Free Sandlands by Rosy Thornton Page A

so incrementally slow as to be almost imperceptible, as gradual as the softening of the contours of a familiar face. To say that the Ship falls into the latter category is to sell it far short. It is, of all the pubs in my wide and motley acquaintance, in a class of its own.
    Moving the cursor over the older of the two archived clips, I click to play it again. In the foreground a slight sparrow of a man, who might be anything from fifty to seventy-five, stands crookedly to play the violin, one thigh wedged against a table, apparently for support, while the other rises and falls in jerks with the tapping of his foot. It’s an old Irish jig tune, and his fingers run like mice. But my focus is on the portion of the public bar that’s visible behind the fiddler. So many things are recognisably the same in 1954 as in the 1979 footage. In fact, most of them were still there this afternoon when I was in the bar myself, capturing the floor session on my little pocket Sony.
    Along the back wall behind the piano runs a wooden ledge and on it stands a row of old beer bottles, photographs and other memorabilia. There, just left of the piano, is the obligatory team photograph: five men down on one knee in the grass in front of six more, standing, all of them balloon-shorted and sporting shirts and moustaches of various shapes and sizes. One or two of the elder players could be grandfather to the youngest, a grinning lad of twelve or thirteen, as if every able-bodied male in the village had to turn out to make up the eleven – and perhaps it was the case, it occurs to me with a bit of a shiver as I spot the date inscribed below the picture: 1919. Next to the football team leans another framed photo of what looks a similar vintage: a man in a cornfield with a collie dog. He seems to be wearing too many clothes for what, by the height of the corn, is surely spring or early summer. His dark jacket strains out of shape at its single buttoned fastening. The man stares straight into the camera, his face impassive, but the dog clearly lacks its master’s stoic patience: its head is a blur of motion.
    The fiddle player has shifted tempo now and is playing ‘Fathom the Bowl’, the verses sung out by a florid man in a cloth cap seated at a side bench, then the chorus taken up around the bar to the accompaniment of stamping feet and the thump of beer mugs on tables. As the camera pans towards the singer it brings into view behind him the far end of the ledge and below it an empty, high-backed wooden corner seat. On the ledge, beside a Toby jug, stands a third photograph: no more than a snapshot, really, taken there in the pub. A regular, no doubt, in a full beard and collarless shirt, grasping the neck of what could be a shepherd’s crook but is probably just a walking stick. A pint glass stands before him on the table – the same table, back to the left of the piano, where I sat this afternoon, because there in the photograph is the scrolled wooden sidepiece with one brass candlestick, and on the ledge behind him is the photograph of the football team, and the man in the cornfield with his fidgety dog.
    But stout and strong cider are England’s control
    Give me the punch ladle, I ’ll fathom the bowl...
    The singer is warming to his theme, his tankard now raised aloft and pitching hazardously, while his brow gleams beneath his cap. I shift the cursor to the time bar at the bottom of the screen and drag the little round dot to the right, stopping ten minutes or so further into the clip to let it resume playing. The soundtrack here is a muddle of scraping chairs and rumbling voices, loomingly loud and close at hand and then quiet again, before at length from out of shot another song begins. A solo voice, unaccompanied and uncertain at first as to key but swelling in confidence: male and, I’m guessing, elderly. I don’t know the song, but its themes are familiar: love, betrayal, a girl with raven hair.