Who remembers?

‘Palimpsest: a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing.’

Bob used to sit on a stool at the bar every lunchtime, drink five pints of Exmoor Ale and then walk back to his house three doors away and have a few whiskies. Later on around 6pm he would be back in the pub and enjoy two or three pints before he went home. Then he died, which didn’t really come as a surprise given that he also smoked like the proverbial chimney, but, for the two or three years I still lived in the Exmoor village after his death, each time I went into the pub I couldn’t help but look at the empty space where he used to sit and remember him sitting there. 

If I go back even further to when I was 19, I used to call the King’s Head in Llandudno my local (the first of its ilk). It was a classic multi-room survivor of the late 19th century and one day I went in and walked into one of the back rooms and there was a woman without a nose. Being young I went out again. I never saw her again and for a while I felt guilty at my youthful insensitivity. Not long afterwards, prior to the summer, the interior of the pub was gutted and now it’s all open, but I still recall the woman without a nose on the rare occasions I visit it, as if her shade still sits there. 

Remaining in Llandudno around the same period, I also occasionally visited a pub called the Royal Oak and recall seeing a pre-Factory Tony Wilson (who I then recognised from his stints on Granada TV) pontificating to what I think were media students; this pub was also the place where we used to see the ‘Jim Morrison of Llandudno’ (so named because he wore leather trousers). The pub is no longer there and a hotel chain takes up its place, so when I walk past there is nothing remaining of these memories, unlike in the King’s Head or the pub on Exmoor. The first two contain memories of the sacred spaces that pubs can have if you know them well enough, which is why I believe some pubs can be like palimpsests, places that host generation after generation of drinker, but even when they have moved on if you know the place their memories linger. 

These are not ghost memories or ghost signs as we see on old buildings but something a bit more metaphysical, something that presumably has to be remembered. Sometimes though you can go into a longstanding pub you have never visited before and feel the weight and the presence of those who have gone before you.

I had this feeling when I visited the Triangle in Lowestoft a few years ago. This was (and still is) owned by Green Jack Brewery and as I was enjoying my pint of their rich Lurcher Stout I saw three individual boots, one of which was covered in paint, standing on the ledge below the pub’s front window. I asked the bartender about them and was told that the boots belonged to three separate regulars who had passed away, but their families, knowing how much the pub had meant to them during their lives, asked if the boots could be displayed as a kind of memorial. I didn’t know the people, but these boots made sure that they were remembered. 

Last summer I was in Southwold researching my next book (out in the autumn) and went over to the neighbouring village of Walberswick to see Mark Dorber, who runs the Anchor. I have known him for over 20 years from when he was the landlord at the White Horse in Parsons Green, which was a noted place for great beers and being introduced to visiting brewers from around the world.  We were talking about the people he had seen throughout his time as a licensee at the White Horse and he recalled a regular called Ronnie. ‘He would come in, start at 11,’ he told me, ‘and in order to get his 20 pints tucked away by midnight, if he had trouble at any part of the day he would pep it up with acidic red wine to give him impetus. These chaps don’t survive forever. They don’t turn up one day and you go to their funeral.’

This is the downside of regular pub-going as the experience of Bob also showed. Then the pub becomes a memorial hall and finally no one recalls those who spent their lives there. 

Let me finish on a more cheerful note. I recently found online (https://flashbak.com/a-cracking-british-beano-photographs-from-a-1960s-pub-outing-452180/) a photo from the 1960s of a crowd of pub regulars, about 30 men and five women, standing outside a coach, pints in hand. This presumably was the occasion of the pub organising an outing (or a beano as these events used to be called) for those who frequented the house regularly. There they stand (or crouch in the front row), the men in ties and jackets, the women in smart coats, wherever the coach took them to, smiling and laughing, a long ago day that will live forever even if very few (if any) in the photograph remain alive. The pub is the Kings Arms, Amesbury, and it is still going, and I wonder if anyone has memories or heard stories about this outing and those who took part? Went the day well? Let’s hope so.