21st-Century Yokel

storm. As he grinned up at me with it in his mouth he could easily have been saying, ‘I am so high right now, man, on being a dog.’ But I was about to be his buzzkill. At the standing stone below Gripper’s Hill, near a similarly ancient-looking standing sheep, we turned for Susie’s cottage at Deancombe, a place with its own black dog legend, concerning a seventeenth-century weaver called Thomas Knowles, whose workaholic ghost terrorised his sons until the local vicar threw churchyard earth in his face and turned him into a canine. Thirty minutes later, when I dropped Billy off, he looked genuinely hurt, and even after almost fourteen miles I was left feeling like I’d wussed out. I did genuinely wuss out not long after that, walking into the centre of Buckfastleigh and doing something I’d never done before during a walk: I asked a taxi to take me home. I was looking forward to seeing Roscoe and feeling the contrast of her grudging, hard-earned respect after the unconditional sort I’d been receiving from Billy for the last few hours, but she wasn’t around when I got in.

I reminded myself that this was a good thing and ran a bath. I glanced at myself in the bathroom mirror: I appeared tired but had an outdoor brightness around my eyes. A long walk could so often be a strange, exhausting form of rest. I enjoyed lowering my aching muscles into the hot water, though. Afterwards, with considerable relish, I went to retrieve the pair of fresh pyjama bottoms I’d left to warm on a radiator at the start of the day. I located them on the floor, flecked with tiny black and white hairs, a couple of tiny leaves and some dried mud. But that was OK. There would always be other pyjama bottoms. The world was positively overrun with them.

10

DAWN OF THE DAD

My late paternal granddad Ted was an almost constantly grinning man with a moustache, glasses and a large scar which ran across most of the entirely bald dome of his head. Right from when I was very small I’d known that he’d been injured in the Second World War, but it wasn’t until later that I asked about the scar’s exact origin. ‘NO, HE DIDN’T GET IT WHILE HE WAS FIGHTING,’ my dad told me. ‘TED DIDN’T DO ANY FIGHTING. HE WAS MENDING A PLANE AND WAS IN THE WAY WHEN THE PROPELLER STARTED GOING AND IT CLONKED HIM ONE.’

Maybe there was a point when my dad addressed his dad as ‘Dad’ but I only ever heard him call him ‘TED’ or ‘TEDWARD’. To me this says as much about Ted’s extreme Tedness as it does about the jocular relationship the two of them shared. In my memory Ted is preserved as a human teddy bear: cuddly, circle-faced, dopey, entirely guileless and often found in the woods. But teddy bears are not built to survive alone. In my grandma Joyce my granddad found his complementary opposite: stern and fearful, a woman who once called the police on her own son for putting pennies on a train track close to their house. Joyce’s role was to reduce Ted’s head injuries to a minimum, remind him not to post his house keys in the letter box at the end of the road or leave loaves of bread on the roof of the car prior to journeys, and, during visits to heavily mirrored buildings, stop him from spending too much time apologising profusely to other moustachioed men with scarred bald heads for blocking their path. Ted’s – arguably more significant – role was to shake Joyce out of her naturally pessimistic state of mind with a succession of dancing classes, neighbourhood bonfires, fancy-dress balls, caravan holidays and walking expeditions to the Peak District.

The council house where Joyce and Ted lived for almost their entire married life was on the western edge of Nottinghamshire, close to the Derbyshire border, where a large portion of my family have resided for the best part of the last century and where our lives have been flavoured by a bucolic yearning for our taller, more attractive neighbouring county. My grandparents were part of a new generation of ramblers who went to the Derbyshire part of the Peak District in the 1950s and 1960s as a weekend escape from their factory jobs, freed by the greater access to the countryside opened by the Kinder Scout Trespass in 1932. ‘MARVELLOUS!’ my granddad would say upon rounding a corner and getting a view of Dovedale or Milldale or Chatsworth. ‘JUST MARVELLOUS.’ Ted was one of that last tribe of men who managed to make driving through Britain at weekends a hobby without being a speed junkie or petrolhead. When Shell and their contemporaries put together countryside guidebooks aimed at touring motorists after the Second World War, my grandparents were the kind of people they were thinking of. But when my dad was a kid the area where they lived was still fairly rural itself too – enough to be a fertile foraging ground to satisfy my granddad’s wood obsession. One day in the mid-fifties word spread around the neighbourhood that the big oak tree at Tommy Thompson’s farm had come down in the storm, and my granddad and his dad – also named Ted – immediately grabbed a two-man crosscut saw and headed up there. The bus stop you waited at to get the number 32 into town was beside a pen containing a neighbouring farm’s large and angry bull. The high-rise flats at Balloon Woods, a quarter of a mile away, had yet to be built, and my dad and his gang, led by his older cousin Flob, made dens and fires in the woods and put coins on the train track, hiding nearby and cheering as trains wooshed by and squished the bronze flat. Venturing further into the wilderness in the direction of Trowell, he