Moving out of London

Been collating a few tales:

Golly Gosh

My local pub has a golliwog behind the bar and wondering why has been keeping me awake at night. The golliwog isn’t the first thing you notice about the pub. I’d been in there a dozen times before spotting it perched up there on a shelf with the obligatory sheaves of dried hops and old pump labels. My first impression of the pub was its beautiful exterior; all glazed tiles, ornate signwriting and cascades of flowers in baskets and window boxes. The door tinkles pleasingly on entry and once inside there’s the welcoming smell of an open fire and malty ale. The cosy bar has bare board floor and wood panelled walls, there are snug booths along the back wall the remaining space is dotted with the sort of high tables meant for leaning on with a pint and newspaper rather than sitting down to a meal. There’s no food on offer here other than the picked eggs and peanuts on the bar. It’s an archetypal proper country pub and its yards from my front door. I felt like I’d won the local pub lottery.

Before we moved here last year, I looked forward to making it a feature of our idyllic DFL life. I imagined popping in for a pint on the way back from the station. I daydreamed about becoming a regular on first name terms with the friendly staff and locals. I even imagined booking gigs there and looking out on room full of beaming faces, all transfixed with my fancy DFL folk music skills. Of course reality intervened and the rigours of our new life as working parents and frantic commuters dashing back to relieve childcare meant that the much fantasised about lazy pint on the way home didn’t really materialize in the first year. I didn’t have the time or energy to organise gigs either. More often than not I’d stride or cycle past in a hurry and wave enviously at our retired next-door neighbour as he raised his pint in salute. My guitars remained in their cases and a little piece of my DFL fantasy started to crack and crumble.

Over the next few months and as our routine settled down a little I did manage to pop into our picturesque local from time to time. More often than not our cheerful retired neighbour was either perched at the bar or lurking outside with his vape and I’d buy him a half and have a chat. I took visiting friends in for a quick drink and on a couple of occasions went in with our toddler daughter. This was despite some misgivings about an apparently humorous sign on the door which reads “Well behaved dogs are welcome but children must be kept on leads”. Oh my sides. The sign doesn’t say no kids but it’s prominently displayed on the door and does seem designed to put parents with young children off. I’m not planning on letting a toddler run amok in a quiet pub so what’s the deal? Are children allowed for an apple juice and bag of mini cheddars while I enjoy my pint or not? The intent was difficult to decipher. I’m pretty sure I’d asked “Am I okay with the little one?” as we walked in and wrote it off as just being a shit and unfunny joke, the type of which there are many on brass plaques in pubs an downstairs toilets all over this island. Then I saw the golliwog.

At first I thought it must be a relic, some forgotten dusty promotional give-away from a different age. But it looked quite new. It was quite prominently displayed just above the spirits in the middle of the bar. The shelf it sat on was clean and uncluttered and while I was in there, the landlord reached up to retrieve the latest edition of a series of neatly arranged beer guides from the same shelf. It’s not been forgotten up there, I thought, it’s been put there deliberately. And recently. What does that mean? I surveyed the room for clues. The bar was populated almost entirely with white middle aged men. Nothing untoward there, just the usual mix of tradesmen, brewery workers and antique dealers who make up the demographic for pubs in this neighbourhood. Not exactly the rainbow nation but no other indications of far-right leanings.
Before we left London we had fretted about leaving our comfortable multicultural Guardian-reading neighbourhood for the white working class Tory hinterlands of East Kent. Other considerations won out however and here we happily are. We reasoned that we were both brought up in the suburbs (by racists) and we’d turned out okay hadn’t we? Our adopted town isn’t even particularly Ukippy. In fact it’s got a bit of a hippy vibe about it and on paper should be no more right wing than any other Tory voting southern English town.

