Down and Out at the Rose and Crown, Part Two

For Part One of the story of my summer working in a London pub, click here. And if you rather listen to me read today’s post, here you go:

The house I lived in that summer, 1990, seemed either completely full of people or eerily empty; mostly, it was empty. Often, it felt as if everyone had left moments before I walked in: footsteps echoed, absorbed into the worn carpet; a door thudded softly. When I wasn’t working at the pub or walking the streets of London, I sat reading in the weedy strip of garden, broken pots and old metal chairs scattered about, or in my bedroom window overlooking the street, watching people disappear into every other house except the one I was in. No one there knew who I was and no one from my life knew where I was, not exactly. It was a strange kind of freedom.

When my housemates and their friends did occasionally materialize in the evenings, they would lie around on the dirty furniture in the front sitting room, which was always littered with full ashtrays and empty beer cans. I hung back from their conversations, listening to graphic stories of hunger and cold and general suffering at the hands of Margaret Thatcher. I had nothing to offer.

The one housemate I was sure actually lived there was Colin, who was Irish and said he was going to teach at university in the fall, though it was never clear which university or what he was going to teach. He worked in a wine shop, and we got to be friends because he would sometimes bring home half-empty bottles for me to drink; in return, I would listen to him pontificate about soil quality and elevation. He asked me to bring him leftover food off the plates from the pub and I obliged there, too, sneaking cheese from the Ploughman’s lunches, half a fish pie, boiled cabbage, and even some haggis, but he threw that away, saying he was from Dublin, not Glasgow.

One night, Colin showed me some cigarettes he’d purchased. There were ten of them, black and thin, and partially wrapped in gold foil, in a hinged metal box. “Bess,” he said, waving one of them in the air, “you’ll learn that there are things in life more important than food and passion for other people.” He had a framed picture of Van Gogh in his room and the only clothes he owned were two shirts and a pair of skinny jeans.

In the past year, I’d watched Chinese students my own age standing up to bullets and tanks in Tiananmen Square. The Berlin Wall came down. Nelson Mandela had been released from prison. The IRA was still occasionally setting off car bombs in London, and Pan Am Flight 103 had left Heathrow and exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in December, 1988. Those things didn’t scare me. I wasn’t sure what, if anything, did anymore.

I’d just learned that one of my closest friends from high school, Billy, was killed in a plane crash, in a plane he was flying. His eight-year-old nephew was with him. He’d been doing touch-and-gos at the runway in Fairbanks that I knew well, because my dad kept the church plane there. Billy clipped a wing on some brush and the plane flipped over, exploding on impact. I’d flown with him once; my dad had been nervous and decided for Billy where, precisely, he was allowed to fly with me in the plane: toward Manley Hot Springs, based on the weather.

I never told my dad that Billy practiced stalls that day, cutting the engine in mid-air and then bringing it roaring back to life.

I just shrugged at Colin and his black cigarettes and assumed he knew better than I did, about whatever these things were that are better than food and sex.

One morning, after I’d been at the Rose and Crown almost a month, I walked through the door to a mess: tables covered in glasses and crumbs, chairs in disarray, bar towels missing or askew or on the floor instead of neatly laid out the way they usually were when I showed up for work. There were wet ashes everywhere in pools of beer.

Norman and Jean were gone, and in their place were John and Mary, a couple in their late 20s, and their little son Sean, almost two. They were the real management, I learned; Norman and Jean, I learned, were the “relief” – they went around England from pub to pub watching over things while the regulars went on holiday.

No one had told me.

Mary and Sean had gone to a beach somewhere on the Mediterranean; John had gone to Florida. Mary had cold eyes and ran the place from her office in the cellar, her desk in between kegs of beer and boxes of wine that were hoisted up through the floor to the bar and the locked cage where the expensive bottles were.

John, tall, ginger, with mottled skin and a puffy face and gut, didn’t do anything except demand double-brandy Cokes starting as soon as I got there in the morning. He’d stand between the end of the bar and the wall, so when I went around to collect glasses and wipe tables, I had to squeeze by him. He would bend his knees so his crotch was the same level as my ass.

I opened the pub every morning; I wasn’t experienced enough behind the bar yet to be there when things got really busy, so I had the lunch and afternoon crowd and had only worked a few weeknights. Norman had always repaired the damage from the night before, so I’d started each day with racks of clean glasses, full refrigerators, and a floor you didn’t stick to. Now, I had to clean up and pour at the same time and I was always behind, always rushing and always looking like it, in that way you’re not supposed to.

Mary seemed to hate me on sight. When a customer said “and a half for you” (there was no tipping, but customers would sometimes include a half a pint for the bartender with their order) and I had a Bailey’s instead because I didn’t know any better, she scolded me for “taking the piss.” When I ordered chips with my lunch (I got one free meal when I worked) she said “you can’t have chips because you’ll get fat like me” (she and John talked all the time about when she was going to “lose the baby weight”). When I chatted too long with the roofers, she said “don’t encourage them.” When John rubbed himself against me as I went around the bar to collect glasses, she glared. At me, not him.

“Say ta!” I said to Sean, who was in the crook of my arm while I poured a pint for a customer who had just given him a packet of crisps. John pointed his cigarette at me and said to the row of men, “she’ll be a good little mother, that one. Look at those hips.”

