21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  Clothes were always important to Ted. If he dressed up, he really dressed up. If he didn’t, he really didn’t. His tendency to look a little dandyish or extremely scruffy and rarely anything in between is one that both I and my dad have inherited. Around the turn of the last decade, when my dad finally had the income to buy the clothes he hankered after, I accompanied him to a tailor in the town of Holt in Norfolk, where he spent so much time trying on suits and asking the proprietor her opinion that three hours later when we finally left she announced that she was going to have to go upstairs to have a lie-down and some ginger nuts. Just before we sat down for our meal the night before our walk to Bog End my mum asked my dad if he knew he had a large stain on the front of his T-shirt, at which my dad hurriedly pulled the T-shirt over his head and put it back on, inside out. ‘Ta-da!’ he said. ‘Gone.’

  A Sunday ritual in my grandparents’ house was that while the roast was cooking all leather footwear in the house – whether it belonged to Ted, Joyce or a visitor – was buffed by Ted to a high, mirror-like sheen. Before walks in the Peak District it was mandatory for walking boots to be thoroughly cleaned and dubbined. I don’t clean my own walking boots since my staunch belief is that they’ll only get dirty again very soon afterwards. As for dubbining, I have never even entertained the idea. Also, I live in south Devon, where there is invariably a puddle or creek somewhere nearby if you get desperate. I did feel a bit bad in March 2015 when my parents and I visited Wolfscotedale, where Joyce and Ted’s ashes are scattered, and I looked down at all the dry cakey West Country mud I’d carried up there with me. It was one day when I perhaps should have made more effort.

  Before that afternoon it had been many years since I’d visited the Peak District, and seeing the curtain in the land that marks the entrance to it from the south knocked me for six. As I passed towards Ambergate along the A610, Crich Stand, the lone ring at the top of the curtain, rose out of the mist ahead, and a concomitant geyser of memories rose out of some mist inside me. My dad racing home further down the valley to get me back in time to see that night’s episode of The Incredible Hulk, overtaking, unthinkably, a Ford Capri, and me realising properly for the first time that overtaking was something a person could legally do and becoming excited by the future personal implications of that. The spectre of the ruined Wingfield Manor, one of the venues on the ghost of Mary Queen of Scots’ haunting tour of the UK, appearing in fading foggy light in the valley below our Morris Marina’s headlights then staying in the corner of my mind’s vision for days afterwards. Getting the cable car up the Heights of Abraham to see my cousin Fay working at the cafe at the top: the ambience of roller disco created by the decor and staff uniform. A raft race at Matlock Bath, Ted wrapped up against the cold in layer after layer, looking even more teddy bearish than ever. Our old, deceased weekend life. This curtain in the land is much more significant than the actual Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border a few miles behind you. The change is negligible as you travel from Eastwood, the last town in Nottinghamshire, to the spoil-heap-shadowed Langley Mill, where I once saw an empty shop with the heartbreaking handwritten sign which read, ‘Rob me if you like: I’ve been burgled so many times I’ve got nothing left’ in its window, or Ripley, where I contracted food poisoning from a transport cafe ham sandwich in 1987, or Codnor, from whose Codnor Pets and Aquatics my parents purchased my first goldfish. I noted as I waited at the traffic lights beside the latter establishment that it now sold air rifles, pistols, crossbows and knives as well as aquatics. I found it hard to imagine anyone wanting to buy a gun and a goldfish at the same time. If they sold barrels too it might have made a bit more sense.

  The change, by contrast, as you continue west to Ambergate with Crich Stand looking down its nose at you and turn right towards Whatstandwell, is like the change that occurs when you meet a venerable witch at the edge of a wasteland who takes you by the hand and says, ‘It’s OK. I know where the good place is with the enchanted stone and the wise sheep who speak,’ and leads you directly to it. It is not the fault of Ripley and Langley Mill and Alfreton and Codnor that they got the tyre stacks, chippies and bleak-looking pubs. Tyre stacks, chippies and bleak-looking pubs have to go somewhere, and not even the most rampant environmental charlatan would want to scatter them over the other side of the Crich divide: it would be like fly-tipping in Middle Earth.

