Today I am going to talk about a pub known, appropriately enough, as the Dumb Post Inn. Now I fully understand it if you just reject the idea that this place exists, but it does. It is in Bremhill, near Calne in the West of England, which is a delightful little place, surrounded by fields and countryside and wildlife and all the things that make an area attractive and pleasant to enjoy your real ale in. A few years ago the owner of this pub got up to open up the pub on a new day, a Wednesday, as I remember it. This particular day the sun was shining, the air was clear, and it was a crisp winter morning. They hadn’t even yet started building the huge road bypass which would eventually carve up their little community. All seemed right with the world; in fact it all seemed a little more beautiful and sparkling and special than usual – as indeed it was. The day was a relatively quiet day; only the usuals came in – the farmers and the owner of the post-office and so on. A few jokes were told by the old men, lined with age and hard work, and indeed, some of them were funny. Old Mr Makepeace told this one:
“Arrrrr. What be brown, and sticky?”
“Oi don’t knaaaaaoow.”
“A stick. Arr arr.”
“Thaaaat was drrreeeadfulll. Now get orrrfff moi laaaaarnd!”
And others were told, and many laughed, and all enjoyed their local brewed bitter, for in this pub no lagers were sold, for there was no demand for sophisticated drinks like that from the simple living yokels who enjoyed the landlord’s hospitality (and indeed that of his wife from time to time). It was an idyllic spot in the centre of a fast-paced world, were people took planes to Scotland, and tractors were a thing of the past, as far as private transport was concerned. As the landlord closed for the afternoon, he was struck by an idea. He was just about to throw away that morning’s leftover bread (because he liked his bread only an hour or three old) when he thought, “Why not make it into toast? And put cheese between two slices of this toast, and call it a toasty?” He was not aware if this idea had been thought of before, living as he did in an isolated rural community, but he thought it would be a damn sight more warming than a floppy salad sandwich. He decided that when he opened up for business that evening, he would offer the ‘Toasty’ as a special offer to warm up the labourers and farm-hands that had been working out doors in the cold since three hours before daybreak that morning. He called out to his wife to get out of bed and do some work, and when she did, he told her that as of today she would be on kitchen-duty, in charge of making toasties for the customers. He immediately found an old blackboard and chalked up an enticing sign offering the “New Cheese ‘Toasty’ – only 50p”
Back in those days you could buy a pint of beer for a pound and still have change enough for the bus ride home, and for a round of ammo for the old Winchester, and then you could sit in your outside toilet and think about how you fought in both world wars, and how your pension isn’t enough and how in my day you could leave your front door open, and how the kids would give you some respect, and how we had proper music in them days and not this racket the kids seem to like now, and how all the family used to gather round the wireless of an evening and listen to the World Service talking about all other places around the world, places that only existed in descriptions by Kipling, and how we used to have a proper head on the beer that we bought (and still have change enough for a pair of cinema tickets for you and your sweetheart) but that’s beside the point.
With the sign finished, the owner of the pub stood back and sighed, thinking about old times, and how his father would never have put up with change like this. To him it was an abomination of nature if the brewery wanted you to stock a new beer. Still, you couldn’t drag your feet in times like this, he thought. He went outside and looked for a suitably prominent place to hoist the sign. Finally he found one that couldn’t be missed from the street: directly over the road signs to Bristol. Having positioned and secured his ticket to a new realm of wealth (he dreamed, and he wasn’t far wrong) he retired inside, only to remark that she really should oil the bedsprings if she was going to make a noise like that. The afternoon passed, and the landlord spent it perfecting his recipe for Toasties. He found that if he popped down to the local cheesemonger and got some extra matured cheddar it mad for a more poignant toasty, as did dashes of lemon juice or Worcestershire sauce. His upstart daughter informed him that she would never eat any of his toasties as long as the had Worcestershire sauce in them, as it contained anchovies. He replied that she was a stupid little cow who could sod off as far eating any of his creations was concerned. By about half past five he figured he had got his technique sorted out. This much cheese, that many splashes of juice and a touch of sauce to make sure that that sodding little brat would keep her greedy vegetarian mitts of his prized creations. He wrote all this down on a piece of sackcloth and gave it to his wife. Meanwhile he went back to the cheesemonger to buy considerable quantities of cheese. He came back with a barrowful of cheddar cheese, and some stilton to help his bad dreams. He believed that Stilton was the home of witches and warlocks, and that cheese from Stilton had the power to relieve the consumer of nightmares.
