Portrait of Elmbury (13 page)

“If the drop do freeze in the cup of the blum
  We shall have neither cherry nor plum!”

And yet if the season were too kind there would almost always be a glut of fruit so that the crop was practically worthless. The weather, and the law of supply and demand, worked hand-in-hand with a crazy capitalism to frustrate the fruit-farmer; so that his best hope of making money was that a hard frost should blight the trees of his neighbours and, as sometimes happened, leave his own unharmed. Given such a stroke of luck, a man whose average profit was two hundred pounds might make two thousand. Thus was fruit-farming conducted in a state of anarchy and disorder; with that old and disorderly anarch, the weather, turning things topsy-turvy each year.

All manner of things came our way for sale or valuation from time to time: shop-fittings, the machinery of a flour-mill, builders' materials, standing timber, the stock-in-trade at public-houses. Timber was an expert's job and we used to call in the help of a wonderful old man called Charlie Hewlett, who was over eighty, yet he could walk all day through woods and parkland, and when he had stared at a tree for a few seconds through his old and bleary eyes he could tell you its height and girth and its cubic content when reduced to timber. Although he was the judge condemning them to death, a hundred great trees in a day, he loved them and would shake his head sadly over the fate of each. “ 'Tis a fine sound oak,” he would moralise, “and three hundred years if it's a day, and all sprung from one little
acorn. ‘Twould thrive for another three hundred if 'twere let be. Pity, pity.” And he would pick up a sprouting acorn and plant it in the soil. “Please God make that grow another oak as fine.” Alas, I doubt if any of Charlie Hewlett's acorns are saplings now; for you can't plant a tree like that. Rabbits nip off the green cotyledons; cattle and horses eat the young sprout down to the ground. But there was something in the idea; England would be a lovelier place if landlords were compelled by law to plant a tree, and to tend it, for every proud spreading oak or tall elm their woodmen chop down.

It was my humble task, at these valuations, to chip off a piece of bark with a hatchet and paint a number on the smooth piece of wood; which was like signing the tree's death warrant, for next season the timber-feller would come with his axe and saw, and read that number upon the paper his master had given him, and set to work upon its great bole.

Public-house valuations were also matters for a specialist; but we had an expert of our own in one of the partners who knew all the esoteric customs of the trade. He carried a curious little instrument in a box, with which he performed experiments upon samples of whisky and gin. He was inclined at first to be rather secretive about it; I think he liked to be thought a bit of a witch-doctor; and he was disappointed when I demonstrated that I could use the little instrument too and carry out the simple experiment for determining specific gravity. “Do they teach you
that
sort of thing at school?” He was rather shocked. “Waste of money,” he said; and I remembered Mr. Chorlton's advice: “Stick to your classics,” and agreed with him; though I daresay he'd have thought Latin and Greek were a waste of money too.

These pub valuations, in contrast to those of Tenant Right and farming stock, were rather sordid affairs. Death or disaster was almost always the occasion of them, for inn-keeping is rarely a lifetime's profession like farming and a man takes a pub when
he retires in order to ensure him company and a small income during his declining years. He stays in the same pub, as a rule, until he dies or until the Brewers kick him out. Therefore our clients on these occasions were generally either distressed widows or men broken by drink or—curiously enough, most frequently of all—men broken by their wives' drinking. I remember one meek little man who hadn't a vice in the world, nor a five-pound note, who flitted about nervously while we valued what little was left of the spirits and confided to us tolerantly: “It's the missus, you see, bless her, she likes her little nip from time to time!' Another innkeeper, ruined by horse-racing, was far less interested in the price he would get for his few remaining assets than he was in a peak-faced menial wearing a battered bowler hat who crept in and out of the bar furtively bearing betting-slips to Mr. Benjamin, the local bookie. A seafaring man, whose arms and neck were tattooed with landscapes showing the sea-fronts of Yokohama and Singapore, and with dragons from China and wondrous beasts from all the jungles of the world, accompanied our deliberations with song. He was suffering from delirium tremens, and the words of his song, endlessly, repeated, were:

“O for the wings of a—
Soda-water—bottle!”

and each time he came to the words “soda-water-bottle” he made the appropriate gurgling and sizzling noise.