  For a year, maybe more, before I drove through the Peak District to Wolfscote Dale, in my dreams I’d been seeing a tower looming over a giant rock face not quite a cliff but very reminiscent of one. It always felt like a calming place, but where was it? I couldn’t work it out. It seemed like it should be in Devon, somewhere near the sea, but it didn’t match up to anywhere in Devon I had so far visited. It reminded me a little bit of the Daymark, an octagonal nineteenth-century shipping tower on the south Devon coast near Kingswear that I had often walked to, sometimes in atmospheric fog, but that wasn’t it; the Daymark is a little too brutalist, sci-fi in a starker way. As soon as I saw Crich Stand – built in 1923, the year of Ted’s birth, on the site of at least two apparently more gloomy and ominous previous towers, in remembrance of the members of the Sherwood Foresters regiment who had died in the First World War – loom up ahead, I knew immediately that that was what I had been dreaming about.

  The Stand continued to watch me for several miles as I made my way in the direction of Matlock, parallel to the Derwent, and I had to tell myself to stop looking at it after veering into roadside gravel not far from the turning to Wirksworth. ‘Kimberley Ales’, announced big painted letters on the side of a pub. A benevolent gesture: an area as magnificent as this, stooping to import ales from the less magnificent area where I grew up. The brewery was now defunct, but still. The road here keeps following the river and gives the impression Derbyshire is one long valley, a deep, green avenue to the Proper North. I turned left at Cromford and climbed for the Peak through remorseless rain, reluctantly leaving behind Scarthin Books, Britain’s best second-hand bookshop: a warren of maps and local history and excellent home-made soup, whose owner gets about on a tandem, just like Ted and Joyce did for a lot of the 1940s and fifties. I stopped for a wee by a stone wall, and the wind blew my wee over the wall and into the adjacent field. I don’t know where my wee ended up. In fact, several hours later it seemed entirely possible that my wee could still be airborne, making its way steadily towards Glossop. Despite the cold, I was getting warnings from my car that it was overheating. My car is fairly modern so vocalises its anxities about its health quite openly. It even beeps at me when it’s worried about running out of petrol. I miss the old attitude to petrol from cars – the ‘Oops. All gone. Oh well!’ attitude of the mossy Toyota. But in this case my car’s panic was justified. The engine’s coolant filter was broken. If I had been Ted I’d have been straight under the bonnet, sorting that out in no time. But I am not Ted, only parts of Ted, and not the most useful parts, so instead I splashed a load more coolant into the engine and resolved to take it to a garage at the earliest opportunity.

  In the village of Alstonefield I parked and met my mum and dad, and we began to walk in the direction of the River Dove, passing rainfucked barns, a farmhouse with a ram skull proudly displayed in its window and a herd of Belted Galloway cattle. We paused to admire the cattle through the soupy downpour.

  ‘THEY WERE MY FAVOURITE AS A KID,’ my dad remarked. ‘THEY’RE HALF PANDA, HALF COW. THE BULLS KILL YOU. FOOK! I WANT TO PAINT THEM!’

  ‘You’ve got shortcrust pastry crumbs down the front of your coat,’ my mum said to me, and she was not incorrect.

  My dad’s mood became a little more sober as we reached the hillside where Joyce and Ted’s ashes were scattered. ‘FOOKIN’ HELL,’ he said. ‘IT’S GOT STEEPER SINCE 2002. I’M GOING TO SLIDE DOWN ON MY SIDE.’ As I helped my mum down the ravine towards the Dove and my dad slid behind us, two professional-looking hikers coming from the opposite direction kindly stood aside for us.

  ‘MY DAD’S JUST UP THERE,’ my dad said t
o the hikers, gesturing over a craggy knob in the drenched hillside behind us, beyond which a distant tumulus looked like a jelly pudding stubbornly drawn in HB pencil through the defiant moisture.

  ‘Oh, there’s one more of you to come, is there?’ asked one of the hikers, continuing to stand aside.

  ‘NO. I MEAN HIS ASHES. HE’S BEEN DEAD ALMOST THIRTEEN YEARS.’

  I wondered where my grandma and granddad’s ashes had ended up after my mum and dad had scattered them at the top of the hill respectively thirteen and twelve years earlier. It rains a lot here, so runnels of lightly mudded water probably washed them down the slope. Some ashes perhaps eventually made it into the Dove. Maybe some didn’t. Everything returns to the earth in the end and is remade, so in a sense what was technically happening at present was that my dad was sliding down Ted and Joyce. My dad continued to slide down Ted and Joyce, almost all the way to the bottom. It was an activity that Joyce would no doubt have disapproved of, viewing it as high-spirited. ‘Michael!’ she would have called my dad, but of course a Michael would have been far less likely to do something like that. It was the act of a Mick.

