This is the first in an occasional series of short memoirs, centred on past and present Medway pubs that I’ve had some association with. This one, Admiral Elliott, has been recently displayed as part of the ME4 Writers exhibition, ‘Letters Home’, in Rochester and Walderslade libraries.
I recently came across an old photograph of the Admiral Elliott, taken sometime in the 1950s, I think. There are a couple of coaches drawn up outside the pub, and a crowd of monochromatic people, most of them looking older than they probably are, pose for a group photograph. They are heading off on a daytrip, perhaps, to Margate or Broadstairs. The men are in suits, baggy-trousered, caps firmly planted on heads; many of the women appear to be shrouded in their raincoats.
I grew up with the Admiral Elliott. It stood on the corner of the street where I lived, East Street in Gillingham, until I was twenty-two. I grew up with its presence, but I never went in there, at least not until about twenty years after I had left home. By then it was a rundown, ramshackle sort of place. I was performing at a benefit for the Socialist Alliance. I don’t recall much about the event, now, except that it was tinged with sadness at the state of the old pub.
You see, I not only grew up with the Admiral as a physical presence. It was that, sure enough. I passed it on the way to and from school. I passed it as I went around the block, playing on my little blue scooter, rattling along the same pavements over and over. I passed it on errands, or running round to the odd little DIY corner shop that sold Airfix kits swathed in the incense of sawn wood.
Towards the end of my time in East Street, I had to pass the Admiral when making my way to and from my own preferred drinking haunts. Foliate heads, a family of Green Men carved in stone, watched me from the pub walls whenever I walked by.
And, digressing for a moment, the odd thing about the photograph is this. In my memory, the Admiral gleamed like a palace, dressed in the green-glazed tiles of an earlier age. I’d always assumed the tiles must have been stripped off when the pub was bought up and converted into apartments, a few years ago. Yet in the photo, those tiles aren’t there. It’s as if my imagination had placed them there, and they disappeared when I left.
Instead, what I see in the picture is a neat, tidy sort of pub, flowers in hanging baskets and window boxes, a place scrubbed clean inside and out. It was, and remains even now, the container for a hundred family stories. The Admiral Elliott was the favourite rendezvous, decades past, for my maternal grandparents, great-uncles, great-aunts and any number of other relatives. They were a big family, big enough that I could never remember all the names or always fit the right names to the right faces.
There was a whole platoon of them, at least. On Sunday afternoons, during my childhood, they’d gather at my grandparents’ little terraced house in Granville Road, drinking tea and maybe something stronger too, regaling each other with those same stories of the old days at the Admiral, over and over, laughing together at the same jokes and the same anecdotes.
At the time, sat in the middle of that crowd and often feeling barely visible in the present, I was too often bored. Now, with sufficient hindsight, and my own history with my friends and comrades collecting dust, I can see that those Sunday afternoons were a vital bonding, a means to keeping alive all their personal and connected pasts as an uncertain future loomed ahead.
By the 1970s, their numbers were fewer but there seemed to be more stories than before. Inflation, immigration, strikes, pop music, short skirts, legalised homosexuality, extra television channels, technology spiralling faster and faster; the world was altering so swiftly, a bewildering maelstrom of changes around the survivors of their generation. They needed their stories more than ever.
I can remember one of the anecdotes. It seems they’d all been drinking in the Admiral Elliott, the whole clan of them, and at the end of the night someone had ordered a taxi. The person who had ordered it climbed into the back seats when it arrived, then out of the opposite door as the next person clambered in, who then did the same as another followed, and so on, till the whole pubload of people were passing through the back of the taxi. And naturally, as they came out of the taxi everyone sneaked back round to climb through again, and again, and again.
There were probably hundreds of other such stories. Small stories, inconsequential really. I’ve forgotten all but that one, and I have no idea why it’s that one in particular that has stuck so firmly in my memory. The people who told them are long dead, and most of the stories lost for good, but in that single surviving anecdote something of them survives too, something of their lives, and of their laughter.
As a teenager, I stopped listening to those tales. The Admiral Elliott was considered a rough old pub by this time. There was sawdust on the floors and the windows were left dirty. There were no hanging baskets or window boxes any longer. My family didn’t go there. It was a den for the kind of people who lived at the top end of East Street, just across from the dishevelled Admiral; angry looking men with cheap tattoos, women with missing teeth, unkempt children. The foliate faces were still peering out, but they looked forlorn now.
One of those families kept a dog. It was a skinny black thing, and more or less left to run wild in the street, but it was friendly enough. It would come up to be petted whenever I walked past the Admiral Elliott. Until, one day and for no apparent reason, as I was on my way home from school, it bit me. To be honest it wasn’t much of a bite. But it frightened me enough that I avoided the route past the Admiral, and past the dog, for a while.
The reason I’ve come to that story, recounted it now, is that it doesn’t mean anything, but at the same time it means a great deal. Some stories are like that. It’s why we tell them to one another, and to ourselves, over and over.
Philip Kane
The Regenerate 