21st-Century Yokel

countryside was drowned out by an intangible inner restlessness that I now recognise as the standard need of an overambitious, quarter-moulded young yokel to go somewhere else and find out who he was. I dragged the phone into my bedroom and conducted interviews with motormouthed musicians in California and Texas and Georgia then bashed the conversations into a semblance of shape for my own self-edited fanzine then, later, proper music magazines and newspapers based in London. I included our home phone number in the fanzine. My dad and I competed excitably to get to the phone first when it rang as, for the first time in our lives, it had become something we associated with good news. He usually won. Away from the Legoland estates we’d lived on previously and supply teaching jobs in inner-city Nottingham, he’d shaken off a bout of depression and was happier than I’d seen him in years. ‘THAT BLOKE OFF THE RADIO CALLED EARLIER,’ he told me one day when I returned home from my girlfriend’s house. ‘JOHN PEEL. I DIDN’T TAKE A NUMBER BUT HE SAID HE’D CALL BACK.’ He never did. The softest most flawless Jersey calves made eyes at me from the field opposite, our gang of bantam chickens did circuit after circuit of the garden digging for grubs, and a gentle, elderly German shepherd named Tina from two doors away came in each afternoon to ask politely for a biscuit then leave. Ray Manzarek called and speculated about Marianne Faithfull’s role in Jim Morrison’s death, while Frank from next door prowled about in the twitchell with a shotgun, looking for the fox that had got some of his partridges.

My means of escape from all this stifling surreal beauty was the 1977 Toyota Corona that my granddad passed on jointly to my dad and me. The winter before he passed the Toyota on to us, he and Joyce drove to see us. Snow fell hard during their visit, and a small drift formed around the car, meaning that to get the vehicle back onto the road a passing group of hardy cyclists had to be enlisted to push it, a task that, even bearing in mind the snow, necessitated an unusually high level of grunting. It was only later, when the cyclists were almost finished, that it dawned on Ted that he’d forgotten to take the handbrake off. He weighed up mentioning this to them and decided it was best to leave it. On other occasions he had been known to park the Toyota in the dead centre of the lane, blocking all traffic from both directions, and regularly left a small paraffin stove burning inside the car’s footwell to keep the interior from getting frosted up. I remember him running a couple of red lights around this point in the mid-nineties, and that the donation of the car was at least partly due to a concern that it might be time for him to stop driving, but he purchased another car soon after and in fact stayed on the road until not long before his death, in 2002. Ted had a history of bad luck buying cars, including a couple that broke down during maiden journeys from the point of purchase. It never appeared to bother him: he still rhapsodised about what ‘good blokes’ the men who’d sold them to him had been, and he had the skill to fix the problems himself. When my parents’ Morris Minor broke down in the mid-seventies, he loaned them his Triumph Herald to drive to work and spent the morning cycling around Nottingham scrapyards until he found the replacement part he needed to fix the problem. The smell of engine oil is indelibly associated with him in my mind. Right from that first Wolseley, all his cars were kept in immaculate condition, but by the time my dad and I had had custody of the Toyota for a year lines of moss rose from the wheel arches across its door panels like eco-friendly go-faster stripes. In a young bozo’s attempt to save petrol by trundling the last mile home down the lane with the engine off, I crashed the car into a hedge at low speed when the steering lock clicked on and sent me sideways. I moved away from home, to York, for a while, then moved back. As a twenty-year-old living in the sticks with his parents, two miles away from the nearest bus stop and four times that far from the nearest train station, I relied crucially on the car to connect me to what I told myself was civilisation but I treated the Toyota with scant respect. Now of course I see it as the best car I ever had, and not just because I have reached an age when, as a man, I am contractually obliged to have a car from my past that I refer to as ‘the best car I ever had’, but at the time I was myopic regarding its plus points, just as I was myopic regarding the plus points of the valley where we lived.

Despite my blindness to much of my immediate surroundings, I remember walking into the thick woods separating the house from the M1 during those antsy summers of urban yearning and experiencing great moments of birdsong peace. I wonder if, on the second or third day of hiding out in these woods, as the police helicopters circled above, the armed robbers who escaped into them in 1995 began to relax and experience a similar form of peace. I sometimes mentally combine these armed robbers with the other armed robbers who tied our neighbours to chairs, beat them with baseball bats and sprayed mace in their pet greyhound’s eyes, but this is incorrect: they were definitely different armed robbers. The neighbours who suffered the attack lived at the farm at the end of the track which our house fronted, looked after retired racehorses and had an enormous damp barn full of over