Anthem for Doomed Youth
Note to readers: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is presented as the memoir-cum-confessions of a maniac hiding behind the ominous pseudonym of Humbert Humbert. The other players and settings in the story have, we are told in a foreword by the briskly useful John Jay Jr, been masked with false names and re-ordered places, to protect those innocent parties “that taste would conceal and compassion spare”. The only true name in the book is its titular figure, Dolores, Dolly, Lo, Lolita; “her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fibre of the book to allow one to alter it”.
As it is with poor unfortunate Dolores Haze, so it is with the pub that forms the topic of this piece. While I too would like to protect those who need it, the name of the pub is too central to what it is to keep it out, and in any case, as William Burroughs put it - perhaps there are no innocent bystanders. What I do need to say, though, is that this all happened more than a decade ago, in a small town far away, and if anything was ever less than legal, it was my fault and mine alone, and no single venue, landlord, management company or anyone else should be held responsible. What’s more, I’m sure that nowadays, this pub is an upstanding institution of great moral character, that has long ago shed any of the seedy connotations it carried back in the heady days of the post-Millennium. I wouldn’t know. I’m not going back.
***
Because I was a particularly nerdy 16-year-old, I asked my father’s permission to go out drinking for the first time. And, because I was a particularly nerdy 16-year-old, and there was in his view very little trouble that I could wind up getting into, he said yes. So, one Friday night, dressed in my finest shirt and shiniest shoes, we headed down town to a pub where my mate Will guaranteed we could get served.
We couldn’t. As it turned out, they’d been raided the week before by the police, who’d checked the IDs of all the furtive drinkers huddled in the back room, and given the owners a very stern talking to. As soon as we’d opened the door, a very large man with a very bald head asked to see our papers, and even though we insisted that we were just there to meet a friend, who was already sat inside, conspicuously avoiding our nods and waves, the door was closed to us, the merry lights glowing behind the bullseye panes of glass like the light Gatsby yearns for at the end of Daisy’s dock. It was slightly humiliating, but also, in some ways, a relief - what exactly were we going to do once we got inside? What were we meant to order? A whole pint of it? But something about the experience was scarring enough that we never tried to go back there again. I don’t even remember the pub’s name now, but it wasn’t long until it turned into restaurant serving British classics. It has mediocre reviews.
After this early setback, our drinking plans were scaled down. We knew we could have pints of gassy Cobra in the local balti house, but after one awkward evening where it was made clear we had to order main courses, not just keema naans, before we could have the beer, it was an expensive proposition for a boy on a dishwasher’s salary. If we wanted to drink in a pub, there was only one other option - the Doom.
The Horse & Groom, known locally as the Doom & Gloom, or just the Doom for those in the know, was that pub - the one in town with a reputation for serving any school kids who had the foresight to take off their tie and blazer. It should have been our first port of call, but something about its reputation - a slight edge, an air of danger - meant we wanted to build up some experience in advance of wading in.
After nearly bankrupting ourselves on lamb saags, a decision was made: we would invest in fake IDs, purchased from a website of questionable repute, and present ourselves down at the Doom in the time-honoured fashion - sneaking into the “beer garden” (a concrete yard with two picnic tables overlooking the bus station), making our way into the pool room, then finally, nervously, desperately, heading up to the bar.
The plan had teething problems. In the first instance, my fake ID arrived with the wrong date on it - it actually made me seem younger than I actually was, which was very much against the point. Surprisingly for a website which peddled questionably legal products, the customer service was outstanding, and a couple of emails later saw a replacement winging its way to me in no time at all. I remember it was pink, vaguely like a driving license, but with some dodgy holograms that said something like “European Identity”, which didn’t quite have the racist connotations it does now. No bouncer with more than a primary-level education would have been fooled by it for a second, but it was the thought that counted - if only we looked like we were meant to be there, we thought, we’d be accepted.
And so, one fateful night, we headed down town again. We might have bought chips first, or maybe hit up the Chinese (noodles were a whole meal in themselves - far more reasonable that the balti house). But at some point, under cover of darkness, with the smell of cigarette smoke wafting across the car park, we approached the Doom.
Furtively, we opened the gate and slipped into the yard. A crowd of students from the year above - some of whom may have even been of legal drinking age - were knocking back pints and smoking with a vigour only teenagers possess. They didn’t seem to notice us. We had passed the first test.
Next, into the pool room. We opened the door and stepped into the pub’s back room, where a dented and defeated pool table, slightly too large for the space that held it, was the focal point for another group of people familiar from school. We made out like we belonged. Lots of nods. Lots of “alright?”s. Chuckling nervously as we ducked under pool cues as they banged off the wall as every shot was lined up. Into the corridor between the pool room and the bar. A tactical decision - into the gents.
