In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy has a running skit about the alehouse in his heroine’s home village where her father, and quite often mother too, disappear for hours at a time. People aren’t allowed to drink on the premises, so are strictly limited to ‘a little board about six inches wide and two yards long, fixed to the garden palings by pieces of wire’. But as the locals don’t like drinking while standing outside, they all head into the landlady’s bedroom and perch on her bed, chest of drawers and washstand while supping ale. And if anyone comes to the door during these sessions, the landlady, as she hurries to answer, repeats loudly her pseudo-legal disclaimer: ‘A few private friends I’ve asked in to keep up club-walking at my own expense.’
I thought this was a comic evocation of a long-vanished culture. That was until the summer when I went into a pub in Plaistow, east London. I had never visited the place before but as she was serving me, the landlady said: ‘Oh we know you, don’t we — you’re in here all the time — so we’ve got your details on here already, haven’t we?’
It took me a second to cotton on. She was practically winking while nodding in the direction of the bar top, where there were forms on which I was meant to record my contact details. But in order to save her customers the hassle, she had instead come up with this faux-familiarity ruse.
Drinkers and the trade that grew up around them have always been resourceful at bending rules. Just within my drinking career I think of the serving of ‘meals’ that amounted to little more than bags of crisps to get around the pre-1990s dry Sunday afternoon laws; or the forming of spurious ‘social clubs’ with ‘members’ to swerve the legalities of a cash bar at a private party; or, of course, the classic 11 p.m.
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