A QUAINT SURVIVAL

Waipa Post, Volume 37, Issue 2218, 6 October 1928, Page 7

A QUAINT SURVIVAL

"THE OLD CIDER SHOP ." There can be very few Englishmen who know England as well as it is known to Mr H. V. Morton. He has made a special study of its beauties and its quaint old world corners, and he writes of them with the affection and the tenderness they deserve. In his latest volume "The Call of England" he writes of his vagabond rambles through the north country. An idea of the quality of his work may be gained from his description of a cider shop. "I suppose," he writes, "that not more than one Birmingham man in 1,000 knows of the secret cider drinkers of Snowhill. Near the station goods yard, tiucked away in a row of old and rather mean buildings, is. a fruit shop which at first sight seems nothing more than an ordinary small fruit store in a not too smart district. Behind the crates of red apples rise tall black casks bound with metal; they are full of draught-cider. Behind the shop, but entered from an ill-lit alley at the side, is a kitchen known to the elected few as 'The Old Cider Shop.' Its licence is, I have been told, the only existing licence of its kind.in England; it is for the sale of cider and nothing else.

"Night after night men who would not insult their throats with beer or whisky meet in the kitchen to drink the apple-juice. The two rooms are small, but they are always full. The stranger who blunders in by chance feels that he is a trespasser, for the cider drinkers meet like the members of a club, banded together under an invisible apple-tree, ranking themselves against the heathen ale drinker and the great barbai'ian of whisky. It was dark. My companion pulled me up at the entrance to the alley. 'Here we are,' he whispered, 'and when they ask you if you will drink "sweet" or "rough" say "rough" or they will know you are not a cider man.' He opened the door, and we found ourselves in a remarkable room. It! might have been plucked up, china mugs and all, from some little Herefordshire or Somersetshire village. A big fire blazed in an oldfashioned grate. An ancient sporting gun hung in the smoke over the broad mantel. A brass sign bore the words, 'Home, Sweet Home.' A stag's

head protruded from a waU bracket. "Bound the room, sitting' on wooden benches at wooden tables',, 'were' the cider drinkers; a marvellously, varied gathering. City men, workmen, a man wearing a railway ,<unfforro,. Each man grasped the handle of a big china mug. Over the sawdust of the floor passed and repassed a girl in an apron with her hands full of empty mugs. 'All these men are regulars,' said my friend. 'They come here night after night. The big man with the grey hair is a farmer from Hereford. That man talking to the railway-man is an ex-city councillor. They are all cider men. They all know one another, rich man and poor man.' A curious attractive atmosphere. How different from an ale bar! Your cider drinker is a cool, calm, and thoughtful person who likes to drink sitting in an ingle-nook with his feet to the fire. I looked round the room, half expecting the door to be pushed open by the squire in a pink coat with the mud of a day's hunting on his white breeches. "One or two new arrivals entered, were greeted by a series of nods, settled down in their favourite seats, and automatically large mugs of cider appeared in their hands. In the dark alley we met Mr Smith, an elderly man in a white apron, who owns the cider kitchen. Mr Smith, who is over 70 was bom in the cider shop, and even then it was a very ancient institution. Mr Smith refused all information. He said he did not want his place overrun. He was kind but firm. 'You see,' he said, 'there is not much room, and if you write a book about it we shall be overcrowded, and we're quite content as we are. Now an old customer came to-day to cure his rheumatism. I don't want my old customers to be crowded out by a lot of curious beer drinkers. Thank you all the same.' We turned and looked back at the cider shop. A man could pass it every day for years and never know that it existed. Such places are the secrets of great cities. All cities possess them; little insulated patches which never alter. The city grows up round them, changes, matures, but they pursue an extraordinary existence of their own, selfsatisfied, careless of change, content to be as they always have been. So in the heart of a modern city you sometimes find a village kitchen."