Hidden behind the darts board in the back room of the Ring O ' Bells is a cache of the landlord's classic reads. A favourite is W.H.Davies' Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. How drinkers love to read the graphic description it gives of the author having one of his legs sliced off while jumping trains! Chapter three of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle depicts "the slaughtering machine" of the Chicago stockyards. The landlord says it "pre-figuring" the slaughtering machines for humans that were set up four decades later in Central and Eastern Europe. There was a time when he was the only pub landlord in Bath who used the term "pre-figuring", and nowadays you cannot order a ginger beer without the landlord asking whether it will be "pre-figuring" a request for a packet of crisps.
Jane Austen is big amongst visitors to Bath, but Flann O'Brien is big amongst the locals. In The Hard Life he alerts readers to the fact that "all the persons in this book are real and none is fictitious even in part." You wonder how O'Brien's Gaelic character Macsamailliun Ui Phionasa -Maximillian O' Penisa feels about this.
The Bath & Wilting Chronicle once described the Ring O' Bells as "a shady place that is full of sunny people." "Shady people in sunny places" was how Somerset Maugham described his fellow residents in the South of France. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge is a great favourite in the Ring O'Bells. A hand-written note of Somerset Maugham is framed above the saloon bar which suggests that readers "look out for my stylish use of the colon."
The cache behind the dartboard contains a novel of Mikhal Sholokhov which describes the brutal treatment that was meted out to prisoners of war in Russia. This touched a raw nerve with the old man. His father had been a prisoner of war in Germany during the First World War. (He had been a coalminer in South Wales who enlisted in the army, was captured, and spent the last year of the war working in a German coalmine. By the time he retuned home his black hair had turned white).
After reading the Sholokhov passage the old man got quite angry. "My father was not treated like that!" he said. Then we had one of our kitchen debates. Was Sholokhov giving an implicit stamp of moral approval to barbarous acts or war. Or was he just telling the truth about what war is like. This debate was taken back to the Ring O'Bells, and is still going on there today.
One day a copy of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front found its way from the darts board cache into our prefab. My mum looked really surprised when she saw it. "It was banned in Germany" she whispered.
This prefab is more than a few sheets of aluminium riveted together with six windows added on. It is a literary gold mine!