If there is one thing my parents agreed on, even after they split up when I was 10, it is that my first word was ‘pub’.
It’s not wholly surprising. I love pubs. I love the way they bring together otherwise disparate groups of people who, for as long as they are inside those heavy wooden doors, are united across a sea of sticky tables and clinking glasses. I love dry-roasted peanuts and soggy coasters, the raucous laughter of strangers and the unmistakable sound of a pool-cue thwacking a ball cutting above the thrum. I love the exhilarating freedom of a pub garden in Summer, and the comforting wall of warmth that hits you when you walk inside the bar on a Winter’s evening. I love the way you can go in by yourself and sit with your thoughts, or meet old friends and come away having made new ones. I even love the smell, especially when the smoke wafts back in through the door, instantly transporting me back to a handful of bars around North London where I spent a large portion of my childhood, teens and early twenties – in front of, and for a while, behind, the bar.
In fact, the only person I know who loves pubs as innately as I do is my nine-year-old daughter who declared when she was five that when she was a grown-up she would own a pub called Window Pindows. Pubs, she says, are her favourite place in the world ‘because everybody is happy there’.
While my daughter’s theory is flawed, I understand the sentiment. For centuries deemed the beating heart of the British community, the public house is, above all else, somewhere to feel less alone. This is partly why it was so heartbreaking when the outbreak of Covid 19 forced landlords to ring for last orders, indefinitely, back in March.
Finally, with the partial easing of lockdown on Saturday, publicans across the land are preparing to open their doors again. For sure, with social measures distancing in place and altered service for the foreseeable future, the scene will be very different in the short term, and yes, it remains unfathomable to me that the Government has prioritised reopening a swathe of leisure and hospitality facilities above schools.
Nonetheless, I can’t help but delight in the imminent return of an institution I first fell in love with as a child, gorging on crisps and pineapple juice with my dad and those who would congregate there most afternoons, forming the kind of motley crew that traditional boozers do best.
Over the years, I was met by the same scruffy carpets and the same faces as I weaved in and out of the pubs of Camden and Kentish Town, in my father’s footsteps. I knew the phone numbers of those places by heart, not least The Camden Falcon where my Dad’s mate Baxter, who was the landlord, would pay me 50p a cassette to listen to the demo tapes dropped off by punk bands hoping for a slot to play in the back room. This was presented on the fair basis that even a seven-year-old girl was a better judge than he was what constituted banging punk music than he was - but it was probably also a ploy to distract me from finally getting so bored at times that I insisted on being given the key to the pool table.
Wherever I am, there is something about stepping into a pub that feels safe – a known, even in an unknown city.
Today, The Falcon has been replaced by smart flats, and it’s not the only one. Yet, even if today the landscape of those institutions that were pivotal in my formative years has been smudged away in parts, with pubs gentrified beyond recognition or simply knocked down, for me, their ghosts hover.
On almost any afternoon of the week in the Eighties and Nineties you could walk in to any one of a handful of boozers around Kentish Town and Camden and find my dad perched at the bar, dressed in double denim, glasses hanging from a cord around his neck and a curl of Café Crème rising from the ashtray, having clocked off from his job as a joiner in the now-transformed railway arches at King’s Cross, where his joinery business was based. Beside him might be his mate Terry the opera-buff who owned the hot-dog stand outside Bagleys nightclub, comparing crossword clues, or Big Stavros who was all of five foot four, Bud, Bob, or several blokes of varying shapes and sizes, all named Bill. As night fell, the energy would inevitably shift, a swell of newcomers seeping in like uninvited guests at a wedding, threatening to shatter the fragile peace for the regulars who counted these perches as much their personal property as their own furniture.
Partly because of who my dad was, partly of my own volition, as a teenager I got weekend jobs in various bars, first as a waitress and then – with a great deal of pride – graduating to the bar. When I moved to Brighton for university, the same day my dad left London to start a new life in a dusty village in the Languedoc in South of France, where he died in 2009 when I was 26, one of the first things I did was get a bar job. From dingy nightclubs to sea-front boozers, I worked behind the bar at more establishments in those student years than I can name. And at every turn, I felt at home.
Wherever I am, even now, there is something about stepping into a pub that for me, feels safe – a known, even in an unknown city. To this day, a whiff of the beer barrels in a damp cellar as I pass on my way to the loos, or a hint of the sweary behind-the-scenes bustle of the kitchen, still kickstarts a rush of adrenaline.
For many writers, there are places to which we like to return again and again in fiction. For me, I found that with my second novel, A Double Life, I kept finding myself coming back to the darker recesses of the pubs that I’ve known all my life. Partly, these are useful places to set a novel such as mine, which pivots around the lives of two women, one of whom is a tenacious local reporter who witnesses an attack on the way home for a party, and the other a senior negotiator at the FCO. With their low-lit corners, background noise and free-flowing booze, pubs are the perfect place to share shady moments, to have secret liaisons and to find out everything about people who have no idea they’re being watched.
Partly, I know, my love for the pub is about nostalgia – for my childhood, for my dad, for a world that no longer exists. But mainly, I think, it’s a sort of instinct. I know pubs – I know how people work when they’re inside them, and this, I suppose, brings an air authenticity. So yes, I will be raising a glass to the reopening of the greatest British pub, whatever that renewed form takes – and I’ll be taking my daughter with me.
A DOUBLE LIFE, BY CHARLOTTE PHILBY IS PUBLISHED BY THE BOROUGH PRESS ON 9 JULY.