Before He Ruined Me
Happiness called and has saved you a seat by the bar
The Village, she said. She was changing the venue to The Village. I don’t go to many parties these days. Too many comforts at home. I’m not looking for love or new friends, and my husband is a party grump so if I go, I must embrace going alone. Fishing among strangers for connection, for depth, over music that strains conversations, takes energy. So mostly, when it comes to the party night, tiredness twinkles its fingers at me, Oliver Hardy-style, and I text an excuse before settling for a wind-down and early bed.
But an old friend was having a birthday party and for once it felt really important to go. Bela’s father died earlier this year and we’d exchanged a few emails about it; the sticky drowning qualities of bereavement. She having a party, and I’d committed to going. And she was having it at The Village.
Things get renamed all the time in this town, and though I’ve lived here for most of 42 years, I rarely know what people mean when they say The Walrus, or The Pig and Snicket or the Downpipe and Guttering. Then I’ll make my way there and go, Ah, you mean the old Sussex Arts Centre, or the old Chequers, or the old Norfolk Arms. The Village sounded like a community centre, and I knew the area of town, so roughly where I was heading.
The night arrives. My husband is giving me a lift, and we are already on our way when I plug Village, Islingword Road into Google Maps. The photo that pops up throws a ligature around my heart and tightens it. That is not a community centre. That is my old local, The Horse and Groom.
We pull up outside. Those familiar green tiles. The old name still there on one side, and a new sign above it, telling me this is “Village”. It is the fucking Horse and Groom.
I’ve not stepped inside that pub for thirty years. Not since I moved away, when I was pregnant with my second child. When Phil the landlord was still there. Phil, who I had a small crush on, who would pour our drinks as soon as we stepped over the threshold because we were there every night. Me and my first husband.
I get out of the car and stand in front of those dizzyingly green tiles. The corner doorway we never used is open. The side door, which was ours, is also open, but blocked by a leather armchair. Outside, cafe tables, planters, a whole different vibe. From the name change, I know it will be remodelled inside too — this town is too cool for old-fashioned pubs. Yet still, this is the Horse and Groom. And it feels … haunted.
It’s not easy going in. Part of me wants to get right back in the car. But Bela. Bela’s birthday. So, with trepidation, I enter.
The old bar is gone; the new one has a cafe counter vibe: pastries under glass domes. Cubby-style shelves filled with bottles go back into a square space, like a village shop. I want to say something to someone, but there’s no one to say anything to. Bela must be around the corner, dancing. And it isn’t anyone’s drama but mine. And it isn’t a drama, really, but a quiet, weird series of explosions, as memories come back to me of When I Was Happy With Him.
Our house was ten yards across the street. I could have thrown a paper aeroplane out of the bedroom window and had a good chance, if the pub door was open, of landing it on the bar. We’d eat on our laps on our garbage second-hand sofa, then cross the road. The pub was our real front room. That was where we hung out with our neighbours for in-jokes, laughter, and lock-ins.
These are the memories that never come up. How can they even exist, after all that happened later? When that relationship took me to the point of wanting to die? To the point of opening a fourth-floor hotel window to a blast of January air, and calculating whether or not the drop would be fatal. How could I have memories of being happy when it ended in rape, death threats, court injunctions, a police alarm in my flat, my car being tampered with, a spiked drink, prison, and a deep-seated fear that reverberated through the next thirty years of my life?
There’s more to these memories, too. The sense of a culture, lost. The late Eighties and early Nineties when a pub really was a ‘Public House’. How normal it was, if you didn’t have children to stay in for, to spend every night in your local, making friends, chatting to your neighbours. It was part of what made that area of town so good; a pub on every corner, and the community feel that came out of drinking together getting to know the people who lived in your neighbour
The Horse and Groom was a great pub. Phil became a friend. We had darts nights, quiz nights, theme nights, and everyday laughs. No TV to suck away our attention and interaction. No sports. And if there was something worth watching on one of the four available channels at watch, we’d watch, then go out, or we’d tape it for later. The pub was our social life. It wasn’t even expensive to half live there. Beer and crisps were cheap. I only had warm feelings about The Horse and Groom.
I’d say nothing bad ever happened there, except there was a long-standing story about a gangster in the 1950s (the criminals represented by Brighton Rock’s Pinkie) coming in with a box, and getting so drunk he forgot to take it with him. The landlord opened it up. Inside, a severed head. Which he (not wanting trouble), walled up between the ladies and the gents. The new owners keep the skull behind the bar.
We didn’t lose our heads there. We drank, and made friends. We got engaged, then married. We had our first child and found the baby monitor had better reception in the pub than we could get in our basement living room. I could reach him quicker too, if he cried. Our dog would bark if anything was up. Don’t at me, it was the Nineties. We’d been raised by parents who left us in the car.
I go around the corner to find Bela in the place where the dartboard used to be, now set up with decks, and LPs stuck to the ceiling. I pass the wall which used to bear the noticeboard. Photos of me used to be there. Me and him. In various costumes, playing various party games, in various states of inebriation. A clean wall now. Just tasteful mint green paint.
Before he ruined me, I was happy here. I laughed here. I felt at home here. With the man who would later wish me dead, and make me wish I was. But from the ruin of me that escaped, I built a better version of myself. The experience equipped me to write better characters, not puppets and cut-outs, but real, flawed humans with a pulse. Eventually, I even came to recognise my part in the marital horror show; the vulnerabilities and desire to please that more or less asked him to twist me into a shape he liked better, even if that shape, Fifties Housewife, was one that cut off my oxygen supply.
How can happy memories feel this peculiar? Because I never think of being happy with him. I mean, of course, I had to have been. You don’t marry someone who makes you miserable. You marry someone who makes you happy. He made me happy. But the taint of everything that came after makes these memories feel alien and false. Dim and fuzzy. Vague ghosts of memories, overwritten by the misery that followed. It was the weirdest, weirdest of nights. But I stayed. And I danced.
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Roundup of things I’ve enjoyed on Substack:
’s ‘How we met’ story is both funny and heart-warming. I avoid politics on here but ’s article about understanding US vice-presidential candidate J D Vance through Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was the American history primer I didn’t know I needed and I fully feel better informed for reading it. It throws a lot of things into relief! I read ’s very special piece on the emotionally affective qualities of a video game called The Long Dark, and adult teddy bear attachment (and so much more) last month before I started doing roundups so this is a catch up. But if you haven’t read it, treat yourself.Since last week I have:
Moved into my tiny garden office, which I have christened The Beach Hut. It is a perfect quiet space for retaining my focus.
Made a whole raft of final novel tweaks suggested by my agent.
Received over £1,500 to my defamation defence fund, the crowdfunder I have set up to defend myself against a defamation lawsuit.
Over to you
Have you ever felt haunted by happy memories?
Do you have, or have you had, a local?
Have you ever accidentally gone somewhere you didn’t intend to go?
Has any beloved place of yours had a makeover? How did you feel?
very brave, vulnerable piece♥️ May you have peace throughout your life? Find joy and have fun♥️
Great, visceral writing. Yes, haunted by a happy thing that didn’t turn out so rosy. A lost love, wrong turns, poor decisions. Don’t we all have regret closets? The trick is not to go in there too often and never let them define us.