I continued to look for clues. There were no prominent swastika tattoos or signed portraits of Mike Read in evidence. And yet there it was. Perhaps it’s just a cultural thing, and the person who put it up there doesn’t understand just how phenomenally offensive it is? Maybe I’m being an over-sensitive DFL snowflake? Perhaps I should be more sensitive to the insensitivities of a community who didn’t realise they were being insensitive? Is that patronising? I think it is. Oh god thi sis minefield. What if that friendly but grumpy old DFL I’d met in the market that time had been right? He’d moved down here in his 50’s after a lifetime in Peckham. He told me whilst giving me a lift up from the quay in his Landover “Some of the things you’ll hear said openly in the pub round here will shock you” he’d said. We’d been here a year and I hadn’t witnessed anything of the sort. This was the first inking I’d had that we really were in a different world.
I had been prepared for some shifting of cultural norms on leaving London and liked to think that I wasn’t completely naïve in that respect. I work in the construction industry and have spent enough time around fairly salty characters not to be easily shocked. I’d long since given up being scandalised when family members expressed views I found abhorrent. I wouldn’t turn the other cheek, but I’d long since stopped working myself into a lather over the fact that some people hold views I find distasteful. The difference here I think is that almost all of the overt racism I’d encountered in my life had been expressed in private. Usually over Christmas dinner. The racist Nan has become a comedy staple but in real life, even our grandparent’s generation eventually learned that their most colonial views were best kept to the house. Our parents, the baby boomers, did better as a rule and the huge majority of my generation was brought up to believe that racism was entirely unacceptable. Even in traditionally white working class environments such as football or trades unions, expression of explicit racist views was tantamount to professional and political suicide. Wasn’t it?

The next time I passed the pub I stopped and looked in the door to check I hadn’t imagined anything or exaggerated the effect. There it was, flopped over on top of the optics, grinning obscenely down on a fine selection of ales and ciders. The only conclusion I could come to after all this was that the golliwog’s presence wasn’t an accident or a quaint misunderstanding. The person who put it up there knew exactly how offensive it was, and that was the reason it was up there. The message was not only are “Your type not welcome here” but also “Those offended by that statement are equally unwelcome”.

Back home I mentioned the golliwog to my wife and she replied that she wasn’t surprised and had always disliked the pub. She mentioned the ambiguous sign about children being kept on leads and said that it had a weird, blokey and unfriendly atmosphere. Now I knew what she meant. My perfect local boozer dream had evaporated and left me feeling like more of an outsider than I had since we arrived.

The next problem was what to do about it. I could do nothing. I could just walk away and write it up to clash of cultures and let it go in the name of assimilation. I’d probably forget about it and barely notice after a while. But to my surprise I found that that I couldn’t let it go. I lay bed and went over and over different scenarios in my head. After a few nights of this I decided that I needed to do something.

A boycott wouldn’t achieve anything. It’s not much a protest if no-one knows you’re protesting is it? I barely went in there anyway. I’d need to let them know. I should go and talk to them. I’d do it politely with no judgement attached. Like a local Louis Theroux. I practiced the speech in Theroux’s slow, slightly plummy and adenoidal voice:

“I like this pub very much… This is very nice beeeeer… I notice there’s a… a golliwog up there… Some people might think that was a bit… offensive? What do you think about that?”

I didn’t allow myself to imagine what the response to this might be. But I knew I wasn’t going to do it… UNLESS I GOT DRUNK FIRST! Yes! That’s what I’d do; I’d go in there and drink the perfect amount of delicious beer to make me just self-confident and disinhibited to be able to say

“Hey, what’s with the golliwog? Bit much isn’t it?”

Although the thought of the potential for this to backfire makes my skin crawl, I’m still not ruling it out to be honest.

Then I hit upon the anonymous note. Yes! I’d just drop a polite note though the door early in the morning, saying how offensive it was and asking politely that they reconsider having it on display. But what if they see me? What if they see me and don’t take it down? Not only will they know I’m poncey DFL outsider who’s come down here and wants everything and everyone to conform to my effete metropolitan elite sensibilities, but on top of all that I’m a pathetic coward who couldn’t say it to their faces. I ruled out the note.

Then I went nuclear. How about the local press? I could write to the paper alerting them to the scandal and get them to contact the pub for a quote. They might not be interested but what if they really went for it? The idea has its merits but still reeks of cowardice and has the potential to escalate horribly. I don’t want to shut down anyone’s independent local business down, especially not a beautiful and beloved local landmark. Plus I live very close to the pub and am not hard to track down. I could see this approach getting ugly. I quickly backed off from this idea.

Unless I’ve dramatically miscalculated, that leaves the tipsy casual comment as the only viable option.

Wish me luck. I’m going in.