21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  My grandma and granddad’s council house, which they moved into at the beginning of the 1950s and vacated in the mid-1990s, appeared unchanged when my dad and I wandered past it on our way back towards Balloon Woods from the Co-op. After walking through the new estate and the old site of Wollaton Colliery, we’d hooked around the other side of Bilborough, where women in their forties used to shout, ‘Sod off back to your end!’ from their doorsteps at my dad and his gang if they ever strayed there. My dad stopped to point out the exact spot in his old road once occupied by a squashed frog that he’d told the other kids on the road was a monkey, charging them a halfpenny each to have a look at it. He then pointed to a spot on the pavement where Terrence O’Doherty had writhed in a violent ball with a greaser from a rival neighbourhood until my grandma broke the ruckus up by striding over to them, eyeing them flintily and asking if they were ‘making love’. Across the road the allotment where my granddad grew his vegetables had now been concreted over. Next to the garages that had replaced it was the O’Dohertys’ old place, where my dad once lifted up a sofa cushion and found a writhing nest of pink mice. Eric, the one of the nine O’Dohertys with whom my dad was friendliest, was enlisted to help my granddad mend his Wolseley and my dad was jealous. At a similar time, around his seventh birthday, my dad was challenged to a fight by the oldest O’Doherty, Elizabeth, who was thirteen and in my dad’s words ‘FOOKIN’ ENORMOUS’. He was soundly beaten. ‘THE WHOLE AVENUE CAME OUT TO WATCH. IT WAS BECAUSE THERE WAS NO TELLY IN THOSE DAYS.’ Remembering this and looking at his old front door, my dad was quiet for no more than a fraction of a second but enough for it to be noticeable and for the air to turn wistful. ‘DID I TELL YOU THAT WHEN I STARTED SCHOOL YOUR GRANDMA BOUGHT ME THIS ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE SCHOOL UNIFORM SO IT WOULD LAST ME THE WHOLE FIVE YEARS I WAS THERE?’ he asked me. ‘FOR THE FIRST TWO YEARS I LOOKED LIKE DAVID FOOKIN’ BYRNE IN THAT TALKING HEADS VIDEO.’

  When I used to arrive at my grandparents’ house, the first object to greet me was an imposing grandfather clock dating from the mid-1800s. My granddad bought the clock for next to nothing in Nottingham in the late 1940s. Not yet being a driver, he somehow managed to lug the clock, with the sole help of his brother Ken and a wheelbarrow, all the way up the steep slope of Sherwood Rise, on the edge of the city, back to the house where he and Joyce lived before this one: a distance of over two miles. At my primary school, in assembly, we often sang Henry Clay Work’s ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’. Its opening line, about the clock being too large for the shelf, always confused me. Only a fool – a fool much much more foolish than even the kind of person who’d choose a wheelbarrow to cart a clock two miles home – would have attempted to put a gigantic bastard such as this on a shelf. Then there was the bit in the song about the clock being taller by half than the old man himself but weighing not a pennyweight more. My granddad was only of average height and his clock had a few inches on him, but he’d have to have been a remarkably short, overweight grandfather with a very tall clock – one you’d be even less likely to try to put on a shelf – for the maths to make sense. Not far from my granddad’s grandfather clock there were some notches on a doorway made where he and my grandma had periodically recorded my height: these moved more slowly than I’d have liked them to then remained static at around 5 feet 6 inches, not because I stopped growing at 5 feet 6 inches but because, like most adolescents, during the period when I rapidly gained height I was too truculent to wish to have such progress recorded for posterity on an architrave. I often wondered if I’d end up as tall as the grandfather clock, but I didn’t quite make it, as I can verify by standing next to it in its current home, my parents’ hall. One shiftless afternoon when my dad was in his early teens, he reached up to the top of the clock and found a set of explicit playing cards hidden there, which ultimately led to his sexual awakening and that of several other boys in the neighbourhood. When my parents inherited the clock, they did not inherit the playing cards, whose whereabouts remain unknown.

