Beer, Glorious Beer
AFTERTHOUGHT By JOHN WELLS
MY spirits, as I approached the Whitbread Festival Beer Garden on Horseshoe Wharf last Friday night, could hardly have been higher. Sustained by a carafe of rough but amus- ing red wine and an enor- mous raw steak, I noted that the sky above St Paul's was a dull purple, against which the trees along the Embankment hung wet and unnatur- ally green. It seemed almost certain that there was going to be a thunderstorm. The evening's entertainment, 'Beer, Glorious Beer,' would be washed out by a sudden deluge of terrifying tropi- cal violence, and with all possible respect for the organisers there was nothing I could imagine en- joying more. For one thing because I resented in advance the imposition of bogus folkloric merri- ment on an apathetic and seedy audience, and for another because well-polished praise of drink and debauchery has always struck me as being rather an unpalatable substitute for the real thing. As the taxi edged down the narrow slope by St Benet's and turned into Upper Thames Street I decided to produce a witty little piece called 'A Fete worse than Death.'
Certainly the initial impression was encourag- ing. The wharf, a cobbled yard between high warehouse walls, was hung with little coloured electric light bulbs and loud with the tinny tinkle of a recorded bar-room piano playing 'Roll out the barrel.' A few gaudy umbrellas gleamed under the lights, creating an air of doomed gaiety. Vari- ous young executives in suits and club ties held half-pint glass beer mugs and stood about in poses reminiscent of chewing-gum advertise- ments: the conversation was muted and urbane. One voice, louder than the others, asked the way to 'the facilities.' and an infinitely gloomy old man in a long gaberdine mackintosh standing by the little but on wheels that served as an open- air box office complained in a penetrating mono- tone that he had been waiting for half an hour for a ticket and was beggared if anybody else was going to jump the queue. With the rain beginning to splash down I composed myself, smirking quietly, to wait for the debacle.
It was at that moment that I realised with a sudden shock of disappointment that the Beer Garden itself was under cover, inside the ware- house and festooned with fishing nets filled with corks and imitation flowers. Two attractive waitresses in white blouses and ankle-length black curtain material moved among the tables with trays loaded with beer glasses. The atmosphere seemed jolly, and unlikely to be dampened in any way by the approaching storm. Indeed with the shutters open overlooking the black river where the lamps on the farther shore were already beginning to be reflected in broken wriggling snakes of white and yellow light, the rain could only enhance the view. More than a little chas- tened I climbed the stairs to the entertainment, also protected from the weather under a low roof, and with tables in the form of beer barrels set out among the chairs so that the audience could drink throughout the show.
Frustrated in my hopes of a more dramatic disaster, I turned my attention on the other spec- tators, who were sitting quietly among the murmur of discreet conversation, occasionally showing their teeth in a well-bred smile, and sip- ping their gin and bitter lemon as they waited for the show to begin. A moment later the house lights dimmed, the five performers walked up through the audience; after shouting for a little against the quiet murmur of conversation, they made themselves heard and embarked on the opening number, interspersed with pithy sayings by drinkers in the past, and invited us to follow the words in our chorus sheets. 'Beer, beer, glori- ous beer, fill yourself right up to here! Drink a good deal of it, make a good meal of it, Stick to your old-fashioned beer! Don't be afraid of it, drink till you're made of it, Now all together, a cheer! Up with the sale of it, Down with a pail of it, Glorious, glorious beer!' The audience applauded warmly, and a man at the back shouted '011ocks.' There was a sibilant hiss of disapproval in the rows near him, and a lady in bright lip- stick on my right leant across to her companion in the darkness to whisper the word 'Drunks.'
From that moment on my loyalties were sharply and agonisingly divided. On the one hand my natural sympathy was with the heckler, reaffirming the validity of the experience against the convention and matching every rhetorical question from the stage with a slurred obscenity or a shaft of rough wit. On the other hand I could only admire the skill of the performers, who sur- vived the uneasy lack of conviction of those em- barking on an evening in praise of strong drink on two dry sherries and went on toasting us bluffly with their small pewter tankards until we really believed they meant it. As the evening went on Pamela Cundell drained a pint mug at a draught and then sang and danced with breathtaking aplomb, Joyce Grant sang a scintillating honky- tonk song, the glass of whisky at my elbow was mysteriously refilled, and when the whole cast combined in a beautifully harmonised version of a Victorian bar-room ballad it suddenly became clear to me that the cool beauty of Form is after all preferable to the hot frenzy of ecstatic Inspira- tion, and that the now totally incoherent heckler, who was being encouraged by a disreputable old man of dubious leanings, was after all less of an asset than the chaste revellers. I was also quite relieved that we had a roof over our heads.
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