21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  I loved football at this time and, inspired by the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, played a lot of it with the other kids in the village, but I also had whooping cough, so my main contribution to matches was the meagre, sluggish one of a donkey with surprisingly deft footwork. I laughed along with everyone else as they poked fun at my painful comedy honks, periodically decamping to the side of our makeshift pitch to throw up. One week in 1988, when the road through the village was closed so Ken Russell could film his BBC adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, we moved our pitch to the tarmac, then, when we tired of Maradona scissor-kick re-enactments, staged running races along it: our own village Olympics. I won one of the sprints, ee-awing absurdly away as I crossed the makeshift finish line, which Dosser had fashioned from some baler twine. Then I threw up. Lee had heard that a sex scene in The Rainbow was going to be filmed in the village hall and told me and Rocker that Imogen Stubbs, the actress playing Lawrence’s heroine Ursula Brangwen, had outstanding jugs, so the three of us sneaked up to the back window of the hall and Rocker climbed on some crates but he slipped and we heard one of the ADs or grips emerge from the front door to see what the commotion was. One of us, I can’t remember who, shouted, ‘Run!’ and we did, but later, after I’d thrown up again, Rocker said the window had been blacked out so we wouldn’t have seen any pretend television sex even if we hadn’t been rumbled.

  ‘Anyway, jugs aren’t that important. They’re not the best part of a woman. They’re what you like when you’re younger and you’re not a proper man yet. You two will understand soon,’ said Lee, who was almost two years older than us and just approaching his fifteenth birthday.

  For the next few years the ghost of Lawrence – the laureate of Nottingham–Derby border struggles – seemed to stalk my parents and me. The last of my mum and dad’s three Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border houses – the only one not ruinously beset by structural issues relating to a nearby mine – could not have been situated more squarely in the middle of Lawrence’s quintessential landscape, overlooking the ruined abbey from his short story A Fragment of Stained Glass and only a stone’s throw from the star-crossed reservoir from Women in Love. Lawrence – whose real name was David Herbert Richards – grew up a couple of miles down the road, in the town of Eastwood, where joyriders often hot-wired the cars that they later set fire to in our lane. Not long after Christmas 1993, after my mum and dad had signed the tenancy contract on the house but not yet moved in, my dad excitedly drove there through the snow, alone, with a canvas and a selection of paints, then sat in an unheated bedroom and painted the freshly whitened valley which rolled down from the house then rose to the woods: a scene by far the most Almost Derbyshire one he had ever lived amid. After years as a supply teacher he had just got a permanent job teaching at Greasley Beauvale Primary School, where Lawrence had once been a pupil. One lunchtime not long after that, my dad came out to the school car park and found the janitor taking the back off a huge, sturdy Victorian cupboard. He asked what the janitor planned to do with the cupboard. ‘It’s going to t’ tip, me duck,’ said the janitor. Built beautifully from pitch pine, with a pleasing liquorice quality to its grain, the cupboard had previously resided in Lawrence’s old classroom. Later that week I helped my dad carry the cupboard into a borrowed van then into our house. The cupboard moved again in 1999, to my mum and dad’s next house in the north-east of the county, and has been in their living room ever since. It is known as Dave’s Cupboard. Shortly after Dave’s Cupboard was acquired, my dad wrote a children’s story, submitted it to a national prize committee and won, subsequently signing with the literary agents Pollinger, who were best known for handling Lawrence’s estate. This eventually helped to pay his and my mum’s rent, which went to the Barber family, who for centuries had owned the local mines, and whose dynasty appeared in not vastly disguised form in Lawrence’s novels.

  When my dad visited my grandma and granddad and announced that, after two and a half decades of trying and failing to do so, he was going to have his work published, Joyce’s immediate reaction was to open her purse and produce a sheet of Basildon Bond writing paper on which was scrawled a few lines of verse. ‘I’ve written something too,’ she announced, handing the poem to my dad. Ted said he thought the fact that my dad had been published was marvellous.

  I’ve listened to a fair bit of Lawrence on audiobook in recent years and discovered that this is a useful hobby to take up if you regularly wish to sink into a deep trough of despondency on long car journeys. I find him much more depressing than Thomas Hardy, perhaps because Hardy’s books don’t take place in intellectual and topographical terrain that is so palpably an echo of where I lived. I got about halfway through Lawrence’s 1913 novel Sons and Lovers while driving from Devon to Nottinghamshire in early 2016 but had to break off from it just to remind myself that life contained a flicker of hope. I want to read more of his writing though, as the north-west Nottinghamshire pit country he describes is incontrovertibly a part of me, and helps me understand some of the geographical factors that make me who I am. I recognise an earlier version of a very particular Nottinghamshire world view and way of speaking in his books: a geographical nearliness, a rigid knowing of your station, a tone that can come across as grudging even when it isn’t. Back when I lived in East Anglia I met the nature writer Ronald Blythe for not much more than an hour and didn’t tell him where I was from, but clearly he picked up on my Almost Derbyshire aura. ‘Tom is tall, dark and thin and looks like he has escaped the denouement of a D. H. Lawrence story,’ he wrote later in his column for the Church Times.

