The Small World of a London Pub

In every morning, is this vicar, just as the doors open. Little pudgy vicar bloke in for his double Scotch and then away to do daily vicaring. He never speaks and you wonder what he would speak about if he did. The Word of God? Too many bloody funerals? Where’s an AA meeting around here? He only uses this pub because it’s the nearest to his church. Speak vicarman, speak! Speak truth to the almighty power.

The other night we had a drunk American communist from Oregon (a particularly militaristic US state, which is saying something in a country of weapon-fetishism!). He showed me his membership card in a way that you might furtively reveal yourself as the organiser of a paedo-ring. Had me down as a fellow traveller and wanted to share his secret with a comrade. I am a sympathiser but quickly regret my fellowship as I discover that there is nothing more boring than a drunk, American communist. The relationship quickly degenerates into Eugene O’Neill country as the human race is denounced as one big capitalist lackey with each and every one of its members too pig-ignorant to realise the blinding truth.

He leaves – finally – cursing his woes to the cool summer sky.

I am behind the bar of a pub in east London in the very early eighties and, though I don’t know it yet, I will end up living here and very rarely leave its premises. These were the days when everyone knew that very heavy drinking was in no way good for your health but no-one in authority had yet made any official announcement to this effect, so everyone just carried on as if it weren’t their personal responsibility. Drinking stories were ‘great craic’ especially if they involved the police or some sort of injury to one’s person or dignity or both.

“He fell on the train lines and was only saved cos some kids found him!”

“Woke up covered in cow-shit in a field. How he got there is a mystery especially to him.”

Drinkers like other drinkers to be as fucked-up as they are. They won’t thank you to hear your successfully on the wagon.

One of the first things I learn as a bar/cellarman is how to filter back slops into a barrel. Always a dark beer so it is undetected by the undiscerning drinker. Double Diamond was the favourite. Let the gas out of the keg (vitally important this unless you want your brain matter spread all over the cellar walls) then open the barrel lid with a mysteriously pre-prepared spanner appliance. Metal funnel and filter paper and slowly pour the evening’s alcoholic effluence into the barrel and it’s ready to go.

“Nice pint, that,” says an auld yin smacking his lips at the taste of this dark abortion.

“Ye like yer Double Diamond, eh?”

 

The Red Lion was housed in massive premises on a corner on Leytonstone High Road. There were three floors and on the middle one there was a ‘ballroom’. I’m not sure if it was ever used for this purpose but it certainly had been a music venue in which such as The Who and Pink Floyd had one played. On the top floor was the flat in which the manager and his family lived and several bedrooms. The pub itself was the usual arrangement of ‘Lounge’ and ‘Public’ bars. The public bar was where pool and darts could be played and where the more boisterous crowd gathered. The lounge was where the vicar had his morning snort and where a more elderly and genteel clientele congregated.

When I initially worked there it was an Irish landlord named, predictably, Pat who was dismissed for selling his own booze in the optics. A common enough scam, you just bought quantities of spirits wholesale and kept the profits. The trick was merely not to get caught but Pat was greedy, and the area manager wondered why gantry-made money had become practically non-existent.

Then a human hurricane hit the place in the shape of a new manager, Kenny O’Donnell from Springburn, Glasgow and with him his pretty wife, Tracey and his extended family from up north. The Red Lion was to become a Glaswegian colony in London.

 

Leytonstone in those days was in the latter stages of being a little Bohemia on the very edges of Epping Forest. Dopeheads, artists, guys that used to be in semi-famous rock bands, they gravitated towards the area perhaps for its semi-ruralness or just to follow their tribe. There were streets and lanes and markets. There were pubs and cafes and a Woolworth’s on the high street just down from Bearman’s where one could buy fancy lamps and continental quilts. On the heath of the burgeoning forest were the Hollow Ponds which fell arid in the hot summer of ’76 and the cows pastured there and were stuck on the islands when the waters returned. These same cows would wander into residential areas much to the delight of the children, bumbling and bashing into fences before mysterious herdsmen appeared to guide them back to the grasslands. The forest glades were venues for fathers playing made-up cricket and football games.

