Bonkers Conkers at The Compton Arms
Written whilst waiting for Geir to turn up to see Howe Gelb, or was it Robyn Hitchcock? At the Union Chapel in Islington. One of my favourite venues in London. I did walk out of a Residents show I went to there, but then, everything had been going wrong that week and being shouted at by a mad man in a cow costume wasn't helping my mood.
The Compton Arms is a small pub off of a small side road in Islington. It’s been there a long time and by it’s very nature of being in a small side road, time has left it alone. I walked in there on Tuesday evening to wait for a friend to turn up. The nature of an old pub means that a lot of dead ex-drinkers like to still go there, particularly if there is nothing too vulgar or modern. The Compton Arms is this type of pub. On walking in, the small bar is occupied by a handful of locals who have been clearly drinking for most of the day. The dead prefer the slightly quieter tables to the side of the bar. On one of these tables sits the ghost of George Orwell quietly nursing a pint of brown ale whilst watching the living at the bar. To the table opposite him is the Earl of Compton, clearly worse for wear and smelling of the river Thames. He has duckweed in his hair and fronds of pondweed draped across the epaulettes of a once smart frock coat. George Orwell idly picks at a pack of ready salted peanuts.
I order a pint of Bonkers Conkers. The bar lady asks me about me choice.
• Bonkers Conkers? Have you had it before? • Yes, but I can’t remember when.
Man at the bar asks me:
• What does it taste off? • I suppose, slightly like Conkers. Have you ever licked a conker? That slightly metallic autumnal taste? • Sounds delicious.
At the living end of the bar a tired married couple in their fifties are clearly ruined. They have been drinking for England for the whole day. She clutches a half drained glass of white wine. He is wearing a brown trilby and sports a neatly trimmed moustache. They are accompanied by a lady clutching a small sleeping dog and a large man with a shaved head and tattoos.
Tattooed man turns to his audience.
• I read it in the paper today. They have a tablet they are proposing for the working man to curb drinking. They say it will be prescribed for anyone who drinks over three pints a day.
Brown Trilby replies:
• Three pints? I know how many pints I’ve had by counting my change at the end of the evening. I know I get a twenty pence piece change for every round.
He reaches into his blazer pocket.
• Hmm.. Nine pints. Time to go home I think.
The bar lady nods in agreement.
• Just mind the bloody stair carpet this time.
I join George Orwell at his table and watch on. George isn’t saying much. The Earl of Compton is saying even less. Thames mud is grained deep into his forehead and his shoulders are sloped forward. George Orwell eats another peanut slowly.
The lady with the sleeping dog hears a tune from the speakers above their table. It is not intrusive but there if you listen. Too loud and the ghosts would not stick around.
• Oh I like this one. It’s a soul singer? What’s his name?
Brown Trilby briefly wakes from his alcohol slumber?
• Soul? • How do you turn a duck into a soul singer? • You stick him in an oven until he’s Bill Withers…
His wife makes a decisive move. Time to go. They slowly stagger off to the door and leave.
I ask for a refill of my Bonkers Conkers. It’s tasty and refreshing. I make a hand motion of a tipping glass to George Orwell. He nods quietly and I bring a pint back to the table for him too.
Five minutes pass and the music changes again. It’s someone imploring us to do the Hippy Hippy Shake. Neither George Orwell or The Earl of Compton appear to be much in the mood for The Hippy Shake. In fact, the Earl of Compton looks positively ruined. His clothes emit a haze of foul Thames water.
The pub door opens. It is the man with the brown Trilby hat. He sits down next to the Earl of Compton. George Orwell smiles at him and raises his pint in his right hand.
• Stair Carpet.
Says the man in the brown trilby.
George Orwell carefully takes a peanut out from the packet. He skilfully takes aim with a curled index finger and thumb and propels the peanut in to the Earl of Compton’s pint. It sinks slowly in a cloud of bubbles.
Kilburn: So I’m stuck outside a house for an hour waiting for someone to turn up for an appointment and I gaze up idly to the first floor windowsill of one of the flats. A truly enormous and weird looking bird looks down at me with a look of complete contempt. This bird looks as close as it is possible to look, like an avian version of an obese Las Vegas period Elvis. He has rather filthy white plumage on his chest and back and what looks like a black quiff of feathers on his head. He can barely move he is so fat. His feet I notice are webbed and very dirty. Beside him there is a metal tray which he lazily pecks at. He scowls at me with a look of arrogant boredom, spreads his filthy tail feathers and craps extravagantly over the parapet of the front door porch.
Dexys Midnight Runners’ made a cover version of “Jackie Wilson Said” by Van Morrison. In 1982, They performed it on Top of the Pops, but in front of a picture of Scottish darts player Jocky Wilson. There remains some debate as to whether it was a misunderstanding or a deliberate act.
We were somewhere around the Brenzett straight on the edge of the Dungeness when the Battenburg cake began to take hold.
We can’t stop here, this is Trilobite country!; Shouted Pam Ayers through a mouth crammed with Battenburg, spilling sticky crumbs on the dashboard of my open top Morgan.
Good people eat good cake! She continued, pounding the melamine dashboard for emphasis.
Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of Greatstone and the world. Whatever it meant.
Strange memories on this nervous night in Romney Sands. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. Dymchurch in the middle nineties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Bailiff’s Sargent, half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big Austin Allegro, across the St Mary’s Bay drainage outlet at a hundred miles an hour wearing Flared trousers and tie dyed shirt jacket . . . booming through the Folkstone ring road at the lights of Brookland and Lydd on Sea, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across St. Mary’s Bay, then up the New Inn or down 101 to The City of London Pub. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Hythe and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Side 2:
Nico – Chelsea Girl