At 6 o’clock he opened the Inn to the public, and they came in dribs and drabs, but no-one bought his new delicacy. He was quite disappointed, and his wife was equally elated – something new to carp at him about; a new fresh wound to open at any time in the future for easy points scoring in an argument, for theirs was a loveless marriage. If he had been more careful they would never have needed to marry. Also they would never have needed to marry if her father had not been so aggressive, and had not wielded the 12 bore with such alarming promise. The evening drew on, and the man thought that the day’s early promise had nought but faded away into a cold night’s disappointment. Outside it had started to snow lightly, and the wind was whipping up, but inside it was as cosy as a litter of kittens. The pub started to fill up with drinkers, and being the middle of the week, most of them felt that they had something to celebrate. Tomorrow they would have to celebrate something else, but today was the middle of the week, and that was what counted. A warm convivial atmosphere grew around the nodding heads of those listening to the story tellers like myself, and everyone there was ensconced in the feeling that there was nowhere on earth as blissful as the Dumb Post Inn. In the corner the old grandfather clock chimed eight times, and then settled off to sleep again. Suddenly there was a weak tapping on the door, and only Old Man Payne heard it. At fifty-five he was the youngest of the old men, and he still had his hearing. He signalled over to young Davies to open the door. As the door swung open a flurry of snow flew in, and everyone turned to scold the youngster who had introduced the cold to the pub. The youth looked down and spotted what had caused the noise. He bent down, picked it up and shut the door, looking rather sheepish under the glare of the old-timers. He placed it on the bar, and it shook itself off. It was a rabbit. It looked straight up at the barman and said, “I’m freezing. What have ya got that’ll warm me up? A shot o’ whisky?” To which the barman, ignoring the cries of, “A talking rabbit!” and, “Aliens Exist!” immediately saw an opportunity to get his snack off the ground. First he had to get something straight between him and the rabbit. “First answer two questions. One: you are not a bloody vege are you? Two: I don’t know what you call them but you haven’t got any of those rabbit diseases have you?” The rabbit looked relieved and said, “No ‘n’ no. What d’ya reckon?” The barman said I think you need a pint of ale and a cheese Toasty. That’ll see you right. He served up a pint of Smiles Exhibition (one of the finest ales you will ever drink) and went off to go and get his wife to make up a toasty. He went into the kitchen, but couldn’t find his wife, so he got out the cheese and bread and so on and made the toasty of his life for the rabbit. He lovingly selected the perfect proportion of ingredients, and combined them into the perfect toasty, in fact, Toasty scholars are in agreement that the finest cheese toasty ever produced was made by Mr Linden (the barman and owner) on that cold winter’s night, for the world’s only known talking rabbit. He came back out to the bar carrying this icon of perfection on a platter in front of him. The whole pub (apart from Old Man Payne, who had lost his sense of smell in the war) turned to see what that heavenly scent was. If you could have bottled that smell and sold it, you could have become a millionaire overnight, it was so good. The rabbit too was not immune to the allures of the cheese toasty – he was in fact possessed of a highly sensitive set of olfactory glands. He greedily devoured the toasty and said,
“My man, that was a _fine_ toas’y there. You sho must-a worked damn hard to get it that right.”
The barman, pleased immensely with the compliment and recognition of his effort simply nodded, and the two of them got chatting over their beer about this and that, and how a rabbit came to be buying toasted cheese sandwiches at a bar in Bremhill. It turned out that the rabbit was from nearby Bristol, and hence had a more urban accent than most of the denizens of this area. The fact that he could talk at all was ascribed to his being raised by parrots in an animal shelter. The parrots taught him to say things like, “Who’s a pretty boy, then?” and, “Answer the bloody phone!” and so on, and soon when he was talked to by the managers of the shelter he found he could string a sensible reply together. Soon he learned to pick locks, and he escaped to the wild, or the St Pauls area of Bristol. There he learned to street talk, as your life depended on knowing the language of the streets, sometimes. This was how he came to be a talking rabbit, and why he dropped consonants from time to time. At about nine thirty the rabbit got up and said,
“Well, I’m off now, and thanks fo’ the hospi-tality. See you ’round.”
