A beautiful thing

The Last Landlady by Laura Thompson

The Last Landlady is the story of Laura Thompson’s grandmother, Vi, and a history of the English pub. But it is also something more. At a time when English nostalgia is widely demonised, Thompson has been subtle and brave: her rich, devoted portrait of Vi supports another, even richer story. Subtitled ‘An English Memoir’, The Last Landlady is a study of Englishness itself.

Thompson knows that memory colours the past. Without seeking to reverse the positive developments of the last 70 years, she captures the poignant sense that something of value has been lost on the way to our homogenised present. Vi had an innate sense of inclusiveness. Her virtues did not require signalling. Her flaws were non-negotiable. Her rules were implicit. She did not need the forcefully permissive yet nannying machinery that imposes standards and fears the indefinable. At one point, Thompson mentions the self-supporting microcosm of society that surrounded Vi’s pub. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘this would be called “community”. Then, nobody thought that way. They simply did things.’ This nostalgia’s paradox lies in its celebration of ‘present-tense living’.

Her greatness as a landlady came from the fact that she believed, with a true faith, that a proper pub was a beautiful thing.

Laura Thompson

Thompson’s style is affable and conversational, with sublime, rhapsodic descriptions: early mornings at Vi’s pub have a ‘shimmering look … poised between hush and promise’; black oak settles shine ‘like the coats of young Labradors.’ She calls a public house ‘a theatre in which people are playing themselves’. Characters are both more fulsome and more fixed, enhanced and limited by the encircling performance. But Vi is always centre-stage. With her Estée Lauder cosmetics and leopard-skin coat, her habits of speech, her perfected mix of warmth and hauteur, if Vi were a fictional creation she would be called glorious. Our sense of Thompson growing up in her wake, her desire to emulate, is deep and vivid. Yet perhaps it’s for the best that she did not mature entirely in her grandmother’s image: there’s no room for the last landlady, or for the pub that was ‘an absolute expression of [her] tough bright soul’ in Britain today.

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