21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  The hill and the greater area around my nan’s house always smelled pleasantly of hops due to the brewery. This was in contrast to the area around my auntie Jayne and uncle Paul’s house, on the other side of town, which smelled strongly of white bread due to the nearby Sunblest factory, a smell too redolent of migraine and chemicals to merit a term as benign as ‘yeasty’. There was a small area in the centre of town which smelled neither of hops nor white bread. This usually smelled of chips.

  The front door of my nan’s house, which was always unlocked during daytime when she was in the house, led directly into her living room. When I arrived I walked in without knocking, just as the rest of the family always did. My nan lived alone for the final thirty-six years of her life but was often surrounded by people: children, spouses of children, grandchildren then great-grandchildren. Until I was around nine she also had a questionably disciplined chihuahua called Beau, who once ate fifty quid. She said there was a ghost who lived with her: a man a few years older than she was who she sometimes heard walking down her stairs, but she said he was a shy ghost who didn’t like to be a bother to anyone. He was an apt ghost, since not liking to be a bother to anyone was also a central trait of my nan’s personality. When my nan moved into her terrace, in 1985, from her even tinier house half a mile away, ‘Easy Lover’ by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey was relentlessly on the radio, and the whole family mucked in, scraping tired, dirty old wallpaper from some walls and slapping paint onto others. ‘Easy Lover’ was the best song I discovered in my nan’s house, the second best being ‘Stop’ by Erasure. My nan’s house was not on the whole a place synonymous with the discovery of exciting new music. She only owned about a dozen albums, all on cassette. One of these was the 1971 album Imagine by John Lennon, who like her was from Liverpool. The others were all by the country singer Don Williams. My nan rarely played music, preferring TV and radio news. Besides the news, she stuck exclusively to three other types of programme: snooker, tennis and Coronation Street. Nobody in our family was more passionately up to date on current affairs or the heartbreaking near-misses of Jimmy White at the Crucible Theatre than my nan.

  In my mental picture of my nan’s house two ever-present smaller objects stand out: a 1950s wooden backscratcher and a large, shiny seashell that looked like a toothless mouth – not in fact entirely unlike my nan’s own mouth, on the occasions when I stayed overnight at her house and saw her after she’d put her teeth in a glass to soak. It could be argued that the wooden backscratcher was a poignant symbol of the fact that, for many years, my nan had not had anyone to scratch her back, but in reality it was probably just a really nicely crafted backscratcher. The significance of the seashell – which in the mists of time had been attached to a living conch – is in less doubt. Living in this most landlocked of places, my nan missed the sea terribly. ‘Put this to your ear and listen, son,’ she would tell me when I was little, in a Scouse voice as gentle as a couple of intertwining lines of silk thread, and hand the shell to me. ‘Can you hear it? That’s the actual sound of the waves.’ Even now, long after doubting the logistical possibility of this, I still fail to completely shut myself off to the idea of it being true.

  ‘Which waves?’ I once asked my nan, being the annoying kind of child who was always looking for specifics.

  ‘The best ones,’ she replied.

  When I was a little younger than school age and my nan used to look after me while my mum and dad were at work, my nan and I would walk into the centre of Kimberley to the Co-op, where she would do her grocery shopping. We would then go to the newsagent, where she would settle her newspaper bill and purchase a packet of twenty Embassy Number One cigarettes from a man called Richard who stroked the palm of your hand very lightly as he gave you your change and had astonishing bouffant hair that some people claimed was visible from space. If I was very lucky, she would then buy me a Matchbox car from the toyshop directly opposite the Co-op, under the big black shadow of Kimberley’s soon-to-be-demolished Wolseley factory. One day my nan, a non-driver, bought me a Lamborghini Countach, and the two of us hatched a plan: on another day, in the distant future, when I was old enough, I would buy a real Lamborghini – my nan was by no means wedded to the idea of it being a Countach – and drive her over the hills of Derbyshire in it. In retrospect, I wonder if this plan, which was as much my nan’s brainchild as mine, contained an ulterior motive. If you drove to the high part of Derbyshire from Kimberley, then pressed on in the same direction, the second-to-next big place you’d get to after Manchester was Liverpool. The Peak District is always a bit of a bugger to get across, but in a Lamborghini with the traffic gods on your side the journey could surely be completed in less than two hours. That seemed like a long time to me as a four-year-old, but to my nan, who was forty-nine, it must have seemed like no time at all: less than the duration of an average Wimbledon or World Snooker final, less than a week’s worth of Coronation Street, even if you chopped out the ad breaks, which my nan would, since she hated them.

