by Tom Cox
Despite my blindness to much of my immediate surroundings, I remember walking into the thick woods separating the house from the M1 during those antsy summers of urban yearning and experiencing great moments of birdsong peace. I wonder if, on the second or third day of hiding out in these woods, as the police helicopters circled above, the armed robbers who escaped into them in 1995 began to relax and experience a similar form of peace. I sometimes mentally combine these armed robbers with the other armed robbers who tied our neighbours to chairs, beat them with baseball bats and sprayed mace in their pet greyhound’s eyes, but this is incorrect: they were definitely different armed robbers. The neighbours who suffered the attack lived at the farm at the end of the track which our house fronted, looked after retired racehorses and had an enormous damp barn full of over a century of damp equestrian literature, which my dad helped them to coerce into some kind of order. The barn, long since under different ownership, is now a less damp tea room, serving a selection of D. H. Lawrence-themed lunches, including a dish called Lady Chatterley’s Platter whose exact contents I declined to investigate when I went there, being in one of my more conservative moods at the time. Our old house and our neighbours’ now boast big fences, nearly-as-big dogs and KEEP OUT signs, which is depressing but should perhaps not be viewed too reactionarily as a sign of changing times, since my parents were burgled twice during their five and a half years living there.
‘THREE TIMES,’ said my dad as we walked across the ridge heading away from the direction of Derbyshire, not quite in view of the house, with IKEA just visible in the distance.
‘Two,’ said my mum.
‘NO. YOU’RE FORGETTING ABOUT THE SHED.’
‘Oh yes. You’re right.’
In the pub after our walk, not far from my old school, my mum, my dad, Mal, Chris and I ate some chips while two men on the table opposite discussed their favourite motorways. They agreed that the M62 was their least favourite but did not reach a consensus on the number-one spot. ‘What’s Sinbad up to today?’ one asked. ‘He’s gone to Cleethorpes on a fanny hunt,’ replied his friend. My dad removed his mobile phone from his coat pocket: an inexpensive clamshell around a decade old that displayed an alert for 144 unread messages.
‘I’VE NEVER LOOKED AT ANY OF THEM,’ he told me. ‘I DON’T KNOW HOW.’
I had one unread message on my own phone. It was from the lady who, with a slight sense of class betrayal, I paid to clean my house for two hours every week. She wanted to know if she could adjust her hours for next week and also wondered if I realised I’d locked her in the house when I set off yesterday. I didn’t, just as I hadn’t the other time I’d absent-mindedly done it three weeks earlier. She said it was OK, since she’d managed to find the key to the French windows and let herself out that way.
Nobody can remember the exact moment my granddad’s scatterbrain gene kicked in, but a poll of those who knew him puts it at around the age of thirty-six, four years before he set fire to a stranger’s coat by putting his still-lit pipe in his pocket during a coach trip from Ilkeston to Mablethorpe. I was always closer to my nan than I was to Ted and Joyce, and have often been told that my looks, as well as my character, are closer to hers and those of her husband Tom. But in recent years, as my hair on my head has become slightly less thick and the hair on my face slightly thicker, I’ve started to see a hint of Ted in the mirror. This effect will no doubt become more extreme if I finally start wearing my glasses as often as I should. It has also got me thinking about my genetic destiny, especially on days when I put the coffee beans straight into the mug, lock my cleaner in the house or place a bottle of unused shampoo directly into my brown recycling bin.
I kidded myself for a few years that my increased doziness might be down to a mind overstuffed with nonsense or the pace of modern life, but I’m now facing up to the fact that my Ted gene is fully operational. I suppose a big signpost was the moment in 2013 when I got a bit too involved in a folk album I’d just bought, forgot to check on my bonfire and accidentally set a fairly large portion of my next-door neighbour’s garden alight. Increasingly, friends and strangers chase after me as I exit pubs and shops, waving my clothes and valuables in the air. But that’s OK. Ageing is often about facing up to your flaws. Admitting your mistakes is something everyone has to do at some point. One day last year I put my wallet in the fridge, for example, and I now realise that was a mistake.
I mentioned some of these incidents to my dad a few years ago, seeking reassurance, following a couple of occasions when I’d come perilously close to recycling my car keys in bottle banks. I felt confident that he at least hadn’t inherited the doofus gene: he was always double-checking that he’d switched appliances off and, for all his excitability and turbulence, was a rigorously organised person. He sat me down and said in what was for him an unusually hushed voice, ‘Why do you think I’m so neurotic? It’s not just because I got it from your grandma. I have to be like that or I’d walk around doing stupid things all the time.’ He too had first experienced the phenomenon during his mid-thirties, he said, during a holiday when he broke an up-and-over garage door off its hinges by pulling it the wrong way. ‘IT’S A LATENT COX TRAIT. I WAS GOING TO WARN YOU ABOUT IT THE OTHER SUMMER WHEN YOU DROVE INTO THAT PARKING BARRIER AND SNAPPED IT, BUT I THOUGHT I’D GIVE IT A WHILE JUST TO MAKE SURE.’
