Climbing the Stairs (7 page)

Some twenty to thirty years after this, when I was married and Albert and I used to go into pubs, they were different. Or at any rate they seemed different. Most of them had three bars –
public, private, and saloon – and people seemed to keep to their particular definition. The type of customer was different or dressed different. In the public bar would be the working class.
Working class, that is, who never dressed up at any time, never changed and wanted the bar to be just spit and sawdust, darts and dominoes. Then in the private bar would be the kind of people who
didn’t want to go in the public bar where the language and the people were too strong and salty for them, but nevertheless didn’t want to mix with what they thought were the snooty ones
in the saloon. The saloon bar was a mixture. You’d get the working-class people who when they’d finished their work would dress themselves up and go there as well as the well-to-do who
used it as a matter of course. We used to go in the private bar during the week because it was cheaper, but at a weekend we dressed ourselves up and always went in the saloon. It was a sort of
class and dress consciousness.

Although they weren’t the same kind of places they were still friendly and cheerful. Full of people, especially at weekends, and they’d still got the mahogany and mirrors and brass
beer handles – the impedimenta of a pub. Barmaids were in the ascendancy, and to have a barmaid instead of a barman made a vast difference. They were bright, cheerful girls, often peroxided
or hennaed which was all the go in those days, and with the beer or spirits they dispensed a fund of good humour. They’d listen to you; if you had a hard-luck tale, they’d be
sympathetic, or if you told them a bawdy story they’d screech with laughter. They were all things to all people and they added sort of another dimension to the pub.

I don’t know how they stood socially. It sounds terrible to compare them to prostitutes – they weren’t of course – but just as there is a type of man who likes
prostitutes and prefers them to anyone else, so there was a type of man who liked barmaids. But never in a million years would they ever have dreamt of marrying them. They loved them, called them
‘sweetheart’, told them things they’d never have told their wives, shared their business troubles, their office jokes, and you know how obscene office jokes are, laughed with them
and teased them and often bought them presents. They treated them I suppose as a wealthy man might his kept woman, and they expected the same things from her, except of course the sex bit, but
marry them – never.

Christmas in the local used to be like the old childhood Christmases. The decorations, Christmas trees and a spontaneous kind of gaiety. The landlady would come round with the gin bottle for the
ladies, and the landlord would dispense free beer to the men. In the local Albert and I used in Chelsea it was a mixed kind of pub – rich and poor – but all knew each other, and
although Albert and I didn’t join any of the large parties it wasn’t because we wouldn’t have been welcome. It was just that we didn’t accept from people drinks that we
couldn’t afford to return. And people respected that. But you could talk to anyone in there. You didn’t feel ostracized because you weren’t in a position to buy a round. And the
talk was interesting and friendly. You could either pass the time of day or have half an hour’s intelligent conversation – so that for very little money you could have an enjoyable
social evening.

I suppose pubs really started to change after the last war, and that change is now almost complete. Occasionally you’ll come across one of those pubs that’s still got the glass, the
mahogany and a whiff of the old atmosphere, but you are made to feel an alien – an unwelcome stranger. I suppose the landlord doesn’t want you because the pub might become popular. Then
he’d have to employ staff, the brewers would raise the rent, he’d lose the regulars he’s used to and the way of life that suits him. And the customers think on the same lines.
They’ve seen what’s happened in other pubs and they don’t want it to happen there – and who’s to blame them.

I think that television was the beginning of the end of pubs as we knew them, as television has been the death of so many things. I remember when it first came in how the pubs tried installing
television in the bar. That was an absolute disaster. If you’ve ever been into a pub in the early days of television you’d know what I mean. The bar would be full of people all
watching. And apart from the noise of whatever programme was on, it would be as silent as the tomb. You’d go in and ask for your drink in a whisper. And if you didn’t want to watch the
thing, which we didn’t, you’d start a
sotto voce
conversation. Then the heads would flash round and shh you like snakes. Oh, it made a real jolly evening out. It didn’t
take long for publicans to realize that installing television was no answer to this falling trade, because the people watching television spent very little money and the people that didn’t
want to watch were so bored that they gave up coming into the pubs. And that I think was the beginning because people lost the habit. This doesn’t apply in the City and the West End of
London. There, pubs are lovely places to go to, particularly at dinnertime. You get food, drink, and conversation. No, it’s the provinces that seem to have given up trying.

Some people blame the decline of pubs on the influence of women. I don’t agree of course. To my mind the presence of women has done away with a lot of drunkenness. Whereas men on their own
didn’t care how they got – the kind of disgusting condition men can get into left on their own, over-indulging in foul jokes and things like that – when they’ve got a woman
with them or near them they’ve got to not only moderate their language, they’ve got to moderate their drinking too. Because the money’s got to do for two people instead of one.
No, I think women add a great deal to pubs. Surely a pub is a place for social intercourse. Well, if it’s only going to be exclusively for men, they’ve got very little conversation,
because men are inherently lazy about using their brains. They’re not interested in talking about anything but their work, dirty stories, what girl they’ve been out with or what girl
they hope to go out with, and what they’re going to do to her when they get her out. Women have changed this. So I think they’ve done a lot for pubs.

In any case with the equality of the sexes rearing its ugly head, as men put it, why shouldn’t women share in the social life? When you marry a man you don’t expect that your domain
is going to be just the home, do you? An example of what it used to be like is this. About eight o’clock at night the man says, ‘Well, I’m off to have a drink. Cheerio. I
shan’t be late. Have my supper ready for me when they close.’ What the devil did he think you were? He could’ve waited till the cows came home for his supper as far as I was
concerned. And when he came back he’d have found I was out too. That’s what so many working-class wives had to put up with. They were nothing but unpaid housekeepers. I wasn’t and
I never intended to be.

