A kind of peace about the place bred out of its bareness and the solitude

From A Mind to Murder by P.D. James, published in 1963.  This was just before I lived there in the mid-sixties and she wonderfully captures some aspects of English life which have since disappeared.

The next few miles fled in a gold thread of winking cats’-eyes marking the crown of the road, a rush of cold autumnal air. Outside Stalling he turned from the main road to where the dark, uninviting little pub was set well back among its surrounding elms. The bright boys of Stalling Coombe had never discovered it or had rejected it in favour of the smart pubs edging the green belt; their Jaguars were never seen parked against its black brick walls. The saloon bar was empty as usual, but there was a murmur of voices across the wooden partition which separated it from the public bar. He took his seat by the fire which burned summer and winter, evidently stoked with malodorous chunks of the publican’s old furniture. It was not a welcoming room. The chimney smoked in an east wind, the stone floor was bare and the wooden benches lining the walls were too hard and narrow for comfort. But the beer was cold and good, the glasses clean, and there was a kind of peace about the place bred out of its bareness and the solitude.

In pubs of that period, to a much greater extent than today, there were two parts, the saloon bar for the gentry and the public bar for the working class.  In the sixties locally brewed beer was just beginning to give way to the large national and later multinational brewing companies with standard processes and quality controls.  My father enjoyed the variety back then and the pleasure of discovering superior beers in the most unprepossessing pubs.  

1963 was also just before the North Sea natural gas began flowing.  Central heating was uncommon and fireplaces and chimneys were not decorative but functional.  Knowledge of wind direction and chimney flues were common because it determined the degree of comfort in a house or room.