People in the Pub 1 - Nostalgia for the past

He has a story to tell, but no-one to tell it to. Life hasn’t been easy since the return to London. The street looks the same; those rows of houses, each seemingly innocuous, but loaded with memories of youth. The day when his father had left with barely a goodbye, and the absence of twenty years that followed.

Happier times; the celebrations, crowds of familiar faces, arm-in-arm, singing songs joyfully and far into the night. The time when Brian had lost a bet and had had to streak all the way down the road, only to find a slow patrolling police car had chose that very moment to roll past.

He remembers the race riots in the early eighties. The appalling treatment of the Pakistani immigrants in the corner shop. The sour regret at feeling helpless to do anything to help them.

The pub is still on the corner, where he had his first drink, age fifteen. His uncle had allowed him a taste (after much persuasion) and had subsequently turned his nose up when he asked for lager. “Bloody Euro-fizz,” he had said. Strangely, this had subconsciously influenced his drinking habits way into his adult life.

The pub is different now. A group of Spanish students sit around a table, eating olives and drinking white wine. He likes to think of himself as a well-rounded sort of chap, happy to embrace people from other countries. Though as he sips his London Pride, this all seems so wrong. He mildly loathes himself for feeling this way, and sits on the bar stool quietly, half reading the sports pages of the Daily Mirror.

The dank smell of years of spilt beer and ancient cigarette smoke, the slight yellowing of the walls, the ancient clock with its roman numerals offer some comfort, but within these walls is a map of his past that no-one here could understand. The bad discos and ill-judged copulations with friend’s sisters. He allows himself a smile now at this memory; of the sheer terror as a gang of ten older boys had chased him down the street. There is a slight scar just above his left eyebrow. They had taught him a lesson that day that went far beyond the code about fooling around with friend’s siblings. They had taught him about the community, the importance of people close to you.

Resntful of finding himself middle aged and bitter, he plays up to this stereotype. Joan used to run this place. Third generation. He makes sure the barman knows it. The people he once knew have long since gone, and now the most prominent sound in the pub is not old George crooning a war song, dewy eyed and looking down at the remains of his seventh pint of Light and Pride, but a language and a youth he has no recognition of.

He orders another drink. His third. “You from round here then mate?” he asks as the young barman hands him his change. “No, been here just a few months.” He smiles, wryly.