I felt a little hard done by. My dad had had great fun playing practical jokes on his dad – I am thinking here particularly of the time he convinced Ted that he’d received a call from my grandma on an unattached analogue telephone many yards from any building – but because of his pesky compensating for his own condition I’d been robbed of the chance to do the same thing with him. Instead I had been doomed to a life of being told ‘REMEMBER TO PUT YOUR HEADLIGHTS ON’ and ‘DON’T SAW INTO YOUR ARM WHILE YOU’RE CUTTING THAT WOOD.’ Now my illness had been confirmed, I could no longer even claim he was fussing unduly. Then there is the worry about how my doziness might become more of a liability as it escalates, due to my habit of sometimes having ideas above my station. Never getting ideas above his station perhaps made Ted’s doziness easier to manage. Not long before he died, my parents took him – with Joyce, who was by then suffering from dementia – on a visit to a country house with a garden open to the public. Not a mansion, but a big place – seven or eight bedrooms, half a dozen acres of land. ‘Ah. If I could do it all over again and got luckier, who knows…’ Ted sighed. My mum and dad smiled, thinking that in a fantasy parallel life this would indeed be a lovely place to live. ‘I could have been the gardener here,’ continued Ted.
Back in my mum and dad’s living room after our Bog End walk, I went through some old photos from Joyce and Ted’s collection: my granddad and my dad’s uncle Ken pretending to be rally drivers in an abandoned wreck of a car they’d found on a walk; my grandparents immaculately attired at work parties; the two of them and Ken dressing up, often in very androgynous fashion; my granddad grinning in photo after photo; my grandma’s older brother Les in what for all the world looked like the promo shot for a 1940s heart-throb starring as a Los Angeles gumshoe. ‘PEOPLE LOOKED LIKE FILM STARS AT THAT POINT BECAUSE THEY COULDN’T AFFORD TO EAT PROPERLY,’ my dad said. ‘BEING FAT WAS A SIGN OF WEALTH. NOW IT’S THE RICH PEOPLE WHO ARE SKINNY.’ My granddad’s side of the family all grew their own veg. By the time they were twenty each of them had killed at least one chicken with their bare hands. In a time before unemployment benefit they found coal for their fires by waiting along the railway line for the chunks that would drop off trains. ‘MY AUNTIE IRENE USED TO PUSH A PRAM AROUND PRETENDING SHE HAD A BABY AND USE IT TO STEAL COAL FROM THE OPEN-CAST MINE IN BRAMCOTE. SHE GOT ARRESTED FOR IT.’ He passed me another photo: my granddad in a suit and tie, grinning as usual, surrounded by beer bottles and seven people I’d never seen before. ‘LOOK AT THIS,’ he said. ‘YOU CAN TELL IT WAS AN INNOCENT ERA. PRE-INTERNET, PRE-DOGGING.’ Joyce’s family, though not well off, did not suffer the same poverty as Ted’s did in the twent
ies and thirties: her mum, Ethel – a woman even more fearsome than her – ran a haberdashery shop and lived in a house full of buttons. Joyce went on to work in a shoe shop and for a library supply company.
I couldn’t help returning to that photo of Joyce’s brother Les, a dashing debonair figure who a stranger might be forgiven for not at first guessing was a Nottingham-based dental technician with a sideline in hypnotism. After Joyce first met my mum, she told my dad that she had good teeth, describing them as ‘like celery roots’. ‘I remember looking in the mirror afterwards to check if they had ridges on them,’ my mum said. Perhaps influenced by her inside knowledge of the dental trade, Joyce advised me that it might be worth thinking about having my own teeth out early in life, as it would save a lot of hassle as I got older. I was approaching my seventeenth birthday at the time. Much of her life appeared to be about sensibly preparing for her years as an old age pensioner. By the time she and my granddad turned forty – when they were both very healthy and active – she already had their names on a list for a retirement bungalow. In her defence it should be pointed out that when their retirement years did arrive they seemed to spend a lot of them having a very good time, which they told us about in great detail in what became a reversal of more traditional family meet-ups, where the old people listen to the young people tell them about all the fun, energetic stuff they’ve been doing.
Joyce was the only close family member I was frightened of when I was a child. But maybe that was useful: all my other close relatives apart from my daredevil uncle Tony were big softies, and one Victorian influence wasn’t such a bad thing for me. High-spirited behaviour was not tolerated in Joyce’s presence, which might go some way to explaining why my dad indulges in so much of it now. My memory of her relationships with those close to her reminds me of something the novelist Richard Russo’s grandfather once said about his grandmother: ‘With your grandmother, you always have a choice. You can do things her way or you can wish you had.’ The general line of thinking is that she and Ted did argue early in their relationship but not later on, after Ted realised that to let her have her way 100 per cent of the time led to a simpler, easier life.
As I continued to flick through the photos, I could hear my mum and dad in the kitchen preparing the evening meal. My dad then announced that he was going upstairs to the loft. My mum asked why he was doing that, and he said he wanted to fetch the electric heater for her to use during the life-drawing class she had organised for tomorrow. I heard the fridge start to beep, as it did when somebody hadn’t shut the door properly and it felt the need to warn them.
