Slow Kid called in. “I got the word out about that roof job, Stones.”
“That’s good, Slow. Thanks.”
“You want me and Dave to lean on the boys that done it when we find ’em?”
“I mainly want them to put the roof back, Slow.”
“Yeah? Them roof slates sell really well. There’s lots of places being worked on out Retford way, and that. Old barns and things. The council tells the builders they got to use old slates, like. But the builders can’t get hold of enough of them.”
“I want them put back,” I said.
“Right, right.” I heard him make a mental note. I knew it would get done.
Next I had to drive down to the cop shop at Ollerton with Dave so that we could make statements about our little French connection. There was no sign of Moxon and Stubbs, which was a small mercy. We just got some DC, with a pimply youth in police uniform to do the writing. There was nothing they could argue with really. It was all down to a communication problem. This is one of the major benefits of the European Union — there are a lot more communication problems to blame when things go wrong.
Dave’s statement was pretty brief anyway, and it was all in words of half a syllable. Even the young bobby had no difficulty writing it down. But then they really threw Dave with a tough one when they asked him to sign his name. After a bit, they were panicking about whether to send for a doctor to see if he’d gone into a coma. But I took pity on them and dictated it to him a letter at a time. ‘D’ for dinner, ‘a’ for afters... otherwise, we could have been there all day.
I was feeling even more depressed by the time we got back to Sherwood Crescent. It was this depression that made me do the one thing that brought me even worse trouble. I took a walk up through the estate to see if it would give me any ideas.
You might not think the Forest can possibly be the sort of place to bring anybody inspiration but you’d be wrong. Sometimes it tells me what’s up with the world.
Take a look down First Avenue, for example. You can see down the hill into Oak Avenue and right round the corner into Birch and Maple Crescents. There are rows and rows of grey council houses with tiny porches over their front doors. Those porches are covered by a sheet of lead to keep the rain out. If you can collect enough of them, you can turn the lead in for scrap. Some of the kids take it as a challenge to see how many they can strip.
If you look a bit closer, you’ll see that the latest in style round here is to decorate the top of your porch with one of those garden ornaments made out of resin and moulded into the shape of an animal, like an otter or a toad, really rural. Or an Alsatian dog maybe, if you want to look tough. The trouble is, they don’t wear well in the weather up there, and nobody ever takes them down for cleaning. So after a while it’s like looking at the grisly trophies that used to be stuck over the huts of Celtic tribesmen to warn strangers away. Maybe it has some deep significance, I don’t know.
The estate is in two halves really. The older streets at Top Forest are the old British Coal houses. They were actually built by the company that sank Medensworth pit, long before nationalisation and the NCB. Medensworth was one of that flurry of pits sunk in the 1920s, along with Rufford, Clipstone, Ollerton, Blidworth and Thoresby. Suddenly mineral railways and headstocks appeared everywhere among the farms and woods. Huge splodges of miners’ houses were grafted onto traditional farming villages. Planned communities, these were called. They have geometric rows and terraces, and grid pattern streets. They didn’t need names for these streets — they were called First Avenue, Second Avenue and Third Avenue.
A lot of pit owners took a paternal interest in their employees. The company had complete control over its tenants, giving it the sort of power that the lord of the manor might have envied. At one time, different grades of employees occupied particular streets — such as at Edwinstowe, where only colliery officials lived in First Avenue. The company owners themselves tended to move into prestige residences. Montague Wright of Butterley Company lived in Ollerton Hall — now derelict and awaiting conversion into a Sue Ryder Home.
At Bestwood, where the first shaft was sunk by the Bestwood Coal and Iron Company in 1872, an entire village was built. The houses all have the initials of the company, BCIC, over the front door, just in case the serfs forgot who they belonged to. When a new village was built for miners at Shireoaks pit, the place was even named after the boss of the mining company. Unfortunately, his name was Rhodes. That’s why we now have a place called Rhodesia in North Nottinghamshire, which is about as far as you can get from Central Africa. If you start to look, there’s not much difference between these mine owners and the dukes, is there?
Later on, British Coal came up for privatisation, and it sold off all its pit houses. They went into the hands of private landlords.
Down on Bottom Forest, though, the houses are a bit newer, and they’re council houses. You can buy your council house these days, and some folk have done just that. You can tell the ones — where the open front gardens have been fenced in with wavy lines of larchlap panelling, like the stockade of a little Englishman’s castle. Owning property does funny things to your mind. It can even make you plant a privet hedge.
Some of these houses are tarted up with leaded windows, or even a mock brass carriage lamp by the front door. It’s like folk are saying they aren’t on a council estate at all, but really belong up Budby Road, where all the big houses are with their landscaped lawns and wrought iron gates.
These leaded windows and carriage lamps say you think you’re too good for your neighbours. It’s like you’re expecting the chauffeur to bring the Bentley round to the front door at any moment, except he can’t get it past the second-hand caravan parked on the concrete apron where the front garden used to be, and he’s worried about scraping the paintwork on the old Mini Cooper with its wheels off that’s been standing in the driveway for the past eight years. The servants just don’t put things away properly, do they?
But the most common decoration on the front of these houses is the satellite dish. Your kids can do without clothes, you can go without proper food for weeks, and you can fail to pay the rent, your Council Tax or your court fines. But you’ve got to have the satellite dish. It’s still number one on the list of essentials items for the nub end of the 1990s.
These things tell me what’s wrong with the world. It’s like all the money’s going to Rupert Murdoch, who already has more than enough, thank you very much. And there are lots more Rupert Murdochs around, only they don’t make such a shout about it. I read the figures once. They were printed in The Sun, with a diagram. They said the income of the top tenth of society grew by over fifty per cent in the 1980s and 90s, but the income of the bottom tenth actually fell by eighteen per cent. Well, these are the bottom tenth, right here. You don’t have to look any further.
Now, they tell us that one child in three lives in a poor household, the highest rate of any European country. A lot of these kids are suffering ill health and stunted growth because of their lousy diet. Well, the European Union has done one thing for us anyway — it’s helped us to compare ourselves to others and see what a pathetic state we’re in.
Sometimes it feels like there’s a mountain to climb. Usually it’s on days like these that the mountain seems highest. Why don’t I just forget about all this and concentrate on lining my own pocket like everyone else is doing? Why don’t I sell up and move to somewhere with warmer rain, like Devon? Well, it’s tempting, now and then. Otherwise, I’m going to end up as another daft old sod in a nursing home.
Dave was with me on my stroll, but as usual he wasn’t making with the witty conversation too much. Eventually we reached the end of the estate and turned the corner onto Ollerton Road, at the end of the village’s main shopping street.