  If you strolled straight on past the grandfather clock further into my grandparents’ house – without being distracted by the playing cards – you’d end up in the kitchen: a culinarily austere room which always smelled of pepper and in whose adjoining larder my grandparents always kept a can or two of what they called ‘pop’ – usually ginger beer or lemonade or, in later years, shandy from the Co-op, in cans that, though still in date, had mysteriously already acquired a faint patina of age – waiting for me. My mum remembers entering the kitchen on her first ever visit to the house and discovering my granddad wearing a party hat while washing the dishes. Since it was not Christmas and hadn’t been anyone’s birthday, she thought this slightly odd. My dad later explained that making Ted wear the hat was Joyce’s scheme to curb his habit of leaving the immersion heater on for long and financially injurious periods of time. If Ted glanced in a mirror and noticed he was wearing the hat or reached up to his head and found the hat there, he’d know the immersion was still on.

  If you continued through the kitchen into the backyard, past a small veg patch additional to those on Ted’s allotment, whose soil was always rich and evenly hoed, you reached Ted’s shed. In here was every tool imaginable, all meticulously organised: drawers and shelves of screws and nails, ordered by size: hardware for every emergency – a collection devoted to the art of mending rather than making. My granddad knew precisely where every bradawl, spanner, socket wrench, trowel and ratchet was in his shed, yet somehow never got quite accustomed enough to the location of the upper shelves not to repeatedly bang his head on them.

  My own most memorable first-hand encounters with my granddad’s legendary doziness include the time he caddied for me on the local golf course and, arriving on the second tee and reaching for my driver, I found the flag from the first green sticking unceremoniously out of my bag. This occurred during the same year that he sent a Christmas card to my parents reading, ‘To Joyce and Ted. Happy Christmas! Love from Joyce and Ted.’

  My granddad didn’t play golf but was very enthusiastic about my decision to take it up, as he was about all the numerous sporting activities of my early teens. Seconds after I’d watched the tiny, unconventional Ian Woosnam – more terrier than sportsman – sink the putt to secure his unlikely victory in the 1991 US Masters tournament, my parents’ phone began to ring. I picked up, wondering who it could be at this time, past midnight, when my mum and dad were in bed. I said a nervous, quiet hello in the voice of the women on my mum’s side of the family. ‘DID YOU SEE THAT?’ my granddad said. ‘BLOOMIN’ MARVELLOUS. AMAZING. MARVELLOUS. WHAT A MAN!’

  My dad and I crossed a couple of roads and headed towards Balloon Woods, where a large estate of bungalows stood and there were small paths – jitties and twitchells, as I grew up calling them, and still do, much to the bewilderment of anyone from south of Burton upon Trent – with a profusion of signs asking people to clean up after their dogs. ‘NOBODY USED TO WALK THEIR DOGS IN OUR ROAD IN THE FIFTIES,’ my dad said. ‘THEY JUST LET THEM OUT TO RUN AROUND THE STREETS FOR A BIT INSTEAD.’ I have a memory of walking up here as an eight- or nine-year-old, when the high-rise flats were still up, and coming across a playground with broken swings, a leaning roundabout that looked like it had been hot-wired by joyriders and crashed, and shattered glass all over the tarmac: a dystopian vision I shied away from even as a child with a nagging need to climb any new structure that looked even vaguely fit for the purpose. My dad and I looped around the identikit one-storey houses now standing on the site of the playground, passing a woman in a garden arguing into her mobile phone with a man called John who she accused of not doing his share, and climbed onto a footbridge over the railway. My dad looked down the track and remembered the time my grandma had jumped up and down on another footbridge not far from here, part of the old Black Path, now demolished: a tiny figure pogoing in rage a couple of hundred yards from where he and Jeff Spurgeon stood in readiness for a train with their coins, shouting to them that she knew what they were doin
g and was going home to call the police. Jeff Spurgeon’s dad died that year, along with two of the other dads on the avenue. ‘I SPENT THE NEXT YEAR TERRIFIED THAT MY DAD WOULD DIE, EVEN THOUGH HE SEEMED PERFECTLY HEALTHY,’ my dad said. I noticed that exactly next to where he stood ‘mick’ had serendipitously been scrawled on the bridge in blue paint by a graffiti artist. My dad was christened Michael, but Mick is the name he prefers and the name by which friends and family know him. When my dad meets posh people he has noticed that they often don’t wish to call him Mick even though that is what he has introduced himself as; they opt, without his permission, to call him Michael or Mike instead. But in my mind Michael and Mick are very different people, and Mike is somewhere way off in a different name galaxy, doing his own thing in tinted spectacles and a leather jacket with rolled up sleeves. My dad is Mick. My granddad called my dad Mick, but my grandma tended towards Michael, especially when she was angry or telling him not to do something, which was often. My grandma was not posh, but her voice had a memorable eloquence and authority to it, like it was always coming at you through a speaker or down a brass tunnel, almost like an East Midlands version of the voices you heard on old news broadcasts. A voice that is now extinct.

