A bit more about Alan Cadbury

My books about the exploits of Alan Cadbury are based on a series of informal interviews or discussions between him and me. In the case of The Lifers��� Club nearly all our talks happened several months after the events I describe in the book. The only exception was the episode that started me writing the book in the first place. I happened to bump into Alan, purely by accident, in a pub in Crowland. He was returning to his brother Grahame���s farm in the Lincolnshire Fens and had stopped-off for a much-needed beer on his way back from the outskirts of Leicester. I hadn���t seen him for a couple of years and it was good to renew our friendship. He then told me about the things he had just witnessed, which I immediately wrote-up on my return home, and which later became the Epilogue, the final scene of The Lifers��� Club. Anyhow, it was immediately apparent to me that the traumatic events described in the book had bruised his confidence and I flatter myself that our subsequent sessions in most of the pubs between Peterborough and Grantham had a restorative effect ��� greatly helped, of course, by the great food he was enjoying with his brother. Grahame���s wife Liz was, and is, a wonderful cook.

That scene described in the Epilogue happened in mid-July, 2010 and the book itself was researched that autumn. The first of many drafts was written-up over the following winter and spring. But I did nothing about finding a publisher, as all my time was taken up writing the last of my Britain books for HarperCollins and in promoting the paperback edition of The Making of the British Landscape for Penguin. I think it was the following year that I stumbled across Justin Pollard at the Hay-on-Wye Festival, where I���d been talking about The Birth of Modern Britain. Justin is, of course, a co-founder of Unbound.

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