A Story of London in 3 Pints

The great war correspondent Martha Gellhorn once said, “In England, when you want to find out how people are feeling, you always go to the pubs.”

So pull up a stool. Here’s a story of London, November 2019, in three pints.

Two weeks ago I found myself back at one of my old haunts, the Rising Sun on Tottenham Court Road, drinking a pint of bitter. It had been my “local” during the “Winter of Discontent,” in early 1979, when the trash collectors went on strike, then the lorry drivers, then the gravediggers. By that summer Prime Minister James Callaghan was out, and Margaret Thatcher was in.

I was a student then. It was the coldest winter since 1963, and I remember walking through the snow, looking for a place to live, the wind howling. One night I called Pennsylvania from one of those red British phone boxes. My mother told me that my father’s cancer had returned. Don’t come home, she said. You enjoy yourself!

Later I thawed out by a gas fire in the Rising Sun. An old man who lived in the flat above the bar offered me counsel. His bulldog lay on the floor. “Everybody dies,” he suggested.

It’s been 40 years, and I have long since forgotten the man’s name. I remember the bulldog’s though: Benjamin.

I returned to London six years later, in 1985. I walked up and down Tottenham Court Road, but the pub had vanished. Instead, I found something called The Presley, an Elvis theme bar. The interior was black, with red velvet chairs. The Victorian interior had been destroyed. The fireplace was sealed. There was no sign of Benjamin.

As I left, however, I saw tiles on the floor of the foyer that spelled out, the Rising Sun.

Well, you can’t go home again, I concluded.

But ten years after that, I once more found myself back in London. And there it was: the Rising Sun — more or less as I remembered it, restored by its new owners. Had The Presley just been a terrible dream?

“We try not to talk about The Presley,” said the bartender.

The moral here might be that of the great philosopher Bruce Springsteen: “Everything dies, baby that’s a fact. But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”

For our second pint let’s take a short detour to Cork, Ireland, where I lived in the late 1990s. The pub is the Gables on Douglas Street, and it was there, on Sunday nights, that my friend John Neville, of the band North Cregg, would play “sliabh luachra” tunes, the raucous traditional music of Kerry and West Cork.

It had been my fond hope during this London trip to fly over to Cork for a few days, to see old friends and have a glass of Murphy’s at the Gables, and to hear John sing the old songs.

But Brexit was supposed to kick in on Nov. 1, and I’d been warned off traveling to Ireland from London at that time. This was a perfectly groundless fear, but I’d been spooked anyway and like a fool I’d canceled the side trip. Shortly thereafter, Brexit, deal or no deal, was put off yet again.

I’d come to England this November to teach at the American School in London, to talk about transgender identity and writing. After work, Brexit arose in nearly every conversation, and when it did people groaned with exhaustion and fury. Please, they said. Just make it stop.

That would be my second lesson: Brexit has poisoned everything. Whatever Britain has been, it is becoming something else.

Let’s take our final pint down at the Sherlock Holmes, near Charing Cross. My father, a great fan of Arthur Conan Doyle, had loved it there, even though it is a giant tourist trap, almost more like one of those fake English pubs in Epcot Center than the genuine article.

When I’m in London, though, I like to have a lager and lime there and remember the old man. That fellow with the bulldog wasn’t wrong: Everybody dies. But who knows? Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

Now and again, when I am holding forth, I feel my father’s hand upon my shoulder.

The Sherlock Holmes was loud and crowded, though, and I didn’t want to linger. But before I headed out, I went up the stairs and peeked into a back room, where just as in years past, I found the reproduction of the study in 221B Baker Street. There was Holmes’ pipe, and his violin, and his scientific equipment. There was the snuffbox — a gift from the King of Bohemia in the wake of the case of Irene Adler, the woman who once disguised herself as a man.

I wanted to say, look out Irene Adler. It’s a slippery slope.

Earlier that day, I had looked at the skyline and hardly recognized the city I once had known so well. It made me sad, to think of all the changes that have come to London, and to think of what the post-Brexit future might hold.

But then, I’m not who I was 40 years ago, either, and it occurs to me that maybe the only thing worse than change is its absence. Martha Gellhorn reportedly once wrote, “Those who find growing old terrible are people who haven’t done what they wanted with their lives.”

By that measure, I haven’t found growing old terrible. Sometimes it amazes me, that I am even here at all.

We left the Sherlock Holmes — my wife and our friend Amy and I — and headed up the street to the Ship and Shovell. It was quiet and warm. A fire glowed in the corner. We had a few pints.

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