The wooden walls of English pubs

Secular magic on a Sunday in Cambridge

In the Live and Let Live in Cambridge an abundance of wood: flooring, bar, wall panelling, beams criss-crossing the ceiling like discordant crucifixes and a solid mass of furniture. There is not such a surplus of wood in the Cambridge Blue, where the walls are covered with tin signs and framed ads for various defunct breweries and beers, brands of tobacco and Bournville Cocoa (the latter an irony that made me chuckle given the lack of pubs in the eponymous temperance town). There is still a generosity of wood though and it complements the bric-a-brac hosted on the walls. 

Earlier in the Live and Let Live, along with an old Cambridge friend I hadn’t seen since she moved to Australia in the 1980s, there was a warmth about the richness of the surroundings, a handshake of a welcome that dovetailed well with the Sunday silence of the pub (one man on a chair at the bar, another in an alcove at the far end, the two of us in another corner). If I listened very carefully I could imagine that the soundtrack was the rustle of Sunday newspapers, the tap of a glass put back on the table, the almost perceptible hum of tranquillity and relaxation. The Blue, as I expect it is called and I do recall first visiting when it was a Tolly Cobbold pub called The Dewdrop, was busier as a fractious child tested its haunted looking parents, while a couple to the left of the bar looked as it they wanted to queue. Elsewhere there was conversation and the consumption of beer and cider. As for the prospective queuers I thought, ’don’t even think about it’, as my friend and I went straight to the bar. Settled at our table, by the window, we discussed the secular magic of the wooden womb that some pubs sometimes have. The following words are the boiled stock of our conversation. 

Wood is about warmth, an earthiness and a connection with nature; it is also about emotional well-being, nostalgia, childhood innocence, fairy tales and the wild wood in which no one can ever find you even though it is coming to teatime and you wanted to be found. Escape, even. From what though? Perhaps the leaping over the wall from the hard concrete world outside, into a place of greater safety, but also a false memory that brought up the feasting halls that Beowulf invaded and Valhalla where the dead souls went. It is an elemental sigh, the music of the spheres, this land has a thousand voices, Ariel’s ability to create a storm, Pan at the gates of dawn. I then remembered another place where the presence of wood made me ponder and digress and reach out, this time a table in a famous pub in the centre of Prague, a pub where beer was supposed to have been brewed since the Middle Ages. 

Outside it was a hot late summer’s day but inside at U Fleků I was in the halls of the mountain king and taken out of my ordinary world because the table at which I sat had a mighty majesty, seemed immovable, an idol of contemplation, rooted in the bruised and brooding red-coloured tiled floor, upon which the hardened leather soles and heels of well-groomed passers-by clicked with old-style Hapsburg thoroughness. As well as bearing witness to the buff brush of thousands of elbows the table was pock-marked with all the warts and wattles of age, the smooth passage of time, a sharp ravine made by a knife years ago, the polish of the morning clean, which had been carried out just as I was flying into the airport. 

For a brief Lord of the Rings moment I wanted to believe that this monumental table had been carved from a single tree, the result of the ancestrally handed down craft of a Bohemian woodman, whose name now only existed in a carving on a tree in a lost forest where a village had been planted. Such were the dreams of romance and history: an inner voice whispered (with the treacherous hiss of a latter-day Gollum perhaps) that the table’s real maternal home might actually be a business with a warehouse in the suburbs, whose owners had made a name for themselves in supplying Czech pubs such as this with suitably Gothic adornments, one of whose purposes, along with being a surface on which beer and meat could be served, was to fire and inspire the imagination of those who often liked to see beyond the mundane.

So back in the present this is what wood represented as well, an escape route, a sliding door of time and a spur to the imagination, a sideways step from the travail of the days and a prompt to letting the scales drop from the eyes. All of this is what the Live and Let Live and the Cambridge Blue (on a smaller scale) did on that chilly Sunday afternoon in the company of my old friend. 

Later on we went to another former haunt, The Elm Tree, which was compact and different in its mood but just as atmospheric. A band played the blues, ‘old guys rule’ guys nodded their heads and vertically drank at the bar, while an elderly man squeezed himself into one end of a large wooden table (not as monumental as the one in Prague), his back to the wall. He had brought a small bottle of wine and a glass from the bar as well as a pint of water. Sitting there, as if he was on the stage of a fringe production, he then brought out a paper bag containing a loaf and handed bits of it, along with some cheese, to the two women on his right, a mother and adult daughter. This was a carefree action, generous and genial in its implication. Meanwhile looking and settling my soul within the pub I realised that I was experiencing a different atmosphere from the afternoon at the Live and Let Live and later on at the Blue, and I felt as if the three pubs during our visits represented different parts of the day, a haunting possibility of the division of time. Secular magic, indeed.