After abandoning my Lawrence audiobook and arriving at my parents’ current house, hanging my coat in the hall opposite Ted’s grandfather clock and drinking tea overlooked by Dave’s Cupboard, I went to bed, knocking my glass of water all over my clothes and mobile phone as I switched off the bedside lamp. The following day my dad and I set off on another walk along the wrong side of the Derbyshire border, in the countryside around Eastwood, Greasley and Moorgreen. Before we left, my mum, who, along with my auntie Mal and uncle Chris, had decided to join us, sat down with me to discuss the route. My dad went upstairs, returning a couple of minutes later with a pile of watercolour paintings. He handed me the top one.
‘What’s this?’ I asked. The painting depicted two well-loved children’s book characters walking through a dark underpass hand in hand while three grotesque, hatchet-faced men in trenchcoats loitered on the other side.
‘IT’S WINNIE THE POOH AND PIGLET ABOUT TO BE ASSASSINATED,’ my dad said.
‘Is it one of yours?’
‘YEAH.’
He handed me the remainder of the paintings and I browsed through them. There were about a dozen in total: all works in progress, mostly of a madcap or macabre nature. One featured a bearded man on a wooden cross with a not-displeased expression on his face, surrounded by people in tunics wielding sticks with feathers attached.
‘Does this one have a name?’ I asked.
‘YEAH,’ he said. ‘THAT’S THE TICKLING TO DEATH OF JESUS.’
My dad went outside to fetch some wood and I continued to look through his art. He’d always painted, as far back as I can remember, but he’d been working particularly hard since being semi-retired, and his style had developed a new freedom. This was very different material to the Derbyshire landscapes he had painted when I was a child. Here were disco dog walkers, nightmare medieval murder scenes in complex mirrored formations, Spiderman handing spare change to a busker, a bank of feline gods staring down in judgement at the grotesque figures presiding over a pedigree cat show. I was so mesmerised that time must have briefly frozen, and when I looked out the window after what I thought was four seconds, my dad was 200 yards away, wrestling a log near the small river that runs behind his and my mum’s house. Seemingly another four seconds later, he was back inside, one hand full of kindling, the other full of chocolate. When my dad was young, Ted would regularly take him and eight or nine other boys over to Balloon Woods and Jacko’s Oller to forage for logs, then bring the wood back with one boy on the end of each log. Almost sixty years later the only things that had changed were the location and that my dad generally worked alone.
‘He’s always got a load of wood in his hands,’ my mum said. ‘I ask him to wash them but he forgets. There are black marks all over the walls and banister. The chocolate is worse. I saw a big smear of it in the middle of the novel he’s reading. He said it’s his bookmark.’
I pictured a different abode, in a parallel dimension, where my dad lived in solitude, unmarried: a remote, dirt-floored shepherd’s hut strewn with spilt paint, rabbit carcasses and Yorkie Bar wrappers. The embers of a small fire burned outside, arcane pieces of masonry scattered around it.
The phone rang, and my mum picked up. It was my auntie Mal, wanting to know what the plan was for the walk. My mum handed the phone to me, and Mal and I agreed on a basic five-mile route, with a four-mile epilogue just in case we felt ambitious. ‘Then those who feel like going all the way can,’ said Mal.
‘OOH MISSUS!’ said my dad, who’d clandestinely picked up the other receiver and been listening in.
Clandestinely picking up the other receiver and listening to conversations has long been a habit of my dad’s. One time my mum was telling me about a life-drawing class she’d attended at which their village postman turned out to be the model. Just as my mum reached the story’s climax, my dad, via the other receiver, chipped in: ‘EVERYONE RECOGNISED HIM BY HIS SACK.’
Unlike the Peak District, the area around Eastwood has never been renowned Walking Country, and unsurprisingly we passed no other ramblers on our route, but on the outskirts of Kimberley we were joined by a few men in tracksuits with dogs. We took a short cut across a small park, and a black Labrador barely out of puppyhood gleefully nudged a red ball along beside us. ‘LOOK OUT FOR THIS BASTARD,’ my dad advised us. ‘IT WILL HAVE YOUR FACE OFF.’
Mal and I suggested that my dad was perhaps being unnecessarily negative.
At Greasley church my mum, Mal and Chris and I stopped to look at the churchyard’s burgeoning snowdrops and ancient yew tree, and at the gravestone of Millicent Shaw, who was crushed to death in the middle of a populist crowd frenziedly rushing to attend a local hanging in 1844.
