Bang in the Middle. Robert Shore

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      Hungry for possible leads on this unseasonably warm autumn afternoon, I scout feverishly through the magazine racks at Mansfield town library and the local WH Smith. Eventually I alight on an issue of Nottinghamshire Life and Countryside that looks promising: the cover announces a piece about ‘The Pyramids of Nottinghamshire’. I can’t remember any mention of a ‘Sutton Sphinx’ when I was a boy or of Mansfield’s role in the development of ancient Egyptian civilisation, but that doesn’t put me off. Anticipation growing, I turn rapidly to the article and discover that the ‘pyramids’ in question are actually dovecotes, and fairly recent ones at that, but I’m nonetheless full of admiration for the magazine’s feverish overstatement and it persuades me to think big. If the Midlands was the source of my family, why shouldn’t it have been the source of everything else too? Why shouldn’t civilisation itself have begun here?

      Well, for one reason – which is that the Midlands is usually said to have no ‘deep’ history. (As a Midlander you sometimes get the impression that the principal aim of history in general is to let you know that you and your kind have played no part in it.) The immemorial mists of time are typically thought to have dispersed to reveal that nothing actually happened here until around 1842. To quote one twentieth-century source on the subject: ‘England’s prehistoric antiquities are mostly to be found south of a line drawn from Worcester to Ipswich; and north of a line drawn from Blackpool to Hull’ – lines that seem almost deliberately conceived to exclude the Midlands.

      But history is a remarkable thing. Although by definition it’s all in the past, it keeps turning up again and transforming itself – and everything else with it – in the present. What if evidence suddenly emerged that Nottinghamshire genuinely did have pyramids, and a corresponding Pharaonic era? Unlikely, I know, since everyone seems to agree that the middle band of the country has no prehistory, but a development of the sort isn’t entirely out of the question. After all, think of the evolution of our own species. Even on a matter as fundamental as that, the question isn’t entirely settled. We know that Homo sapiens first appeared on the African continent about 200,000 years ago, before gradually migrating north, through the Middle East, to Europe and Asia. But, around the time of my writing this, fresh archaeological finds in Israel, Spain and China emerged to throw into question some of the finer details of the development of modern man. Even prehistory is in the process of rewriting itself. And if Israel, Spain and China can get in on the evolutionary act, why not the Midlands?

      * * *

      After Hector has gone to bed, I explain the challenge I’ve set myself to my parents.

      ‘Don’t you think you’re taking it all a bit seriously?’ says my mother, the queen of taking-things-too-seriously: most nights she can’t sleep for thinking about all the things that worry her but over which she has zero control. ‘Just tell Hector’s school mates it’s a good place for a punch-up and have done with it.’

      ‘Hey!’ interjects my father. ‘We’re worth a bit more than that. Tell them about Cloughie and Forest.’

      ‘Fighting and football’ I scribble down on my notepad.

      ‘There’s Robin Hood, of course,’ I say. ‘I thought we could go and look at the Major Oak tomorrow. Hector will like that.’

      ‘Well, there you go then,’ says my mother encouragingly. ‘Robin Hood’ll do, won’t he? What more do you need?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ I reply earnestly. ‘He might be a start. I want to know what makes us Midlanders: where we came from, who we are, where we’re going, to borrow a phrase from Gauguin.’

      ‘Go what?’ mugs my mother. ‘Well, I’ll tell you this for nothing: I don’t think people from Blidworth [where my mother was born] are much like people from Sutton [a couple of miles away, where my father was born]. For one thing, we used to make fun of people in Sutton because they said “bwaan bwead”.’

      ‘I’m not really interested in the microscopic differences between Blidworth and Sutton, Mum. I’m looking for the bigger picture.’

      ‘Well, if I’m not allowed to make fun of your father, I don’t want to play. Shift yersen, Denis, I need to walk around a bit. My leg’s killing me,’ she huffs as she pulls herself to her feet.

      ‘Shift yersen’ provides the cue for a brief discussion of local dialect terms. With the help of one of those mysterious photocopied documents that seem to circulate among old people keen to relive the linguistic glories of their youth, we laugh over ‘Ayer masht?’ (Have you made a cup of tea?), ‘Arkattit’ (Listen to the rain), ‘Ittle norrocha’ (You won’t feel any pain) and ‘Mekitt goo bakuds’ (Put the car into reverse gear): all classic Notts locutions. My personal favourite is ‘Ittim weeya poss’, or ‘Hit him with your purse’. It perfectly captures the delicacy of the local female population – by which I mean my mother really: no offence to anyone else.

      I’m not sure these phrases are getting me any closer to my grail of a foundation myth, however.

      ‘This used to be the centre of the hosiery trade, didn’t it, Dad?’ I say airily to move the conversation along a little.

      A bit of an obvious question, really, since that was my father’s line of work and, across a forty-odd-year career, it carried him from one end of the Midlands to the other.

      ‘Yes, I’ve got a couple of books about it upstairs,’ he responds. ‘They’ll tell you more about it than I can.’

      ‘But it’s your impressions I want. You worked in the industry for five decades. I want to tap into your experiences.’

      He shifts uneasily in his seat. This kind of waffle doesn’t really appeal to him. He’s not the sort of man who likes the idea of being ‘tapped into’, thank you very much. To escape further questioning he gets up to put TalkSport on the radio, ostensibly because former England manager Steve McLaren, aka ‘the Wally with the Brolly’, has just quit as boss of Nottingham Forest – my dad’s team for the past seventy years – and he thinks they might be discussing it.

      I turn my attention back to my mother.

      ‘All right, Mum. Answer me this: is Mansfield civilised?’

      ‘Not totally, no,’ she begins after reflection. ‘For instance, we’ve got two supermarkets: Sainsbury’s and Tesco. Now if you ask me about the people who go into Sainsbury’s, I’d say maybe. If you ask me about those who go into Tesco, I’d say maybe not. And then there’s the way they stack the shelves …’

      (For the record, I should say that my mother happily shops in both Tesco and Sainsbury’s, which by her own reckoning makes her simultaneously both maybe civilised and maybe not civilised. Which sounds about right – maybe.)

      ‘All right,’ I stop her. ‘Let me ask you this: Do you think that people from Mansfield and Nottinghamshire and the Midlands generally have contributed much to world civilisation?’

      ‘Oh yes,’ she replies with surprising certainty.

      ‘In what way?’

      ‘We’ve turned a lot of good people out. This region invented the hosiery industry. That was worldwide. Then there was Raleigh bikes in Nottingham. And Metal Box in Mansfield: that was good for trays. It was worldwide too. Cars of course were Birmingham. Birmingham’s the СКАЧАТЬ