In my mental picture of my nan’s house two ever-present smaller objects stand out: a 1950s wooden backscratcher and a large, shiny seashell that looked like a toothless mouth – not in fact entirely unlike my nan’s own mouth, on the occasions when I stayed overnight at her house and saw her after she’d put her teeth in a glass to soak. It could be argued that the wooden backscratcher was a poignant symbol of the fact that, for many years, my nan had not had anyone to scratch her back, but in reality it was probably just a really nicely crafted backscratcher. The significance of the seashell – which in the mists of time had been attached to a living conch – is in less doubt. Living in this most landlocked of places, my nan missed the sea terribly. ‘Put this to your ear and listen, son,’ she would tell me when I was little, in a Scouse voice as gentle as a couple of intertwining lines of silk thread, and hand the shell to me. ‘Can you hear it? That’s the actual sound of the waves.’ Even now, long after doubting the logistical possibility of this, I still fail to completely shut myself off to the idea of it being true.
‘Which waves?’ I once asked my nan, being the annoying kind of child who was always looking for specifics.
‘The best ones,’ she replied.
When I was a little younger than school age and my nan used to look after me while my mum and dad were at work, my nan and I would walk into the centre of Kimberley to the Co-op, where she would do her grocery shopping. We would then go to the newsagent, where she would settle her newspaper bill and purchase a packet of twenty Embassy Number One cigarettes from a man called Richard who stroked the palm of your hand very lightly as he gave you your change and had astonishing bouffant hair that some people claimed was visible from space. If I was very lucky, she would then buy me a Matchbox car from the toyshop directly opposite the Co-op, under the big black shadow of Kimberley’s soon-to-be-demolished Wolseley factory. One day my nan, a non-driver, bought me a Lamborghini Countach, and the two of us hatched a plan: on another day, in the distant future, when I was old enough, I would buy a real Lamborghini – my nan was by no means wedded to the idea of it being a Countach – and drive her over the hills of Derbyshire in it. In retrospect, I wonder if this plan, which was as much my nan’s brainchild as mine, contained an ulterior motive. If you drove to the high part of Derbyshire from Kimberley, then pressed on in the same direction, the second-to-next big place you’d get to after Manchester was Liverpool. The Peak District is always a bit of a bugger to get across, but in a Lamborghini with the traffic gods on your side the journey could surely be completed in less than two hours. That seemed like a long time to me as a four-year-old, but to my nan, who was forty-nine, it must have seemed like no time at all: less than the duration of an average Wimbledon or World Snooker final, less than a week’s worth of Coronation Street, even if you chopped out the ad breaks, which my nan would, since she hated them.
There’s a tendency to assume that a family settles in an area for solid and organised or at least logical reasons – a business, a collective plan, the binding roots of history – but just as often a family can end up in an area like they have been dropped there out of the cargo hold of an uncertainly piloted plane then picked themselves up, dusted the dirt from their knees and hair and made the best of it. My mum’s side of my family – my nan’s side, the big side, the female-dominated side – all lived in Liverpool until my mum was in her mid-teens. My nan, my granddad, my mum and her two sisters moved to Lenton on the outskirts of Nottingham when my granddad got a job there with the Co-op. After my auntie Mal gave birth to my cousin Fay she and my uncle Tony bought a house in Kimberley because it was the cheapest subrural area half an hour from the city in which to buy a decent-sized semi, and my parents and my uncle Paul and auntie Jayne followed nearby for the same reasons. It was only practical that my nan should live in the same area, especially after the unexpected early death of my granddad. Within time, my cousin Fay, then I, then my cousins Jack and Jeff attended the comprehensive school in Kimberley, and in a half-accidental way, despite a strong awareness that there were better places in the world to live, the family became tethered to the area. I know though, from my later conversations with my nan, that she never envisaged living out her final years there. There was talk of a nice bungalow in a different Nottinghamshire town, a little to the north-east, on a quieter street without swearing schoolkids,
