Lost and Not So Lost Worlds

A few months ago, my son Tom and I went to see the comedian Harry Hill at Cambridge Corn Exchange. It was a terrific show, I laughed my head off. At one point, he was lamenting the skills we have lost in this machine intelligence age, and among these skills he included stealing women’s underwear from washing lines. He had various other ridiculous examples, but I’ve forgotten them. Anyway, rather clumsily, this brings me round to the theme of lost worlds, which I’ve visited several times in these blog posts.

The first thing that occurs to me is a world which is not lost at all, which goes on very nicely but without me. Linda and I had a lovely time last weekend. Her sister Margaret had got us tickets to see Martin Stephenson and the Daintees at The Old Woollens, Leeds on the Saturday night. Instead of going straight to Yorkshire, however, we went to Lincoln on Friday afternoon, stayed in a hotel a few yards from the Castle, and went on up to Yorkshire on the Saturday morning.

Lincoln is a beautiful city, and we had a very pleasant walk round it on the Friday afternoon, ending at about five o’ clock with a pint in a great wee pub called The Strugglers, also just by the Castle. Set aside the rather alarming inn sign above, and the grisly history of the location (former site of hangings). What we noticed was that the pub was packed and there was a considerable deal of coming and going, as people came in for a quick drink or two after work and then left. There is something unique, stimulating and relaxing at the same time, about that Friday early evening bustle.

I think that up to then I had assumed that the habit of going for a pint with your mates straight from work on Friday, to mark the start of the weekend, had died out, along with the larceny of foundation garments mentioned above. That I was unaware of it was not just because I’ve been retired for a year, it’s also because for almost forty years before I retired, it wasn’t the practice in any of the places I worked.

In the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s when I was a student and later when I was a research fellow, it was the practice of a select band (i.e., bunch of bevvy merchants) from the statistics and economics departments to assemble at five o’ clock on a Friday in The Captain’s Bar, South College Street. Similarly, when I worked in Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow in the 1980’s, several of the colleagues in our department would go to the hospital social club on Friday evening before going home. But it hasn’t been part of my working life since 1985. Prior to the revelation in The Strugglers Inn, I should have realised that like so many supposedly lost worlds, it hasn’t gone anywhere: I have.

One world that is lost, and good riddance, is the paranoia of licensing hours. When I was a young man in Scotland, pubs opened from 11 am to 230 pm, and from 5 to 10 in the evenings. People used to cram as much booze into their faces as possible in the last fifteen minutes of opening. I supplemented my student grant by working as a barman, and that part of the evening wasn’t fun. And only hotels were allowed to open on Sundays. When I was a child in the early 1960s, to get a drink even in a hotel, one had to be a bona fide traveller.

I am in the process of writing a novel with a mistaken identity/doppelganger theme, and I thought I would have an interlude in the middle, a kind of knocking at the gate in Macbeth. One of the characters reminisces about an uncanny and possibly supernatural story his grandfather told him about those bad old days of bona fide travellers. So here is that interlude, a sneak preview of my next Greatest Miss, The Cowboy Angel Rides. Note that this is fiction and I have changed a lot of the place names in Fife.

                                                          ***********************************

My grandfather Tony Durkin once told me about an unnerving incident in his life in the 1950’s. Prior to the Licensing Act (Scotland) of 1962, only hotels were allowed to serve alcoholic drinks on a Sunday, and then only to ‘bona fide travellers’. This meant that in order to be served drink, you had to be more than three miles from your home, and had to declare your destination of travel. How strictly the law was enforced and how thoroughly the details of travel were documented usually depended on the level of zeal of the local police force in controlling alcohol use.

Tony lived in the village of Corburn in Fife, and as a determined pub-frequenter he would drive his Hillman Minx to the Burnside Hotel in the town of Galton, five miles away, every Sunday evening. There he would enjoy a few drinks before driving back to Corburn. This was the 1950’s, remember- the past is a foreign country. The quiet country roads had few cars on them, but substantial numbers of those cars were driven by men (almost invariably men) who were the worse for drink. Drunk driving was illegal, but prosecutions were rare outside of collisions and other accidents. Unusually, Tony had been prosecuted for drunk driving a couple of years ago. He had pleaded guilty but asked that his sentence not include a driving ban, as he had a duty to drive the priest from Saint Margaret’s church in Galton to Corburn every Sunday morning, to say mass in the village hall. The magistrate did not accept this argument and banned him from driving for six months, remarking that he should have thought of his church duties before driving around Fife under the influence of alcohol.

