A lockdown look at the local …

I’ve spent a lot of time in bars and pubs. Growing up in the UK and reaching the age of 18, and legally able to drink alcohol, was a rite of passage. Of course, most of us would cautiously sidle into a pub, trying to hide in a crowd, at age 16 or 17. In those far off days, in the early ’60s, one was not required to carry state identification. Perhaps in the UK one still does not have to. Then one operated on the honour system, and if a few of us were just a wee bit dishonourable, well, then, so be it. Interestingly, the only time I was asked my age by a bartender, was on the occasion of my 18th birthday, and so my very honest answer was ’18. Today!’ Fortunately it was a pub I had never been in before so I was spared the implicit admission of former guilt.

Since coming to America, where they have bars rather than pubs, and where they also require people to carry ID. It was a bit of a jolt. Being a post-war kid, I had grown up on a diet of WW2 literature, and in particular, the real-life adventures of captured airmen and soldiers escaping German prisoner of war camps, devouring books such as ‘The Colditz Story’, ‘The Wooden Horse’ and ‘The Great Escape’; movies, of course, also played a part ... grainy black and white images of steam trains with ever-present inspectors, roadblocks ... the Nazis required all the citizens of Europe to carry identification papers. ‘Show me your papers’ was the command of officialdom, and was a constant source of paranoia to the escapee, who carried forged papers, and so I found it a bit odd that the same demand was to be found in the Land of the Free.

Over here bars are at times similar to English pubs, in that they may be local watering holes, places to meet friends, social destinations. Much of the time, however, they are more like service centres for alcoholics, more solitary drinking, less of the badinage that goes on in a pub. 

The one undeniable thing both have in common is the lack of social distancing, and although these days, virus or not, my bar hopping and pub-going are things of the past, I cannot help but wonder, like thousands of others, how things will look for the pub and the bar in the years to come.

In Britain, huge changes in social habits have been signalling the demise of the local for many years. Drinking and driving laws, the outlawing of smoking, and last but not least, the gentrification of the countryside. A pub that fifty years ago welcomed farm labourers and craftsmen nightly is probably only visited once a month by the stockbroker who has purchased the former labourer's cottage. And maybe twice a month by that young couple who built a bungalow on Farmer Perkins' cow pasture. Both of them commute daily by train to Bristol - the only thing commuting and community have in common is the first five letters of each word.

So this long preamble leads me to the meat of this course. I have been writing on myriad subjects for this website - the common thread stringing much of it together has been my traveling in the US while working in the music business, and odd ruminations on the effects of the Coronavirus, and the ensuing lockdown.

I intend to start a lockdown induced glance back at pubs I have known, and bars I have frequented throughout a lifetime. This won’t be the simple confessions of an old alchy, but a bit of a nostalgic reminiscence of bars past, although hopefully not in such Proustian detail that it will drive readers to drink. My English pub-going days were social occasions, most of my US bar visits were strictly business because it was mostly in bars - also known as nightclubs - that Roomful of Blues plied its trade.

I suppose the first memorable pub would be The Queen's Head in Holloway Street in Minehead, Somerset, a hundred and thirty miles from Winchester, where I grew up. My best boyhood friend was John Eatwell, and his dad, in a delicious stew of name and career, had a catering business, owning several restaurants and cafes, including The Wimpy Bar and The Crock of Cream in Minehead. And so was set in train a life-changing set of circumstances, for which The Queen's Head was, in retrospect, a key player.

1963 was a year of amazing change. The Beatles had their first number one, Harold Wilson became the leader of the Labour Party, Kim Philby defected, the Profumo affair exploded, Dr. Beeching began to dismantle the railway system, the Great Train Robbery took place, and a friend, Tom White, and I left home, hitch-hiking to Minehead, to work at Mr. Eatwell's restaurants - our first summer jobs, and our first time away from home.

Tom and I stayed at the restaurant, sleeping on the floor. I imagine that doesn't happen anymore, but who knows? We washed dishes, cooked burgers, cleaned up the restaurant after the last customers left. And being two teenagers on the loose, we went out every night, met a lot of locals, and generally made the scene - Saturday night dances, walks over North Hill, parties on the beach, the usually fruitless pursuit of girls. 

