Old Hats and London Pride

Coleridge gave us The Ancient Mariner, P.G.Wodehouse created the golf club’s Eldest Member, and the White Hart has “Charlie” – gnarled and grey haired, an unkempt grey beard, roll-your-own with liquorice paper, bobble hat with leather trim (pretty much a permanent fixture in my brief experience of Charlie and the village) and a fund of information about how the village was when he was a child – the blacksmith, the garage, the sweet-shop and greengrocer now all gone.

Being a warm and unseasonably sunny Thursday afternoon I had came back home from work earlier than normal and, as the church bell struck six, I decided to down a quick pint at the village local. But I chanced on the bar stool next to Charlie and the quick pint extended to three and, more worryingly, the evening became uncannily like an omnibus edition of “The Archers”.

For a start Charlie is the postman’s brother but they haven’t spoken for ten years. You see the postman is going to marry a young African girl who is only 23 and Charlie doesn’t like that sort of thing. Rather sad really with the postman sat at the other end of the bar. And then Charlie is epileptic and likely to have a fit at any time, more so since his wife died in December (and the cost of the coffin, you know), and then there are the herons (shoot the buggers, we say), and of course there used to be more pubs in the village, and there were more buses (double-deckers to Chichester on the half-hour, and to Petersfield) and of course when the village flooded …

In the middle of all this a well-dressed, middle-aged (but rather wild-eyed) man entered the pub and, spotting Charlie in deep conversation with your narrator, interrupted with the unforgettable words “Give me back my bloody hat. You know that hat is mine”. The pub went quiet for a moment while Charlie considered this question. “You can have the bloody hat” he answered removing it to reveal some rather untidy bald patches, “but it’s not yours, I got it in Petersfield”. The man took the hat and stormed out of the pub. “Twenty five pence that hat cost me, but I don’t care. They’ve got four more in the shop”.

Big drama, especially as I felt that the evening was only just beginning to get started and that there would be further episodes to come in the matter of the “hat”. So I took my leave and walked slowly back to the wife and the (getting cold) toad-in-the-hole. As I walked past the churchyard I pondered on one chance remark from Charlie that worried me more than everything else I had learned about him – his age. You see Charlie was born in 1946 and is actually younger than the Ranting Nappa. Oh dear!