Closing time
Pining for the Vine
On the aptly named Cemetery Road in Sheffield here was the shell of a closed pub: The Vine Inn. I passed it last weekend when I was in the city. I saw it last year when I walked this way and nothing seemed to have changed: there was still the eviscerated rubble of the interior dumped in front of it and it still didn’t look habitable, though possibly new windows had been put in. I knew nothing about the pub, how good or bad it was and I didn’t even know when it closed (and for once I thought I would resist the siren call of internet sleuthing), though I would guess from its faded nature it’s been a few years. What struck me about it, apart from the suggestion that building work was slowly, ever so slowly, going on, was the possibility that this shell might have harboured any ghosts, whose lost voices could be heard on nights when the wind was in the right direction (or was the pub the ghost?). After all, Sheffield General Cemetery was just up the road, where to wander through its grounds was to marvel at how death had undone so many, from merchant bankers to captains of industry to ministers of various truths and many loved sons and daughters and husbands and wives.
Back to the pub, I wondered if laughter still lingered in the brickwork, perhaps from when Ricardo and Howey (ok I made their names up but they sound like popular pub names of regulars) drunk themselves sober or maybe it was the echoes of a pub quiz (‘pop from the 1980s tonight ladies and gentlemen’) or a game of bingo (‘housey housey!’) or a darts match (‘top of the league mate’)? Then there might have been a man whose name no one knew (inevitably known as the man with no name) who stopped coming in when he lost his ancient Jack Russell, Terry, and some would say that they saw him wandering through the grounds of the cemetery, wraith-like and hollowed-out. Was it a place where the slow passage of time was like a glacier, whether advancing or more likely retreating, or perhaps it was a place where pints shoved time along with the brutality of a bouncer chucking an interloper out of a pub? Time was always moving without the constraint of permission.
I wondered if it had regulars who came in at lunchtime in search of company and serenity or just maybe to play pool (did it have a pool table?), or was it a place where desperation sometimes took hold and sadness was a long swig from a pint in the company of a chaser? What was it like in the evening, when alcohol loosened tongues and careless talk flew through the air like spindrift? Did anyone met their future partner there or maybe start the long journey towards an estrangement from their current partner? Did friends collide over football, combine over the right way to fix a burst pipe or even spend time within when the finality of a life well lived could be cheered on its way. Pubs give us so many permissions to live our lives that it would not surprise me if a dead pub still hoarded its voices and personalities like a miser his gold.
However, as I am doing now, I could speculate and take liberties with the advance of time, but all I know is that this pub was now as dead as Jacob Marley and one day no one would ever know that this was a place where those who called it their local felt at home and one last laugh from Ricardo and Howey rent the air like the sound of splitting fabric.