Previous visits to the West Country had been with my family, on camping holidays, and I had always loved the area, be it north Devon, Cornwall, the wild and dramatic Atlantic coast, with its breathtaking cliffs, secret little coves and harbours, the ever-present bracken, gorse and heather, daubs of yellow and purple accenting old stone walls and ruined barns. Dartmoor, Bodmin and now Exmoor became places of intrigue, mystery and enchantment. There was a loneliness, a sense of the sacred, of ancient places that whispered of geomancy. High on the cliffs solitary trees grew, bent by hurrying and urgent winds, as if seeking the safety of further inland; the smell of the sea was forever in the air, borne on the breezes that the gulls rode, squalling their news and information. It was then, and for me is now, a place that reeks of antiquity, and so exudes a feeling of serenity, of eternity being experienced in the here and now. 

Somerset was not only home to all of that; it was also the home of cider. Strong, strong cider. As sold in the Queen's Head. Being 'foreigners' Tom and I were rationed to two pints each whenever we went to the Queen's, and that was probably a good thing. The stuff was very strong, and by the time I returned to Minehead the following year, it had been banned from just about every pub except for the Queen's, and they would only serve locals. Thing was, Minehead was a tourist town, the archetypical English seaside resort, with a promenade with rows of deckchairs populated by old men with knotted handkerchieves on their heads next to ageing ladies with knotted varicose veins on their legs, tacky gift shops that sold ribald postcards of fat ladies, curvaceous blondes, and red-nosed lechers. It also had a Butlin's Holiday Camp. In the peak weeks of summer Butlin's would have ten thousand 'campers' and three thousand staff, nearly all seasonal workers from out of town. Drifters, dreamers and desperadoes. They had all heard of the magic of scrumpy, as the local cider was known throughout the British Isles, and all wanted to try it. None of them were prepared for its strength, its power and the succeeding results. By 1965 it was easier to score pot in Minehead than it was to buy a pint of cider.

The Queen's had two bars. The public bar, which opened onto Holloway street, and a snug which as far as I can remember had an entrance 'around the back'. I think I went into it once, and immediately knew I was completely out of place, peopled as it was by tweed-wearing ancients who spoke in a dialect so thick it was way beyond my comprehension. These men - for there were no women present - all drank cider. They got their glasses refilled by holding the empty through a tiny little opening in the corner of the room. When in the public bar, one could see this little hole in the wall, with a wizened hand pushing an empty glass, but not the face, not the body. Just a hand and a glass. And a call ' Clarry'. There were two main bartenders - the chief one, Clarence, known to all as Clarry, a portly ruddy-faced man in his late fifties, with centre-parted hair combed straight back, inevitably wearing a woollen cardigan, and a Spanish looking guy, with curly dark hair, sallow complexion, dark circles around his eyes and an air of being overwhelmed by everything. The Queen's had a rough reputation in those days - it was not really a tourist destination except for the unwitting, but it was the preferred meeting place for the town's working class, the artists and disaffected, and a regular entourage of seasonal workers who had perhaps landed a job in the town a few seasons ago, liked the town, made friends with some of the locals and had stayed on at the end of the season, going on the dole until Butlin's opened again for Christmas, Easter and the next summer. 