  Near the bottom of the slope my dad got himself upright again, picked up his pace and nipped ahead of my mum and me, across the river. By the time we reached the foot of the ravine, he was talking to a party of teenagers on the other side of the footbridge. ‘Oh God,’ said my mum, as we admired some bracket fungus. ‘I bet he’s telling them about Cottesmore.’ Cottesmore was the inner-city Nottingham secondary school where my dad taught in the 1970s. It had remained one of his favourite conversation topics to the present day, but I was amazed that my mum could tell from a distance of over a hundred yards that this was what he was talking about until it hit me that close to five decades of marriage can endow people with many particular skills.

  ‘Were you telling them about Cottesmore?’ my mum asked my dad when we caught him up.

  ‘YEAH. WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT? I TOLD THEM ABOUT THE TIME I BROUGHT MY CLASS HERE ON A SCHOOL TRIP IN 1974 AND THEY CHARGED SOME CATTLE AND ALMOST GOT SOME PICNICKERS TRAMPLED TO DEATH. BARRY LASKOWSKI WAS THE RINGLEADER. AND VINCENT BROWN . . . HE WENT ON TO WIN MR UNIVERSE.’

  ‘Were they interested?’ I asked.

  ‘THEY PRETENDED TO BE BUT I THINK THEY WERE BEING SARCASTIC. I TOLD ONE OF THEM OFF FOR SMOKING BUT IT TURNED OUT HE JUST HAD A PEN IN HIS MOUTH.’

  With that my dad was off again, telling me the story about the time in 1976 when two pupils burgled one of his colleague’s houses – a teacher who had moved into the same neighbourhood as the children as a socialist gesture – and sprayed graffiti on its living-room wall, then, when they found out the house belonged to the teacher, who was their favourite, voluntarily returned all the stolen goods. Then, after that, the story about a boy named Mark who used to sit quietly in the library and read Just William books but went on to put a petrol bomb in Hyson Green police station. My dad brought his Cottesmore pupils to Derbyshire on a few occasions, and they were always high-spirited: the most city of city kids, many of whom had never seen proper countryside before. Upon spotting expert climbers working their way up the rock face at Froggatt Edge, many of the boys, including Lenford Marquis and Lloyd Clockton, ran over to join in. ‘THIS WAS NOT LONG AFTER LLOYD GOT LOCKED IN A CUPBOARD,’ remembered my dad. ‘I TOOK THEM ALL THROUGH SOMEONE’S GARDEN BY MISTAKE ON THE SAME WALK. YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE FACES OF THE PEOPLE IT BELONGED TO. I DON’T THINK THEY’D SEEN LAIRY SIX-FOOT JAMAICAN TEENAGERS BEFORE.’

  If the Peak District is a mounted painting, the nearby cities are situated like hastily placed drawing pins at the edges of the mount. Because of the foot traffic, the path along the Dove – the first river I ever swam in – is rarely totally quiet in daytime, even in thick end-of-winter rain like today’s. Complaints about the Peak District becoming besmirched by crowds are nothing new. In J. B. Firth’s Highways and Byways in Derbyshire of 1905 he laments the vulgarisation of the Derwent Valley: its litter and its transformation into a ‘tripper’s Paradise’ populated by hordes of ‘callous rowdies’ from the conurbations that distantly surround it. Devon is a place much more synonymous with holidaymakers, but its central walking country remains emptier than this, even in high season. That’s because it only has drawing pins in one direction from the edge of its mount. If you tried to attach a drawing pin in any other direction the drawing pin would be swept away by some large waves. But in this rainy, high-altitude terrain I rediscovered much to remind me of my current home. As we pushed towards Milldale, skirting the Staffordshire border, and the rain soup cleared to mere consommé, the scenery looked like Devon in a different jacket. It was hard to conceive that there was no coastline just over the horizon, let alone within sixty miles. I understood why Derbyshire had been nagging at my subconscious lately: this bleak, craggy, up-and-down terrain and damp climate was a deep, ingrained part of me. By moving to south Devon I’d finally made myself aware of it. The top of Lustleigh Cleave on Dartmoor was my Froggatt Edge, the Teign and Dart were my Dove and Derwent (the original meaning of both ‘Dart’ and ‘Derwent’ is roughly ‘river valley thick with oaks’). Devon was not just somewhere I’d moved to because of two love affairs – one, destined not to last, with a woman and one, still burgeoning, with a landscape. It also kept me connected to Ted. And maybe during his lifetime Derbyshire had kept Ted – whose mum had grown up on Dartmoor – connected to Devon, whether he knew it or not.

