21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

ME:

  I got sent some free records from a record company this week!

  NAN:

  I told you you’d be famous one day.

  ME:

  I’ve been offered a music writing job at the Guardian. I think I’m going to take it!

  NAN:

  I told you you’d be famous one day.

  ME:

  I’m going to New York in a few weeks!

  NAN:

  I told you you’d be famous one day.

  ME:

  I just bought some cheese. It’s marginally more expensive than the cheese I bought last week and has a fancy foreign name!

  NAN:

  I told you you’d be famous one day.

  OK; so I made the last one up, but you get the idea.

  Another of my nan’s catchphrases when talking to me was ‘You’re getting ever so tall,’ which she said to me regularly from around the time of my fourteenth birthday until she died. In fact, if you overlook her enquiry about how I was and our actual goodbye, my nan’s last words to me were ‘You’re getting ever so tall.’ I was thirty-four at the time. In my nan’s defence, during her last few years of erroneously informing me that I was getting ever so tall she was getting noticeably smaller. Almost impossibly so by the end, to the extent that, if you happened to be wearing a decent-size parka at the time, you might have looked at her and genuinely wondered if she would fit inside one of its pockets.

  I remember being aware that my nan struggled with her health from the moment I was old enough to understand such a concept. I knew that you couldn’t jump on her and ask for a piggyback, like you could with most adults. She couldn’t come on country walks with the rest of the family and you certainly wouldn’t even think of trying to involve her in a game of football. I knew that the problem was somehow connected with the cigarettes she smoked but also that it wasn’t so simple that all you needed to do was take them away for her to be better. In fact, she’d had a small heart attack not long before I was born, and the doctor had said that her clogged arteries were down to years of chain-smoking. From that moment on, my mum, Jayne and Mal lived in constant awareness of her fragility. They’d lost their dad suddenly and unexpectedly, and it seemed eminently possible that they could lose her too.

  Like a lot of working-class family get-togethers in the mid- to late seventies, those of my relatives – even those where children were present – were conducted in a thick miasma of cigarette smoke. But by the early eighties almost everyone save for my nan had given up. She had smoked constantly since she was thirteen, when her mum had handed her her first cigarette and taught her how to inhale and the best way to hold it. One time when I was doing some drawing at her house when I was eight or nine I asked her why she needed to smoke fags. Were they like food? ‘Not exactly, son,’ she said. I handed her my felt-tip pen and asked if she could pretend that was a fag instead. She said it wasn’t that simple and, besides, it was far too late now. Who could deny her that one pleasure, when she’d lost two of her primary others, her soulmate and the sea? But the nagging of her offspring and their offspring finally paid off: directly after her sixtieth birthday, for which the family bought her a precise total of sixty presents, she found the willpower to give up. For the final couple of decades of her life she did not touch a cigarette and lived almost exclusively on the healthy diet of a pescatarian chaffinch. All that oily fish appeared to have a positive effect on her brain. She still nearly always went through the roll-call of almost all her children and grandchildren when addressing one of us – ‘Can you pass me my specs, please, Fay, Jack, Jo, Jeff, Tom . . . ? Oh dear!’ – but she’d been doing that more or less for ever. She began to read more, devouring the novels my dad passed on to her until reading got too much for her failing eyesight. Her awareness of news and politics was more razor sharp and up to the minute than ever. As I became a hungry reader of novels myself and started to spend time with people far more educated and wordly than me, nothing I talked about was intellectually beyond her, even though she made a good job of pretending some of it was. Because she underrated herself so comprehensively, she ended up playing a character during these discussions: a small person cooped up in a small house who was bewildered by far-off places, erudite, ambitious people, new gadgets, constantly shaking her head at the size of the world. She believed in the character, but it wasn’t her. She was actually a big person, wise enough to relate to and empathise with lives far outside hers, skilled at detecting the real from the fake, fundamentally more worldly and, in the most important sense, tougher than most of the erudite, ambitious people whose worldly toughness she shook her head in amazement about.

