Garden, the Nell Gwynne behind the Adelphi: cosy, protective places. I suppose my barmaid years make every decent pub feel like home, low-lit and beerscented, with a comforting tinkle of glasses and bottles and chatter, and just the right sense of moth-eaten
frowstiness to wrap you round like a good old rug. In some ways it is the very anonymity which is comforting in these city pubs, alone but feeling the breath of a protective herd of humans. One of the saddest things about the Covid year indeed has been that necessity to fear the breathing of others.
But closer to home [Libby recently moved back to Walberswick in Suffolk, where she grew up], there’s another kind of inn. Our village pubs are the Anchor and the Bell: a century ago, they say one was the farmers’ and one the fishermen’s, and there are tales of fights on the Green. The Bell is a glorious dark cave with a curved, highbacked settle, which invites conviviality and confidence: my three brothers always loved it, and the night before my wedding held the stag-drink there (in which I joined, obviously).
But the Anchor is even dearer to me. Some of my best childhood memories
are of being sent there on Sunday after church, aged eight, to ask at the offlicence door for “a bottle of beer and a bottle of ginger beer” to provide my mother’s shandy and a fizzy ginger for us kids. I suppose it was illegal, but the host knew who I was and that I would not interfere with the beer before I got it home.
The Anchor stepped up gallantly all through the Covid year. A WhatsApp group offered Anchor takeaways: all the way from battered fish and pasties to exotic curries, Persian fesenjan duck and creations inspired by the visiting fish van. To eat them, with a takeout beer, in the legal isolation of home was not like being in the human warmth of a pub, but it was a link. We have all needed links, proof that life goes on. And when every pub in the land once again opens its doors, sets up the pumps, and the optics twinkle again and the old wooden settles open their arms, we will be back. And grateful.
There is a sigh of relief when you settle into a good pub. You are free to be solitary or sociable