  After abandoning my Lawrence audiobook and arriving at my parents’ current house, hanging my coat in the hall opposite Ted’s grandfather clock and drinking tea overlooked by Dave’s Cupboard, I went to bed, knocking my glass of water all over my clothes and mobile phone as I switched off the bedside lamp. The following day my dad and I set off on another walk along the wrong side of the Derbyshire border, in the countryside around Eastwood, Greasley and Moorgreen. Before we left, my mum, who, along with my auntie Mal and uncle Chris, had decided to join us, sat down with me to discuss the route. My dad went upstairs, returning a couple of minutes later with a pile of watercolour paintings. He handed me the top one.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked. The painting depicted two well-loved children’s book characters walking through a dark underpass hand in hand while three grotesque, hatchet-faced men in trenchcoats loitered on the other side.

  ‘IT’S WINNIE THE POOH AND PIGLET ABOUT TO BE ASSASSINATED,’ my dad said.

  ‘Is it one of yours?’

  ‘YEAH.’

  He handed me the remainder of the paintings and I browsed through them. There were about a dozen in total: all works in progress, mostly of a madcap or macabre nature. One featured a bearded man on a wooden cross with a not-displeased expression on his face, surrounded by people in tunics wielding sticks with feathers attached.

  ‘Does this one have a name?’ I asked.

  ‘YEAH,’ he said. ‘THAT’S THE TICKLING TO DEATH OF JESUS.’

  My dad went outside to fetch some wood and I continued to look through his art. He’d always painted, as far back as I can remember, but he’d been working particularly hard since being semi-retired, and his style had developed a new freedom. This was very different material to the Derbyshire landscapes he had painted when I was a child. Here were disco dog walkers, nightmare medieval murder scenes in complex mirrored formations, Spiderman handing spare change to a busker, a bank of feline gods staring down in judgement at the grotesque figures presiding over a pedigree cat show. I was so mesmerised that time must have briefly frozen, and when I looked out the window after what I thought was four seconds, my dad was 200 yards away, wrestling a log near the small river that runs behind his and my mum’s house. Seemingly another four seconds later, he was back inside, one hand full of kindling, the other full of chocolate. When my dad was young, Ted would regularly take him and eight or nine other boys over to Ballo
on Woods and Jacko’s Oller to forage for logs, then bring the wood back with one boy on the end of each log. Almost sixty years later the only things that had changed were the location and that my dad generally worked alone.

  ‘He’s always got a load of wood in his hands,’ my mum said. ‘I ask him to wash them but he forgets. There are black marks all over the walls and banister. The chocolate is worse. I saw a big smear of it in the middle of the novel he’s reading. He said it’s his bookmark.’

  I pictured a different abode, in a parallel dimension, where my dad lived in solitude, unmarried: a remote, dirt-floored shepherd’s hut strewn with spilt paint, rabbit carcasses and Yorkie Bar wrappers. The embers of a small fire burned outside, arcane pieces of masonry scattered around it.

  The phone rang, and my mum picked up. It was my auntie Mal, wanting to know what the plan was for the walk. My mum handed the phone to me, and Mal and I agreed on a basic five-mile route, with a four-mile epilogue just in case we felt ambitious. ‘Then those who feel like going all the way can,’ said Mal.

  ‘OOH MISSUS!’ said my dad, who’d clandestinely picked up the other receiver and been listening in.

  Clandestinely picking up the other receiver and listening to conversations has long been a habit of my dad’s. One time my mum was telling me about a life-drawing class she’d attended at which their village postman turned out to be the model. Just as my mum reached the story’s climax, my dad, via the other receiver, chipped in: ‘EVERYONE RECOGNISED HIM BY HIS SACK.’

  Unlike the Peak District, the area around Eastwood has never been renowned Walking Country, and unsurprisingly we passed no other ramblers on our route, but on the outskirts of Kimberley we were joined by a few men in tracksuits with dogs. We took a short cut across a small park, and a black Labrador barely out of puppyhood gleefully nudged a red ball along beside us. ‘LOOK OUT FOR THIS BASTARD,’ my dad advised us. ‘IT WILL HAVE YOUR FACE OFF.’

  Mal and I suggested that my dad was perhaps being unnecessarily negative.

