At the fag-end of the Nineties, I resolved to step off one treadmill and onto another. I had decided to enter an entirely new trade, of which I knew precisely nothing.
I had been to such establishments, of course, though only in the capacity of a customer. I had stood on the public side of the bar, glass in hand, surveying the world with the serene ignorance of a man who supposes that behind every counter there lies nothing more intricate than a till, a few bottles, and somebody willing to pour a pint.
What actually went on behind that counter, I had not the faintest notion. Nor, as would soon become painfully clear, had I any particularly sound ideas about how it ought to be run.
What I did have, was an entirely unjustified faith in my own abilities, together with a certain talent for getting things done. Between those two qualities, a bar emerged. Then a café. Then a cultural venue that everybody in town seemed to know about, and to which nearly everybody had some sort of relationship: fond, resentful, nostalgic, or vaguely disapproving.
I was very clear about the profile I wanted. I was absolutely rigid about certain products. I did not know the trade, but I knew what I liked.
It soon transpired that the suppliers had arrangements of their own. Choose one brand of beer, and you found yourself contractually obliged to stock a particular brand of soft drink. Choose the wrong product and some obscure clause might determine which crisps you were permitted to sell. The whole industry seemed to be held together by a dense web of internal agreements: some of them skirting the outer edge of corruption, others standing squarely in the grey territory bordering it.
I had imagined, in my innocence, that one might simply buy good beer, good coffee and good wine, and offer them to the public at a sensible price. I had not reckoned with the fact that the trade was less a marketplace than a feudal system — a landscape of tied houses, exclusive territories, loyalty discounts and gentleman´s agreements, none of which had ever been explained to me, and all of which appeared to have been settled long before I arrived.
There were men who knew these arrangements intimately. They spoke of them in the relaxed, proprietary manner of people discussing the weather or the football results. They knew which wholesaler would forgive a late invoice, which brewery representative could be charmed, and which contract clause was best ignored. I, meanwhile, was learning the language from scratch: cask and keg, tie and freehouse, margin and rebate, rotation and listing.
One supplier turned up one afternoon and suggested that we have a little chat and a drive in his new Jaguar. I could drive, he said. It would be no trouble at all.
There was no talk of business during the journey. No talk of purchasing arrangements, discounts, exclusivity, or anything as vulgar as terms. We simply drove — through the town, into the countryside, past hedges and roundabouts and the ordinary machinery of the day — while the car performed its quiet, expensive miracle beneath us.
Then we parked.
He produced a reasonably thick envelope and explained, with the delicacy of a man offering a mint after a heavy meal, that it was intended as “establishment support”.
I understood at once what he expected in return. I also understood that he did not stock the products I wanted for the venue. So, I declined.
He received the refusal with perfect good humour, as though I had declined a second helping of trifle. There was no anger, no recrimination, and no very great surprise. The envelope disappeared with the same smoothness with which it had appeared, and we drove back in a companionable silence, discussing nothing of consequence.
We never became close associates. The drive had been pleasant enough, though. And the Jaguar was a joy to handle.
It was the first time I understood that in this trade, generosity was rarely gratuitous. A favour was not a favour; it was an investment. A discount was not a discount; it was a leash, elegantly leather-bound and comfortably fitted. The men who offered such things were not necessarily villains. Most of them were simply fluent in a language I had yet to learn — one in which every kindness carried a small print, and every gift arrived with its invoice folded neatly inside.
Another caller was a Staff Officer from the Armed Forces. He had a sideline, as men of that sort often did. He sold burglar alarms.
It was, I had to admit, a useful service for a restaurant with our size stockroom. There were bottles behind doors, tills beneath counters, and the perpetual possibility that some enterprising member of the public might mistake our premises for a charitable institution.
He explained the system well and sold it with quiet professional competence. There was nothing theatrical about him; no hard sell, no inflated promises. He simply set out the merits of the apparatus as though briefing a junior officer on the disposition of troops, and one came away feeling that refusal would be not merely unwise but faintly unpatriotic.
Since I knew he was a Staff Officer with responsibilities in the military reserves, I said, half as a joke, that I might buy an alarm from him if he could arrange to have my name removed from the rolls.
He laughed and said that would be perfectly all right. The offer, he said, wrote itself.
I took it as a joke. He seemed to take it as a joke. The alarm was a good offer, and it was installed.
A few weeks passed.
Then I received a telephone call from a man I had served with in military intelligence. He had my file open in front of him.
“I am looking at your mobilisation order,” he said. “It is for six weeks. After six weeks, we have either won, lost, or gone into hiding in the woods. Nobody has a mobilisation order for six weeks”.
There was a pause.
“Except, it seems” he added, “for those who buy burglar alarms from a Staff Officer.”