  There’s a tendency to assume that a family settles in an area for solid and organised or at least logical reasons – a business, a collective plan, the binding roots of history – but just as often a family can end up in an area like they have been dropped there out of the cargo hold of an uncertainly piloted plane then picked themselves up, dusted the dirt from their knees and hair and made the best of it. My mum’s side of my family – my nan’s side, the big side, the female-dominated side – all lived in Liverpool until my mum was in her mid-teens. My nan, my granddad, my mum and her two sisters moved to Lenton on the outskirts of Nottingham when my granddad got a job there with the Co-op. After my auntie Mal gave birth to my cousin Fay she and my uncle Tony bought a house in Kimberley because it was the cheapest subrural area half an hour from the city in which to buy a decent-sized semi, and my parents and my uncle Paul and auntie Jayne followed nearby for the same reasons. It was only practical that my nan should live in the same area, especially after the unexpected early death of my granddad. Within time, my cousin Fay, then I, then my cousins Jack and Jeff attended the comprehensive school in Kimberley, and in a half-accidental way, despite a strong awareness that there were better places in the world to live, the family became tethered to the area. I know though, from my later conversations with my nan, that she never envisaged living out her final years there. There was talk of a nice bungalow in a different Nottinghamshire town, a little to the north-east, on a quieter street without swearing schoolkids, without neighbours who took air rifle potshots at birds and cats. But I think in her truest heart she would have liked to have ended her life on the edge of the country. As someone who did not believe herself to be remotely important though, and liked to be anything but the centre of attention, she would never have expressed this desire to us in any assertive way. Instead, as she drifted off to sleep at night, she liked to imagine that the hum of cars behind her house, heading along the A610 towards Ripley – harmonising with those on the M1, if the wind happened to be in the right direction – was the sound of the sea. On the same side of the house, in the stone shed at the back of her tiny backyard, she also made a quiet monument to her longing: a grotto containing hundreds and hundreds of seashells, which she glued to the shed walls using tile cement.

  There’s a photo of my nan and me walking hand in hand, from a family holiday in 1987, taken on Blackpool Sands beach on the south Devon coast not all that far from where I live now. With hindsight it strikes me rather sadly that, although it was over twenty years before her death, this would have been one of my nan’s last handful of visits to the sea. It is also almost certainly the trip during which she collected the first batch of shells for her grotto. It was around this point, while she was cooking Supernoodles or Findus Crispy Pancakes for my school lunches every weekday, that she would have been clandestinely beginning her grand project. Soon word of it got around the extended family, and if anyone was going to the seaside, they knew what to do: collect some nice shells for Terry’s shed. T
erry – that was what she was known as to those not related to her by blood, short for Theresa. To everyone else she was mum or nan, never – never – grandma. The distinction was very clear from as far back as I can remember: a grandma, while technically the same relation to you, was a much sterner and less relatable character than a nan. A grandma might knit you a jumper just like a nan would, but it would be less comfortable. You could talk to a nan about a girl you liked at school, but never to a grandma. My nan carried off her nanness well, possibly partly owing to the fact she’d had it thrust upon her so early. She was still a year shy of forty when she first became a nan, which strikes me now as a dizzying bit of worldly-wise-before-its-time artistry, like finding out that Cat Stevens was just twenty-one when he wrote his Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman albums. By the time her second grandchild – me – came along, six years later, she was in possession of all the classic accoutrements of 1970s nanhood: the fluffy-toed slippers, the pension, the false teeth, the hair curlers, a plentiful and magical supply of cake and wool beyond her means. Look at photos of her from the mid- to late sixties though, with her beehive hairdo, and you get a sense of just how swift a transformation this really was: 1968, possible lost member of the Shangri-Las; 1975, full nan. Dependable. Timeless. Classic. It wasn’t that she seemed old as such, more that she suited the paraphernalia of oldness.

