Lunch with English Novelist John Wain
“I was never very angry you know…”
In the mid-1980s I was living in Warwick. My first marriage had crumbled and I was renting a small attic flat in a 19th century terraced house. I would often sit at a small table by a window that overlooked a hundred back gardens, watching as many cats. I would read — mostly plays in those days — or try and write a play of my own on a small portable typewriter.
A couple of lunchtimes a week I’d wander into town for a drink or two at the Zetland Arms.
The Zetland had, since the mid-19th century, been the lunchtime haunt of barristers taking a drinking break from defending or prosecuting murderers at Warwick Crown Court. They were a noisy lot too: laughing and joking about their clients. It was a good place for a budding writer just to sit and listen, and discover what a dreadfully hit and miss thing British law was.
Davenports, the Birmingham brewery that served the Zetland, made an excellent bitter that went well with the landlady’s splendid cheese and onion sandwiches, which was the only choice then.
