as we arrived, sometimes because we couldn’t but also to pre-emptively put a time limit on my grandma’s stories. We would turn right at the grandfather clock and sit in Joyce and Ted’s living room and listen as Joyce, with Ted as her backing vocalist, updated us on stuff that had happened to people we had never met in rooms we had never set foot in: the ‘crumpet’ my granddad flirted with every month at the over-sixties dance in Sandiacre, Agnes and Roy’s caravan at Rutland, the teenage singer they’d seen at the pub in Stapleford in the talent competition who I really should write about for one of my music magazines, the escape and return of Irene’s tortoise. My dad, being a man with two brains, was able to take it all in even when he looked like he wasn’t, but I could feel his unease at my grandma’s domineering conversational manner, the way it took him back uncomfortably, as well as comfortably, to places in his past. He was the same as his parents in that he was loud and liked the countryside and went to the library a lot, but he was different to them in many other ways: he’d decided, not unlike many young working-class people in the mid-1960s, that he wanted a bit more out of life. Unlike Ted, who was frequently known to salute when visiting his GP, he did not retain a huge amount of respect for authority figures. He had ideas above his station, which again was very unlike Ted, who if he had developed an idea above his station would no doubt have asked around to see if anyone more middle class than him would like to use it. By the time my dad was fifteen he was doing three different jobs, travelling to Europe alone, hitchhiking to Brighton to watch mods and rockers fight, learning the trumpet and going out with a girl six years his senior. ‘I DECIDED I DIDN’T WANT TO BE A SKINNY LAD OFF A COUNCIL ESTATE; I WANTED TO BE A BLACK MUSLIM JAZZ DRUMMER,’ he told me. He failed to fulfil this ambition but, alongside my mum, who he met at seventeen, fulfilled another, which in the context of his relatives was outlandish enough: he became a teacher. The two of them then did what Ted and Joyce had never considered doing even at that point later in life when they finally could: they purchased their own house. As if that wasn’t enough, they cooked moussaka and wore Afghan coats and saved up to buy prints of art featuring naked European women. But my parents, just like their parents before them, faced barriers against what they wanted to achieve: of income, of self-belief, of class, and, like anyone, of luck. Barriers they’ve made a huge effort to stop me from facing too, but which a wider appreciation of society has since made me realise I have faced, if on a smaller scale. Sometimes the barriers are always there; they just diminish a little with every generation.
With their greater ambitions, my parents got closer to Derbyshire than their parents, but they didn’t quite make it all the way. It remained the place where you walked at weekends but could never actually live: the impenetrable Fairytale Hill Kingdom. My dad returned from their walks and painted intricate watercolours of its dales and stone barns and ash copses and ruffian sheep. Three times we moved to houses which teetered tantalisingly on the wrong side of the border. Around the most southerly of these, in fields less than an hour’s walk from Jacko’s Oller that looked not dissimilar to how my dad’s old stamping ground had looked twenty-five years earlier when the developers were yet to move in, I began to live an early adolescence not all that dissimilar to his: I joined a gang, loitered a lot, spat on pavements unnecessarily. Although I’d spent the first decade of my life in the countryside, I’d arrived there from a brief spell in suburban south Nottinghamshire and the children in the village seemed simultaneously unsophisticated and dangerous. They sniffed glue and had fist fights, but many of them also sang in the church and baled hay at weekends. Some of them stole valuable items from houses and schoolrooms but they also invited me to scrump and play knock-a-door run with them. We scrumped less inventively than my dad and his gang, who, inspired by a Bash Street Kids caper from the Beano, had eaten the apples where they hung, leaving dozens of cores dangling surreally from the trees. My grandma only ever allowed my dad to see the Beano after it had been read by his uncle Frank, who at the time was in his early forties.
Ted liked to visit us in the village because we were geographically much closer to him and Joyce than we’d been before and because a lot of horses were ridden on the lanes nearby and he could stop his car behind them, get his shovel out of the boot and load up with their manure for his allotment. A tall, broad girl – the sister of one of my classmates – who rode one of the horses was known to everyone as Dosser. It wasn’t until three years later, shortly before I left the village, that I found out her name was Charlotte. About eight of us, including Charlotte, regularly played a game called churchy, which was exactly the same as dobby or tag, save for the fact that it took place in the churchyard. Down by the canal and in the woods there were always torn-up pages of porn magazines. Who left them there? Nobody knew, but the phenomenon was so common that nobody posed the question. A stray boob in a tree or half a bellend in some bulrushes was commonplace, and after a while slightly anaesthetising, like our own early outdoor version of going online. Looking to broaden their horizons,
