A Walk To Bog End And Back With My Dad
In Celebration Of My Dad's Birthday: A Short Account Of A Walk My Family And I Took A Few Years Ago
“What’s this?” I asked my dad. He’d just walked into the living room with several canvases under his arm. On top of the pile was a watercolour painting featuring Winnie The Pooh and Piglet walking through a dark underpass hand-in-hand while three mean-looking men in trench coats loitered on the the other side.
“IT’S WINNIE THE POOH AND PIGLET ABOUT TO BE ASSASSINATED,” he said.
“Is it one of yours?”
“YEAH.”
He handed me the canvases and I began to browse through the others. There were about a dozen paintings in total: all works in progress, mostly of a dark, madcap or macabre nature.
“Does this one have a name?” I asked.
“YEAH,” he said. “I’VE CALLED THAT ‘THE TICKLING TO DEATH OF JESUS’.”
My dad went outside to fetch some wood and I continued to look through his art. He’s always painted, as far back as I can remember, but he’s been working particularly hard recently, since being semi-retired, and his style has gained a new dark freedom. I found disco dog walkers, nightmare medieval murder scenes in complex mirrored formation, Spiderman giving money to a busker, a bank of Feline Gods staring down in judgement at the grotesque figures at a pedigree cat show, and the aftermath of a road accident involving a Triceratops. I was so mesmerised that time must have briefly frozen. 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. What felt like another four seconds later, he was back inside, one hand full of kindling, another full of chocolate.
“He’s always got a load of wood in his hands,” my mum told me “I ask him to wash them but he forgets. There are black marks all over the walls and banister.”
I pictured a different house, in a parallel dimension, that my dad lived in alone, unmarried: a remote, dirt-floored shepherd’s hut, strewn with spilt acrylics, rabbit carcasses and Yorkie Bar wrappers. The embers of a small fire burned outside with arcane pieces of masonry scattered around it.
The phone rang and my mum picked up. It was my aunt Mal, wanting to plan our walk for today. My parents live on the east side of Nottinghamshire now, but I’d been wanting to walk through the countryside over on the west side, bordering Derbyshire, where we used to live, as I’ve been researching some of the history of the area, which is sometimes referred to as “DH Lawrence Country” with either pride or deep-seated resentment by its residents. We completed the fifty minute drive to the house Mal shares with my uncle Chris then set off on foot towards our target: the tiny nearly-hamlet of Bog End, via my old secondary school, skirting an estate of pebbledash houses where a kid called Ian once threatened to hit me in the face with a hammer.
“YOU LOOK LIKE YOU’RE MADE ENTIRELY OF MOSS,” my dad said, appraising Chris’s fuzzy green jumper. My mum, Mal and I admired the Victorian pattress plates on the beautiful dark red brick buildings of the old brewery: heartbreakingly empty and unloved for a decade, its windows periodically smashed by local schoolkids, but now being readied for a mixture of residential conversion and demolition. Next-door, in 1991, I’d tasted my first ever pint of ale at The Nelson And Railway inn. I remember thinking it tasted astonishingly fresh, due to the brewery’s close proximity, but also that it seemed sort of weak. This was no doubt due to the fact that the only alcohol I’d consumed in any quantity previous to that had been Carlsberg Special Brew. I didn’t know at the time that Special Brew had a reputation as a “tramp’s drink” and, at 9% alcohol, was knock-a-horse-over strong. I just thought it was what you drank, because that’s what my classmate Beau O’Dowd, who could pass for 18, bought me and my friends from the off licence on Hardy Street when we were on our way to a school disco.
Down by the old railway cutting, with the brewery buildings in the background, the footbridge restored and the white dog poo that peppered it during the 1980s gone, it was easy to imagine the old branch line train chugging down here. My dad and I agreed that there is something uniquely eerie about railway cuttings, that they retain an atmosphere like few other places.
“There’s a term for areas like this now, you know. They call them ‘edgelands‘,” I said to my dad.
“LOAD OF BOLLOCKS,” he said.
We turned a couple of sharp corners, past my nan’s old house, and met a friendly tortoiseshell cat with a sardonic military officer’s face and Chris and I gave it some fuss. “I think that’s your cousin Jack’s cat,” said Mal. “Yeah, I think it is,” agreed my mum.
Soon we were high on the hill above Kimberley, with the tower blocks of Basford and inner city Nottingham shining through the haze in the distance. In the other direction, on a clear day, you can see Crich Stand from here: the landmark of another, more handsome kind of Coal Country, where people were less eager to fight in the streets, but not one where my family could have afforded to live when I was young. Over the hill’s brow, though, in the direction of Bog End and Greasley Beauvale, the view was as unspoilt as any in North Nottinghamshire: a haunting Wilkie Collins ghost tree, the spire of Greasley church, patchwork fields which could almost be in one of the gentler parts of north Devon were they to make slightly more elaborate promises. I walked down here with a girl I liked called Sarah one dark winter night when I was fourteen and, as we reached the quietest most romantic spot below the tree canopy, she moved in close to me and spoke softly, explaining that we could never be together as she’d started doing stuff with a boy in the sixth form. “Matthew’s got a really hairy chest,” she elaborated. “Do you have a hairy chest yet?”
“No,” I admitted.