At the heart of the community was the tube station, elegant even before they Hitchcock-tiled it, From here you could venture further east to such as Hainault or Gants Hill or into central London or the western suburbs. It didn’t know it yet, but the bowels of this station would be home to a small cubby-hole of a dry cleaners outfit wherein would sit employee Julie Stephenson who would by turn be chum and confidante to passing trade and be crying her eyes out due to her new lowly position in life. One kind punter of an eastern persuasion would be so affected by her sad demeanour that he would bring her a spiritual gift: a book about reincarnation. This would make her laugh and cry all the more.

 

Leytonstone – along with neighbouring Leyton and Walthamstow – was a great area for Irish builders. Maybe like Kilburn in the north-west of the city, it had just started as an area for Irish congregation and grew from there. This demographic fact ensured that there was a great deal of Irish craic and colour in the area. I well remember the Sunday drinking sessions in The North Star and The Crown as well as The Red Lion when the pubs were only open between 12 and 2 in the afternoon the great rush of Catholic Irishmen out of the chapel in nearby Wanstead after Mass and into the boozers. A huge swathe of men in cheap suits barely unable to contain their thirst for Guinness. I imagined them ‘at starter’s orders’ as the priest said, ‘The Mass is over’ and they’d be out the doors before he got to ‘Go in Peace and spread the word of God…!’

‘One Round’ Foley was a case in point. A somewhat sly (hence the nickname) though friendly man from Sligo, Foley was a character from Milligan’s Puckoon. He wore his clothes the way a bin contains garbage, and these clothes were nondescript, no more than rags fitted loosely to his frame. He largely assumed the same attire to his work sweeping-up on a site somewhere as he did in his social life which, much like his fellow country-men, consisted of visiting pubs and drinking very heavily indeed.

It was from these men that I learned that I was no sort of drinker at all, or at best a callow amateur. It was the blessed Milligan that said the Irish were born with a thirst and he wasn’t kidding. The level of drinking I witnessed was unwordly and surely no man could survive it for long. Yet, these were rugged men who worked hard and appeared to live reasonably long. They had wives and procreated and laughed and fought and drank and drank and drank.

I worked alongside them for a very brief time indeed before they sussed me as the born office worker I am. One morning at about half six after a night in the Red Lion where a punishing amount of alcohol was consumed we were collected in a van outside the pub to be conveyed to some site on the other side of London: ten or so farting, belching men with pure alcohol for sweat, the air was foetid like it was diseased. Off we went, me straining not to vomit, the twenty or so miles before we stopped outside the greasiest of greasy spoons wherein another couple of dozen men were sat down to breakfasts so large and fatty that it gave you a heart attack just to look at them.

Then, to the site..!

O yeh, One Round Foley. Well, he managed to get himself a date. Much humour was shared about this. Was she a resident of some care home for the permanently bewildered? Would she be carrying a white stick? It was true that Foley was not the handsomest of men. He had a face like a bag of chisels and his general demeanour and appearance was of someone still living through the worst of the Great Famine and you got the impression that maybe he had been born with the haystack of grey hair on his head. In short, he looked like a very badly turned out undertaker.

Still, he had this date, and the North Star was abuzz with anticipation as to how it had gone. So, one rainy Saturday night around half nine the Foley walks in sans female and with his face running with a black substance like dye. My first thought, bizarrely, was that he’d joined some shock-rock metal group – one of them boys out of Kiss - and this was the persona. The truth was a little less glamorous. In order to compensate for the grey hair, he told us, and to make him appear younger to the lucky female, he had run shoe polish through his sallow locks to give him ‘that Johnny Cash look’. Unfortunately, it had rained on the way to his lover’s tryst and this was the result; the creature from the shoe-black lagoon.

And what of Joe Kane? Joe Kane was the sub-contractor a lot, if not all, of the Irish lads relied on for a pay-day and he abused his position shamelessly. A truculent, argumentative brute of a man, you could only imagine a wife at home who loved his absence like she might appreciate the subsidence of a toothache. A missus who would encourage her man to ‘go out and drink, go out and work, just go out away from me’. Grown men would act as look-outs from pub to pub down the high street and when Joe Kane was spotted coming toward the Ted Lion, say, would rush up the back streets to The Crown or even the half mile to The Heathcote along Grove Green Road rather than suffer his boorish company. A fighting, cussing, thoroughly disagreeable Galway man, squat and hard with dark features and a tongue that could lacerate, no-one wanted to be Joe’s friend yet everyone had to be.