It was a wonderful mixture of people. Lunchtime there would be a lot of older people, such as Tom, an old farm hand with whom I became very friendly, who would regularly drink ten pints of cider, and then drive home to his cottage in Allerford four or five miles away. He took me home a couple of times, showing me his garden, and cooking me a huge lunch at four in the afternoon. He was probably about eighty, full of good humour and never seemed to get drunk. His wife had died years before, and he lived a solitary life, commuting to the Queen's midday and back to home and garden for the afternoon. Many of the lunchtime crowd were nighttime regulars too - indeed, they were there opening time to closing time. Chronically unemployable and chronically alcoholic. Like Ray, a broad-shouldered Welshman, who always wore a checked lumberjack jacket, always had an excuse not to work.  Always had an opinion on something, always tried to have the last word, and was always trying to borrow money which he was usually refused, a fact that he was forever angered by, seemingly unable to connect his lack of employment with his lack of funds.  Not long after I got to know him, he took up with a good looking young Scottish woman who, in spite of their regular and very public arguments, stayed with him for years, slowly losing her good looks, becoming pale gaunt and wan, and alcoholic. There was Arthur, a short effeminate intellectual, always well turned out in a tweed suit, screamingly gay before gay was a noun, and who was regularly beaten by homophobic assholes. Big Davey, a tall sad Scot in his late forties, forever in a loose and worn black suit, who could never seem to get a break, who told heartbreaking stories of being abused by his mother as a child, she taking lovers, and literally kicking him down the bed they shared to make room for her man of the moment. Ah, Big Davey, I remember him breaking down in tears as he tried to flush away these torments with cider and scotch. Joe Roberts, one of the head chef's at Butlins, a fast-talking Irish speed freak who was scoring dope from three different doctors on town, whose go-to opening conversational gambit was 'The crack is good in Cricklewood', and Pete Connolly, Scottish musician and raconteur, lover of poetry and literature and Glasgow, and his parents, Old Con and Betty, both prodigious drinkers, Old Con also a great reader and thinker, but who became incomprehensible by ten in the evening, the marriage of cider and the Glaswegian accent.

Another regular was Alan Rennison, another Scot, with a bent and broken nose, with a thirst for liquor that was impossible to quench - a man with the sweetest disposition, who was always happy to see everyone and ask after their health, in a genuinely gentle smiling and caring manner. One more was Tony Harper, a merchant seaman who was mad about rhythm and blues and '50's rock and roll. We'd sit at a table together, and talk records and shows we had seen. He'd regale me with tales of far-off lands, carousings in foreign ports, of how you could get any record in Singapore, really cheap, because of the rampant piracy there. Tony had an angular, jerky and probing manner of speech - his head and face making odd movements to emphasise a point. Sometimes one would be so fascinated by his very physical way of speaking it was hard to actually listen to what it was that he was saying.

For the first time in my life, I was spending time talking to people of all ages and from all walks of life. I suppose I should qualify that last statement a bit - to be sure, there were no lawyers, bankers, or policemen gathered around the bar - but there was an intriguing mix of ages, backgrounds, attitudes and interests.

If the midday drinking sessions at the Queen's were rural reminiscences with Tom and his ilk, the evening gatherings were a maelstrom of wild conversations, subjects veering from Robert Burns to William Burroughs, how Butlin's just sacked two hundred workers, Davey Graham to John Renbourn, how Butlin's just received three hundred workers from Czechoslovakia - did you hear the Czech girls don't shave their armpits? The Beatles to The Rolling Stones, the cops just arrested Wee Jim for fighting with his woman, how dangerous the gangs were in Glasgow compared to Belfast, to 'No Ray, I don't have any money, you still owe me five quid, and when am I gonna get that, eh?' And all the while Clarry and the Spanish looking guy were running from one side of the bar to the other, keeping the cider and beer flowing, taking empties from the hole in the corner, refilling them, and pushing them back, the two of them perspiring mightily, and the customers kept up their racket, imploring, arguing, shouting, laughing, waving arms, swearing, grinning, slapping backs, asking questions, puzzled looks, satisfied smiles, and bending elbows, swallowing, swallowing and swallowing, pausing for a moment to consider another question, to light a cigarette with an unsteady hand, a bloodshot eye trying to focus on the match.

As the hands of the clock swept on, and closing time approached, the drinking became more frenzied, Clarry's cardigan was off, the roar of the bar swelled and intensified, the air was a soup of smoke, beer and cider fumes, all seasoned with the body odours of the crazed and drunken crowd, collectively hurtling towards ten minutes past eleven, the end of drinking up time, the lawful ten minutes allowed by law to finish your last drink. 

'Time! Time, gentleman, Please! Time!' Hollered Clarry, wiping his brow, washing glasses, wiping the bar, 'Time! It's Time -Go Home -the Lot of You', said with a weary grin and a wink at the Spaniard.

Ah, those poor residents of Holloway Street, having to endure the turning out of the inebriates every night, the arguments, the laughter, the catcalls, the exuberant shouts and singing. By 11.30, silence returned, and the night reclaimed its majesty, cloaking the street, and the town, with its shadows and mysteries.