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VILLAGE INN

Have you been to the pub lately? The one in the village I mean, and do you, like me, remember it as it was fqrty years ago?. The flagstone floor with a West of England sack here and there to take the chill from your feet. The scrubbed table and the wooden benches and, in the midday opening times a faint smell of Jeyes disinfectant. Hogsheads of cider and beer in thirty-six gallon barrels. Real Ale it would be called today, excellent for the first day or so but getting flatter as time went by. Six old pence (2-2' p) per pint and cider at four pence.

In the summer it was cool and dark, a haven of rest from the harvest field. The midges played around the taps of the cider barrels and showers of hayseeds or straw would fall on a floor scored by the nails of generations of boots, and there was never a complaint.

Bread and cheese was just that - the end of a loaf, a wedge of cheese complete with the muslin on the rind and, if you chose, a couple of pickled onions. The excellent fare eventually became tarted up with a lettuce leaf, a sliver of tomato and a wrapped pat of butter and became a Ploughmans’ Lunch. The ploughmen of my youth would have looked askance but the modern tractor ploughmen survive it! People did not go to the pub to eat in those days to any great extent and only of necessity and the choice, if it had to be made was bread and cheese or bread and cheese or perhaps, on a Monday, a sandwich with beef cut from the Sunday joint!

In winter the taproom was warm and inviting and again a haven from the weather outside. The fire blazed merrily - it still does in some places - and the poker was often heated to mull the cider or beer. The redhot iron was plunged into the cup -cider was served in ware pots which gave it a good colour - and the drink hissed and gurgled and the froth overflowed onto the floor.

The talk was of the village - it was scandalous, what unmarried girl had become pregnant? It was sympathetic, some one had died and the thoughts were of the family. It was helpful, somebody had a difficult job to do, or it was lighthearted, the village dance had taken place the previous evening.

The talk is still of the village but somehow it is different, the whole atmosphere is different and I cannot quite fathom it. Perhaps it is because the people are different. Most of them no longer work on the land so that they do not have that common bond. They commute daily to the town and the conversation is no longer only of the village, which has taken second place in their thoughts. There are the retired people who bring into the pub a whole lifes’ experience of a different kind, the experience of the city which does not nick with the life of a village. There are the visitors - called grockles, unkindly to my mind - who come from far afield, even world wide. These people - on second thoughts they are not different, it is only their environment which has made them appear so - these apparently different people have altered the whole atmosphere of the village pub.

Their coming has pushed out the scrubbed tables and the wooden benches. It has brought covering to the flagstones in the shape of fitted carpets and easy-to-clean vinyl. It has brought the thatch from the roof into the bar and fairy lights among the bottles on the shelves behind the counter. It has brought a fruit machine to the corner and perhaps, Heaven help us, a record-player too. Their coming has brought highly polished tables and foam rubber cushions to the benches.

And yet these people did not want the chromium plated artifacts of the trade. They did not want the polished surfaces and the reproduction posters on the walls. They drive for miles seeking a ‘genuinely oId-fashioned country pub’ with a flagstone floor. But they search in vain. The pub of their imagination no longer exists and they regret its passing.

I too regret it. No longer can I and my helpers go straight from the harvest fields at dusk after a long day’s work and refresh ourselves in the pub. Common courtesy dictates that we shed our filthy oilstained clothes. and wash our sweaty bodies before we mingle with the nicely dressed people who frequent our village pubs on a summer evening. The smell of honest toil would not be appreciated and I do not criticise them for this but I would feel out of place. For me the effort of cleaning up after a day in the fields and driving two miles to the pub for the short time left of the licensing hours is no longer worth it. I settle for a cup of tea and a look at the late news on television.