On a summer’s day early in the second decade of this century, many years since I’d last visited this area, I met my dad in the Co-op car park around a mile from my grandparents’ old house. ‘I’M NOT WALKING WITH YOU IF YOU WEAR THAT,’ my dad said, pointing to the straw hat on my head, a prized item of headwear I’d purchased from a car boot sale in Lincolnshire for three pounds. After that we said hello and began to walk south in the direction of Wollaton Park. My dad pointed to a 1980s housing estate on our left named after a famous ice-skating duo where, for a very brief time more than twenty years ago, my parents rented a two-bed semi. ‘THAT WAS ALL WASTE GROUND OVER THERE IN THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES,’ he said as we turned into the estate. He pointed to some houses on our right. ‘THE CANAL USED TO BE THERE, BUT IF I WENT AND PLAYED NEAR IT I COULDN’T TELL YOUR GRANDMA BECAUSE SHE SAID I’D GET POLIO. WHEN THEY DRAINED IT THE O’DOHERTYS TOOK LOADS OF TENCH, BREAM AND PERCH HOME AND PUT THEM IN THEIR BATH. SEE THAT MANHOLE COVER? THEY WOULD HAVE HAD THAT OFF IN SECONDS JUST TO SEE WHAT WAS UNDERNEATH. WHY DO PEOPLE HAVE PERSONALISED REGISTRATION PLATES? WHEN THEY DRIVE PAST ME I ALWAYS WAVE AT THEM SO THEY KNOW I RECOGNISE THEIR IMPORTANCE AS PEOPLE. JIM SPURGEON WAS VERY ADVANCED FOR HIS AGE. AT OUR SCHOOL WE DIDN’T HAVE SEX EDUCATION. WE HAD HIM INSTEAD. HE TOLD ME HAVING AN ORGASM WAS LIKE HAVING A HUNDRED CHRISTMASES AT ONCE.’
When my dad starts talking about his childhood, all you can do is quickly hitch your trailer to the back of the juggernaut and hope that some of it – maybe, say, a wheel and the number plate – is still in one piece by the end. Except, technically, there is no end. When my mum or I ask my dad to stop telling a story we generally do so not because we aren’t interested in the story but because we know that if we don’t, the story will just segue into another story, and another, and eventually the whole history of the universe will be told through the prism of Jeff Spurgeon, the O’Dohertys, Joyce, Ted, the less salubrious end of Wollaton and the Bilborough estate. My mum likens the way he talks to the way a man with two brains might talk, or someone acting as a translator for his own words, but translating in an odd, rarely sensical way that in fact creates a mild form of oral abstract art. I grew up with the tendency to speak in the slightly hushed, reticent voice of my mum’s side of the family, which constituted a genetic development against the odds, since both sides of my dad’s family were unusually loud. When my mum and dad first got together in the 1960s and they and Joyce and Ted drove to Derbyshire for a weekend walk, the noise would frequently get too much for my mum, and she would have to tell them she had a headache and needed to be silent for a while in the hope that they might be too. During Christmas 1985 Joyce talked at my nan so much that my nan had to excuse herself to visit the toilet, where she quietly vomited. At Ted’s funeral my dad chose not to employ a vicar and took charge of the ceremony himself. Had he not been told it was time to stop, I got the sense the eulogy could have gone on indefinitely and might still even be taking place right now, fifteen entire years later. During my dad’s speech, which praised Ted’s boundless good nature, gardening skills and enthusiasm, my grandma shouted, ‘I can’t hear you!’ at my dad, which, in its way, felt just as fitting an addition to the day as the decision to play Bing Crosby’s ‘Accentuate the Positive’ when the coffin disappeared. I have no recollection of my granddad saying a negative word against anyone during the entire twenty-seven years that I knew him. I’m sure he wouldn’t have had any criticism of my dad’s eulogy and would have thought the length and volume of it just marvellous.
My grandma and granddad’s council house, which they moved into at the beginning of the 1950s and vacated in the mid-1990s, appeared unchanged when my dad and I wandered past it on our way back towards Balloon Woods from the Co-op. After walking through the new estate and the old site of Wollaton Colliery, we’d hooked around the other side of Bilborough, where women in their forties used to shout, ‘Sod off back to your end!’ from their doorsteps at my dad and his gang if they ever strayed there. My dad stopped to point out the exact spot in his old road once occupied by a squashed frog that he’d told the other kids on the road was a monkey, charging them a halfpenny each to have a look at it. He then pointed to a spot on the pavement where Terrence O’Doherty had writhed in a violent ball with a greaser from a rival neighbourhood until my grandma broke the ruckus up by striding over to them, eyeing them flintily and asking if they were ‘making love’. Across the road the allotment where my granddad grew his vegetables had now been concreted over. Next to the garages that had replaced it was the O’Dohertys’ old place, where my dad once lifted up a sofa cushion and found a writhing nest of pink mice. Eric, the one of the nine