The new Guv’nor is a nut-job! The second week under his leadership he can be found drunk and completely naked and being led by the willy through the Sunday night lounge bar. Witness to this are all the ‘sherry and half a pint’ couples who are usually stoic in their silent wedded grief and can barely believe their eyes at the sight they are forced to behold. The willy-leader is his big-bearded mate, Liam, who is a big bearded Jacobite who has brought his considerable Irish-Glaswegian charm to the capital along with a very definite let’s show these English bastards how to have a laugh attitude.

There’s a whole tribe of these dope-smoking, hard-drinking guys fae ‘up the road’: the Comanches fae Cumbernauld and they’re all drinking and revelling for free. Kenny shoves a few bob my way every now and again but theft and corruption is rife. I take a 20 pack from the machine and then drunkenly misplace it so just take another one. I am serving drinks and changing barrels but I’m often more pissed than the punters. These Londoners look on aghast as every Scottish stereotype they’ve ever heard of is fulfilled. They may wonder if this is some Bonnie Prince-less invasion only this time we made it past Derby.

The draymen come so early and are sadistic. I’ve only been to bed three or four hours, not long enough to sober up properly and the clanging barrels and the crates and bottles are not what I need. Kenny is up in (or on) his bed half-naked, the cash-filled till beside him. He treats his pretty wife abysmally although she joins in the fun. Only last night she more than half-heartedly during the inevitable lock-in attempted to shove the neck of an empty Pils bottle up her husband’s anus.

The rest of the tribe are sleeping late and, after the draymen leave, I am left to deal with about a million glasses and dowt-filled ashtrays. In the public bar the air is diseased, the sweat, unhealthy tang of old fag-smoke makes me want to heave.

I pour myself a glass of lager and away we go again.

 

I moved to England reluctantly and pretty much because I had no option. My father had secured a plum job with Waltham Forest council having been almost run out of Glasgow for threatening to expose landlords who were scamming the homeless. He was a factory worker who had become a social worker, an occupation he approached in his habitual radical leftie way. He, my mother and little brother moved south in the searing summer of 1976 while I stayed in Glasgow with my granny and failed the Highers I was taking.

I was an emotionally cauterised teenager readying myself for life as ‘a waster’. I had been described by a teacher as a boy who had ‘no character or personality’ a claim to which my mother responded ‘Does that mean you don’t exist?’.

I felt like I didn’t exist or at least not in any meaningful way. The fact that I continued to exist was not through any heroic effort of will but because I was too cowardly to attempt the obvious option.

 Somewhere within me was that most desperate of aspirations: hope!

Why I mourned Glasgow I have no idea as its population offered me very little in the way of a warm embrace or a fond goodbye. Maybe I had Stockholm Syndrome without realising it: I loved and missed my torturers. My father was the same, writing beautiful, wistful poems about the damn place even though it had damaged him too. Only my mother, I think, never missed it as for her it was a place of darkness and early emotional abuse, and she was sensible enough to know she didn’t owe it any mawkish nostalgia. What my little brother’s views on the matter were I’m not sure but he’s now more Londoner than Scot and all the better for it.

Being a bit of a lost soul I naturally took to alcohol and pubs all too. The Crown was my first regular with its pool and darts teams and its sexy wee Asian wench behind the bar who seemed to take a shine to me. I gave her a Celtic scarf to wear romantic sod that I am. I felt like I was entering a womb when I went to the pub which was, increasingly, every night I could and the afternoon sessions at the weekend. A warm, bright, comfortable womb. I was now addicted to pub-life and also several of the liquids it purveyed. I entered a world of light and lager and Tuborg and Black and Tan and I found I had a mighty thirst for these things.

If I could have changed the name of this pub, I’d have named it The Electric Womb.

“Where you off to o waster son of mine, as if we didn’t know?”

“I’m off out to The Electric Womb, da, a place I’ve found that I’m happy in!”

I think this is maybe why my folks didn’t make a bigger thing about my drinking. They felt a little guilty about dragging me out of my homeland and I’d made such a big thing about how much I missed it that they couldn’t bring themselves to criticise this, my seeming happiness.

They must have wondered at me and my slow, aimless descent into dissolution. Being an outsider myself my friends tended to be of a similar stripe, loners and oddities and, in the shape of Rube, a certified lunatic.

