Welcome to the latest issue of my newsletter. If you subscribe I’ll send you a free copy of my Microcosmos Fiction Magazine, containing five original stories. Thanks for reading.

Originally, it was the road that got moved and not the pub that got hidden. The White Horse at Priors Dean in Hampshire was a coaching inn, and the story goes that the road was straightened in the early nineteenth century, leaving it isolated behind trees and hedges, down a narrow lane. There was a sign on an iron post on the road, indicating the inn’s existence, but the locals so much enjoyed having the place to themselves that they took it down. The White Horse became known as The Pub With No Name. The frame on the iron post is still there and still vacant, but now a road sign shows where to turn off, which is handy but spoils the sense of discovery.

Edward Thomas lived with his family in the village of Steep, a couple of miles away. His first known poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, is about the White Horse and a barmaid there. Thomas loved this part of Hampshire, and fed his imagination by walking its hills and woods and combes. The locale was a kind of Eden for him, and the White Horse is an Edenic kind of pub, ancient and snug. Though I doubt you’ll find many impecunious poets or agricultural labourers among the clientele now. Earlier in the day I walked past one of the houses that Thomas rented, and a struggling young writer of our time, with a family, could not afford a residence of that character, with that kind of view over Ashford Hangers. Affluence and the motor car have done their work in this part of England too.

A pub like the White Horse, with its age and its literary patina, prompts one to reflect on how central the inn, the tavern, the alehouse once were to English social life and how they no longer are. Pubs are closing at a remarkable rate: 16,000 UK pubs have gone since 2000 and there are now about 45,000 left. The reasons for the decline are too complex to go into here, but it’s tough, often impossible, for many landlords to turn a profit in the current environment. (As an aside, the link between literary pursuits and drink has also weakened: in short, writers are not the boozers they once were.)

Thomas was one of the White Horse regulars, and the smaller of the bars, named after him, has a wooden plaque put there by the Edward Thomas Fellowship, along with some memorabilia. What about the place as an actual pub? Thankfully, there are no bogus antique-shop effects about it, and no reek of the heritage trail, though the clientele is more chartered surveyor than farm labourer. I could have sat there, downing pints and reading Thomas’ verse, all afternoon. But I had driven for a couple of hours to get to the White Horse and had to drive back the same way, which meant that getting slowly sozzled on beer and poetry was out of the question. Reluctantly, I left what Thomas called ‘that forest parlour, low and small among the towering beeches’ and headed for home.

Our memory can play tricks on us, not least when we’re trying to remember the name of an author or book. One day at work, I was reading Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo during my lunch break. A colleague, Janet, spotted the book cover and said, ‘Oh, I’ve read one of his books. It had this hilarious scene where the main character’s having alfresco sex and he looks up and sees a tortoise staring at him’.

Nostromo was the first novel by Conrad I’d ever picked up, so my knowledge of his other novels was almost non-existent back then. The scene she described didn’t sound Conradian, even to my callow ears. But this colleague was older and better educated (and more confident) than me, so I didn’t question her.

Several years later, having read more of Conrad’s novels and still not come across the scene with the alfresco sex and the tortoise, I was part of the way through Kingsley Amis’ One Fat Englishman, when I read:

Immediately, I remembered the conversation I’d had with Janet all those years before, and wondered how on earth she had confused Joseph Conrad with Kingsley Amis. But it took only a few moments to realize how simple the chain of correspondences was. Joseph Conrad wrote a novel called Lord Jim. Kingsley Amis wrote a novel called Lucky Jim. Two books, two Jims. Perhaps her memory had melded the two into a single novel, Lucky Lord Jim. Or perhaps she thought that Conrad really did write Lucky Jim and went on to produce a series of comic novels, including One Fat Englishman. Or that Amis turned, with high seriousness, to producing such novels as Lord Jim and Nostromo. I’ll never know. But whatever the explanation, it’s an interesting example of how memory sometimes does, or doesn’t, work.

The clothes designer has a fierce attachment to her mannequins. ‘They are pure form, you see. No thoughts, no emotions, no self-consciousness. No minds, no souls. Nothing to detract from the garments, nothing to spoil the look, the silhouette. I can dress them however I wish, and there are no opinions or tantrums. They don’t have silly affectations or little quirks of posture, and they don’t think they know more about clothes and how to wear them than I do.

‘They’re never late for work. I don’t need to scold them — though I do sometimes praise them. That’s just a daftness of mine. I know they’re just moulded plastic and yet I talk to them. Don’t look at me as if I’m a madwoman — of course, they don’t talk back!

‘I’m fond of them, in the way that other people are fond of their pets. A pet, after all, doesn’t talk to its owner — it’s a one-way street. And despite what their owners say, animals don’t have souls — or proper thoughts. The difference is that I treat my mannequins as collaborators, not as slaves. Though I always know what’s best for them.

‘Eventually they decay. Scars appear, the plastic discolours. Mannequins age, just like humans do. I’m quite unsentimental about it. Out they go! Those two out there by the rubbish? Oh, that’s a different story. You can see they’re quite new, no age at all. Sisters, you might say, from the same factory. You see, even though mannequins don’t have souls, they have personalities. What’s so strange about that? A room can have a personality — or a chair. A mannequin does too.

‘We worked well together at first. But then something changed. To be honest, and you’ll think I’m a bit touched, I didn’t like the way they looked at me. As if they shared a secret, knew something I didn’t, and were quite smug about it. I couldn’t stand it. I had to get rid of them. The bin men will be round later, and that’ll be the end of it. I won’t miss them, but if I’m honest, I feel a bit guilty about it. How silly is that? Guilt about a pair of mannequins! Let’s talk about something else…’

[Photograph taken on Leather Lane, London.]