FOR THE LOVE OF PUBS: THE DRINKING TOWN WITH A FISHING PROBLEM

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by Leneta Hey

The Back Beach was already crowded by the time I found Hugh. The tide had pulled back to reveal between the moored boats and the sea wall a strip of sand, just wide enough for the stage the scaffolders had put together that morning. They were all now enjoying their modest payment in beer. Hugh stood outside The Ship with a pint in his hand, the other in the pocket of his oilskin jacket.

‘This town’s a fishing village with a drinking problem,’ he said, looking past the drunken heads and out towards the quay. There, Shaldon lay low and peaceful across the river, its neat row of pastel Georgian houses and clipped hedges reflecting neatly off the water.

Shaldon is polite, a postcard image of Devon in all its tidy charm. Teignmouth is a different kind of seaside town. It has always been pretty — but gritty, and very working-class.

‘Yes…’ Hugh said, ‘..certainly a drinking village with a fishing problem.’

During my stay I had come to realise that while the salt water kept the men and the sailors busy and not broke, it was the hops and barley water that kept them afloat.

The fisherman I spotted each morning on the quay, leaning into his boat, one hand buried deep in the dark compartment of the hull, seemed driven less by the work itself than by the knowledge that, once it was done and done well, he could wipe his hand on his dungarees, tip his hat back from his brow and walk straight up the slipway to the Ship.

The other fishermen — the ones who moored their smaller boats along the beach across from the row of bright Ballamory houses — also seemed carried along by the promise of a pint, wandering off to one of the many pubs. They mark the village like buoys: The Blue Anchor, the Teign Brewery, The New Quay. The oldest, Ye Olde Jolly Sailor,’ dates back to 1132.

“The Jolly Sailor was one of the only pubs that survived the French invasion in 1692,” said Hugh, who had now moved on from describing the town’s drunken habits to its history. He was clearly excited to talk about it.

“Everything was burned to the ground, including the fishing fleets. Everything except that little alehouse,” he told me, with a deep pride in his voice.

I cannot say I was surprised that the Jolly had refused to burn in the attack. I had visited a few times, to drink beneath its black-beamed ceilings which sag over worn wood and the regulars. It stands there like a weathered old captain, refusing to surrender Northumberland Place.

What did surprise me about the town, however, was how stubbornly myth, story, and gossip clung to it, like sea spray on the quay walls.

Four shanti-singers formed a semi-circle on the tidal stage, their voices carrying all the way to the other side of the river. No one listened. The village was more concerned with what Kate’s friend’s mother’s cousin did behind the beach huts and by what Tony got up to the other night in King Billy’s.

When the sun dropped behind the ridge towards Shaldon, and the sky, like everyone at the festival, flushed a deep red, I thought over the story Beryl had told me in The Java Café earlier that day. Beryl is seventy-nine, long retirned from her role at the Teignmouth Job Centre.

‘It was common for the ladies of the night to meet the sailors at the pubs, spend a night on their boats, and come into the Job Centre the next day asking for their money. One woman I hadn’t seen for a while… it turns out she spent the night with a sailor on a boat in Plymouth, and by the next morning she was shocked to find they had set sail for the Caribbean. She ended up in the Dominican Republic for six weeks.’

The story had never quite left my mind and returned again when the moon rose over the water and the Teign sparkled with gold reflections from the moored boats and the lights along the quay. I imagined the ladies of the night, their skirts caught in the harbour wind, their heels clicking against the cobbles between the ship and the quay as they made their way towards the boats.

Such rules that apply on sea and land — life, death, money, the weather — seem to haze slightly where the world and the water meet, where the sailors, their lovers and the ladies of the night find there ways through and between them.

The morning after the festival was slow. The boats bobbed lazily as if they were nursing the same hangovers as the people. The man on the quay tended to his greasy brown boat again and the ferry went back and forth between Shaldon and Teignmouth.

The children scooped pebbles into their buckets and lifted large rocks to find small crabs disturbed by the pale, silvery light. Meanwhile, their parents sat on the balcony of The Crabshack enjoying the seafood caught earlier that morning by the owner’s husband. A simple salted breakfast which washed down well with a pint of cider.

Shaldon is a pretty view, but Teignmouth is Devon. The sea takes what it will and the town seems content to argue about it later, under the surveillance of gulls. As John Keats said while nursing his sick brother on Northumberland Place, ‘here all the summer I could stay.’ Me too.

Teignmouth is certainly a drinking village with a fishing problem. But fishing is hard, fickle work. The sea is capricious, the wind-bites hard on the south coast and salt-water makes its way into almost everything. One could think of it another way: Teignmouth is a fishing village with a drinking solution.

That’s not necessarily a bad way to live, if you ask me.