  By this point – the late nineties – her shell grotto was really starting to take off, spreading out, covering all four of the interior walls of the stone shed, which a hundred years earlier had been the outside toilet of a brewery worker. In this small, glittering, unlikely fairy wonderland, in a town smelling of beer, pappy white bread and chips, were shells of almost every size and colour, every one of them once containing a life. Limpets, cockles, whelks, shark eyes and ponderous arks, none of which, if they’d had the brainpower to imagine their own future, would surely have pictured themselves so posthumously exalted. Ever since I had reached that height my nan defined as ‘ever so tall’ I had been able to get across her backyard in any direction in not much more than three strides, but in that tiny yard space were packed as many plants as it was physically possible to fit. Soon the shell grotto at the rear of it would be the same: a vast, multi-faceted universe squeezed into a modest space without fanfare. You’d think she’d done all that she could with it then it would expand some more, shapes within shapes appearing within it. I missed this peak period of the grotto’s development and, not travelling to the sea for a long time, due to the location and somewhat nocturnal nature of my new job, failed to contribute any raw material to it.

  In 1999 I had accepted a job as a full-time, contracted music writer and relocated to London. My nan was suspicious of the south of England as a whole, but truly hated the capital, spitting the name of the place out only when she had to. I only saw her more venomous when she was talking about Thatcher. She never went back to the capital for so much as a day trip after her brief move to its outskirts with Tom, my mum, Mal and Jayne, as part of a council-house swap with a family in Pinner, when Tom found himself working for a chronic bully at the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions. I did not hate London and had a high time there for a while, but like my nan I often found it icy and insincere, and after a little over two years realised it was not for me. To her credit, my nan never for a second tried to dissuade me from going and knew I had to find this out for myself.

  For me, living over a hundred miles away, first in London, then in Norfolk, it would have been unthinkable to return to Nottingham to see my parents and fail to visit my nan as well. As always, I’d walk without knocking through her front door and invariably find her in her favourite chair with a cup of strong tea next to her, watching the news, the backscratcher and big seashell on her mantelpiece as ever, and she’d not seem remotely surprised at my arrival from several counties away, even on those occasions when I’d not warned her with a phone call. If you knew my nan and her general relationship with unheralded occurrences you might find this curious. She disliked shocks intensely – understandably so, since her life had been defined by a huge, terrible one. It didn’t require a burst balloon or crisp packet or smoke alarm to set her off. She’d jump out of her skin at the smallest abrupt noise. At the sound of her phone, she would levitate to a height of between two and seven inches from her seat, dark orange tea splashing the upholstery. I like to believe that this was simply another way that she was slightly hip and ahead of her time: loads of people get excited by phones nowadays but my nan was already all about that way back in the early 1980s, before anyone even had text or the Internet.

  When I was younger I laughed at my nan for being scared of the phone and for calling me by my cousin�
�s or uncle’s or mum’s name by mistake. I also laughed – and still do – at her habit of clutching her house keys for up to an hour before returning to her house on any day when she’d been away. Wasn’t it silly, that key-holding thing my nan used to do? I was remembering last year, about twenty minutes from home, on the walk back to my house from my local supermarket, silently chuckling to myself. So premature and ridiculous of her! I thought, looking down at my own right hand and noticing my front-door key clasped tight within it.

  It was probably inevitable that I would become parts of my nan as I got older, but what was strange was how abruptly I became some of them immediately after her death: the premature key-clutching, the tendency to jump at the buzz of my phone and other smallish technological noises, a sharp increase in the strength and volume of my tea intake and, finally and perhaps most noticeably, a visceral, all-consuming need to have the sea in my life. I could have started doing any of these things as a tribute to my nan, in the same way that I began to wear the small green terylene scarf I inherited from her, but that wasn’t it. It felt almost as if, as part of her death, there had been some kind of transference, without me having any say in the matter. But maybe that’s an integral part of becoming a nan, or even becoming part of a nan: it’s willed upon you by an independent force.