He then proceeded to hop off home. Everyone in the pub talked about it for hours afterwards, indeed the oak panels reverberated to the sound of queries and questions and speculation and supposition. The regulars were quizzing the barman vigorously about the newcomer, and whether he would be allowed credit, or allowed to drink beer from the special tap that only the inner circle of the Dumb Post clientele could drink from. This tap had never been cleaned, for fear of disturbing the unknown culture that lived just south of the valve. This culture, made up of a specially resilient form of bacteria and fungus gave a certain edge to any draught ale pumped through it, although the best results were obtained from a combination of the aforementioned Smiles Exhibition for three days and then Uncle Igor’s Falling Down Water for a day. Having correctly fed the culture in this way the barman then needed only to switch barrels to whatever beer he chose, and that beer would taste phenomenally good for three days, with the best results after 22 hours. These and many other questions were put to the barman that night, but the only answer he gave to any of them was, “We’ll have to wait and see…”
Night passed, and the next day was a cold overcast westcountry day. The day passed as might a usual working day for a small village of farmers and one electrical repair man. The only topic of conversation that day in Bremhill was the incredible smart talkin’ city rabbit, with a penchant for toasties. Every man there swore that he too liked toasties, and had in fact had them on a number of occasions, and so could personally describe their taste and texture. Each and everyone in the village wondered if the rabbit would return that night. Night fell, and the Inn opened up and it was packed with every man and his wife/dog/mistress in the village. All night the pub did a roaring trade in toasties and alcohol, as everyone wanted to try the miraculous toasty (which they had of course tried many times before…) and share the experience with their friends. Only young Davies (who always had to be different) professed not to like the toasty. He said it was too popular, and that the Inn had sold out. He was widely castigated for his idiotic viewpoint. They all went home disappointed, however as the rabbit failed to show. The same happened the next night, and the barman took more in those two nights than he had in the whole previous month. After that, however, the inhabitants of this little community got tired waiting for a rabbit to turn up at a pub, so they went about their normal business.
The next few days passed in a similar manner with the attendance at the pub slowly declining until once again it was Wednesday, the middle of the week, and the inhabitants of Bremhill (near Calne) could celebrate the week being half over. The pub filled up, and many people ordered toasties of many varieties, and everyone enjoyed his or her evening. With his new found profits the landlord had driven into Bristol and bought one of those new digital watches. It had an alarm which beeped every hour, and he was showing it off to the regulars at the Dumb Post Inn. All present were astonished at the facility with which one could tell the hour from this astounding timepiece. Some, like Old Man Payne, propounded the theory that this watch would make idiots of us all, and that the digital nature of the display had simply been invented to keep the population soft in the head, so they would accept communist rule when it came. He was gently humoured. At 7:58 pm the landlord called everyone round and hushed them up, so that all could hear the gentle beep of the new hour. 7:59 and 40 seconds, and the countdown was on. 7:58 and 50 seconds – ten seconds to go – five – four – three – two – one and…
There was a loud report as the door flew open, completely drowning the quiet pulse of sound from the watch. Everyone groaned and turned to see who had created this untimely disturbance. Zounds! It was the rabbit, back again, and he was as sassy as ever. The barman cried, “Thank you, Lord!” and then,
“Quiet everyone, now we can have two good things instead of the one – I’ll wind my watch back and we can hear the beep, in the company of the rabbit-” “Call me Melvin, man,” the rabbit interjected, “In the company of Melvin, the rabbit-” “Who’s Melvin?” the pub asked. “The rabbit, man!” the barman replied. “Who’s this Rabbit Man?” The clientele demanded, angrily. “MELVIN IS THE RABBIT!” the landlord screamed. “HOW DO YOU KNOW?” shouted back the pub. “BECAUSE HE JUST BLOODY WELL TOLD ME!” the irate owner yelled. “THEN WHO THE HELL IS THE RABBIT MAN?” they roared. “THERE IS NO RABBIT MAN!” he replied, less than calmly. “Hey, chill, I’m the rabbit, man.” “In the words of Craig Arthur Hurst, ‘Clearly badword OFF!’” “I’ll have a cheese toasty, man. No, make that two cheese toasties, as they’re sooo damn fine!” said the rabbit, in an attempt to defuse the situation. “Comin’ up!” replied the barman, regaining his cool. The rest of the pub were still highly confused as to the identity of the furry four legged, floppy eared, friendly customer. He turned to the pub and explained the situation, and all was well. He also explained to the barman that he would be returning every Wednesday at eight o’clock, because it was such a lively pub, and everyone was very friendly to him. In fact, the people of Bremhill soon adopted the little rabbit as their unofficial mascot. After a few weeks had passed, and with them a few more visits from Melvin, the landlord saw an opportunity for more money making. He telephoned the BBC and told them that every Wednesday at eight o’clock a talking rabbit (called Melvin) came in and ordered the same snack every time. The man on the other end of the phone didn’t believe him, but they sent a reporter down anyway. Soon they had national newspaper coverage and live television broadcasts and the whole of this small community was swamped by journalists and speculators and zoologists and scientist and so forth. The little town was very unhappy, although they were getting rich from it. The barman alone was charging 500 pounds an interview, which is what he used to get in a whole working week before the rabbit incident. The rabbit himself used to hop in on a Wednesday and buy his two cheese toasties and then hop back into the undergrowth, and he never talked to the interviewers. He confided in the barman that there were some people in Bristol who might just like to come down and pay a visit to the village, and particularly the rabbit, if they saw his face on television. The landlord nodded, knowingly, (although he didn’t have a clue what Mel was chattin’ about) and said, “Wise, man. Very wise.”