Tony parked in Galton’s High Street a few yards along from the Burnside Hotel, a rather nondescript, early 20th century building. As he entered the tiny lobby between the public and lounge bars, he reflected as he often did, that it was difficult to imagine anyone actually using the place as a hotel and occupying a bedroom. Hotels in these small mining towns were essentially pubs which were allowed to open on Sundays.

Galton’s police station was headed by Inspector Mackay, a fanatical teetotaller and an enthusiastic pursuer of licensing offences. Because of this, the Burnside Hotel kept meticulous records of bona fide travellers. At a table in the lobby, there was a visitors’ book. Here, Tony had to enter his name, home address, where his journey was from and to, and his car registration number. Travellers who were not in cars had to show a member of staff their bus or rail tickets. The book contained none of the D. Ducks or M. Mouses recorded in the visitors’ books of hotels in towns with less particular police forces.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Tony to Willie the manager, who was checking Tony’s bona fides, ‘Look at the book. Somebody has signed in as me earlier tonight.’

‘What! Begod, you’re right,’ said Willie. Three entries above the one Tony had started to fill in there was a record of Tony Durkin, travelling from nearby Cowdenbeath to Corburn, and giving Tony’s correct address and car registration number.

‘I suppose it wasn’t you who checked him in?’

‘No, I would have known it wasn’t you. Must have been Archie or Isa. Let me go and find out,’ Willie went into the lounge bar, a pleasant, orange-lit, thickly carpeted room with soft, comfortable chairs and tables well spaced apart. He returned in a minute or so with a middle-aged women whom he introduced as Isa, the barmaid in the lounge.

‘Hello again, doll,’ Isa said, ‘Did you leave something behind?’

‘No, I definitely haven’t been here tonight before a couple of minutes ago,’ said my grandfather, ‘Did you sign this guy in?’ as he pointed to the entry in the book.

‘Aye, I did, about half past seven. The man looked just like you. Are you sure it wasn’t you?’

‘I’m certain. At half past seven I was at home with our Helen and the kids in Corburn. Did anyone actually see his car? He’s put down my number plate there.’

‘No,’ said Isa, and Willie shook his head.

‘Tony, I’m sorry about this, but we can’t admit you,’ said Willie, ‘You know the polis are bastards in this town. I don’t want anything in the book for them to come the c- to get stroppy about.’

‘No bother,’ Tony replied, ‘Of course you canny be too careful with old Mackay in charge. I’ll pop over to the Elm Tree Hotel at Weaverston.’

Tony returned to his car and headed for Weaverston. It used to be said that in Fife there was a road round every field. This was an exaggeration, but there were definitely large numbers of narrow lanes through the mix of rolling farmland and coal industry detritus which made up the landscape of that area of west Fife. Where the pit slag-heaps were not visible, the countryside looked pleasant, even idyllic, in the twilight of this late spring evening.

At the Elm Tree, a slightly grander establishment than the Burnside, one in which it was possible to imagine real hotel guests, my grandfather had another unpleasant surprise. It appeared from the visitors’ book that Tony Durkin had also signed in to the Elm Tree an hour or so previously. The management and staff were less familiar with Tony than in the Burnside, but the person on door duty said that the man who had signed in looked like him.

The Elm Tree was in the jurisdiction of a more liberal police force than Galton’s in terms of alcohol control, that of Dunfermline, and the manager said, ‘Well, since you’re signed in already, you might as well have a drink.’

Tony didn’t need asking twice. He had several drinks, along with conversation with several other Sunday night bona fide travellers whom he had met before in hotels in west Fife.

He drove home at around ten o’ clock. It was dark, and a haar, or mist, had drifted in from the North Sea. Tony chose a route of minor roads to avoid any unwanted meetings with the forces of law and order. He was driving on nominally dual track roads, but if two cars had to pass, they would have to do so slowly and carefully. Only once on the journey home did this happen, but it was a disturbing encounter. Out of the mist loomed a blue Hillman Minx, identical to Tony’s car, and as the two vehicles passed each other, he saw his own astonished face less than two yards away on the driver of the other vehicle.

The mystery was never solved. My grandfather said that the entries in the two visitors’ books could have been the work of someone playing the fool, and the sight of his own car and his own face might have been some kind of Fata Morgana, a reflective mirage. But both happening on the same night? Decades later, he said that it still made him shudder.

                                                          **************************

Sorry it’s a bit long this month. You can have your life back now.