This is straight up, too. Well, the original Great North Road is a bit to the east, but it’s been well and truly bypassed now. Some of it has deteriorated to a track, fit only for horses and trail bikes. But make no mistake. This whole area is still bandit country.
“Then there was Robin Hood,” I said. “Robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Oh, and we had Mrs Thatcher, of course, who got it the wrong way round.”
The Frenchman wasn’t listening to my tour guide bit. He was gesturing down past the gear lever towards the bottom of the fascia, where there was my mobile phone, a pile of music CDs, and the world’s worst in-car stereo system.
“Yeah, you’re right, it’s crap, this local radio. Le crap, eh? I don’t know why I listen to it. What do you fancy then, mate? Some Sacha Distel maybe?”
I poked among the CDs as if I was actually looking for Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. It wasn’t likely to be there. Not unless there was a cover version by Enya or UB40. Whoever normally drove this Escort had different tastes from mine. No doubt about it.
“How about this? This is French.” I held up Chris Rea’s Auberge. “Auberge. That’s French, right?”
I slipped the cassette into the deck, and Rea began to sing about there being only one place to go. It’s really funny how you can always find Chris Rea tapes in sales reps’ cars. I reckon they have them so they can play “The Road to Hell” and feel all ironic.
“No, no. You must call for help,” the trucker shouted in my ear over the music. “Roadblock. Stop the truck.”
And then he reached forward, trying to grab the phone. Dave barely moved. He gave the Frenchman a little flip and the bloke hit the back of his seat like he’d bounced off a brick wall.
“Sorry, mate, but the signal’s terrible round here,” I said. “It’s all the trees. Sherwood Forest, this is.”
The lorry driver called me a cochon. I failed French O-level, but even I know that isn’t polite.
“Look, I’m really sorry it’s not Sacha Distel, but I’m doing my best, right?”
As we approached the big roundabout at Markham Moor, the Iveco was already halfway up the long hill heading southwards, growling its way past the McDonald’s drive-thru and the Shell petrol station. I could catch up with the lorry easily. No need for lights and sirens — which was lucky, because we didn’t have any.
But the sight of the red and yellow arched signs across the carriageway put me in mind of something.
“Hey, it’s a bit like a scene in that film, what’s it called? You know, with John Travolta and the black bloke in a frizzy wig. What do they call a Big Mac with cheese in France?”
Dave’s ears pricked up at the Big Mac, but he didn’t know the answer.
The Escort’s steering juddered and the suspension groaned underneath me as I twisted the wheel to the right and we swerved into the roundabout, across the A1 and towards a little B-road that leads past the Markham Moor truck stop. As we passed, I couldn’t resist a glance into the truck stop for professional reasons. On the tarmac stood two orange and white Tesco lorries, a flatbed from Hanson Bricks and a Euromax Mercedes diesel, all backed up against a couple of Cho Yang container trucks. There was a load of NorCor corrugated boarding, and even a Scania full of Weetabix. To be honest, though, I couldn’t see anyone shifting fifty tons of breakfast cereal too easily. Not in these parts.
The Frenchman started gibbering again and pointing to the main road, where the back of his lorry had just vanished over the hill.
“Non, non. Turn round. That way. The thieves go that way.”
“It’s a short cut, mate. What do they call a Big Mac with cheese in France?”
“Merde!”
Then he began to poke his finger at Dave’s shoulder. Well, that was a mistake. Dave stared at him, amazed, like a Rottweiler that finds a cat pulling its whiskers. His immense jaws opened and his teeth came down on the round, stubby thing in front of his face. It disappeared into his mouth with a little spurt of red, and he began to chew. The Frenchman pulled back his finger fast, in case it went the same way as that sausage.
We passed through a couple of little villages before I turned on to a road that was more mud than tarmac. A track led us over the River Maun, past some derelict buildings, through some woods, over another river and into more woods. The trees closed all around us now, dark conifers that wiped out any hope of a view.
But in the middle of the trees a space suddenly opened up on a vast expanse of wasteland — acres and acres of black slurry and weed-covered concrete. There were old wheel tracks down there in that slurry, and some of them were two-feet deep. This was one of our dead coal mines, whose rotting bodies lie all over Nottinghamshire these days — a memory of the time when thousands of blokes and their families lived for the seam of coal they called Top Hard.
Finally we ran out of road and pulled up by a series of slurry lagoons. These lagoons are pretty deep too, and I wouldn’t like to say what the stuff is that swirls about down there.
“Okay, Monsieur Merde. Out.”
The Frenchman looked from me to Dave, who helpfully leaned back to unfasten his seat-belt. The trucker flinched a bit, but looked relieved when the belt clicked open. He got out and looked at the devastation around him, baffled.
Well, this little bit of Nottinghamshire is no picnic site, that’s for sure. We were on the remains of an old pit road, where British Coal lorries once trundled backwards and forwards all day and all night. In some places there are old wagons dragged off the underground trains, filled with concrete and upended to stop gypsies setting up camp in the woods. But there are always ways in, if you know how. Up ahead was a bridge where you could look down on the railway line that had carried nothing but coal trains. The lines are rusted now, but the coal is still there, way below the ground. Top Hard, the best coking and steam coal in the country. Top Hard made a lot of the old mine owners rich.
Yes, this was once the site of the area’s proudest superpit. A few years back, when it was still open, a report came out with the idea of making it a Coal Theme Park, preserving the glory days of the 1960s. There would have been visits to the coal face, a ride underground on a paddy train, and maybe a trip to the canteen for a mug of tea. They had a dry ski-slope planned for the spoil heap.
You’d need a heck of an imagination to picture this theme park now. The buildings have been demolished, and the fences are a futile gesture. There’s just the black slag everywhere and a few churned-up roadways where they came to cart away the debris of a way of life.
The Frenchman stared at the lagoons, then turned round and looked across the vast black wasteland of wet slurry behind him. It would be suicide to try to walk through that lot. He shrugged his shoulders and waited, his eyebrows lifted like a supercilious customs man at Calais. Suddenly, his complacency annoyed me.
“Take a look at this then, mate. What do you think? Pretty, isn’t it? This is what’s left of our mining industry. Coal mining, yeah? It may not mean much to you. You grow grapes and make cheese in France, right? But coal was our livelihood here in Nottinghamshire, once. Blokes went down into a bloody great black hole every day and got their lungs full of coal dust just so that we could buy food after the war. You remember the war, do you? When we kicked the krauts out of your country?”
Of course he didn’t remember the war. He wasn’t old enough. Nor am I, but I’ve read a history book or two. I know we bank-rupted ourselves fighting the Germans, and it was the miners like my granddad who worked their bollocks off to get this country out of the mess afterwards. And since then their sons and grandsons carried on going down those bloody great holes day after day to dig out the coal. Decades and decades of it, with blokes getting crushed in roof falls and burnt to death in fires, and coughing their guts out with lung disease for the rest of their lives.