I handed Sean to him and he stood him on the bar: “What do we say, boy, when Ireland scores?” “Olaaay, olay olay olay, olayyyy ohh-ohhlay!” Sean waved his little arms above his head, crisps crumbling everywhere.

Ireland was doing well in the World Cup that year. We had green food coloring for anyone who wanted it in their beer. The day they made the semi-finals, the Irish in London lost their minds, pouring out of pubs, dancing on cars, lighting things on fire.

The sacking went like this: I had started working nights, too, about halfway through the summer, because I got better and faster at pouring and because the pub had started hosting theme nights sponsored by various alcohol brands (on “Bacardi Night” we were given tight t-shirts and grass skirts to wear) and they needed more of us behind the bar. I liked working with Andrea the best; she was Welsh, very beautiful, twenty-four, and worked at the pub a couple nights a week. She explained to me how to give a blow job and clarified some British slang (I had, for instance, made an unfortunate comment about “getting my fanny back behind the bar,” unaware that in Britain, “fanny” refers to a more specifically female body part than it does in the U.S.). She taught me enough French so we could talk about the customers without them knowing it.

The evening regulars were different than the day drinkers like my roofers; they had more money, dressed “smart,” and were sometimes minor celebrities or celebrity-adjacent, like Lou Hirsch, who voice-acted the Baby Herman character in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (he wore a Baby Herman pin on his lapel), members of the new wave band Spandau Ballet, and a dude who claimed to be involved in some top-secret radio channel that broadcast from a ship somewhere in the Atlantic. These guys were better about having one of them stay sober, not to drive necessarily, because public transport was easy, but just someone in the group to keep things steady, often the one to back their friends off us when they got handsy or especially lewd.

One night, one of the regulars who wasn’t drinking came up to get their round and ordered a “Florida Orange” for himself: this was orange and pineapple juice topped with the sparking lemonade we used for shandies and lager or bitter “tops.” He ordered it separately and came back for it after he carried the pints to his mates’ table, and when he tried to pay, I waved him off, just as John was coming upstairs from switching taps on a keg in the cellar. John saw me wave my hand and a dangerous gleam came into his eyes. He looked as mean as Mary usually did.

A few nights earlier, I had stayed overnight in the manager’s quarters to babysit Sean while John and Mary went out somewhere. The rooms weren’t nice; there was just a sitting room and a few bedrooms, no kitchen, because the pub’s kitchen was supposed to be their kitchen. I slept in where Sean’s crib was.

In the middle of the night, there was noise, fumbling at the door, and John and Mary came in, though I had been told not to expect them until the next morning. They were fighting. I had come running out in my tank top and underwear when I first heard the door. John’s eyes lit up and he pulled me into him, sliding his hands down the back of my underwear and grabbing my bare skin with both hands.

“You fecking perv! Get yer ‘ands off ‘er!” Mary started slapping at him, hard. He was so drunk he just sagged and slid down the wall.

I went back to the nursery and climbed into bed. Sean hadn’t woken up.

After I gave away the Florida Orange, John and Mary whispered to each other for the rest of the night, at one point pulling the receipt tape out of the register and looking at it together, nodding gravely, or so it seemed. Andrea’s eyebrows were raised. We were busy as usual.

As we were finishing up and preparing to leave, Mary said to me, “I’d like a word.” She motioned to a table. Andrea said she’d wait outside.

“You gave away a drink.” John sat back, smiling, with his arms across his chest.

I knew what was happening but couldn’t believe it. “I get bought halves all the time and never drink them.”

“Doesn’t matter. You didn’t charge a customer for a drink and that’s against rules. You can’t be trusted behind the bar.” Mary pushed a pay envelope across the table, the last of my earnings. “You’re banned from the pub, too. Don’t come in again.”

So that was it.

It was the beginning of August. I had saved up enough money for the coach pass for my trip to Scotland, but not enough to pay for my textbooks for the fall semester. I needed a couple more weeks of work for that.

I walked out to where Andrea was sitting on the curb and plopped down beside her. “Sacked.”

“Those fuckers.”

“Yeah.”

A couple days later, I slipped in the side door to the pub, the one that led right up the stairs to the kitchen, to say goodbye to Karen, the cook. Karen was in her late twenties, obsessed with saving enough money to get home to New Zealand, always calculating her earnings in a small notebook when there was a lull in the food service. There were lots of “Kiwis” in London all trying to do the same thing, she said; they’d needed to leave New Zealand to realize how good they had it there.

She’d taken me out to a pub where guys had “NZ” shaved into their heads and all anyone drank was snakebite, a potent mix of lager and cider that we weren’t allowed to serve at the Rose and Crown because it supposedly made people crazy.

That night was total chaos, tables crashing, fights rolling out into the street. A large man with ta moko (a traditional Maori face tattoo) picked me up and set me on the bar until a path cleared to the door and Karen and I could run.

“Aw sweetheart,” she said, folding me into a hug. “Rough luck. Everyone does it.”

My mom said, “go to Scotland,” that they would give me what I needed for my books. This wasn’t a small thing; my parents were already taking out loans to pay for what Smith wasn’t covering through financial aid.

So I went, hopping on and off a bus for ten days, sleeping in youth hostels and on a park bench in Edinburgh, and then flew back to the U.S. for my sophomore year of college.