Imogen Williams recounts her grandmother’s job as a pub landlady and memories of growing up in that lively environment.

My 85-year-old granny, Jane, is probably the most glamorous woman I know. She is rarely seen without a pair of heels, wears almost exclusively jewel tones, and always smells of Chanel Number 5. When I started university, her only advice to me was “paint your nails, always wear perfume, and eat a banana”. Today, she is in a leopard-print silky shirt with earrings dangling to her shoulders and bright red lips. I ask her where she is going later. “Oh, nowhere,” she says.

Life has not always been as glamorous as she makes it look. At 21, she married my grandfather, Aldo, the son of a Welsh chauffeur, Jack Williams, and an Italian immigrant, Francesca Rabaiotti. Francesca, her mother-in-law, and my great-grandmother ran a host of Italian cafés in Cardiff: The Florence, The Mayfair and The Savoy. 

It was in The Savoy that Granny, then 35 years old, began her unexpected career in hospitality, ultimately becoming the landlady of a central Cardiff pub.

“I did things I never believed I could do”

Jane Williams

Inspired by her hometown of Bardi in north Italy, my great-grandmother, Francesca, and her multitude of siblings served up coffee, spaghetti, gelato, and booze to Welsh office workers. On busier days, Granny would help out. “In those days, you were supposed to close at 3pm, but we used to have a sort of lock in and people used to break their lunch hour. They would drink themselves silly.” she recalls.

My grandfather, known to me as Bampi, inherited the café business, helping to run The Savoy, before becoming the landlord of The Cefn Mably Arms, a sprawling country pub just outside Cardiff in the early 90s. Granny, who in her youth had modelled and spent time at fashion college in London, was suddenly – and very much to her surprise – a pub landlady.

She took the role in her stride, catering to the swathes of farmers that flocked to the Cefn Mably in the evenings. One year, after a nearby agricultural show, she broke up a headbutting competition between farmers. “I walked between two men in the middle of their headbutting competition and told them to stop, can you believe that?” she says. “I did things I never believed I could do.”

Three years later, my grandparents took over The Traders Tavern, a local boozer in the heart of Cardiff. It is here in this pub that I have some of my earliest memories, flicking peas at my siblings across the table, playing with teddies in the back office while Granny did the books and endless games of musical chairs in the basement when our cousins came to stay.

I grew up five minutes up the road from the pub meaning much of my early childhood involved me hanging off her coat-tails, hoping to be passed a handful of chips to keep me quiet while she poured pints, lugged barrels up from the cellar, and waltzed her way around the room, making every guest feel like they were the most valued customer of the day. “I like casual relationships,” she says. “You could chat to customers without ever getting too involved.”

Bampi died in 2002, but The Traders Tavern remained a family hub where Granny’s children, their partners, and all the grandchildren would gather en masse to see her. In total, we were 22 and it was total carnage. “Having you at teatime wasn’t easy as I was so busy and you were a big distraction,” says Granny. “I didn’t want the staff to see me always entertaining you or they’d have started entertaining their own families at the pub too.”

Unable to behave appropriately on the pub floor, the grandchildren were sent into the basement to wreak havoc in our favourite room – the freezer. Noisy white machines with sliding see-through doors promised frozen desserts that only the tallest cousins were able to peek over and see. The jealousy I felt watching an older, cooler cousin, tall and strong enough to slide open the top of the freezer and reach in for ice cream, was unrivalled.

These freezers were home to my most nostalgic food item of all time, limone ripieno – lemon sorbet in a Sicilian lemon shell. “They were quite exotic for Cardiff those,” laughs Granny. As a result of Bampi’s Italian heritage, he ordered limone ripieno by the dozen, and after he died, Granny never stopped sourcing them.

To this day, I can remember the sound of the crisp, frozen plastic packaging being torn open and the urgent passing of the lemon from one young hand to the other as the frozen fruit numbed my palms in seconds. If there is ever a limone ripieno on a menu today, my family cannot resist but dig five spoons into one and re-tell all of our favourite stories from our childhood spent in Granny’s pub.

Granny’s only time off was Sunday evening. After a long week of late nights propping up drunk guests on bar stools and serving pints of Brains Welsh ale to the masses flowing out of stadiums and theatres and into the pub, Granny should have spent her Sundays resting.

Instead, she would collect my sister and I every week and take us to her flat to bake a Victoria sponge cake. Once our fingers were sticky and our faces covered in icing, she would let us raid her jewellery box and try on every necklace she owned, ruining them with jam and buttercream. When we tired of this, she’d duly bathe us before sending us home, bellies full, hair washed, teeth brushed, and pyjamas on, ready for bed.

Years later, we moved away from Cardiff, leaving Granny in Wales on her own. Three years on, she decided to sell the pub and return to London to be closer to us all. Much to her relief, she no longer deals with the drunk and lairy until midnight, and Sunday afternoons are firmly her own again. But every time that I go over to see her, there’s still a Victoria sponge waiting for me, and she lets me flick my sticky fingers through her photo albums of the pub years.