“How are they doing?” Shit. I hadn’t expected an interrogation at this early stage. In fact, I didn’t even know what I was being interrogated about. “Huh?” I said, uselessly. The man at the stainless steel trough nodded at my shirt. “Liverpool? How they doing?”
I wasn’t wearing a Liverpool shirt. Was this a test? What the fuck was he talking about? I tried to recover. He seemed slightly drunk, but not paralytic, friendly rather than aggressive. My top was a plain, red polo shirt, nothing to do with Liverpool, but I guess it was an easy mistake to make, if you ignored the fact lots of teams plays in red, we were nowhere near Liverpool, and I obviously wasn’t wearing a football shirt. “Not bad!” I said, despite not knowing a single thing about the recent performance of Liverpool FC. He nodded, seemingly satisfied, and refocussed on his urinating. I tried to do the same, which wasn’t easy, as I braced for further football chat. Thankfully, the man finished and shambled out. The next trial was over.
But the biggest challenge was still to come. The dreaded bar. The front room was a large space, with two raised areas either side of the front door, which made the bar seem sunken and low in comparison, a kind of illuminated trench, mobbed with people. It ran across a whole wall, with repetitive fonts offering the same few beers in the same pattern, and a similarly small selection of spirits on the wall behind. A concerningly large amount of real estate had been given over to some sort of Jagermeister machine, which I never saw in operation. For all I know it had never been used at all, perhaps had never been purchased with the intention of use - it had merely manifested itself one Friday evening, a malignant entity that grew out of a collection of congealed shot glasses and was now too cumbersome to remove.
I made my way up, fake ID clutched nervously in my sweaty palm. The crowd in front of me seemed to part in a way which would have been miraculous nowadays, but then felt like a kind of omen - all of a sudden, I was face on with a barman, not much older than I was, who was staring me down with a practiced eye that practically screamed “Nope” at me. I approached the bar. Nodded. He nodded back.
“Can I ge-”
“ID, please.”
Shit. That wasn’t good. Hadn’t even let me order my Fosters (it was that, I think, Guinness, or Worthington Creamflow - not an inspiring selection, but more than enough for me, even if I’m still not entirely sure what Creamflow is).
I handed it over, still clammy from my paw. He raised it to the light, turned it over, turned it back again. His lips moved slightly, as if he was sounding something out to himself. After a moment, he laid it on the sticky bar.
“That’s fake.” The words hung there for a second. The pub was loud, but in that moment, all I could feel was the deafening silence as I fell into the hollow of a skipped heart beat. He said something else, something I couldn’t hear over the deafening void.
“What did you want?”
“Fosters, please,” I croaked, and he began pouring. Shit. I’d done it. I’d been found out, and he didn’t even care. I had conquered the Doom, and I’d only had to shred my nerves and embarrass myself to do it. I had made it. I had achieved the sweetest victory of all. I was drinking underage.
That night was my initiation. I was part of the Doom now, and the Doom, for all its faults, was part of me. I learned to play pool on its table, where every shot had to be taken at an odd angle so you didn’t hit the wall. I developed a lifelong fondness for bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale, once I realised every tap in there poured something that tasted either like vinegar or batteries. I saw my first stripper, entertaining the world’s saddest stag party, who did something unmentionable with a bottle of Budweiser and made me very upset for some time to come. I watched my friend get in a fight with a man with a neck tattoo over a question of darts etiquette, that didn’t involve any thrown punches, but did feature lots of aggressive chest barging, like two novelty wind-up toys lined up against each other. I sat in there all day on my friend Rob’s birthday, while he drank endless pints of Guinness, and we couldn’t believe how much he was putting away, until he stood up to go to the loo, fell over, and didn’t get up again until the next morning. Then there was Nick’s birthday, where we all chipped in for a dirty pint, and the barman returned a glass of brown evil, that put Nick on the floor like a sack of wet cement. I worked my way through all of the bar’s dubious shots, with names like Slippery Nipple and Flatliner, which featured a layer of Tabasco between two things even worse. I was there on A-level results night, when Jonesy stood on a table and hit his head on the TV bracket above, knocking it clean off the wall, and it wasn’t clear how someone hadn’t been killed by the massive appliance collapsing on top of them. I was there through it all, good times and bad.
I don’t think I ever went back once I turned 18. When I was free to go to any pub, the one pub that had welcomed me before seemed less enticing, less sexy, less cool. Maybe also because it was a really shit pub. But for a time, it was my pub.
My refuge.
My Doom.