  The year of my nan’s death, 2009, was the toughest year of my life. In the same month that I discovered she was terminally ill, a friend died very suddenly and my marriage broke up. During this period the sea became my solace and therapy, its hugeness dwarfing any feeling I had of lostness or fear for the future. The sea’s aim is always to make you feel better but never in an unrealistically flattering, emboldened, inspirational, Internet-quote way. When life turns against us in the modern world we often retreat into technology for some reassurance: a small virtual shoulder-rub from a stranger, often executed with the best of intentions but from a safe distance, confirming for thirty glorious seconds that the way we feel is all right. The sea doesn’t give us any of that; its approach is far more Tough Love. ‘My mind is heavy and troubled today,’ you’ll say to the sea. ‘Properly stare at me for a moment and get a grip on yourself,’ the sea will reply. ‘Do I honestly look like I care? I’m the fucking sea.’ It is inconceivably vaster than any of us, will still be here when we are gone – eventually drowning all that we once knew without a moment’s deliberation – and doesn’t care about our problems. Strangely this is often the biggest reassurance of all, especially in those moments of worry that derive directly from the delusion that as humans we are in some way important, which is ultimately all moments of worry, when you really think about it.

  The nearest bit of coast – that belonging to north Suffolk – was just three quarters of an hour away from my house on the Norfolk–Suffolk border, but until then I’d made pitifully little use of it, not frequently enough thrown myself into its howling, flecked winds on the kind of January day that makes your gums throb, rarely done backstroke above its shifting shingle and let its rejuvenating salt seep into my scalp. Now I rapidly made up for that. If I felt anxious or creatively blocked or stymied by indecision or even euphoric, I often went to the sea. Over the next couple of years I traversed around 70 per cent of Suffolk’s coastline on foot, in all weathers. The summer of 2010 was one of the best of my life, and on the first warmish day of it I ran into the cold waves at full pelt, carelessly discarding clothes on my way, like a man in a bad film. It was only when I looked back to the shore that I realised the four friends I was with had not joined me and, moreover, clearly viewed what I had done as a minor act of insanity. But I felt comfortable with my actions. I knew this bit of sea now as a friend. Also, not to do what I had would have struck me as, well . . . a bit nesh.

  How could I have not thought to bring my nan to these places in the years when she was well enough to come? I’d not grown up into the kind of person who would drive her to Chatsworth in a Lamborghini, or even, in fact, who had any awareness of what Lamborghinis themselves had grown up into, but surely I could have spared the time to at least drive her to Lowestoft in a second-hand Toyota Yaris? This is sad, but it’s merely my own version of a standard heartache of family life, experienced by people the world over in their various ways: you can spend your life very close to a relative but, due to the cruelty of time, in some areas of mutual interest still manage to miss them slightly, like two people who’ve entered the same forest on footpaths that come agonisingly close but never quite converge. All I could do in my situation was posthumously take my nan with me on my excursions to the sea, although to be frank this wasn’t hard since by this point I had become my nan in so many ways. My own nanness has only increased since then, and I feel that the part of the coast where I walk most frequently now, in Devon, is one that she would have liked even more than Suffolk’s. Would it be too bold to claim that it has those ‘best’ waves she told me I could hear through her shell when I was little? Perhaps, but it has certainly seen some very impressive, and historically very destructive, ones.

