“Of course you don’t. Business is good, so you keep telling me.”
He fixed me with a sharp eye. Some folk think all the residents in a place like this are a pickle short of a jar. They’d be making a big mistake in my uncle’s case.
“That’s right, it is,” I said.
“Good. I’m really pleased.”
“So?”
“So I’ve decided to leave my money — and I do have a little bit put aside, you know, insurance payouts and all that. I’ve decided to leave the lot to St Asaph’s Church. I’m going to set up a fund.”
“Really?”
“Really. Do you approve?”
“Of course. Yeah. It’s a great idea, Uncle. Well done.”
“What do you think they might use the money for?”
“A swimming pool at the vicarage? A holiday in the Bahamas for the choir? I dunno.”
“I thought a new youth club. Get some of the kids off the streets, give them something to do. You’d agree with you that, wouldn’t you, Livingstone?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Because I’m making you chief executive of the Trust.”
“Hey, wait a minute, what trust?”
“The one that will run the McClure Memorial Fund. The trust will build and run the youth club.”
“Hang on, Uncle Willis. I’m much too busy for that sort of thing.”
“Business?”
“Yeah, right.”
“Well, I think you’ll find that it’s in your business interests to accept this responsibility.”
In the silence that followed, I glanced around idly, looking cool. Inside, my mind was hurtling. What was my uncle getting at? How much did he know about my business interests? He’d been in Rolling Meadows for so long that he’d only ever seen me at work in my previous life. I thought I’d been suitably vague ever since.
It was good enough for Lisa and Nuala, and for the Rev. But Willis McClure was my uncle, and therefore not daft. Was he really threatening me here? Would he interfere in my business interests if I didn’t agree to this ridiculous trust fund idea? Well, he was my uncle. I reckoned he damn well would.
“Uncle Willis, if you reckon it’s a good idea, I’ll think about it, I promise.”
“Well, that’ll do for now, I suppose. We’ll talk about it again soon.”
“Right.”
“Because I’m not going to do die right now, you understand.”
“That’s okay.”
“Do one more thing for me, Livingstone?”
“Of course, Uncle.”
“On your way out, tell that bonny big girl I need her services again.”
“No problem.”
It’s true that there’s precious little in Medensworth for the youngsters to do. Everyone lives next door to everyone else here, and we know each others’ kids intimately. These are the sort of kids who soon learn to fight, thieve, smash the place up and mug old ladies for their pensions — until eventually they get thrown out of the playgroup. By the time they get to school they’re already professionals.
You’d think with all this talk about regeneration of the mining communities after the pits shut, it might occur to somebody that these kids were the future. Maybe somebody would even think to spend a bit of that European money on them. But it seems there are more important things to think about, like what to do with all the derelict bits of pit left over — how to tart them up and make them look cool and stylish.
Near the Miners Welfare and the community centre there’s a patch of grass. This is notable enough round here. But in the middle of the grass, sunk into a concrete plinth, is the Medensworth Colliery sign. It’s about a mile from where the colliery was, you understand. But the sign is Heritage, and therefore sacred.
Every village round here wants to cling on to a bit of its mining past. It helps to make up for watching the pits go down one by one, like ten green bottles. So a village decides to have an old winding wheel painted up and stuck in a prominent position, or goes for the three wagons and bit of line from an underground coal train like the ones that sit by the road in the middle of Warsop. This is Heritage too.
As you know, I’m all in favour of history. But there’s history and history. It’s got to be real and alive, not dead and torn up by its roots like a diseased shrub rose, or replaced with a plastic imitation like a corner of an insurance broker’s office. But that’s the way the heritage business is going.
In the town of Worksop, they must have had a bit of a dilemma. When they built the pedestrianisation scheme in Bridge Street, they had a couple of ideas about how they’d decorate it (they probably said ‘give it a focal point’ or something). One was a modern sculpture of coal miners, very relevant to most folk around there. The other was a series of crests representing the dukes that the Dukeries are named after, all very heraldic and meaningless. The dukes won, of course. You would have thought the days were long gone when the Duke of Newcastle and the Duke of Portland dominated the whole of Worksop, but apparently not. We still have to walk over their family coats of arms to get to Superdrug and Poundstretcher. Me, I try to see them as boot scrapers.
Uncle Willis was right in a way. Something needed doing for the kids round here. But no matter what good use you found for your money, there would never be enough. It’d be like pissing into the sea at Skegness. You can’t put problems right by throwing a bit of dosh at them — not when things have gone on like this for so long. It needs dedication from people — long term. Bear this in mind next time you hear the government or the council or somebody boasting about the latest investment in the area. What sort of investment? A Korean textiles company persuaded to set up a factory by hefty grant hand-outs? A few hundred thousand pounds on a leisure centre? A new school? Like I said — pissing in the sea.
Soon, somewhere around here, they’ll be building a new visitor centre. It’ll be designed to bring the Japanese and Americans flocking in. They’ll be able to sit in the reconstruction of a 1940s concrete council house, with a two-bar electric fire and an uncut moquette sofa that’s been chewed by the dog, where you have to pay extra to sit in the wet patches. It’ll be a full sensory adventure, smelling of piss and dirty nappies and old tea bags. There’ll be four or five half-naked kids sprawled on the floor, with a telly tuned to a re-run of The Simpsons and turned up too loud.
Featured prominently in the midst of this setting will be a scruffy bloke with a beer gut and three days’ growth of beard slumped in an armchair with half a packet of Senior Service and a can of Mansfield Bitter. If you’re lucky with the timing of your visit, you might see him belch and poke at the remote control. Visitors will be able to join the eldest son fiddling about in the electrics of an old Escort as he learns how to hot-wire, or to gaze at a typical mum as she works out how to feed seven people on a tin of stewed steak and a bag of McCain’s frozen chips.
This will be called ‘The Unemployment Experience’. It’ll thrill ’em in their thousands. Hey, we might even be able to get European funding for it.
That’s what life always comes down to these days — money. When there isn’t much of it about, people think of nothing else. When you come to The Unemployment Experience, that’s what the exhibits will be thinking about as they light up the next fag or open the bag of chips. So get your purses out and give generously for the postcards and the souvenirs. Let’s make it really authentic.
13
Rufford Abbey hasn’t seen sight or sandal of Cistercian monks for over four hundred years. But it does have a hundred and seventy acres of grounds. Enough to get a few villages in, let alone the gardens, lakes and ice houses that the earls fancied. Earls of Shrewsbury they were originally, and they had big ideas. Not surprising, because one of them was married to old Bess of Hardwick. And the Earl decided to turn this place into a vast country house.