I loved football at this time and, inspired by the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, played a lot of it with the other kids in the village, but I also had whooping cough, so my main contribution to matches was the meagre, sluggish one of a donkey with surprisingly deft footwork. I laughed along with everyone else as they poked fun at my painful comedy honks, periodically decamping to the side of our makeshift pitch to throw up. One week in 1988, when the road through the village was closed so Ken Russell could film his BBC adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, we moved our pitch to the tarmac, then, when we tired of Maradona scissor-kick re-enactments, staged running races along it: our own village Olympics. I won one of the sprints, ee-awing absurdly away as I crossed the makeshift finish line, which Dosser had fashioned from some baler twine. Then I threw up. Lee had heard that a sex scene in The Rainbow was going to be filmed in the village hall and told me and Rocker that Imogen Stubbs, the actress playing Lawrence’s heroine Ursula Brangwen, had outstanding jugs, so the three of us sneaked up to the back window of the hall and Rocker climbed on some crates but he slipped and we heard one of the ADs or grips emerge from the front door to see what the commotion was. One of us, I can’t remember who, shouted, ‘Run!’ and we did, but later, after I’d thrown up again, Rocker said the window had been blacked out so we wouldn’t have seen any pretend television sex even if we hadn’t been rumbled.
‘Anyway, jugs aren’t that important. They’re not the best part of a woman. They’re what you like when you’re younger and you’re not a proper man yet. You two will understand soon,’ said Lee, who was almost two years older than us and just approaching his fifteenth birthday.
For the next few years the ghost of Lawrence – the laureate of Nottingham–Derby border struggles – seemed to stalk my parents and me. The last of my mum and dad’s three Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border houses – the only one not ruinously beset by structural issues relating to a nearby mine – could not have been situated more squarely in the middle of Lawrence’s quintessential landscape, overlooking the ruined abbey from his short story A Fragment of Stained Glass and only a stone’s throw from the star-crossed reservoir from Women in Love. Lawrence – whose real name was David Herbert Richards – grew up a couple of miles down the road, in the town of Eastwood, where joyriders often hot-wired the cars that they later set fire to in our lane. Not long after Christmas 1993, after my mum and dad had signed the tenancy contract on the house but not yet moved in, my dad excitedly drove there through the snow, alone, with a canvas and a selection of paints, then sat in an unheated bedroom and painted the freshly whitened valley which rolled down from the house then rose to the woods: a scene by far the most Almost Derbyshire one he had ever lived amid. After years as a supply teacher he had just got a permanent job teaching at Greasley Beauvale Primary School, where Lawrence had once been a pupil. One lunchtime not long after that, my dad came out to the school car park and found the janitor taking the back off a huge, sturdy Victorian cupboard. He asked what the janitor planned to do with the cupboard. ‘It’s going to t’ tip, me duck,’ said the janitor. Built beautifully from pitch pine, with a pleasing liquorice quality to its grain, the cupboard had previously resided in Lawrence’s old classroom. Later that week I helped my dad carry the cupboard into a borrowed van then into our house. The cupboard moved again in 1999, to my mum and dad’s next house in the north-east of the county, and has been in their living room ever since. It is known as Dave’s Cupboard. Shortly after Dave’s Cupboard was acquired, my dad wrote a children’s story, submitted it to a national prize committee and won, subsequently signing with the literary agents Pollinger, who were best known for handling Lawrence’s estate. This eventually helped to pay his and my mum’s rent, which went to the Barber family, who for centuries had owned the local mines, and whose dynasty appeared in not vastly disguised form in Lawrence’s novels.
When my dad visited my grandma and granddad and announced that, after two and a half decades of trying and failing to do so, he was going to have his work published, Joyce’s immediate reaction was to open her purse and produce a sheet of Basildon Bond writing paper on which was scrawled a few lines of verse. ‘I’ve written something too,’ she announced, handing the poem to my dad. Ted said he thought the fact that my dad had been published was marvellous.
I’ve listened to a fair bit of Lawrence on audiobook in recent years and discovered that this is a useful hobby to take up if you regularly wish to sink into a deep trough of despondency on long car journeys. I find him much more depressing than Thomas Hardy, perhaps because Hardy’s books don’t take place in intellectual and topographical terrain that is so palpably an echo of where I lived. I got about halfway through Lawrence’s 1913 novel Sons and Lovers while driving from Devon to Nottinghamshire in early 2016 but had to break off from it just to remind myself that life contained a flicker of hope. I want to read
