Hospitality is essential to the way women live as icons of Holy Mother Church. Flossie Lane personified it while remaining unique:
Florence Emily Lane was born at the Sun Inn, Leintwardine, on July 10 1914, the only girl in a family of five. Her father had been a policeman at Ross-on-Wye and her mother was the first member of the family to hold the [pub] licence. Educated at the village school, as a teenager Flossie waited on the customers and helped out in the kitchen by washing bottles and glasses.
After the death of her parents, her brother Charlie took over the licence in 1935 – the year of George V’s silver jubilee – and held it jointly with her until his death half a century later. Flossie Lane had run the pub single-handedly since 1985.
Both she and her brother were particular about who drank there; sons of the tillage were preferred, although some approved non-rustics were tolerated. The pub is still the base and meeting point for the local cricket club, bellringers and fly fishermen drawn to the river Teme which runs through the village. Although popular, there are concerns for the pub’s future; over recent years, Leintwardine has lost four of its pubs and inns.
Her pub was the only one to have five stars in the "classic pub" category. [L]isted in the CAMRA Good Beer Guide as “a pub of outstanding national interest”... it is actually Flossie Lane’s 18th-century vernacular stone cottage, tucked away in a side road opposite the village fire station.
She was incapacitated by a fall in 2006, but the pub ran on volunteers.
During her infirmity Flossie Lane’s regulars rallied round to keep the Sun going, manning it on a rota basis. The owner of the neighbouring chip shop ordered the beer from the brewery, served the customers, and delivered chip suppers which were washed down with pints of Flossie Lane’s ale. Although her name remained above the door, latterly the pub was effectively run for her by its devotees, all of them locals. The accounts, the washing-up, the laying of the fire and even the sweeping-up were undertaken by the volunteers.
Flossie Lane was proud of not having kept up with the times, and did not hold with modernisation. In an age of lager louts and binge drinkers, no one at the Sun Inn can ever recall the slightest hint of trouble there. “The pub hasn’t changed in all the years, and they are all good people here – I won’t have no rough,” she insisted. Although she had been serving ale since the Twenties roared, Flossie Lane’s secret recipe for a long life was simple. “I’m a teetotal,” she said. “I like a nice cup of tea. I leave the drink to the others.”
A chronic agoraphobic, Flossie Lane was never known, within living memory, to have ventured outside her pub (other than to take the air in the rear garden). She never learned to drive and took her holidays at home. She enjoyed a reputation as the best-informed person in the village, and every evening cheerfully dispensed local gossip to her customers.
In her advanced old age, Flossie Lane’s regulars converted a downstairs room into a bedroom to spare her the stairs, but for the last 10 years at least she had slept every night in her customary armchair. The last person out tucked her up.
Much died with her, an age that won't be known again. May she rest in peace. (H/T to Andrew Cusack)
Comments