My dad and I crossed a couple of roads and headed towards Balloon Woods, where a large estate of bungalows stood and there were small paths – jitties and twitchells, as I grew up calling them, and still do, much to the bewilderment of anyone from south of Burton upon Trent – with a profusion of signs asking people to clean up after their dogs. ‘NOBODY USED TO WALK THEIR DOGS IN OUR ROAD IN THE FIFTIES,’ my dad said. ‘THEY JUST LET THEM OUT TO RUN AROUND THE STREETS FOR A BIT INSTEAD.’ I have a memory of walking up here as an eight- or nine-year-old, when the high-rise flats were still up, and coming across a playground with broken swings, a leaning roundabout that looked like it had been hot-wired by joyriders and crashed, and shattered glass all over the tarmac: a dystopian vision I shied away from even as a child with a nagging need to climb any new structure that looked even vaguely fit for the purpose. My dad and I looped around the identikit one-storey houses now standing on the site of the playground, passing a woman in a garden arguing into her mobile phone with a man called John who she accused of not doing his share, and climbed onto a footbridge over the railway. My dad looked down the track and remembered the time my grandma had jumped up and down on another footbridge not far from here, part of the old Black Path, now demolished: a tiny figure pogoing in rage a couple of hundred yards from where he and Jeff Spurgeon stood in readiness for a train with their coins, shouting to them that she knew what they were doing and was going home to call the police. Jeff Spurgeon’s dad died that year, along with two of the other dads on the avenue. ‘I SPENT THE NEXT YEAR TERRIFIED THAT MY DAD WOULD DIE, EVEN THOUGH HE SEEMED PERFECTLY HEALTHY,’ my dad said. I noticed that exactly next to where he stood ‘mick’ had serendipitously been scrawled on the bridge in blue paint by a graffiti artist. My dad was christened Michael, but Mick is the name he prefers and the name by which friends and family know him. When my dad meets posh people he has noticed that they often don’t wish to call him Mick even though that is what he has introduced himself as; they opt, without his permission, to call him Michael or Mike instead. But in my mind Michael and Mick are very different people, and Mike is somewhere way off in a different name galaxy, doing his own thing in tinted spectacles and a leather jacket with rolled up sleeves. My dad is Mick. My granddad called my dad Mick, but my grandma tended towards Michael, especially when she was angry or telling him not to do something, which was often. My grandma was not posh, but her voice had a memorable eloquence and authority to it, like it was always coming at you through a speaker or down a brass tunnel, almost like an East Midlands version of the voices you heard on old news broadcasts. A voice that is now extinct.
A place name that comes up repeatedly in my dad’s stories of his childhood is Jacko’s Oller. When he spoke of it while I was growing up it formed in my mind as many different things: a deep hole of magical Lewis Carroll properties, a grassy warren teeming with feral Brylcreemed children, a shout of such volume and force that it had stayed suspended in the air above the edgelands of west Nottinghamshire since 1956. What it actually constituted was a large depression in the land formed of the remains of ancient bell pits, clay pits and small open-cast mines. The ‘Jacko’ referred to an early patriarch of the Jacksons, a family of farmers and coal merchants who thrived in the 1920s but had died out by the early 1960s. My dad remembers that within minutes of the hearse carrying the last of the Jacksons from the farm, local Teddy boys descended on the place and began illegally disassembling its roof. When my dad clashed with my grandma, Jacko’s Oller was where he escaped to run around with his Davy Crockett rifle and re-enact the Winning of the West. A few years later he and his mates played cards with the area’s Gypsies, who always took their money, and he and Flob made fires and dens. Fires were everywhere: under the tripods and vanners where the gypsies cooked their meals, in the farmland, near the dens, even on the canal when it iced over in 1963, the coldest winter of the twentieth century. Woodsmoke as ubiquitous as air. Sometimes the gang ventured bravely further west, across the Wild Frontier into Derbyshire, and attended the fair in Ilkeston. ‘CAN YOU IMAGINE IT?’ my dad asked, still staring down the railway line in that direction. ‘BEING FOURTEEN. WITH FLOB AND HIS GANG, IN THEIR TED JACKETS AND DRAINPIPES. HANGING OUT WITH GIRLS AND HEARING ROY ORBISON FOR THE FIRST TIME. IT WAS INTOXICATING.’
I try to remember instances when I have witnessed my dad being quiet for several continuous minutes, apart from when he has been asleep, and it takes some effort to do so, but something does spring to mind: the times in my teens and later when he and I visited my grandma and granddad. ‘WE CAN’T STOP FOR LONG,’ my dad would say
