Lunch with English Novelist John Wain

Steve Newman Writer
4 min readSep 5, 2018

“I was never very angry you know…”

John Wain — An ‘Angry’ Young Man. johnwain.com

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.

The Zetland Arms Warwick. Photo: Geographia

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.

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