  At Greasley church my mum, Mal and Chris and I stopped to look at the churchyard’s burgeoning snowdrops and ancient yew tree, and at the gravestone of Millicent Shaw, who was crushed to death in the middle of a populist crowd frenziedly rushing to attend a local hanging in 1844. My dad pointed to the adjacent lay-by. ‘WE HAD OUR HUBCAPS NICKED HERE IN 1995,’ he said. Outside the church stood a faded tourist information board featuring a photograph of Lawrence. ‘LOOK AT HIM. DOESN’T HE LOOK A STUCK-UP TWAT? DO YOU HAVE THAT FLUORESCENT JACKET I GAVE YOU IN YOUR CAR FOR IF YOU BREAK DOWN ON YOUR JOURNEY BACK TO DEVON TOMORROW?’

  Once every month my dad would walk a mile through the woods not far from here and deliver our very reasonable rent to Lady Barber by hand at Lamb Close House. He knew the two main rules: 1) Know your station in life, and 2) Don’t mention D. H. Lawrence. More than half a century after Lawrence’s death the Barber family still nursed a grudge about the thinly veiled, none-too-flattering versions of their relatives in his novels. Researching a Lawrence piece for the Spectator magazine to coincide with the centenary of the novelist’s birth in 1985, the journalist Richard West was told upon visiting the area that Lady Barber’s husband, Sir William, would on no account talk to him about the subject. When Sir William was still alive, early in my mum and dad’s tenancy, he once played the piano for my dad and invited him to play a game of Name That Tune. Later Lady Barber permitted him to compile her a jazz mix tape, which she confessed caused her to gyrate slightly. Once, as my dad left after delivering our rent, she pointed to her dog’s bed and announced with a cackle, ‘There’s your blanket, Mr Cox!’ to my dad, who did not own the blanket in question and did not own a dog but whom Lady Barber clearly viewed as occupying a position in society not dissimilar to one. On another day, in a more generous mood she gave him a tour of the grounds, which took in a nursery full of Victorian toys, garages housing a collection of top-of-the-range 1920s cars and a huge greenhouse containing a lump of coal which, in my dad’s words, was ‘THE SIZE OF A TRANSIT VAN’: a touching memento of when the Barber family first realised they could make money off the sweat, toil and blood of the poor.

  We headed in the direction of Bog End, an ominously named place, particularly in a county where ‘bog’ is not most commonly used to denote marshy or muddy ground. It was not until I left Nottinghamshire and moved south that I realised that most people did not think ‘I’m going to the bog’ was a normal, or even acceptable, way to announce your intention to visit the nearest toilet. But Bog End in fact contains an exquisite wildflower meadow, whose sun-dappled spring state I have had recurring hazy William Morris dreams about. I often have relaxing dreams about the belt of countryside from here to the Peak District in which the more stark and unsightly elements of the landscape – the chippies, the headstocks, the spoil heaps – are always conveniently edited out. I have not thus far inherited my dad and granddad’s knack for having dream premonitions. Many years ago my dad dreamt about a woman who was in a phone box hit by a careening car. Not long afterwards in central Nottingham an out-of-control Vauxhall Viva obliterated a phone box containing my parents’ friend Jean, an incident from which Jean stepped away miraculously unhurt. My dad also dreamt about a new gate on the lane beside the house we rented from the Barbers a few days before someone unexpectedly built a new gate in the exact same spot. When recovering from a heart attack in the mid-eighties Ted dreamt about his sister-in-law Irene beckoning to him on the night she died, even though he didn’t know she’d died or even that she’d been ill at the time. The other member of the family noted for his premonitions was my granddad’s uncle Harry, a practising spiritualist who, using only the power of his mind, once pinpointed the exact place on his shelf where my granddad had stored an issue of Reader’s Digest that Harry wanted to borrow.

  Bog End was not at its best today, under a dishwater February sky, but my dad assured me that my dreams of its wildflower meadow were grounded in the solid fact of several childhood picnics. As we climbed out of the small Not Quite Derbyshire valley below it, he went into what I have come to recognise as his jazz fusion nostalgia mode. ‘I PUT AN EASEL UP THERE IN 1982 AND PAINTED IT THEN GOT BITTEN BY A HORSEFLY. DID YOU KNOW D. H. LAWRENCE SMASHED A 78 RPM BESSIE SMITH ALBUM OVER HIS WIFE’S HEAD? HE DIDN’T LIKE HER PLAYING BESSIE SMITH ALL THE TIME. I LOVE BESSIE SMITH. WOMEN IN JAPAN IN OFFICES PAY YOUNG MEN TO COME AND MAKE THEM CRY THEN DAB THEIR TEARS AWAY. I READ ABOUT IT. THEY’RE CALLED SOMETHING BOYS.’ He adjusted his new hat, which fell slightly over his ears. ‘I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ said Mal.

