She was dressed as a very sexy Snow White and I was a Red Indian. The pub was a pressure cooker of fancily dressed and extremely drunk party revellers counting down the last seconds before 1986 turned into 1987.
Everyone was happy. After all, things were looking good back then. We were all on the roller-coaster ride up in Thatcher’s boom and bust Britain. Our houses were worth twice what we paid for them, everyone had shares in something and as teenagers we strutted around listening to Europe and Billy Ocean dressed like Crockett and Tubbs from Miami Vice, despite the fact that pale peach linen trousers never looked quite the same in the cool English climate.
1987 was a particularly momentous year for me as I was soon to turn 18, which meant I could at last legally buy the beers I had till now been quietly stealing from my dad, often blending his frothy pints of Courage Directors with my glass of lemonade to produce a sweet and refreshing bitter shandy.
But tonight Snow White and I didn’t bother with the lemonade. It was easy for older friends to pass us beers in all the confusion and by the stroke of midnight, fortified by ale, I was pretty sure this evening would have a fairytale ending.
Snow White and I somehow managed to squeeze ourselves between the cigarette machine and the stone fireplace in the corner of the pub where we were hidden from both sets of parents to steal our first snog (not a kiss but a proper, messy, overly enthusiastic teenage snog).
We knew it was going to happen because things had a habit of happening at the The Royal Oak, the community pub at the centre of the rather well-to-do village of Bearsted.
The ‘Oak’ was THE place to be on New Year’s Eve. Bringing in the New Year here was always eventful. People who normally wouldn’t share the time of day with each other were regularly seen locked in heated carnal embraces and plenty of rock steady marriages were severely tested in those crazy hours around midnight.
The Oak’s landlord (who will remain nameless) was the party ringleader, inciting us (we would later claim) to drink far beyond our ability, the one who always started the dirty rugby songs off and the first in the conga line that ritually snaked its way every year around the huge oak tree outside from which the pub got its name.
Back in 1987 The Royal Oak was the epicentre of village life. Before the Internet and credit card-sized mobile phones the best way to catch up on what was going on was to simply drop in for a pint. An hour in the Oak was all you ever needed to be fully briefed on village (as well as world) affairs.
It was also a great place to do business – all the tradesmen you needed were there, including the village butcher who seemed permanently glued to one of the padded leather bar stools and who gladly took orders for your Sunday roast. Of course it helped to buy him a pint to get the choicest cut. I grew up thinking a butcher had the best job in the world.
Cricket was still being played on the green the day I went back to the Oak.
The pub itself was a very simple affair. It had once been a pub divided in two, both physically and socially. Separate doors took you either to the saloon bar on the left for discerning residents or right into the public bar so popular with rowdy visiting football and cricket teams coming in after a match on the nearby village green.
But the dividing wall had been knocked down long ago and now it was a simple rectangular room with a huge solid strip of varnished mahogany and beaten copper panels that ran almost the entire length of the room.
The ceiling was stained an unhealthy shade of tobacco brown and the floor was covered with a patterned carpet that looked like someone had thrown up on it and which the landlord proudly claimed had never been cleaned. I imagine if a sample of it could have been examined by some of those forensic scientists from CSI New York they’d gather slack jawed around their computer screens in amazement, screaming “Jeez Detective, you’re never going to believe this!”
The mechanical till had never needed electricity to power it. I learnt only a year later while working there for a brief spell as a barman that you needed the forearm strength of Popeye to push down the keys as you would a typewriter before the (often incorrect) amount popped up.
But it was never the bricks and mortar or the fixtures and fittings that gave the Oak its character. As in any great pub it was the people that seemingly spent their every available spare moment there that made it such a pivotal part of my upbringing. Unfortunately my father was one of those people, which meant I grew up suffering extreme mood swings of love and hate for the Oak, which was one day an exciting and intoxicating adult world I longed to be part of and the next a place that stole my father away from me for hours, sometimes days, on end.
Looking back now I miss the Oak but would never want a pub like it in my life today. Time has been called on places like the Oak. They are drinking dinosaurs that no longer fit comfortably in a society where alcohol and driving is rightfully frowned upon, where sensible people count carbs, conduct conversations via SMS and drink brightly coloured ciders.
So it was with some measure of trepidation that a few days ago I found myself standing outside the Oak 15 years after my last pint there. It is however now no longer called The Royal Oak but the rather more poetic ‘The Oak on the Green’.
I noticed the new oak tree was now almost half the size of the original mighty oak felled on the night of the great storm in 1987 (that really was an eventful year). The outside car park has been transformed into a large fenced dining area where I spotted groups of Dolce and Gabbana girls with designer sunglasses giggling into glasses of Pimms and Lemonade.
Entering the pub I saw the carpet had finally been ripped away to be replaced by brushed wooden floorboards. The ceilings were lined with dried hops and the fireplace where I had once cornered Snow White had been bricked up, only to miraculously reappear at the other end of the bar where a huge extension had doubled the size of the original building.
The worn blood-red leather bar stools sticky with spilled beer had been replaced by stylish wooden seats. There was, in truth, practically nothing of the old Oak left. It was as though when they ripped out the carpet they ripped out the pub’s soul, throwing away the old-timers, the stoneware ashtrays, the newspapers on the bar with half-finished crosswords, the old man in the corner with the hacking cough I was always afraid to serve, the fights, the affairs and the foul language. What was left had been sanitised and repackaged as a Sunday supplement pub. I could, for all intents and purposes, have been standing in the middle of a Bishops Arms.
A simple but delicious pint of Bee-Head from the 1648 Brewery in Lewes
The one thing that saved me from walking out was the sight of a small selection of craft cask ales on the bar. Three beers from the 1648 brewery in neighbouring Sussex that were poured up in excellent condition, with the beautifully light biscuit and honey flavoured Bee Head the best of the bunch.
Sitting in the old car park drinking my beer and counting the number of Mercedes and BMWs as they cruised by I could only grudgingly concede that the Oak is not the only pub to have shared a similar fate. This it seems is the way British pubs are going. It is food, not beer that rings loudest at the electronic cash tills these days. The Oak had been transformed from a pub whose greatest culinary highlight was a bowl of chilli con carne to a restaurant that sold beer.
I used to regularly take a piss where their award-winning kitchen is today.
As I left I decided to visit the men’s toilets where I had rocked unsteadily on my heels on countless occasions as a young man, only to discover it had been converted into a fancy and highly expensive fish restaurant.
That, I thought, was taking the piss and I left quickly so as to keep what was left of my fond old memories intact, vowing never to go back.
