These pages were not originally arranged with any view to publication. They are presented here for your edification and delight as rough workings for my book, “Life Behind Bars”, which began life as my attempt to write a comprehensive history of my pub, The Black Swan.
What appears here reflects the material as it stands: a series of notes set down at different times hinting at a structure rather than imposing one. Some notes are more complete than others, and they are not always consistent with one another. I have left them largely as I first wrote them and I have made only limited efforts to impose order on them.
There are notebooks of course, and a collection of diaries written by someone who knew the house when it was a coaching inn. They are fragmented and incomplete, but they are consistent about what mattered: the inn, the road, the yard, the work, and the day-to-day running of things.
Alongside those are more recent notes. Observations, bits of conversation, and the occasional attempt to make sense of how the place works now.
It is not arranged as a single story. Yet. So you can read the pieces in order, or not. It’s up to you, dear reader. It doesn’t seem to make much difference either way.
If there is a method, it is this:
I write down what happens, figure out what the interesting angle is and then jazz it up a bit. That’s true historical method, right?
Certain entries may appear more than once and may refer to people and places already discussed elsewhere, though not always in ways that are immediately obvious. To get the full picture, you might have to read across the whole piece and return to some notes more than once. But not necessarily in the order they are set down here.
If there is a single account to be found in all this, it is not yet clear to me.
‘Life Behind Bars’ is a work in progress, though the distinction between author and his source material is not always entirely clear.
You get the picture. Or possibly not.
Jack Rhymer
01 April 2026
I always said I’d write a novel. This isn’t it.
agamonkey 01/04/26