  A place name that comes up repeatedly in my dad’s stories of his childhood is Jacko’s Oller. When he spoke of it while I was growing up it formed in my mind as many different things: a deep hole of magical Lewis Carroll properties, a grassy warren teeming with feral Brylcreemed children, a shout of such volume and force that it had stayed suspended in the air above the edgelands of west Nottinghamshire since 1956. What it actually constituted was a large depression in the land formed of the remains of ancient bell pits, clay pits and small open-cast mines. The ‘Jacko’ referred to an early patriarch of the Jacksons, a family of farmers and coal merchants who thrived in the 1920s but had died out by the early 1960s. My dad remembers that within minutes of the hearse carrying the last of the Jacksons from the farm, local Teddy boys descended on the place and began illegally disassembling its roof. When my dad clashed with my grandma, Jacko’s Oller was where he escaped to run around with his Davy Crockett rifle and re-enact the Winning of the West. A few years later he and his mates played cards with the area’s Gypsies, who always took their money, and he and Flob made fires and dens. Fires were everywhere: under the tripods and vanners where the gypsies cooked their meals, in the farmland, near the dens, even on the canal when it iced over in 1963, the coldest winter of the twentieth century. Woodsmoke as ubiquitous as air. Sometimes the gang ventured bravely further west, across the Wild Frontier into Derbyshire, and attended the fair in Ilkeston. ‘CAN YOU IMAGINE IT?’ my dad asked, still staring down the railway line in that direction. ‘BEING FOURTEEN. WITH FLOB AND HIS GANG, IN THEIR TED JACKETS AND DRAINPIPES. HANGING OUT WITH GIRLS AND HEARING ROY ORBISON FOR THE FIRST TIME. IT WAS INTOXICATING.’

