The Drinkers In The Royal Oak

By the time I was finishing school and starting to attend sixth form college the dark and dangerous Waterloo pub was no longer popular and all the school children went to The Royak Oak in the village of Godmanchester. After a while Howard and I found ourselves in there all the time, playing pool in the basement room, even on empty weekdays.

Aside from the younger boys and girls many old men would be there, every day of their lives, getting drunk. They would sit at the bar, a dismal row of them. They were all slightly stupid, misogynist, racist, homophobic, uninspired and unambitious. One sticks out in my memory well, I think he was called Jim and he was a disgusting wretch. He was always drunk and he'd screech incoherently with a voice that was entirely hoarse like, as they say, sand paper. His skin was stretched taught over his flimsy, skinny body, he had a foul mouth, harassed girls and shouted abuse at boys.

He was a builder but I don't know when he found time to build anything since he was always in the pub.

Brothers who had worked on the plumbing of the family home that my dad worked on would always tell me, drunkenly, what a genius my dad was. They were amazed that he had carried out all of the electrical work and carpentry and most of the plumbing on the house himself, especially given that he was an amateur.

One Sunday afternoon I was sitting on the bench behind the place with Jane. All of a sudden all of the regulars ran out, announced that they were about to play 'flaming arse holes' and stood against the wall, pulled their trousers down, put toilet paper between their legs and used cigarette lighters to set the paper alight. They were unpleasant people. Jim declared himself the winner.

I overheard one of them, a stocky skinhead who I think was named James, boasting that he was a great arm wrestler as I was waiting one evening to be served at the bar. I told him that I was confident that I could beat him but he thought this impossible and dismissed me.

Later that evening Jane, Howard and I were standing out the back by Jane's green Morris Minor. We were in the habit of buying undrinkable, cheap 99p La Mancha wine from the local off licence when we were running out of money and drinking from the bottle. James the even heavier drinker walked past and I asked him if he was still too scared to have the arm wrestle, so he took me up on the challenge and we set about holding the competition on the bonnet of Jane's car. And I won. He stared at me momentarily and then punched me in the face. Honestly, the locals at the Royal Oak pub were a dismal bunch.