  We reminisced about a letter of complaint Mal and her colleague Dave had received while working for Derbyshire County Council, regarding some speed bumps that had been installed on a road in a town half an hour south of here. ‘My mate bost his sump,’ the letter, which came from someone called or representing an organisation called Thorne St Blook, had raged, before signing off with the firm instruction ‘Don’t you start coming the bolloks with me.’ Mal and I wondered aloud where the letter was now. I recalled that the version I had at home was just a photocopy, not the original.

  ‘I’VE GOT IT IN A FOLDER IN MY OFFICE,’ said my dad, who was now several yards ahead of us, striding purposefully towards the outskirts of Watnall.

  I was in my late teens when my parents moved to the house near here: a point in my life when my love of the countryside was drowned out by an intangible inner restlessness that I now recognise as the standard need of an overambitious, quarter-moulded young yokel to go somewhere else and find out who he was. I dragged the phone into my bedroom and conducted interviews with motormouthed musicians in California and Texas and Georgia then bashed the conversations into a semblance of shape for my own self-edited fanzine then, later, proper music magazines and newspapers based in London. I included our home phone number in the fanzine. My dad and I competed excitably to get to the phone first when it rang as, for the first time in our lives, it had become something we ass
ociated with good news. He usually won. Away from the Legoland estates we’d lived on previously and supply teaching jobs in inner-city Nottingham, he’d shaken off a bout of depression and was happier than I’d seen him in years. ‘THAT BLOKE OFF THE RADIO CALLED EARLIER,’ he told me one day when I returned home from my girlfriend’s house. ‘JOHN PEEL. I DIDN’T TAKE A NUMBER BUT HE SAID HE’D CALL BACK.’ He never did. The softest most flawless Jersey calves made eyes at me from the field opposite, our gang of bantam chickens did circuit after circuit of the garden digging for grubs, and a gentle, elderly German shepherd named Tina from two doors away came in each afternoon to ask politely for a biscuit then leave. Ray Manzarek called and speculated about Marianne Faithfull’s role in Jim Morrison’s death, while Frank from next door prowled about in the twitchell with a shotgun, looking for the fox that had got some of his partridges.

  My means of escape from all this stifling surreal beauty was the 1977 Toyota Corona that my granddad passed on jointly to my dad and me. The winter before he passed the Toyota on to us, he and Joyce drove to see us. Snow fell hard during their visit, and a small drift formed around the car, meaning that to get the vehicle back onto the road a passing group of hardy cyclists had to be enlisted to push it, a task that, even bearing in mind the snow, necessitated an unusually high level of grunting. It was only later, when the cyclists were almost finished, that it dawned on Ted that he’d forgotten to take the handbrake off. He weighed up mentioning this to them and decided it was best to leave it. On other occasions he had been known to park the Toyota in the dead centre of the lane, blocking all traffic from both directions, and regularly left a small paraffin stove burning inside the car’s footwell to keep the interior from getting frosted up. I remember him running a couple of red lights around this point in the mid-nineties, and that the donation of the car was at least partly due to a concern that it might be time for him to stop driving, but he purchased another car soon after and in fact stayed on the road until not long before his death, in 2002. Ted had a history of bad luck buying cars, including a couple that broke down during maiden journeys from the point of purchase. It never appeared to bother him: he still rhapsodised about what ‘good blokes’ the men who’d sold them to him had been, and he had the skill to fix the problems himself. When my parents’ Morris Minor broke down in the mid-seventies, he loaned them his Triumph Herald to drive to work and spent the morning cycling around Nottingham scrapyards until he found the replacement part he needed to fix the problem. The smell of engine oil is indelibly associated with him in my mind. Right from that first Wolseley, all his cars were kept in immaculate condition, but by the time my dad and I had had custody of the Toyota for a year lines of moss rose from the wheel arches across its door panels like eco-friendly go-faster stripes. In a young bozo’s attempt to save petrol by trundling the last mile home down the lane with the engine off, I crashed the car into a hedge at low speed when the steering lock clicked on and sent me sideways. I moved away from home, to York, for a while, then moved back. As a twenty-year-old living in the sticks with his parents, two miles away from the nearest bus stop and four times that far from the nearest train station, I relied crucially on the car to connect me to what I told myself was civilisation but I treated the Toyota with scant respect. Now of course I see it as the best car I ever had, and not just because I have reached an age when, as a man, I am contractually obliged to have a car from my past that I refer to as ‘the best car I ever had’, but at the time I was myopic regarding its plus points, just as I was myopic regarding the plus points of the valley where we lived.