In early morning hedges were probed, trees walked around and sometimes scrambled up if the lower branches were within arm’s reach. Places of possible ambush were avoided, or danger invented to dispel boredom when the hour was too early for enemies to be on the roam. Bells tinkling so mellifluously on the still air, an archaic but not unfriendly tune, was the distant Sabbath call from Wollaton Church, in which my parents had been married.
My mother sometimes tried to persuade me to take the main road and go along the frequented lane by Radford Woodhouse, but I preferred the heavy dew soaking my plimsolls and short trousers as I pushed a way through nettles and Queen Anne’s Lace taller than myself. Birds were disturbed, plate-sized clusters of elderberries stained my hands, and toadstools made me wary. The route was surveyed as if new every time, laying out my own peculiar mental map, while salivating at the thought of breakfast when my grandmother let me in.
The cottage was on Lord Middleton’s estate, one of a group of three known for some reason as Old Engine Houses. It had neither gas nor electricity, and memories of the visual sort join with odours to re-create the topography: variations on stale lavender, lamp oil, strong soap and turpentine, wholesome smells no longer current but homely for that time.
The only items of modernity were a bicycle, and an enormous gramophone with a horn I could have crawled into, too weighty to lift. Records were heavier than they are today, easy to chip but fascinating to endlessly rearrange, awe for some reason felt when the word REX showed on their paper sleeves.
Cooking was done on a coal fire, in the kitchen-living room lit by a lamp above the table. For water my Uncle Dick took a yoke to the common well with its fairy-tale wooden hood on a rise beyond the garden, staggering back along the path with laden buckets slopping at the brim, and crossing the kitchen to set them down in the cool stone-smelling pantry.
Walking by his side from the well I heard him effing-and-blinding in no uncertain terms at the burden, most of the livid expletives meant for his father, and on realizing I was close enough to hear he smiled and said: ‘Don’t tell yer grandad, will yer?’ — then fell to effing-and-blinding again, repeating his injunction, and his cursing, several times before reaching the door.
Grandfather Burton, a tall blacksmith in his sixties, took to me because I ran errands, cleaned his Saturday night dress boots, and sometimes amused him by reading from the newspaper. His eye, he said with a wink, could not manage the small print, though I noticed it also failed to cope with the headlines, and a spark at the forge had blinded him in the other. He occasionally wore a black patch, and my aunts, who detested his caustic severity, referred to him when he wasn’t close as ‘Lord Nelson’ or ‘Old One-Eye’.
Though Burton spoke little, the pertinence of the words he did use formed lodgements in my brain and joined into a solid bridgehead of memory. Such expressions had more telling effect than my father’s because there was no threat behind them. If you were snatched you were perished with cold; clambed you were faint with hunger; mardy whining childishly and without much cause; windy cowardly — a vocabulary of county argot passed down through generations.
Regarding the discomforts of the senses or the body, everything was related, in the degree of its intensity, to buggery — which, I’m sure, he had never experienced in the common meaning of the word. It, whatever it might be, stank, itched, burned or chafed like buggery. As an indication of surprise he would say: ‘Well, I’ll go to buggery!’ I did not know what it meant, but Burton’s emphasis certainly made it clear as to his state of mind.
Not given to much humour, the apotheosis came when he sat stiff-backed in his Windsor chair by the fireplace, held out a hand with a finger extended, and said to me: ‘Nimrod, pull this.’
Ever suspicious, I held back, noting the glint in his good eye. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘pull it. It’s giving me gyp. If you pull it, it’ll mek me better.’
When I did so, and tugged with might and main, he let out a long splintering fart that almost tore the cottage apart. Another word learned, though the somewhat onomatopoeic tone needed in reproduction was not always available.
In late summer I was awakened by the noise of harvest machinery from the field outside, and by sunlight coming through the bedroom window. My grandmother cooked the farmhands’ dinner, and Burton was given rights to wheat near the hedges that the combine harvester could not reach, his tall, shirt-sleeved, slowly advancing frame with the swinging scythe making an unforgettable picture of the grim reaper. The gleanings were winnowed and husked in the yard by my grandmother, who boiled them in the copper to mix with the pigs’ feed.
Darkness was a long time coming on Saturday evening when my grandparents had gone to the Admiral Rodney pub at Wollaton and left me alone in the house. The grizzling anxieties of the cockerels, the fussy grunting of discontented pigs, and an occasional yap from the wary dog in its kennel came to me as I sat in my shirt at the dressing table in my aunts’ bedroom, arranging cosmetic bottles in ranks like soldiers.
Beyond the cottage lay the Cherry Orchard, a large area not of fruit trees, but of scrubland backed by Robins Wood, where I imagined the famous Hood and his Merry Outlaws passing on their way from Staffordshire to Sherwood. I made friends with the children of a farmworker’s cottage called Cherry Orchard House, so close to the wood that their garden in spring was invaded by swathes of bluebells. Alma Ollington (or was it Amy? Maybe neither) came on pinafore wings to meet me as I crossed the open land, and we hid inside an enormous elm with the lower part of its trunk burnt out, pretending we had run away from home.
Aunt Ivy, another of my grandfather’s daughters, worked at Player’s factory, and being unmarried had a boyfriend called Ernest Guyler, who was to die of tuberculosis. A tall, thin, sprucely dressed man, he used to come up the lane to call on her. The first love of my life was the fair and stately Queen Alexandra, whose picture was on a card Ernest gave me from his cigarette packet before walking with Ivy towards the wood.
Ivy, and her sister Emily, who was also unmarried, would occasionally take down the long tin bath and set it under a plane tree between the back door and the coal house. Showing reluctance — to say the least — with regard to water, even after they had pulled my clothes off, I wriggled out of their grasp and ran away. They chased me around the yard, merrily laughing at the fun, as if I was one of the pigs that had found a way out of the stye. Cornering me by the poultry wire, they dragged me back to a lavish coating of White Windsor soap and the cleansing I certainly needed.
I sometimes shared the bed of Uncle Dick who, a tall handsome man with plenty of girlfriends, rarely came in till the middle of the night. On Sunday morning he cycled along the nearby canal selling permits to fishermen for twopence each, of which he was allowed to keep a farthing for his trouble. He took me on the crossbar in order to amuse himself by scaring me on steering close to the deep and forbidding locks.
Too scruffy a little prince in the house, my aunts went to buy me a new shirt, and I met them at the lane-end near the main road. They opened the paper and held it up, such a crisp bright yellow that I insisted on taking off my old one, which meant changing down to my skin, before going back proudly to show my grandfather.
The lane at the Burtons’ was a dead-end to motors, deliveries of groceries from the town usually by bicycle or a tradesman’s van. The insurance, rent or tallyman for this and that knocked on the door once a week and were invited inside to be paid, a different procedure to that at home, when a knock at the door was feared, and my mother would usually send me or Peggy to say that nobody was in. Peddlers who called at the Burtons’ got no response from my grandfather if he was about, though his wife Mary Ann, whose kindly Irish soul had survived intact, would buy something if she could, or offer a cup of tea if she could not.