‘You don’t need to do that now,’ my mum said. ‘Do it in the morning. Dinner will be ready in a minute, and I’ve put some nibbles out in the other room.’
‘NO, I’M GOING TO GET IT DONE NOW,’ said my dad. ‘I DON’T WANT YOUR LIFE MODEL TO BE COLD. DON’T USE THAT WORD, NIBBLES. I’VE BANNED IT. IT MAKES ME CRINGE. IS THAT FRIDGE REVERSING?’
‘Did you know you bent the potato masher?’
‘NO, I DIDN’T. I APOLOGISE PROFUSELY.’
A recurring line of my dad’s is that his dad was dozy and happy-go-lucky and his mum was intelligent and neurotic, and he drew the short straw by ending up dozy and neurotic. ‘I’M GLAD YOU GOT YOUR MUM’S PERSONALITY, NOT MINE,’ he has told me. He’s being unfair to himself here and not wholly accurate, but I can see another combination of Ted and Joyce in him: a thundering lust for life combined with the ability to create obstacles out of nothing in a future that doesn’t exist, a sometimes exhausting ego combined with a generosity that on occasions has run to the self-damaging, a negative outlook underpinned by an essential softness and good nature. No human is just one thing. That said, Ted perhaps came a bit closer than some of us. Towards the end of my granddad’s life my dad asked him if he’d ever done anything horrible. Ted pondered the question for almost a full minute then said there was one thing he had often regretted which he felt was unfair and hurtful, and that was the times during 1936 when he and a gang of his mates would go into the chip shop in Stapleford five minutes before it closed and ask, ‘Have you got any fritters left, missus?’ to the woman serving there, and if she said, ‘Yeah,’ they would shout, ‘Well, you fried too many of them, didn’t you, missus!’ and run away.
Ted could be bawdy, in a fluffy unthreatening sort of way. Pretty much as soon as I reached puberty he started asking me if I was getting any ‘crumpet’. Before my adolescence he often referred to me as ‘KILLER’, which became ‘LADYKILLER’ as I got older. I was sorry to disappoint him by remaining in a long-term committed relationship with the same girl from my late teens to the middle of my twenties. In view of this side of his nature it was somewhat apt that he spent most of his adult life working in a factory that made women’s underwear. My great-granddad, Ted senior, also worked in a women’s underwear factory. The legend is that during the 1930s Ted senior designed the part of a knitting machine that made women’s stockings fit more snugly around the heel then made the mistake of telling his boss, who immediately patented the idea. Apparently the boss was always sure to send Ted senior a turkey every Christmas though, and Ted senior was content with that.
Before his teaching days my dad also worked in a women’s underwear factory for a while. In fact, I am the first of a century of men on Ted’s side of the family never to have worked in a women’s underwear factory. I feel I am somehow letting the side down here, but I’m still not all that old, and publishing is a very uncertain industry to work in during the early part of the twenty-first century, so I suppose there’s still time and anything could happen. When my dad was a kid Ted’s ability to mend the knitting machines that made ladies’ undergarments was so prized that he worked for a time in a Belgian factory which was having trouble with its machines. The Belgians were so impressed with his work that they offered him a permanent position at a far better wage than he’d ever had, but Joyce did not want to move to Belgium because she thought they had weird toilets. ‘WHILE HE WORKED THERE HE LIVED WITH A BELGIAN FAMILY AND WALKED THROUGH A FRENCH WINDOW IN THEIR HOUSE,’ my dad told me. ‘WELL, I SUPPOSE IT WAS A BELGIAN WINDOW. DO YOU KNOW WILLIAM LEE? HE WAS FROM CALVERTON AND HE INVENTED THE FRAMEWORK KNITTING MACHINE. KNITTING HAS ALWAYS BEEN MASSIVE IN NOTTINGHAM. ALL THE HOUSES IN RUDDINGTON USED TO HAVE THREE FLOORS. THAT’S BECAUSE THE TOP FLOOR WAS FOR KNITTING. EVERYONE WAS KNITTING LIKE FOOK. AND THAT’S WHY HOSIERY WAS SO BIG IN NOTTINGHAM, AND WHY YOUR GREAT GRANDDAD AND YOUR GRANDDAD GOT JOBS IN HOSIERY FACTORIES. I DIDN’T KNOW ANY OF THIS UNTIL I WENT TO LEICESTER TO BUY DRUGS AND HAD A STAND-OFF WITH A MOD THERE. WE BECAME MATES FOR A BIT AFTERWARDS. HE WORKED IN HOSIERY.’
When my granddad was away, my dad and Joyce tended to clash without a teddy bear to soften the atmosphere in the house. When my dad’s shoes fell to bits Joyce sent him to school in some of her own. She gave him charcoal tablets to combat what she called his bilious attacks. My dad wasn’t aware that he had bilious attacks and didn’t even know what they were, but she assured him that he did and that they needed to be combated. Meanwhile, a co-worker of Ted’s in Brussels named Kurt became obsessed with Ted and began to follow him everywhere he went. Ted had to gently explain to Kurt that he was married and not on the market. Kurt told Ted he was the most finely dressed man he had ever seen.