What I think has changed pubs, and what may eventually almost destroy them, is ‘nationalization’. Because that is what is happening. They’re being ‘nationalized’ by
financiers.

Instead of having any number of local breweries, family concerns, owning a few pubs in a small area – we’ve now got four or five industrial giants run by accountants and computers
from boot-box blocks of offices dictating what the public will drink. The pubs are managed for them by the faceless civil servants they now choose as landlords, tenants, or managers.

In the days of the small brewers they knew about local tastes and interests. They studied their customers. If it was thought that something was wrong with the beer the brewer would come round
and find out what. I’m willing to bet that half the people who brew the stuff now have never tasted it in their lives.

And the way they decorate and furnish places! They look clinical, like something out of the Ideal Home Exhibition. But pubs aren’t homes or they shouldn’t be. You come out of your
home for new surroundings and what do you find? Thick carpets, soft armchairs, a sort of cocktail-lounge effect. And the breweries say that’s what the customers want. How do they know? Did
they ask them? And if the customers want that why aren’t they there to use it? A lot of people – people like my husband and me – feel out of place in these cocktail-lounge kind of
places. But you’ve got to go there because they’ve done away with the private bar and you’ve only got two grades now – public bar and this kind of phoney set-up.

Then they haven’t got the drinks you want. My husband likes drinking beer – mild beer. And they don’t serve it except in the public bar. And when you ask you can see them
thinking, ‘What are you doing in here then if you can’t afford expensive drinks?’

It’s not just television. Maybe it’s because in an affluent society people don’t need what we do – the support and company of other people as a sort of prop in our
leisure time. Perhaps money does that for you. Makes you independent. But if that’s what being rich means, I don’t want it. I still need to depend on people for my enjoyment.

It was strange how packed the pubs used to be during the war – and I don’t think this was just because we had to have the alcohol. In a time of adversity we wanted the feeling of
togetherness. It’s a pity that it takes a war to give us this kind of unity with each other.

7

G
LADYS WAS THE
under-housemaid at my first place in London. She was a year older than me and although she wasn’t what you’d call a pretty
girl she had loads of personality. I used to look forward to our Sundays off together. Every other Sunday we got and we always started by going out to tea.

We used to go to rather posh places where they had all gold paint and plaster cupids and marble pillars, and for the price of a pot of tea and two or three cakes you could really feel that you
were living it up. We’d sit there and there’d be well-dressed people all around us with their high-faluting talk. And wooing young men would have their girls there.

Personally I could never see why people wanted to do their courting in restaurants. I think there’s nothing less conducive to love than seeing people opposite you chewing all the time. I
never could understand this mania that English people have for eating out. Either the food is so wonderful when you eat out that you’re not in the least bit interested in your partner, or
else you’re so interested in him that you aren’t taking a bit of notice to what you eat.

When I was trying to get a young man I’d never go eating because the way some young men eat – shovelling away at their food, chewing with their mouths wide open – you
can’t help thinking, ‘Heavens above, would I have to sit opposite that every day of my life if we got married?’ So it’s best not to know.

All men have got defects, we know that, but you don’t want them paraded in front of you before you’ve taken them on, do you? After you’re married you can do your best to
eradicate the defects but you can’t start eradicating before you’ve got your man up the aisle.

Then there’s the kind of man who always props a newspaper in front of him. Of course you can’t see him eating but you want a man to talk to you.

The whole art of spending a married life together is not just popping up to bed. Your husband should be able to talk to you. Perhaps when you’ve been married years you don’t worry so
much, but when you first get married you visualize dainty food, a nice tablecloth and the man sitting there and talking to you about interesting things. Of course it’s all in your mind. It
doesn’t really materialize, but that’s what you think it’s going to be.

So I don’t think eating goes with courting.

Drinking is another thing altogether. You go into a pub or a lounge and you have a glass of wine with a stem to it and you sit there holding the stem and you gaze into each other’s eyes
over this glass of wine. You can really feel romantic like that. Love and wine go together but love and food don’t.

Mind you, you never found any young men in those kind of teashops because no unattached males ever went there. You’d find them in Lyons if you wanted to pick up a couple, but never if you
went in those kind of semi-posh places.

Still we had to give up the chase some time, didn’t we? We couldn’t devote our whole lives to looking for men.

One particular Sunday we decided that we’d go to the Trocadero. It was a place that we’d only been in once before and we’d found it too expensive for us. It was the height of
luxury. They had very deep carpets and beautiful subdued lights, and there was a band that played sweet and low music.

One of Gladys’s uncles had just got a job there as a trolley waiter and we thought we might get things a bit cheaper so we decided to chance it.

It really was marvellous.

They served tea in silver-plated teapots and instead of knives to cut your cake with you got those little forks with two prongs. I know it’s daft but nevertheless you feel that
you’re really moving with the high-ups when you don’t have a knife to eat your tea with.

The only thing was that Gladys’s uncle struck a somewhat incongruous note in all these luxurious surroundings. I suppose it was because he was over sixty and he’d got flat feet, a
very red nose and he’d a scraggy neck so his Adam’s apple bobbled up and down in a very peculiar way the whole time he talked.

Still when he brought the trolley to us I’d never seen such lovely cakes in my life – and he whispered to Gladys, ‘Have two for the price of one.’ And we did this two or
three times.

The beauty of the Trocadero was that you didn’t have to hurry. In some of the teashops we went in we didn’t like to linger because somebody might be wanting the table. But in there
nobody seemed to bother. It was a sort of afternoon ritual. We sat there nearly two hours.

And these teapots that they gave you. You could get four cups of tea for each of you if you kept sticking the hot water in. Of course eventually it came out almost like pouring it straight out
of the hot-water jug but that didn’t matter. We got four cups each so we sat there sipping away and listening to the band.