Sometimes neither drink nor women nor betting were the ruin of the publicans, but just sheer financial folly or bad luck. There were certain small and dingy pubs in depopulated villages where it was impossible in any circumstances to make a living. These, of course, were the ones we got to know best: the tenancy changed every two or three years. There was one in particular which stood in a small village opposite another, and larger, pub called the Angel. It was always a wonder to me that anybody ever went to the little pub at all, so dreary and dismal was it both inside and out; and indeed, scarcely anybody did, except on the occasion of the installation of a new landlord, when it
was likely that there would be free drinks all round. The old men of the village sombrely accepted these, drank them rapidly, wished the newcomer luck in much the same tone as one would use in wishing luck to a man suffering from an incurable disease, and took themselves off, shaking their heads and declaring gloomily: “‘E seems a nice fellow enough, but 'e'll never do any good there 'cause 'e's got the Angel up agin 'im!”

The last owner of this pub, which was a free house
¹
and was known throughout the village as The Landlord's Ruin, had more money to spend than his predecessors. He soon realised that there was no profit to be made out of the old men, so he decided to try to attract the custom of the town. “I'm going all out for the Better Trade,” he said; by which he meant young men in sports cars and girls who drank gin. To the great wonder of his neighbours he installed a chromium-plated cocktail-bar and a shelf full of unfamiliar bottles bearing unfamiliar names. He had a card printed and placed it in a glass frame outside; the village came to read it and lo! the first title in the long list was:

BOSOM CARESSER

The village went away dismayed; but the landlord stood happily in his cocktail-bar experimentally compounding many-coloured drinks and waiting for the crowds of rich young men and attractive young women who, no doubt, would drive out from Elmbury as soon as they heard that the new cocktail-bar was open.

Night after night he waited; but the customers never came. Possibly one or two started out to try to find the place; but it's pretty certain that they got lost on the way. For you have to take the third turning on the left, off the main road, and then the right-hand fork at the bottom of the muddy lane—if you take the wrong one you fetch up in Farmer Guilding's duck-pond— and then you have to keep left down a winding cart track with many turnings, and then you go down a drive with four gates which swing against the car unless you've got somebody to hold them open; and finally a very sharp right turn brings you to
the pub—but if, as is most likely, you miss it and go straight on you drive down a steep slope into the river.

Now I come to think of it, there was a young man drowned in such a fashion just about that time; and perhaps he was the first customer on his way to the little pub. There were no more; and the landlord waited and waited, until at long last a car drove up to the front door and he prepared to shake a Bosom Caresser; but alas, it was no customer, but a dun employed by the Wine and Spirit Merchant, come to demand payment of their bill.

In Elmbury itself there were twenty-eight pubs to serve a population of less than five thousand. Of course on market days this population was swelled enormously by people coming in from the country, and in the summer there were “outings” and visitors from the cities as well. On the other hand, there must have been among Elmbury's five thousand, if no teetotallers at least two thousand five hundred women, children, and sick people who drank rarely or not at all. That leaves one hundred persons to a pub. I don't understand the economics of the business but I confess that if I wanted to be a rich man I should think twice before I took a pub in Elmbury.

The Nonconformist Ministers and the few militant teetotallers who troubled us and wrote letters to the local paper regretting “the drinking habits of Elmbury's population,” always made this point about the great number of pubs in proportion to the inhabitants, and seemed to think it was a very lamentable state of affairs. But this was great nonsense. A man doesn't drink ten drinks because there are ten pubs in his street; and if he is in the habit of drinking ten drinks he usually drinks them all in one pub. In fact almost every man has his own “local” where the beer, the company, the darts, the landlord or the barmaid happen to be to his taste; and since men are conservative in their habits he rarely makes a change.