Howard Rubens had no option to be other than a lunatic, it was his way of surviving a lunatic family. The only son of Monty and Phyllis he stood no chance of normality though that was what they expected of him. As they drove him madder and madder, they expected him to grow straight and true and a credit to them. He gave them only shame and this crucified him further.

One time when he was a gurgling wreck of a child-man in Goodmayes Hospital for the Bewildered after a serious suicide attempt, I wrote in my callow naivety to his consultant psychiatrist advising that he ‘take a look at Rube’s maw’ before he assesses Rube’s condition. Phyllis Rubens was away with the fairies and quite poisonous with it. If he was paying me a visit he’d have to leave my number with her (he’d be in his late twenties) and she’d proceed to ring him and order him home before she ‘burned the house down’. This would be under the influence of cider and pills and would send the poor fella into such a strain of anxiety, rubbing of hands, repeated gulping, that he would indeed go home to placate her. If I visited him at the family home in Gants Hill, which would have been a rare occurrence, I would see the effect she had on him. Her very presence sent him into spasms of anxiousness. Monty would pretend to be deaf, his only defence against this tiny dwarf-virago.

Mind you, I have to say they showed unexpected liberality in allowing him to ‘go busking in France’ with us so soon after his ‘Mogadon Shuffle’ in Goodmayes. Me at seventeen, Rube, a certified paranoid-schizophrenic, and Ray, ex-army and the eldest of the trio.

Ray Davidson was a brooding creature of habit from Berwick-On-Tweed. Six years a soldier had taught him that if his laundry was to be done on a Tuesday evening then that is when it would be done. You could eat your dinner off his shoes though I don’t believe anyone ever did. Dark, brooding and slow-seeming, he was indeed a clump of a man, but by far the manliest of us three troubadours off to the continent. Why then was I perceived to be ‘team leader’? They would very soon come to regret that notion.

I had been a tax collector but had given that up to go a-wandering. Being a tax collector was like being a paid tourist in London. I was based in Moorgate in the heart of the City of London – the Square Mile – but I ranged far and wide and up to the West End and into the hills of Hampstead and Highgate. I hounded diamond merchants in Hatton Garden and legal eagles in The Temple. I took my father’s politics with me everywhere and was even carpeted for refusing to address Michael Havers the ‘Sir’ which had been bestowed on him by Her Majesty.

It was an easy job as I rarely got to actually ‘see’ anyone, just leaving them a C55 to say I’d called and why. For this reason, I had much of the working day to call my own and would ‘go for a pint or two which was my want. Some of the pubs would have strippers on in the middle of the day. One in Clerkenwell and one off City Road that I frequented once or twice. 

Other than the obvious eroticism engendered in a chap not even legally old enough to drink I never quite knew what to make of this phenomenon. The music would strike up – Bad Company’s ‘Live For the Music I seem to recall – and there would appear a young-ish female cavorting in front of a pub half-full of leering men slurping from beer mugs. Most strange. Standing in a crowd of aroused males watching a woman undressing, taking in every aspect of her like a sexual inquisitor. Then, I guess, take the visual memory home and do something with it. I felt there was something sad and pathetic about it but irresistible at the same time.

When I wasn’t doing the outdoor work then office life was sedentary indeed. I remember once being tasked with filling up the ‘confidential waste sacks’, then tying them up and taking them down to some dungeon-like rooms in the basement of the building to be locked from who knew who? (pre-hacking Russians who needed to know if Joe Bloggs had complied with his Schedule D commitments?). As I was busy at the ‘tying-up’ stage a higher graded chap came up to me with Civil Service Manual open for my instruction. On those pages were directions on the knot proper to such work, illustrations and all. This was office life pre-computer. 

On my first day, for induction, I was handed a pencil, some basic stationery, and an ashtray. Folk smoked openly at their desks which is why they had to re-paint the walls and ceilings so often for it to turn nicotine brown again in no time. For a time, I sat opposite an old fella named Fred who blew out billows from his pipe to the extent that you could barely see him.

 

There were ghosts in the old Red Lion and Kenny’s pretty wife Tracey was a devout Spiritualist. In fact, more than this, I believe she was a Diabolist, a follower of Lucifer himself. Pretty as she was, Kenny rarely paid her any mind, he was too devoted to the drink and having larks with his friends old and new. Yes, he treated her neglectfully while the rest of us men went around slavering after her. We would have done anything for even a glance from her pretty blue eyes, and she was well aware of this.