  Some of my nan’s nanness was a reflection of the era – a period when young people transformed into old people at a very early age and made less effort to kick against it – but there was also no doubt that it had been hastened by having her soulmate snatched away from her in the prime of life. Her husband was called Tom, and it is in memory of him that I am named. When my mum was very small, Tom worked at the English Electric factory in Liverpool. My nan looked after my mum and my auntie Jayne and auntie Mal at home and worked part time in a sweet shop. When my mum was five, the family moved from a three-bedroom Victorian villa in the Anfield region of the city – where all five of them had been living in one room, sharing the house with my nan’s parents, three of her sisters and their families – to the vast new Kirkby council estate, which had been created as a place to rehouse families living in the Liverpool slums created by the Blitz.

  In my nan’s dreams of returning to the north-west coast of England, I doubt it was this house in particular she was thinking about. I drove to Kirkby to see it not long ago, and it looks not dissimilar to the pebbledashed council houses I used to walk past on my way from school to see her. Since 1972 the M57 motorway has roared along only a hundred yards or so from its front door, meaning that had my nan returned the sounds she would have heard at night would have been louder, more obnoxious versions of those in Kimberley that she creatively recast as waves in her sleepy mind. These days Kirkby is an eerily silent zombie apocalypse sprawl of three-quarters-empty sports pubs, illegally dumped waste and lonely bus stops, whose crime rate is rarely out of the local news, but in the 1950s Terry and Tom’s house on the edge of the estate looked out onto a country lane and fields which, in August and September, were full of stooks of corn: a scene an old master could could contentedly render in oil as long as he was careful not to turn his vision more than ten degrees to either side.

  My nan made all my mum’s, Mal’s and Jayne’s clothes from fabric she’d bought in the sales at T. J. Hughes in Liverpool, and – in interests of fairness – dressed them identically, which my mum, being the eldest, complained bitterly about. My mum remembers my nan being permanently at her sewing machine and her hands looking constantly sore. While Terry did outwork making window-cleaning cloths out of scraps of chamois leather – a thankless, repetitive job that my mum remembers as akin to slave labour – Tom worked to get the qualifications he had not got at school, attending night school and studying late into the evening at home, learning about economics and politics. As a mark of his commitment to a better life, he purchased a bureau on which to write, a piece of post-war oak Utility Furniture, cheap as chips at the time but now a very fetching example of mid-century modern for which you might see someone charging obnoxious prices in a shop in Brighton or Greenwich. Through his trade union work he had become friends of a distant sort with his fellow Scouser Harold Wilson, the soon-to-be Labour prime minister. One of the wooden slots in his bureau was reserved especially for all his correspondence from Wilson. I am looking at the slot at this very moment, as I write this, sitting at the same bureau.

  Tom was very active within the community in Kirkby and eventually became a justice of the peace. Word got around about this, and coupled with the fact that his daughters’ clothes looked so clean and neat all the time, the family was marked out as ‘well off’ and the house was burgled several times. Through the trade union at English Electric, Tom received a scholarship to Oxford University in his thirties, where he read economics and history. He clubbed together with a couple of fellow students to buy a beaten-up old Ford Anglia – ‘a tatty black box on wheels’, as my mum remembers it – which they used for a week at a time each, enabling him to drive back to Kirkby from the south to see Terry and his daughters once every three weekends during term time. His degree eventually led to his job with the Co-op in Nottingham, in Personnel. The way my nan told it, by the early seventies everything was going well for her and Tom: their money worries had finally begun to dissipate, they’d bought their first house and their own car, and, after a brief, regretted move from Liverpool to Pinner, on the edge of London, they were in a new city where they felt comfortable. But Tom worked too hard and smoked too much. One weekend in 1973, upon returning home from buying a new lawnmower, he vanished behind the sofa in the living room, never to get back up. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage. He was forty-six. My nan was forty-three.

