6
THE BEST WAVES
The tiny Victorian terraced house where my nan lived for most of my life was on a steep, narrow street where cars drove a little too fast, children shouted a little too obnoxiously and dogs defecated a little too freely, in the same Nottinghamshire town where, as infrequently as possible, I attended secondary school. At lunchtime on the majority of school days for five years I walked to my nan’s house, which took an average of eleven minutes. I turned right out of the school gates then left into a council estate of pebbledashed post-war houses, where in the summer of 1990 a boy called Ian threatened to hit me with a hammer, then towards the newsagent where my friend Bushy had once legendarily pointed to a jar of halfpenny chews and asked, ‘How much are halfpenny chews?’ From here I cut half-right down a jitty and downhill across a small patch of parkland to the railway embankment, which was frequently peppered with white dog turds and seemed to wear a permanent invisible cloak of its own past, both dark and light, but mostly dark. Afterwards I turned sharp left along a short public footpath, then sharp right, past the town brewery. This was a beautiful, proud, sprawling, red-brick Victorian building which, because I lacked an enquiring mind, only interested me due to two things: a tunnelled footbridge, which I thought was kind of cool, and the fact that Josephine Shaw, the mum of my classmate James Shaw, worked in the reception there, because when you are a fourteen-year-old boy the fact that your classmates have mums can be a surprisingly enduring form of amusement.
My nan’s house was one of the first row you reached after the brewery. The town is called Kimberley, which its residents generally pronounce as ‘Kimbleh’, leaving their mouths open for a fractional but noticeable moment on the final syllable. The street is called Hardy Street and is named after the beer-making brothers who erected the brewery in 1861.
I normally walked to my nan’s alone or with Graham Basten. At school my social life awkwardly spreadeagled the cool, tough, sporty kids and the more nerdy kids, whose maths and science work I could sometimes copy and towards whom, as I became more mentally and physically absent at school, I gravitated increasingly. Graham was one of the latter. He lived on a new estate five minutes further up the road from my nan’s, and his dad was a butcher, not a supplier of sustainable timber and building materials, although my memory sometimes alters this due to the fact that his dad was a dead ringer for the man who fronted the TV adverts for a famous supplier of sustainable timber and building materials. Graham and I saw ourselves as mild and well behaved, but I now realise that was less to do with us being mild and well behaved and more to do with having plenty of contemporaries to compare ourselves with who were the diametric opposite of mild and well behaved. If we were feeling a bit lairy, we would shout, ‘Josephine Shaaaaaw!’ at James Shaw’s mum as we passed the brewery entrance then run away up the hill. Further up the hill from my nan lived a tall hairy man with big teeth who always wore para boots and an anorak and was, so my nan alleged, a poet. Sometimes when we walked past him, or anyone else who strayed from the tight parameters of late 1980s Kimberley fashion, Graham and I would say, ‘And there it is!’ just loud enough for our targets to hear us.
The hill and the greater area around my nan’s house always smelled pleasantly of hops due to the brewery. This was in contrast to the area around my auntie Jayne and uncle Paul’s house, on the other side of town, which smelled strongly of white bread due to the nearby Sunblest factory, a smell too redolent of migraine and chemicals to merit a term as benign as ‘yeasty’. There was a small area in the centre of town which smelled neither of hops nor white bread. This usually smelled of chips.
The front door of my nan’s house, which was always unlocked during daytime when she was in the house, led directly into her living room. When I arrived I walked in without knocking, just as the rest of the family always did. My nan lived alone for the final thirty-six years of her life but was often surrounded by people: children, spouses of children, grandchildren then great-grandchildren. Until I was around nine she also had a questionably disciplined chihuahua called Beau, who once ate fifty quid. She said there was a ghost who lived with her: a man a few years older than she was who she sometimes heard walking down her stairs, but she said he was a shy ghost who didn’t like to be a bother to anyone. He was an apt ghost, since not liking to be a bother to anyone was also a central trait of my nan’s personality. When my nan moved into her terrace, in 1985, from her even tinier house half a mile away, ‘Easy Lover’ by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey was relentlessly on the radio, and the whole family mucked in, scraping tired, dirty old wallpaper from some walls and slapping paint onto others. ‘Easy Lover’ was the best song
