Once every month my dad would walk a mile through the woods not far from here and deliver our very reasonable rent to Lady Barber by hand at Lamb Close House. He knew the two main rules: 1) Know your station in life, and 2) Don’t mention D. H. Lawrence. More than half a century after Lawrence’s death the Barber family still nursed a grudge about the thinly veiled, none-too-flattering versions of their relatives in his novels. Researching a Lawrence piece for the Spectator magazine to coincide with the centenary of the novelist’s birth in 1985, the journalist Richard West was told upon visiting the area that Lady Barber’s husband, Sir William, would on no account talk to him about the subject. When Sir William was still alive, early in my mum and dad’s tenancy, he once played the piano for my dad and invited him to play a game of Name That Tune. Later Lady Barber permitted him to compile her a jazz mix tape, which she confessed caused her to gyrate slightly. Once, as my dad left after delivering our rent, she pointed to her dog’s bed and announced with a cackle, ‘There’s your blanket, Mr Cox!’ to my dad, who did not own the blanket in question and did not own a dog but whom Lady Barber clearly viewed as occupying a position in society not dissimilar to one. On another day, in a more generous mood she gave him a tour of the grounds, which took in a nursery full of Victorian toys, garages housing a collection of top-of-the-range 1920s cars and a huge greenhouse containing a lump of coal which, in my dad’s words, was ‘THE SIZE OF A TRANSIT VAN’: a touching memento of when the Barber family first realised they could make money off the sweat, toil and blood of the poor.
We headed in the direction of Bog End, an ominously named place, particularly in a county where ‘bog’ is not most commonly used to denote marshy or muddy ground. It was not until I left Nottinghamshire and moved south that I realised that most people did not think ‘I’m going to the bog’ was a normal, or even acceptable, way to announce your intention to visit the nearest toilet. But Bog End in fact contains an exquisite wildflower meadow, whose sun-dappled spring state I have had recurring hazy William Morris dreams about. I often have relaxing dreams about the belt of countryside from here to the Peak District in which the more stark and unsightly elements of the landscape – the chippies, the headstocks, the spoil heaps – are always conveniently edited out. I have not thus far inherited my dad and granddad’s knack for having dream premonitions. Many years ago my dad dreamt about a woman who was in a phone box hit by a careening car. Not long afterwards in central Nottingham an out-of-control Vauxhall Viva obliterated a phone box containing my parents’ friend Jean, an incident from which Jean stepped away miraculously unhurt. My dad also dreamt about a new gate on the lane beside the house we rented from the Barbers a few days before someone unexpectedly built a new gate in the exact same spot. When recovering from a heart attack in the mid-eighties Ted dreamt about his sister-in-law Irene beckoning to him on the night she died, even though he didn’t know she’d died or even that she’d been ill at the time. The other member of the family noted for his premonitions was my granddad’s uncle Harry, a practising spiritualist who, using only the power of his mind, once pinpointed the exact place on his shelf where my granddad had stored an issue of Reader’s Digest that Harry wanted to borrow.
Bog End was not at its best today, under a dishwater February sky, but my dad assured me that my dreams of its wildflower meadow were grounded in the solid fact of several childhood picnics. As we climbed out of the small Not Quite Derbyshire valley below it, he went into what I have come to recognise as his jazz fusion nostalgia mode. ‘I PUT AN EASEL UP THERE IN 1982 AND PAINTED IT THEN GOT BITTEN BY A HORSEFLY. DID YOU KNOW D. H. LAWRENCE SMASHED A 78 RPM BESSIE SMITH ALBUM OVER HIS WIFE’S HEAD? HE DIDN’T LIKE HER PLAYING BESSIE SMITH ALL THE TIME. I LOVE BESSIE SMITH. WOMEN IN JAPAN IN OFFICES PAY YOUNG MEN TO COME AND MAKE THEM CRY THEN DAB THEIR TEARS AWAY. I READ ABOUT IT. THEY’RE CALLED SOMETHING BOYS.’ He adjusted his new hat, which fell slightly over his ears. ‘I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF.’
‘You’re lucky,’ said Mal.
We reminisced about a letter of complaint Mal and her colleague Dave had received while working for Derbyshire County Council, regarding some speed bumps that had been installed on a road in a town half an hour south of here. ‘My mate bost his sump,’ the letter, which came from someone called or representing an organisation called Thorne St Blook, had raged, before signing off with the firm instruction ‘Don’t you start coming the bolloks with me.’ Mal and I wondered aloud where the letter was now. I recalled that the version I had at home was just a photocopy, not the original.
‘I’VE GOT IT IN A FOLDER IN MY OFFICE,’ said my dad, who was now several yards ahead of us, striding purposefully towards the outskirts of Watnall.
I was in my late teens when my parents moved to the house near here: a point in my life when my love of the
