The Hole-in-the-Wall Gang page 1 By Patrick Henry Start

One individual at The Hole scathing of this development, Harvey tackled the Daily Telegraph crossword daily in the bar, and read the rest of that paper. His career as a NATO official at Brussels now curtailed, he applied his mind to clues in this puzzle. Sometimes I helped him to answers. Breezily scorning the Leftist elements in the place, he called the Westminster leader, Lionel Blair, and devised guises of ridicule for a performer so arch and slippery in his charades as to even impersonate a Prime Minister, none too successfully.

Angus arrived here occasionally from a hermetic shack out on the wild moors, in an old kilt and impenetrable accent. A borderer on the edge of every civilisation, he had been sectioned and locked up sometimes for mentally-induced offences. In here he seemed always peaceful, though stubbornly awkward and poetically-wandering in conversation. His big black dog centred on the trouble that had arisen with his moorland neighbours, yet here too it kept placid but for the odd deep growl. The Hole seemed a probationary respite for the wild, notorious pair. Richard had empathy for dogs from rough country, and for many other creatures.

Victor, an odd-job man at big hotels, kept in touch with rural origins by going out early gathering mushrooms proudly culled from a secret place, prime specimens he expected to sell frequently at shop prices here in the bar. Once, a landowner on a horse had challenged his presence. "I've got to be on somebody's land, I ain't got any meself." Victor reasoned. The owner said "We've owned this land for centuries. My ancestors fought for it." Victor retorted "Then I'll fight you for it." He rolled up his sleeves, but then ran off with the mushrooms instead.

They kept him in beer-money when odd-jobs grew scarce. But we had had a surfeit of high-priced fungi, even Richard, whose pub lunches had featured mushroom soup or omelette nearly every day until diners grew weary. Now that his trade dried up, Victor's indignant anger turned shrill. Harvey looked up from his crossword over half-moon glasses to suggest the gathering of seashells on the seashore. "Mollusc Colony, if it is seven and six," I offered a solution, should this be a puzzle clue. But it was genuine advice to Victor, who thought he was being ridiculed, and thumped Harvey's cheek, dashing down the precious spectacles, fortunately unbroken. But the mushroom man was barred from the place continued below..

The Hole-in-the-Wall Gang continued By Patrick Henry

Harvey's glasses went back on the end of his nose, and he thought my clue a good invention that he would send to the compilers. But he was a not always such an innocent party in disputes. Amid this terrain of dissenters he stood out awkwardly, the last gallant conservative, but he often acted the provocateur who punctured the truce of tolerance the place depended upon. So he too had to go away down the road. A NATO man descended to a bickering barfly, a sad end, Richard thought, although pacifist nonconformist himself, but regretting that alert professionalism should be wasted. The Hole existed to uphold life's misfits so they could advance, not slide into bitter dissolution.

George, a German surrealist artist, partially practised his genius upon these premises, on the precept that every customer here resembled a famous figure, past or present. So apparently the place became full of Martin Luther, Pope John Paul, Ernest Hemingway, Fritz Lang, Buddy Holly and Dolly Parton. Intensely, George almost believed these figures to be present, and interviewing or jibing them, which some found amusing, others annoying or insulting.

He spoke proudly of himself having survived extensive mental treatment. Once attending a psychologists conference, he had spoken from the floor to impress the assembly, later staggered to find out that he was an ex-patient with no qualifications but an arts degree and a folder of surrealist paintings. So the inmate had nearly taken over the asylum, but was now turning our Hole pub into his own kind of clinic. Being on the verge of the premises of insanity had long been an off-beat attraction here, but George's de Sade-at-Charenton style of staging lunatic spectaculars, overshadowed the place's preference to ad-lib its own zany sessions, to enact our own personal fantasies rather than being cast into his blockbusters. So he too had to go, victim to Germanic super-efficiency, trying to impose on drop-out eccentricity a thorough system to rule the world, or the domain of The Hole-in-the-Wall at least.

Richard then sold the pub to go and breed retrievers in Scotland. The new landlord made the place smart, smooth and hopeless ground for the odd, bizarre outcast. Now we of that ilk foregather at an old coaching -inn at the far edge of town, a dusty, crumbling palace retaining awkward characters and lost social causes. All of this has to be perpetuated somewhere.

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