21st-Century Yokel

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 to 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