  It’s always a little unfair to compare one unadorned example of nature to other unadorned example of nature, and to say that the craggy, towering, dog-bite coast of the South West Peninsula is better than the linear, eerie, ghost coast of East Anglia seems particularly harsh. It’s as harsh as comparing one large piece of really lovely cheese to a whole shop full of really lovely cheeses made by people with far more cows than the people who made the one large piece of really lovely cheese. There’s an awe to be experienced at the fact that two such dramatically different seascapes can exist on an island as small as this one, but there’s another kind of awe inspired by the diversity of terrain from the mouth of the Dart to the mouth of the Erme. Bigbury and Bantham, with their art deco island and sliced-tuna-steak cliffs. Bolt Head, which in sea mist is the closest the coastal West Country gets to Middle Earth. The stone steps precariously rounding Sharp Tor, which would befit the climactic battle scene of any great fantasy film and tower above the deep, folklore-charged Black Bull Hole: a passage named due to the legend that a black bull passed through it and emerged all white, so traumatised was he by his subterranean experience. Prawle Point, with its microclimate within a microclimate, where on a July day you walk through clouds of butterflies above turquoise water and want to wrap the whole place up and lock it in an old ottoman where nobody else can steal it. Start Point, a long, arthritic wizard’s finger of land pointing out into the watery dark, where before the construction of the lighthouse at the end of the headland the relationship between ships and weather catastrophes was roughly akin to the relationship between toddlers and falling over: two whole ships, the Marana and the Dryad, sank here in one night in 1891, with every hand on the latter drowning. The long flat Slapton Sands, where the road bisects sea and freshwater lake but which, viewed from above near the village of Strete, looks like an unnervingly straight highway running through the ocean itself. Blackpool Sands, where my nan picked those first shells for her grotto and, with its leaf-framed natural windows to France and pine rows and brontosaurus coastal road, which brings to mind a chilly miniature version of Italy’s Amalfi Coast. The cascading gorse terraces, wild-pony ledges and hidden coves surrounding Dartmouth and Kingswear. All this and more in less than forty miles.

  I am not a tremendous observer of anniversaries. For one thing, they come around a bit too quickly nowadays and take me by surprise. But not long after a recent anniversary of my nan’s death I walked from the high zigzag village of Stoke Fleming down to Blackpool Sands to find some shells. A day previously my friend Hayley had seen me walking along the roadside near my house, stopped her van to say hello and handed me the shell of a small beautiful limpet, and since it was the only one I owned, I thought it would be nice to add to it. As I walked through the trees to Blackpool Sands a girl called sweetly to a dog named Holly as girls with dogs called Holly often do on beaches, but when I arrived on the beach there was no girl and no dog, creating the impression that what I’d been hearing was an ambient b
each soundtrack superimposed over the scene rather than noises from the real life of a dog and its owner. It was November, but at the scrubby back corner of the beach chamomile was still thriving. Blackpool Sands is the most benign cove for miles around and regularly packed with semi-naked bodies on a summer’s day, but now I shared it with no more than three or four other chilly walkers. As I walked along the hard-packed stretch nearest the waves, the bank of shingle behind me got steeper until I realised that, in a matter of less than an hour, with the tide rushing in, I would become totally blocked off, in the far corner of the beach. I am not sure exactly where shingle becomes small enough to be classified as sand, but the shingle here was not that far from it. There were not many shells, or maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough.

  After my nan died, my mum, Jayne and Mal sold her terrace with the forlorn, unalterable realisation that her shell grotto would probably fall into alien, uncaring hands. Would it be torn down? Replastered? Filled with pesticides and air guns? We decided it was best not to know and best not to think about it. The street outside began to look more down at heel. The brewery had been bought by a large corporation and was closed down shortly before her death, many of its windows soon being broken by vandals. Schoolkids drank Special Brew in the empty building, just as I had in the park up the road. Despite the brewery’s demise, a phantom smell of hops lingered in the air as far as where my auntie Jayne and uncle Paul lived, which was now a few streets away and no longer within sniffing distance of the bread factory. In 2012 my mum received an unexpected postcard from my nan’s house’s next-but-one owner, Jackie, informing her that she was continuing my nan’s project with the help of her granddaughter. Together they had filled the remaining spaces on the walls with yet more shells and begun to plaster the ceiling with shells too. Supporting photographs ensued. Jackie wrote that she had got the contact details for my mum from Liz and Andy, the house’s previous owners. Due to her slightly scrawled handwriting I read what she’d written as ‘I got your address from Lizard Andy,’ which made me wonder who Lizard Andy was, what he looked like, and caused me to speculate on the various ways he might have acquired his nickname.