  We arrived at Milldale, whose stone footbridge and matching surrounding cottages my dad had painted in intricate detail when I was young and we were living in the first of our Almost Derbyshire houses. I recall moaning on walks around here as a nine- or ten-year-old, but my mum remembers a weird stamina I had a few years prior to that: an ability to keep going on ambitious routes around Chatsworth and Eyam and Padley and Wirksworth that belied my age and tiny legs and which, if she was honest, she found just a bit unsettling. My parents were tired now, on the bridge at Milldale, and I realised with a pang that the ten-mile-plus walks in which I now liked to indulge at least once a week were never going to be within their reach again. The final stretch of the walk, up the hill towards the George pub at Alstonefield, was hard going. While they caught their breath I stopped to say hello to a farmer rebuilding a stone wall, for a few minutes admiring his craftsmanship and the slow satisfaction of mending. A miracle structure made from local material that withstood the elements purely due to weight distribution, ventilation and mortarless adhesion, being repaired with care and unhurried love. I barely suppressed the urge to join in. About half an hour earlier a slow, tentative sun had finally called off the rain. As its light fell through the branches and we passed along the Dove where the river nips below the high bank of Lode Lane my dad had pointed to a spot where, for many years, an abandoned Wolseley had hung suspended in the foliage: a car like Ted’s that had been driven too hastily or faced a problematic obstacle in its path, or perhaps both, then, unclaimed, had seemed more of an embedded natural part of the landscape with each passing season until one day it was gone.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  21st-Century Yokel is the result of my stubborn conviction that something that a lot of people told me for many years wouldn’t be ‘marketable’ enough to work would be a much better book than the marketable stuff they recommended that I did instead, but it also only exists because, as it began to take form, a few other people did believe in it: in particular, my editor Simon Spanton and my agent Ed Wilson, who have offered support of the kind you hope you will get from editors and agents in optimistic, childlike dreams but rarely would be so bold as to hope for in realistic wakefulness. I am very lucky to have you both on my side. I’d also like to thank the rest of the Unbound team for giving me the springboard to launch this book in a non-conventional way and my astoundingly loyal and lovely readers for helping to get the project off the ground in a manner that would not have been possible in the publishing industry climate of six or seven years ago. The Bear’s Army: you rock, as ever. I
don’t write for newspapers any more and all my non-book writing goes on my website, some of which turns into book writing, and for which the unsolicited, unpaid proofreading skills of Dave Holwill, Lesley Bourke, Becca Broad, Amanda Corp and Miranda Whiting have been invaluable. Thank you for your eagle eyes. I sometimes think writing is just the sum of your disappointments and hopes in life plus all the books you have read but that’s not quite true. This selection you’re holding is also indelibly flavoured by the nature lovers I have spent time around in the last couple of years whose positive worldview and excitement about wildlife has been so infectious: bee goddesses Hayley Anderson and Emily Reed, butterfly overlord John Walters, beaver tracker Stephen Hussey, moorland rootsman Michael Nendick, arboreal mastermind David Prout, eco sextons Ru and Claire Callender, caterpillar guru Jenny Porrett. I must also in this category count my parents Jo and Mick, who were helping to get me excited about buzzards, moss, newts and bees long before I even realised it. But I have much more to thank them for – particularly my mum, whose linoprints feature in this book and have been an inspiration to me during its creation. A few of these stories came together a little more cohesively during spoken word shows in 2015 and 2016. Thanks to everyone who booked me for one of those – especially Chris Woodley-Stewart and Samantha Holland and to Chris Booth and Lucinda Guy for letting me ramble about my rambling on Soundart Radio once a month. Cheers also to the Dominick Tyler for teaching me the terms Cornubian Batholith and Witches’ Knickers. Check out his book Uncommon Ground: it’s really great. And finally a big salute to brilliant comedy actress and fellow Pentangle nut Alice Lowe for giving me the title to this book. She says she can’t remember ever doing so, but she definitely did, and I have documented proof. After reading one of my old columns for the Guardian in spring 2012, not long after I was first attempting to write about life in the countryside in a digressive way that brought in folklore, music and family, as well as landscape and wildlife, Alice asked ‘Have you ever thought of calling yourself the 21st-Century Yokel?’ So I did.