Bog Myrtle & Peat

Orwell wrote about The Moon Under Water, “the perfect pub” which he imagined at length in an essay for the Evening Standard in 1946. He lays it on thick in that essay, which is the sum of a hundred personal predilections, described with the wisdom and knowledge of a pub connoisseur. By dialling up certain details and toning down others, Orwell conveys a vision of peace and companionship; motherly barmaids and beer served in pewter pots and mugs which have handles. There are no radios in The Moon Under Water, and tobacco, cigarettes and stamps are available to buy over the bar, along with dishes of liver-sausage sandwiches and mussels (which are a speciality of the house). It’s a fantasy, and I read his imaginings with a heavy sigh. After all, who would not like to visit a place so beautifully named; with the shimmer of light reflected on the movement of dark and calming eddies.

I understood that The Moon Under Water was only a figment of a man’s imagination, so I was astonished to find a pub which bore that name in Leicester Square. I stopped what I was doing and rushed in for a pint, hoping to catch something of Orwell’s dream in the action. And the joke was on me, because it’s a Wetherspoon’s Pub; one of twelve in the chain which share the same name, and each one as interchangeably poor as the others. They’d turned Orwell’s Moon Under Water into a joke, but I wasn’t even cross. I’ve often leaped towards illusions like these – so much of my life is lived with one foot in fiction that it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s real. And this was just the latest example of a moment when I have trusted wholly to books, then found the rug pulled out from underneath me. On my way home from London, they were talking on the radio about whether literature can help you to survive tough times, or whether it’s just a frivolous escape from reality. The expert panel was undecided, but I’d felt the same old leash tug sharply round my neck in that shitty London pub.

A month later, last night, I drove down from the North Pennines to Carlisle in the darkness. And coming suddenly around a bend in the road towards Lazonby, a bridge appeared at a right angle before me. I slowed down, then realising that I had come to the River Eden, I stopped. It was almost midnight, and water rode high beneath the sandstone arches. For no reason at all, I climbed a fence and went down to the river, ducking beneath alder trees and the trail of willow whips which combed my coat in the passing. I must have walked for half a mile in the darkness, falling twice into pools and ponds which pulsed around my feet. There are holes in my boots, and my socks were immediately soaked by the journey. Then sitting on a rock in the wracks of fallen grass, I smoked a cigarette and listened to the rabbling water. 

I must have been there for ten minutes when sharp whistling interrupted the peace; whistles which are more often heard in description than reality. Otters were coming upstream – at least two of them, calling back and forth from the cold and the mould of the riverbank. And beyond them, the cloud rolled back to reveal a thick and tangerine-coloured segment of light slung low in the sky. That moonset overcame me; my dear old broken-hearted moon, who by this time is recovering that half of herself which was lost. The light splashed across and beneath the water, and having come closer to me than they would have chosen, the otters fell suddenly quiet. Moving towards where they had been, the moon was reflected for a moment in a deep and slovenly pool, overhung with alders and the sound of dripping. It seemed to shine not down to the river and up again like a bounce, but only up.

I am too susceptible to this nonsense. I don’t need it – because I’m all grown up, and I know that pain is just an unmade scar. On a bright day in the height of myself, I might even boast that you’d never catch me making a fool of myself in a fantasy. But there I was, abruptly floodlit and frozen in the act of escape – and if this is just frivolity, then I am more at sea than I supposed.