  I try to remember instances when I have witnessed my dad being quiet for several continuous minutes, apart from when he has been asleep, and it takes some effort to do so, but something does spring to mind: the times in my teens and later when he and I visited my grandma and granddad. ‘WE CAN’T STOP FOR LONG,’ my dad would say as we arrived, sometimes because we couldn’t but also to pre-emptively put a time limit on my grandma’s stories. We would turn right at the grandfather clock and sit in Joyce and Ted’s living room and listen as Joyce, with Ted as her backing vocalist, updated us on stuff that had happened to people we had never met in rooms we had never set foot in: the ‘crumpet’ my granddad flirted with every month at the over-sixties dance in Sandiacre, Agnes and Roy’s caravan at Rutland, the teenage singer they’d seen at the pub in Stapleford in the talent competition who I really should write about for one of my music magazines, the escape and return of Irene’s tortoise. My dad, being a man with two brains, was able to take it all in even when he looked like he wasn’t, but I could feel his unease at my grandma’s domineering conversational manner, the way it took him back uncomfortably, as well as comfortably, to places in his past. He was the same as his parents in that he was loud and liked the countryside and went to the library a lot, but he was different to them in many other ways: he’d decided, not unlike many young working-class people in the mid-1960s, that he wanted a bit more out of life. Unlike Ted, who was frequently known to salute when visiting his GP, he did not retain a huge amount of respect for authority figures. He had ideas above his station, which again was very unlike Ted, who if he had developed an idea above his station would no doubt have asked around to see if anyone more middle class than him would like to use it. By the time my dad was fifteen he was doing three different jobs, travelling to Europe alone, hitchhiking to Brighton to watch mods and rockers fight, learning the trumpet and going out with a girl six years his senior. ‘I DECIDED I DIDN’T WANT TO BE A SKINNY LAD OFF A COUNCIL ESTATE; I WANTED TO BE A BLACK MUSLIM JAZZ DRUMMER,’ he told me. He failed to fulfil this ambition but, alongside my mum, who he met at seventeen, fulfilled another, which in the context of his relatives was outlandish enough: he became a teacher. The two of them then did what Ted and Joyce had never considered doing even at that point later in life when they finally could: they purchased their own house. As if that wasn’t enough, they cooked moussaka and wore Afghan coats and saved up to buy prints of art featuring naked European women. But my parents, just like their parents before them, faced barriers against what they wanted to achieve: of income, of self-belief, of class, and, like anyone, of luck. Barriers they’ve made a huge effort to stop me from facing too, but which a wider appreciation of society has since made me realise I have faced, if on a smaller scale. Sometimes the barriers are always there; they just diminish a little with every generation.

  With their greater ambitions, my parents got closer to Derbyshire than their parents, but they didn’t quite make it all the way. It remained the place where you walked at weekends but could never actually live: the impenetrable Fairytale Hill Kingdom. My dad returned from their walks and painted intricate watercolours of its dales and stone barns and ash copses and ruffian sheep. Three times we moved to houses which teetered tantalisingly on the wrong side of the border. Around the most southerly of these, in fields less than an hour’s walk from Jacko’s Oller that looked not dissimilar to how my dad’s old stamping ground had looked twenty-five years earlier when the developers were yet to move in, I began to live an early adolescence not all that dissimilar to his: I joined a gang, loitered a lot, spat on pavements unnecessarily. Although I’d spent the first decade of my life in the countryside, I’d arrived there from a brief spell in suburban south Nottinghamshire and the children in the village seemed simultaneously unsophisticated and dangerous. They sniffed glue and had fist fights, but many of them also sang in the church and baled hay at weekends. Some of them stole valuable items from houses and schoolrooms but they also invited me to scrump and play knock-a-door run with them. We scrumped less inventively than my dad and his gang, who, inspired by a Bash Street Kids caper from the Beano, had eaten the apples where they hung, leaving dozens of cores dangling surreally from the trees. My grandma only ever allowed my dad to see the Beano after it had been read by his uncle Frank, who at the time was in his early forties.

  Ted liked to visit us in the village because we were geographically much closer to him and Joyce than we’d been before and because a lot of horses were ridden on the lanes nearby and he could stop his car behind them, get his shovel out of the boot and load up with their manure for his allotment. A tall, broad girl – the sister of one of my classmates – who rode one of the horses was known to everyone as Dosser. It wasn’t until three years later, shortly before I left the village, that I found out her name was Charlotte. About eight of us, including Charlotte, regularly played a game called churchy, which was exactly the same as dobby or tag, save for the fact that it took place in the churchyard. Down by the canal and in the woods there were always torn-up pages of porn magazines. Who left them there? Nobody knew, but the phenomenon was so common that n
obody posed the question. A stray boob in a tree or half a bellend in some bulrushes was commonplace, and after a while slightly anaesthetising, like our own early outdoor version of going online. Looking to broaden their horizons, a few of the lads in the village rode their bikes a couple of miles to the M1 services at Trowell and played the fruit machines or looked longingly at exotic teenage girls from Watford and Selby and Market Harborough and Pontefract who were in the midst of bisecting the country with their families.