She has us under her spell!

I know there are ghosts because I heard an old man snoring in the bed next to mine in the big room where staff and guests can sleep. This night I speak of there is only me in that room and the old man who isn’t there but snores and snorts and rattles like he is. In fact, this night I am the only one in this giant barn of a pub. Everyone else is out on the lash leaving me to hold the fort and lock up. By this time, I am pretty much excluded from the social activities that prevail. I am present at the lock-in’s but only because they need someone to serve the drinks while they get pissed and get up to their antics.

I have not proved myself worthy of full membership in their little clique. In fact, they view me as a little odd and a bit of an embarrassment. Far more embarrassing even than George the drag-act who appears sometimes in the public bar dressed in his full stage regalia: full-length split-leg dress, flouncy wig and full make-up. He is brother to Red Lion regular, Gary, a grown-up bovver boy with a sleeveless Union Jack t-shirt to show off his muscles. Gary appears mortified by the presence of his husky-voiced brother but is secretly proud that he is so readily accepted and enjoyed by the group.

I tell Tracy about my experience with the snoring ghost. She says it is the ghost of a former barman who hanged himself after being accused of pilfering the till. I ask how she knows this, and she says she knows all the ghosts in the premises. She also tells me she sticks pins in an effigy she has knitted of her husband and that is why he suffers a ghastly stomach complaint. I decided that I will make an effigy of the popular drag-queen and it won’t just be his stomach that hurts.

On the hovercraft from Ramsgate to Calais I’m already pissed having bought a bottle of duty free whisky before we left. This does nothing to allay Rube’s anxiety and he is gulping and wringing his hands like the crazy chap he is. Ray is stoic and silent and merely awaiting commands from his bevy-head group leader. We have no tents or camping equipment just sleeping bags. I have this great and very naïve idea about ‘the wilds’ and on the first night in Calais I have no notion of any other accommodation other than among some old church ruins in the town. This is somewhat easier for me as by this time I am howling and could sleep in the middle of the road I’m so desperate to get my head down.

Sleeping amid gravestones is not really Rube’s cup of tea and he’s so beyond anxious that he begins talk of returning to the relative safety of Essex but by the next morning which is bright and sunny I have managed to reassure him of better days ahead. Our next mission is to hitch-hike to Paris to begin our new career as street entertainers.

We walk and we walk long into the day and it becomes clear that, as a trio, we are not going to be picked up. Ray dark and brooding, Rube a small fidgety man who appears to be muttering urgently to himself and me six foot plus and swigging from a bottle of Bell’s – who’s going to take the risk? I make an executive decision and we watch our friend Ray walk off up a slow incline and on into the sunset. It seems to take an age until he finally disappears a small dot in the distance.

Rube and I finally get a lift from a French social worker in a Citroen. So far so cliched but then a most mighty storm starts brewing the minute the kind man drops us off at a campsite outside Boulogne having long ago tired of Rube’s joke to put ever more ridiculous French words in front of the sentence ‘Voulez-vous manger mon…’. One time it would be ‘pantalon’ the next ‘derriere’. It was funny the first time, but….!

The skies above Boulogne-sur-Mer opened and a biblical storm ensued. It roiled and rumbled and cracked and a torrential rain turned the grass on the campsite to mud in an instant. Lightning flashed and crackled, and thunder rumbled like the guts of hell. We were armed against this torrent with only sleeping bags. My leaderly wisdom decided that only the camp toilets would do. One night a graveyard the next a communal toilet amid a storm. Poor old Rube must have wished he was back in the relative comfort of the looney bin. Men of many nationalities cursed us that night as they were forced to step over us on the way to their ablutions and we in turn suffered a depressingly inevitable range of continental aroma’s.

The morning brought sunshine and calm, and Rube and I immediately rejected the notion of hitch-hiking all the way to Paris and jumped a train and had croissants and coffee for breakfast. Poor old Ray was a bedraggled figure dozing fitfully on a bench underneath the Eiffel Tower where we’d arranged to meet up. He told us shiveringly of his overnight ordeal plodding along French motorways in the howling wind and rain. He told us of being moved on by the Paris Gendarmerie as he tried to rest in the park. We did not tell him about our luxury ride into the capital and off we sauntered in the sunshine to sing The Wild Rover to the fine Parisiennes.