Thompson - The last landlady: an English memoir

Laura Thompson read English at Oxford. Her first book, The Dogs , won the Somerset Maugham Award. While living in Newmarket she wrote two books about horse racing, followed by a biography of Nancy Mitford and a major study of Agatha Christie, reissued in 2018 in the US. Her book about Lord Lucan, A Different Class of Murder , was also reissued in 2018.

Take Six Girls , a group biography of the Mitford sisters, published in the US in 2016, was a New York Times bestseller. Her most recent book, Rex v Edith Thompson , about the Thompson-Bywaters murder case of the early 1920s, has been longlisted for a CWA Gold Dagger award.

By the Same Author

Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford the Biography

Agatha Christie: An English Mystery

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan

Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters

Rex v Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders

It was astonishing how significant, coherent and understandable it all became after a glass of wine on an empty stomach One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance.

From Quartet by Jean Rhys

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

From Boswells Life of Johnson

W hen I think of my grandmother, it is thus: seated on a high stool, her stool, in the negligent but alert position of a nightclub singer. Behind her, a cool brick wall, whose edges made little snags in the satin shirts that she wore loose over trousers. One of her hands rested on her thigh, not quite relaxed, holding a glass.

Her hair was white but not a grandmotherly white. She went regularly to the salon on the top floor at Harrods, a fairyland pink parlour in those days, its air dense and shimmering with little starbursts of Elnett. She would come home with tales of her hairdressers love life (somewhat pitiable) and green and gold bags full of Este Lauder cosmetics. From middle age onwards she disdained most products that were not by Este Lauder, and there was never any arguing with her. The collars of her shirts were impregnated with Alliage scent, and the Re-Nutriv cold cream on her dressing table bore the marks of her fingers dragged across its surface, like little furrows in snow. She wore dark foundation and a deep red lipstick. Even now I feel that I am letting her down if I do not paint my lips.

So here she is: a casual empress on her stool, a woman in late middle age with a brightness, an intensity of being, that still flares in my head. Mysteriously moving, to feel memory shaping her as I write which reminds me quite suddenly of a camera that she owned, a huge thing with a blue flashlight on top. After the blinding click the photo would ooze slowly out of the camera, a hot square with a white frame around indeterminate dark blobs. My grandmother would clamp it beneath her arm, waiting for it to develop against the warmth of her body. If it didnt flatter her, she would simply throw it away, ripped quickly in two, before anybody else could see it.

Because of her instant culls, many snapped moments are lost, which I suppose is a pity, but I rather like it that way. Photos are finite and unarguable. I prefer the images that are stored in the mind, the precious surprises that they spring (which of course you are springing upon yourself), their magical areas of occlusion and sharpness. Quite unexpectedly I can see, for instance, the slightly pigeon-toed angle of my grandmothers feet, looking older than the rest of her, placed upon the bar of her stool. I can see how she was framed, by the open wooden door to her left, and the counter on which she would lean her right forearm. I can see the texture of the counter, although I have no idea what it was made of (I might know now; these are childhood memories). It was shiny, orange-coppery in colour, hammered with tiny dents, wet where one least expected it to be. And it was covered with the evenings ecstatic confusion: beer mats, glasses, a sturdy blue-green ice bucket, a couple of siphons, the large square ashtray into which my grandmother stubbed her Players untipped.

Her glass, which was her own thick tumbler, contained whisky and soda. She loved alcohol with a respectful, tender passion, and nursed the glass rather as she did her little dogs (she owned chihuahuas, years before they became fashionable), although she drank from it only occasionally. Just a deep sip, now and again, to maintain her dgage buoyancy. She had learned to phrase her personality, as a singer phrases a lyric; she knew the power of withholding, and of brief conspiratorial bursts of charm. People bought her drinks all the time, seeking to please, and she usually accepted them. She would raise her glass in thanks (Cheers, darling!), put it to her mouth, and then throw the contents on the floor. A strip of carpet beside her stool was permanently damp with whisky. Although she did her drink-chucking surreptitiously, as she believed, everybody knew that she did it. It was part of her legend, like her stage whispers and her London childhood.

Around her shining silvered head the beacon of the pub the picture is vaguer. She was the person who conjured and orchestrated everything, so naturally the spotlight of memory follows her around. For example, I see again how, when the evenings were busy, she would slide unobtrusively from her stool in the public bar to the other side of the counter, and instantly take up the role of barmaid-in-chief. As she did so, the way in which drinks were served changed, became theatrical. She tugged at beer handles and shoved glasses under optics, hacked at lemons and ripped off bottle tops, all with an untidy, efficient grandeur that invested every drink with a particular potency. People would sip reverentially, eyes briefly closed. Oh, thats lovely, Vi. This may not have been illusory; the strength of her drinks was also legendary (her gin and French was akin to a knockout punch). Her horror of smallness, exactitude, led her to throw in extra measures of spirits, ice, whatever was going. Meanwhile the round would grow, it sometimes seemed exponentially, or possibly eternally, if the buyer was generous: people who had been served first would be finishing their drink while the round was still in play, so in theory this was a situation that could go on for ever. Youd better have another one, boy, while Im in the mood. Go on then, boy, if you say so.

Oh yes, theyre good drinkers, my grandmother would say the next day, in a tone of the utmost seriousness.

Have you got one? Yes, Ive got one! What about you, have you got one, girl? Oh, Im all right. I know youre all right, but have you got one?

The till behind the counter was a hefty chunk of Bakelite, grey and immovable, with a drawer that regularly jammed but could flatten your breasts when it deigned to spring open, and powerful keys that bore the symbols of numbers but did nothing so recherch as adding them up. Therefore alongside the lemons and cherries behind the bar were dank little notepads, on which the cost of a round might be calculated.

This was not really my grandmothers style. She had never gone to school, or so she said (in fact she spent several terms at a London convent, perhaps the only girl named Solomon ever to have done so), and she never got to grips with decimalisation. She could have done, but she could not be bothered. 55p for a shot of gin meant ten bob, sort of; thus the niminy-piminy increases demanded with every Budget were absorbed into her large-scale nature. Thus, too, the giant rounds that formed the climax of so many evenings were totted up and rounded down to a sum that she thought acceptable. Call it a tenner, darling. How do you make that out, Violet? my father would say, in a droll tone that added to the general delight at seeing her legend in action. God knows how many Este Lauder lipsticks she missed out on with these habitual underestimates. Often people would remonstrate with her, demanding that she take more money, forcing pound notes into her recalcitrant hands. These were the right sort of people, her sort, the kind who fought to pay more while she fought to take less. If the wrong sort came in to the pub, she could become surprisingly mean. In the early evenings she would lay out free food on the counter: the centrepiece was a huge wedge of Cheddar, stabbed in the heart with a cheese knife, surrounded by an overlapping necklace of Ritz crackers. Tacitly, it was understood that this was for regulars. Passing trade might take a sliver of cheese, a gherkin or two, not more. Every now and again some hapless person, who did not know the code of the pub, would order something like a lemonade shandy and hack away happily at the Cheddar. At such times my grandmother became concentrated and dangerous. She would scythe through the saloon bar into the public, seize the plate of cheese and take it into the kitchen. Hungry sod, she would mutter furiously. Im not taking it out again till hes gorn.