Underage, under the radar
Kylie and Jason dominated the charts, Arsenal’s Mickey Thomas denied Liverpool the league and cup double, and David Hasselhoff brought down the Berlin Wall.
And in a small market town in Surrey a young man of 16 and his friends were indulging in under-age drinking… in a pub.
The pub that knowingly and illegally took their pocket money was a mile out of town down an unmade road — what would these days be described as a ‘destination pub’. Local teenagers certainly made it their destination on Friday nights.
Parents were accessories to this crime — dropping their sons and daughters off there and collecting them again several hours later.
And the police seemed to take a ‘blind-eye’ approach to this blatant flouting of the law. They knew where the crowd was, and what it was up to, and decided they had other things to worry about.
Much fun was had on these nights at that pub, and if memory serves the fellow concerned, there was never any trouble beyond a bit of healthy competition over a girl or some petty jealousy over a smart Sergio Tacchini track top — certainly less tension than at any of the house parties of the time.
The landlord was a tough old boy, who stood for no nonsense. He’d serve the youths pints of beer (cask ale was the drink of choice), tell them when they’d had enough to drink and reminded them that they had homes to go to at 11.20pm.
The learning curve was steep for this young crowd. They learnt drinking etiquette, respect for their elders, the meaning of ABV and how much they could sensibly drink.
Not for them a bottle of super-strength cider on a park bench; not for them casual drunken violence, noisy police-baiting, nor regrettable drink-fuelled sexual experimentation behind the ‘rec’.
I’m not saying these juveniles were paragons of virtue. But we… er, they, didn’t make page 15 of the Evening Standard.
They were supervised, they were contained and they were controlled. Because they were in a pub.
Underage drinking in pubs is almost unthinkable these days, thanks to tight enforcement of section 150 of the Licensing Act and frequent crackdowns. But this hasn’t solved the problem — it has just driven it out of pubs and into the community.
I’m not sure that I want to risk breaking a societal taboo and come out publicly in favour of legitimising underage drinking in pubs.
But I do think that — with some sensible, non-hysterical consideration — pubs could be part of the solution. Where would you prefer your kids to be on a Friday night?
Discuss!