And so the affair passed. The TV crews didn’t hang around for very long, and there were only so many column inches that could be extracted from a talking rabbit with a desire for cheese toasties, and so little by little, village life returned to normal. Slowly the extra Bed and Breakfasts closed down, the farmers returned to work, and the post office sacked the extra workers it had taken on to deal with all the telegrams and so on. Melvin still came and ate his toasties on a Wednesday at eight o’clock precisely (one day he came in just after eight, and the landlord commented on his tardiness, until Mel went over and rang the speaking clock, which showed him that it was in fact the landlord’s watch which was out) and he was generally an asset to the community, although he do anything apart from buy two cheese toasties and occasionally a drop of bitter. Week in, week out, Melvin was always at the Dumb Post Inn at eight in the evening, and he always bought two cheese toasties. No one knew where he kept his cash, or indeed where he got his cash from (although rumours abounded) but he was always on time, and he _never_ asked for credit. And so the years passed, until one Wednesday Mel hopped in at eight o’clock and said,
“Y’know, man, I feel like a change. I ain’t eaten nothin’ but cheese toasties on a Wednesday for the last three years. I’s gettin’ bored, man. I is gonna eat summin different, man. Y’know what I’m sayin’?”
The shocked barman just gawped at him for a minute. The rabbit said, “Eeurgh! You got _bad_ teeth, man.”
But the barman, stung, replied, “I’ll give you something to get your teeth into: a cheese and ham toasty!”
The rabbit just replied, “Lay one on me, my man.” The barman turned round and went into the kitchen, determined to do this one himself. This was a job too important for the wife, he thought to himself as he chopped up the ham into chunky but manageable bits. He sliced the vintage mature cheddar lovingly, and buttered the outside of the toasty with the greatest care and attention, so as to prevent any parts sticking to the machine he had purchased for the facilitation of the toasty making process. He carefully arranged the cheese and ham, so that every bite would contain just enough ham to compliment the cheese perfectly, and that every new bite would release a fresh torrent of molten cheese into the waiting mouth of the expectant rabbit. He returned after a few minutes with one cheese toasty (ready made, in expectation) and one cheese and ham toasty, a new creation from the culinarily-inclined landlord. The rabbit quietly ate the two toasties, remarking on the delight with which he encountered a new taste experience. They chatted for a while, and then the rabbit wondered off to chat with the locals. At nine-thirty however he was off, back to his rabbit warren, presumably.
The next week something strange happened – the rabbit didn’t turn up! Everyone was amazed, and saddened. A search party was instigated, in order to scour the nearby roads for signs of roadkill, and every farmer was to check his threshing machine for tell-tale signs of blood/fur/gristle. After many days of searching, nothing was found and the inhabitants started getting themselves accustomed to the prospect of a future without rabbits called Melvin. Rabbits would cease to be fantastic creatures possessed of speech and sensibility and would return to their former image of dull but prolific breeding machines. After three years of excitement it seemed as though village life were truly to return to normal. The Dumb Post Inn returned to its usual life of catering for a dozen or so locals each night, and maybe fifteen on weekends. The years passed, and the rabbit became popular legend. If the number of people who claimed to have been in the pub when Melvin first turned up would have filled Wembley Arena! In fact he was so popular that other villages nearby also claimed to have been visited by the rabbit, although these claims were almost always shown to be false, by their being unable to appropriately imitate the rabbit’s pseudo-streettalk. Many years passed, and the landlord of the pub grew frail and died, leaving the pub to his daughter, who intended to have it turned into a nightclub for the villages youth (all nine of them).
However, in heaven, where the rest of the action of this story takes place, things were happening. Because the barman had been a good Christian all his life, and had always followed the teachings of the One True Lord, he had been allowed into heaven. And because the Christian had been a good barman for most of his life, and had always followed the instructions of the One True Brewery, he was allowed by God to open heaven’s first pub, serving a select few beers on tap. On the opening night of his new pub, which he decided to call, in honour of that missing, mourned Melvin, ‘The Talking Rabbit’, who should hop in, but Melvin himself! Melvin, who had snowy-white fur, in line with Heaven’s standard guidelines on dress, hopped right up to the bar and said,
“I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll have two cheese toasties, hold the ham.”
The barman was only too pleased to oblige, and he questioned the rabbit as to his whereabouts after the famous cheese and ham toasty incident. The rabbit replied that he had in fact got ill and died shortly afterwards, and that he hadn’t died from anything other than his own stupidity.
“Why? What are you talking about?” asked the landlord?
“Well, I shoulda known that if I was gonna die of anything it would be of mixin’ ma toasties!”