To me, Bog End seems like the most quintessentially Nottinghamshire of place names. “Just going to the bog” is what I and nearly all my friends – including several of the female ones – used to say when excusing ourselves. It’s in fact very pretty in late spring, Bog End. A wildflower meadow here has appeared in my dreams countless times: a fluffed up psychedelic memory of a childhood picnic, surrounded by bees and red admiral butterflies As we closed in on it today in its more dormant incarnation, my dad reached full flow in his storytelling, like a man playing a jazz fusion song using the narrative of nostalgia.
“I PUT AN EASEL UP THERE IN 1982 AND PAINTED IT THEN GOT BITTEN BY A HORSEFLY. DID YOU KNOW DH LAWRENCE SMASHED A BESSIE SMITH 78 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 looked across the fields in the direction of our old house and my mum and I remembered the time our next-door neighbours got tied to chairs by armed robbers and beaten with baseball bats, the stolen cars that were regularly burned on the lane outside our house and the two times our house was burgled.
“THREE TIMES,” said my dad.
“Two,” said my mum.
“NO. YOU’RE FORGETTING ABOUT THE SHED.”
Once every month my dad would walk a mile through the woods and deliver our very reasonably-priced rent to our the owner of our cottage, Lady Barber, by hand at Lamb Close House. He knew the two main rules: 1) Don’t Mention DH Lawrence, and 2) Know Your Station In Life. 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 ancestors in his novels. Researching a Lawrence piece for The Spectator 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. Once, as my dad left Lamb Close House after delivering the rent, Lady Barber pointed to her dog’s bed and announced – to her own great amusement – “And there’s your blanket, Mr Cox!” One another day, my dad was shown around the grounds, through a nursery full of Victorian toys, garages housing 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”.
At Greasley Church my mum, Mal and Chris and I stopped to look 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, and then at the churchyard’s burgeoning snowdrops and ancient yew tree. My dad pointed to the adjacent layby: “WE HAD OUR HUBCAPS NICKED HERE IN 1995.”
Outside the church stood a faded tourist information board, featuring a photograph of Lawrence.
“LOOK AT HIM,” said my dad, pointing at it. “DOESN’T HE LOOK LIKE A STUCK-UP TWAT.”
Unlike the Peak District, only a few miles north west, this has never been renowned Walking Country and, unsurprisingly, we passed no other ramblers on our route through the countryside but, as we returned to the outskirts of Kimberley, we passed a number of robust-looking men who were walking dogs. As we reached a small park, a black labrador, barely out of puppyhood, gleefully nudged a red ball through it.
“LOOK OUT FOR THIS BASTARD,” my dad advised Chris and me, pointing at the dog. “IT WILL HAVE YOUR FACE OFF.”
Mal and I suggested that perhaps he was being unnecessarily negative.
“THAT’S MY JOB,” said my dad. “I’M LOOKING FOR THE CLOUD NEXT TO EVERY SILVER LINING. I CAN’T WAIT TO HAVE A SLEEP ON YOUR AND CHRIS’S BED IN A FEW MINUTES. I’M KNACKERED.”
In the pub, we had some lunch while two men on the table opposite discussed their favourite motorways. They agreed, after some quite intense debate, that the M62 was their least favourite. My dad showed us his mobile phone: a clamshell one from the earlier part of the previous decade, which showed an alert for 144 unread messages.
“I’VE NEVER LOOKED AT ANY OF THEM,” he said. “I DON’T KNOW HOW.”
He seemed tired on the drive home and, as it got darker, I worried about his ability to combine road safety with a free-flowing stream of open-ended anecdotes. He had a nap when we got in, but by tea time he’d got his energy back. He told me that my mum had received a parking ticket the previous week and the next day, for a laugh, he’d stuck it on his 70-year-old friend Malcolm’s windscreen.
“WHEN MALCOLM SAW IT HE LOOKED LIKE A GOLDFISH WHO’D JUST RECEIVED SOME REALLY BAD NEWS.”
We decamped to the living room and went through some old books that my parents were planning to donate to charity to allow for more space in the house. My dad handed each of them to me to look at, in case I wanted them. “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” he said, passing me one. “THIS IS BLOODY RUBBISH,” he continued, passing me the next. “DON’T READ HIM. HE’S A MEDIA WAZZOCK.” This went on for several minutes, his critical appraisal of the books containing no discernible middle ground between “FUCKING BRILLIANT” and “TOTAL SHIT”. Later, my mum and I chatted about her artwork and the tree-climbing habits of my cat George, who had recently moved in with my parents. As we did, my dad sketched on a pad on his knee.
“Mick, you don’t see Tom very often,” my mum said. “Why not stop drawing, just for a little while?”
“BECAUSE I CAN’T,” he told her
You can read lots more about my dad in these pieces:
The Gun’s Always Loaded, The Horse Always Kicks
My Dad And The Toad In His Shoe
Some Notes About My Dad I Have Made In My Notebooks
You can order my most recent books 1983, Villager, Notebook, Ring The Hill, Help The Witch and 21st-Century Yokel with free international delivery from Blackwell’s. If you enjoyed today’s piece you might particular enjoy 1983 and 21st-Century Yokel.
I’ve read many of your books several times Tom and I’ve decided that they are a bit like music. You have an album but still really get into hearing the song again if it appears on the radio. In the case of writing - if it appears on your Substack, it doesn’t matter if I’ve read it or it is in a book on my shelf, I’m still into reading it again. Enjoyed visiting this one again. I’m in awe of your Dad’s wood stack.
I HOPE YOU KEPT AN EYE OUT FOR FUCKWITS AND LOONYS