  In the first photograph my mum possesses of my nan and me, from two and a half years after this, I am bawling my eyes out, and my nan is laughing hysterically. Perhaps at just a couple of months old I am already feeling the pressure of being the next Tom: the knowledge that I am never going to be able to live up even close to his strong sense of social justice or his calm and methodical ability to repair electrical appliances. My nan’s face displays the pure joy she almost always felt around young children. She had been one of sixteen brothers and sisters in Liverpool, living in extreme Catholic poverty. When her dad ate bacon at the table, my nan and her siblings watched him hungrily from the floor, occasionally being treated to a little of the rind. Until she was fourteen, neither of her parents worked. Shoes were shared between her and the ten of her siblings who also lived beyond infanthood, as there was not nearly enough money for everyone to have their own pair. The only chocolate to enter the house was consumed by her dad – a Cadbury’s halfpenny bar, which he slowly and methodically ate in front of his children once a week. My nan developed less than positive feelings about large Catholic families and decided she would not make the same mistakes. She would not have sixteen children; she would have three. In her family, even if there wasn’t money, there would be room for plentiful love for children and grandchildren. Every bit of her pension that she could save for birthdays and Christmas, she did, and her presents were always carefully considered. The only time she came even close to not getting it quite right for me was when she bought me a six-pack of Stella a year after I’d told her I’d stopped drinking it. This miniscule error of judgement was vast by her standards, so carefully did she mentally note down all her family’s enthusiasms and loves. Nobody was a better listener or adviser. My cousins and I competed jealously over which of our houses she would come to on Christmas Day. My nan seemed incapable of making the decision herself, as it meant letting someone down, so stood aside and let our parents hash out the details. I cannot recall a single instance when I visited her house and there was no chocolate waiting for me in a cupboard or drawer.

  My nan brought with her from Liverpool a plentiful supply of catchphrases, which became assimilated into our everyday speech. If something was on the floor it was on the ‘dog shelf’, if somethin
g left a bad taste in your mouth or irritated you it ‘gave you the pip’, if you felt the cold too easily you were ‘nesh’, if a partner was behaving badly you should tell them to ‘sling their hook’, if someone was looking nice they were ‘all dolled up’, if you were fed up you were ‘browned off’, if you were pleased but a little too much so you were ‘like a dog with two tails’. One of my nan’s catchphrases when speaking to me alone was ‘I told you you’d be famous one day.’ This gave me a unique feeling of combined warmth and unease that increased exponentially over the years, all the way to her death. Warmth, as I became more and more grateful to have the love and support of a nan like my nan. Unease, because, having inherited a combination of my nan’s desire not to be the centre of attention and Tom’s dogged autodidactic desire to forge a career a little bit different to the one expected of him, I was becoming more and more aware that being famous was something I would definitely never want to be. My nan might once have told me, ‘You’ll be famous one day’ – perhaps during the outlining of our plans vis-à-vis the Lamborghini and Derbyshire – but all I can remember are numerous instances when she said, ‘I told you you’d be famous one day.’ This uncharacteristically self-congratulatory reference to her own soothsaying ability usually came after reports from me of personal achievements that could be optimistically perceived to hint at some miniscule notion of future fame, but not exclusively.

  ME:

  I beat a boy three years older than me in a competition at the snooker hall down town on Saturday!

  NAN:

  I told you you’d be famous one day.