Postscript . • • I AM no lover of English
public houses—squalid and smelly stand-up places (like other male conveniences), where you drink tepid swipes against time and scoop up your change out of pools of Burton or Babycham on the bar counter. All the sane, I am glad to see even such as these resist or escape the drive of the big brewers to herd us into chromium-plated caravanserais where You still have to stand up to drink and still have 10 drink against time, but in surroundings identical with those of the pub in the next street and the pub in the next county, and permitted only the brew that the latest take-over tycoon is currently advertising on the telly.
A colleague urged me to patronise the 'Duke of York' in Charlotte Place, which is off Goodge Street, not because the beer is good (which it may be, for all I know: I'm judge), but ,because there was still an air about it--`the mitniks' boozer,' my friend told me. Well, I don't know about that. It's true that the Irish ,uneh-time tippler by my side—he wore a knee- length sweater, a black eye and a couple of clat_Ys' growth of beard—asked the manager vellind the counter for 'a glass o' beatnik juice, maJor' but I think that was just his little joke, for he was more what you'd call the sporting type. 'Fever row for Leander?' be suddenly aska downcast elderly man in the corner, eacheese sandwiches and wearing a celluloid Collar and no tie, and then, receiving a rather
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!iewildered `no,' turned to me with the equally improbable, 'fever ride wi' th' Galway Blazers?,' nc:Ting my modest disclaimer with' an ad- 'ring, rather than a disappointed, 'Tut-tut-tut,' a, 'I'm sorry to say it, but I love Englishmen. last /ore 'em.'
The 'Duke of York' is a Charrington pub, but in every other sense a free house. Layer upon layer of idiosyncratic wall and ceiling decora- tion u record the diversity of interests of Major h Klein, the licensee, and the development of se 's tastes. There is a wall of sailors' cap-ribbons and urt another of breezy seaside postcards; row I1,1°2 row of club ties ('have ye got the London though?' asked the Irishman, and sure enough he had); and every possible variation on the simple theme of the WC—a row of miniature porcelain po's and pans on hooks behind the bar; the major's portrait framed in a WC seat; a genuine WC complete, covered in laurels and standing in simple dignity in the middle of the saloon bar; and so, cloacinally, ,on. A dog the size of a small donkey lay upon the settle, athwart my umbrella, under a photo- graph of itself as the eponymous star of The Hound of the Baskervilles. and the major showed me the bugle with which he plays the 'Last Post' at chucking-out time. The Irishman read us two poems, one of them—he said—from the Chinese, and bade us an affectionate but rather slurred goodbye. 'You don't 'arf see some sights,' said a Bow Tie at the bar, and the buxom barman —who wears a skin-tight pink sweater, jeans and sandals, and has his portrait, done in the same dress, hanging in the public—nodded his rather blas6 agreement. 'Never a dull moment,' said the major.
It was then that .1 noticed that a brace of beards had joined us, silently, in the saloon, as gloomy as all get out. Here were the promised beatniks, never a doubt of it, and whatever it is that ails the British pub this. is who not to ask to cheer it up. If malt does more than Milton can, as Professor Housman said, to justify God's ways to man, these lads might just as well have gone on drinking their Milton.
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Not many armies can have won so much glory in defeat as Romniel's Afrika Korps, and
now it looks as though their conquerors may be about to pay what would be literally the crowning tribute. Just as the. British Foot Guards took to the tall bearskin cap of the Garde Im- periale they had admired—and defeated—at Waterloo, so the Royal Dragoons (I learn from their regimental magazine) are now trying out, in Aden, a lightweight, long-peaked cap modelled on that of the Afrika Korps and made, indeed, in Germany. It's more than high time we did away with that slovenly, impractical and unmilitary headgear, the beret, and I can't imagine why it's taken very nearly twenty years to come round to something we had seen to be soldierly, or why, after the rigorous and ex- tensive trial it was given in the desert campaign, we now have to be still'Irying it out.'
Mr. Beverley Nichols, the gardening corre- spondent of the Sunday Dispatch, is very taken with 'a charming example of neighbourly friend- liness'. he has just come across—next-door neighbours going shares in a geranium display on the dividing garden wall. He adds, in italics:
That's what I call co-operation, and if only the nations of the world would follow the example, and divide their frontiers with hollyhocks instead of howitzers, the world would be a very much safer place.
I do hope that nice kind Mr. Hammarskjold will turn an attentive ear to this masterpiece of deep, twee thinking. After all, it's a change from that Speech Day profundity about, 'if only Mr. Khritshchev played cricket. . .
A significant note in Hedges and Butler's latest wine-list says (of an expensive white burgundy), 'The entire 1959 crop of this wine will be sold to the United States,' and goes on to offer what the firm has left of the 1957s and 1955s. More of the grander 1959 wines than usual have gone straight from France and Ger- many to the United States, and at pretty fancy prices, although the same firm reports of the 1959 clarets that 'the wines are good but few arc outstanding . . . few will live to a very old age.'
Meanwhile, there are districts that did much better last year•than the Medoc, growing modest wines that have escaped the expense- account gourmets of Madison Avenue, and of the type to be drunk now, young and fresh. Alsace, for instance, really did have a wonder- ful year—the best since 1893, the experts say--- and Harvey's have bottled a charming Sylvaner they are selling at 10s. 6d.: a very refreshing wine and just the thing for the last picnics of summer or the first oysters. One of Harvey's directors claims that it is the best London-bottled Sylvaner he has tasted, and I've no reason, after tasting it myself, to doubt him. If your taste is for young red wines, Hedges and Butler are as enthusiastic about the 1959 Vin du Cornillon, which is only 9s. 9d., though it won a local prize as the outstanding Beaujolais-Villages of the year. It is darkish in colour for a Beaujolais, 'fresh but flavoury, and I like it cool, not chant bre, with a cold-meat-salad-and-cheese sort of meal. For a supper party, what would be nice would be the Sylvaner first, as an eye- opener, and then the Beaujolais with the meat.
CYRIL RAY
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