However, at every session of the Licensing Justices there was much talk of “redundant” licences; and from time to time they would refuse to renew the licence of some small pub, and some poor man's “local” ceased to exist. The Brewers who owned most of the pubs were partly to blame for this. They were only too glad to exchange two old licences—perhaps of pleasant but unprofitable little pubs—for one new licence, promising to build a roadhouse “with large commodious bars and every modern amenity.” The Justices, and oddly enough especially the teetotal justices, seemed to believe that there was some special virtue in large and commodious bars, catering for people who came in cars and charabancs, and some special wickedness in small cosy bars where old friends got together for their evening drink. But for my part I always regretted the passing of the little pubs. I'd rather sit round the fire with half a dozen good fellows in the Wheatsheaf or the Barrel and drink beer from the wood than perch myself on a high stool at a long bar in a roadhouse and be served by refained and supercilious young women with stuff called beer which comes sizzling out of a tap after having been pumped through miles of chromium-plated pipes by hundreds of pounds' worth of machinery. Nor is this just my old-fashioned obscurantism; the majority of the population, it seems, likes the little pubs also and people from the cities drive twenty miles on Sunday morning to crowd us out of our local because they hate the big roadhouses too. A pub, after all, is not just a place for convenient drinking; if it were these modern palaces with their ceaseless fountains of beer would serve the purpose very well. But a pub is primarily a meeting-place for friends; where friends as well as drinking may talk, argue, play games, or just sit and think according to their mood. The personal relationship with the landlord is important too, it is good that there should be a “host,” for thus good manners are observed. I would rather that my host was the landlord of a little pub, a poor man drinking with his fellows, than a “manager” who has no more in common with his customers than the manager of a chain-store; which is exactly what he is.

Nevertheless, the Licensing Justices who were appointed
because they were teetotallers (and therefore best qualified to arrange things for the comfort of people who drink) got their way, and Elmbury lost the Three Tuns and the Cross Keys and got its “roadhouse” instead. And it doesn't matter much; for we've still got the Shakespeare, nobly named, where the farmers' sons talk about horses and never tire of admiring the engravings of “The Midnight Steeplechase” upon the wall. We've still got the Swan, of which I shall have more to write later; the George, the Black Bear, the White Bear, the Railway; the Anchor, where Pistol, Bardolph and Nym will come up to you hopefully and, if you buy them a drink, will tell you a tale of arms and the man; the Goat and Compasses, which seems to be built around its enormous landlord, so that if he wants to go out he must edge sideways through the door; the Barrel, the Wheatsheaf, the Coventry Arms which has a little back-parlour where grave old citizens like to sit in semi-darkness and sip their beer and talk of old times while the shadows close in upon them; the Plough, the Wagon and Horses, and the Red Lion where the drovers gather after market.

These endure; but the Brewers and the Teetotallers, strange and ominous partnership, have plans for another of their great, shining drinking-palaces on the new by-pass road just outside the town. They have established a curious and illogical principle that no new licence will be granted unless an old one is surrendered; and this time it will be the Goat and Compasses, or perhaps even the Coventry Arms, which is sacrificed to Moloch.

But much as I delight in pubs, I didn't much like the valuations; the ruin of their landlords was a dreary tale too often repeated, and since it was inseparable from the auctioneer's profession that he should be in at the kill each time I found the business depressing. There was another aspect of my profession which I heartily loathed; and that was the job of conducting furniture sales. These, too, were generally the consequence of
somebody's death; and I was a bit squeamish about them. People's possessions are sharp reminders of their personality; and I couldn't help feeling that it was an insult to the Household Gods when the chair in which Mr. So-and-So had sat by the fire each evening, his pipe-rack, his favourite books, were offered for the comments of a noisy and cynical crowd, usually to the accompaniment of appalling jokes. There was a kind of convention about these jokes. They were traditional. “Who'd sleep on the floor when he could buy a bed at this price?” the auctioneer would say. He'd said it a thousand times; other auctioneers had said it a million times; but the crowd always laughed. It was a formality and it was harmless, but it always made me squirm. He had his set, conventional jokes for almost everything he sold: the mattress, the mirror, the hearthrug, the chamber-pot, even for that rather useless article which almost everybody possesses yet nobody really knows what it is until he sees it described in the auctioneer's catalogue: the jardinière.