“It’s a fishing expression.”
“I know about floats and wagglers,” said Slow Kid helpfully. “Our Derron’s in the Meden Vale Angling Society. He took me down to the canal a couple of times to catch some roach.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Do you know about ground bait then?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, think of this car as a pound of nice juicy maggots.”
“Oh, right.”
“Hey, you can sell them buggers,” said Metal.
Teri came through with the stuff I needed later that day. The name meant nothing to me, but then people use so many names these days it’s hard to keep track. The address tied in, though. It was one in one of those rich gits’ villages out east towards the River Trent.
This is the affluent part of Nottinghamshire. There’s a whole money belt there, stretching from Newark, right round Tuxford and up towards Gainsborough. It’s a big area, but it’s also the most sparsely populated bit of the county.
Few of these villages have council estates. There are farms and old manor houses, converted barns and vicarages, farmworkers’ cottages that have been done up, and a few new ranch-style bungalows built for people who drive off to work in Sheffield or Nottingham in their Range Rovers and Fourtraks. They think they’re the real country people now. They wear wellies at weekends and carry a walking stick when they take the labradors out for walkies. They support the hunt and maybe bag a few birds now and then. Otherwise nature stops at the double glazing. The real dirt and noise of the countryside is sent round to the tradesman’s entrance.
The sad thing is that these people live in an area where history practically bursts out of the ground. Take the Pilgrim Fathers, for instance. This is where they came from, the villages of North Nottinghamshire. It was here that the Separatist movement started that ended up with Ronald Reagan, where folk were so stubborn about refusing to grovel to the established church that they had to leave the country in the end.
The Pilgrim Fathers are one of the biggest draws for American tourists and all those lovely dollars. But you’d never know it. You see Robin Hood everywhere in Nottinghamshire — the World of Robin Hood, the Tales of Robin Hood, Robin Hood’s Larder, the Robin Hood Statue, the Oak Where Robin Hood Hid from the Nasty Sheriff’s Men, and the Dead Patch of Grass Where Robin Hood Got Caught Short and Had a to Have a Quick Piss. Welcome to Robin Hood Country, God help us.
But the Pilgrim Fathers? Somewhere in a dull museum room in Worksop you might find a wax dummy that looks a bit like William Brewster. And, er... well, that’s about it, really. And Worksop’s at least eight miles from where the real action was — Scrooby, Babworth, Austerfield. You know about those places, of course? No? What a surprise.
Okay, so it’s true the pub at Scrooby is called the Pilgrim Fathers. It was opened in 1771 for travellers on the Great North Road, and its name was the Saracen’s Head until some enterprising landlord in the 1960s decided to cash in and change the name.
Apart from that, your hordes of Brewster and Bradford descendants can steam through North Nottinghamshire without seeing a sign of their courageous forebears. The cameras stay unclicked and the dollars stay in their pockets as they disappear northwards into Doncaster looking vaguely puzzled. It’s as if we’re shy about our history, and we have to keep it hidden.
We drove out through Ollerton and Tuxford, circled the Markham Moor roundabout and turned eastwards on the A57 towards Lincoln. Half way towards the River Trent at Dunham Bridge we found a little ‘B’ road and wound our way through corn fields and dense patches of woodland, with some low hills appearing to the north and west. These were real hills, too, not landscaped slag heaps. These were the Wheatley Hills, the rolling slopes where an army of Parliamentarian soldiers once camped to watch for attack from the direction of Yorkshire.
To our right, we could see the monsters that local people call the ‘cloud factories’. Power stations — three of them, the giants of Megawatt Valley. They dominate the landscape for miles on the western bank of the Trent here. They may not be picturesque, but they’re the biggest customers for coal produced at Nottinghamshire’s pits. For now anyway. All it would need would be for these power stations to switch from coal to gas, and the last pits would be gone. So the western parts of Nottinghamshire, the villages between Worksop and Mansfield, rely on the eastern side for their living, just like the peasants always relied on the gentry at the big house.
Many of these rich gits’ villages shelter behind hills and woodlands, so they can’t actually see the power stations. West Laneton is definitely one of those rich gits’ villages. And Old Manor Farm is a typical rich git’s house.
We came to wrought iron gates across the end of a drive, with two brick pillars and little stone creatures sitting on them — just like the garden ornaments over the porches on the Forest, except these were griffins rather than toads. The drive was beautifully swept gravel, without an oil stain or a kid’s toy in sight, and the hedges were yew instead of privet, and neatly trimmed instead of straggling over the pavement.
Come to think of it, there weren’t any pavements anyway. The spaces between the road and the hedges were grassed over and planted with flower beds. Obviously nobody ever walked in this part of the world, except to get from the garage to the Range Rover. If you were a pedestrian, you must be some poor plebby oik from Worksop or somewhere, so it didn’t matter if you got run over by the mobile library because you had to walk in the road.
The front garden of this particular house looked like something out of Practical Gardening. Geoffrey Smith had been round and shown them how to create the perfect rockery and an interesting water feature that would be totally maintenance-free. It probably would be, too, since most of it was likely to be plastic.
The house was older than the garden, if that doesn’t sound ridiculous. According to the plaques on the brick pillars, the house was called Old Manor Farm. But this place hadn’t seen a real farmer since Bernard Matthews was last on the telly. There was a double garage, so it must be a pretty low-class house for these parts — most of them have triple garages. There’s one for hubby’s four-wheel drive, one for the little lady’s Volvo estate and probably one for the bleedin’ nanny to park her second-hand Mini. When they get going, this lot can chuck out more air pollution than any one of those power stations.
“Stay here and watch my back, Slow.”
“What you going to do?”
“Just a bit of a recce.”
I left Slow in the Subaru and dodged across the road, wary of traffic coming round the bend from behind those big hedges. The gate opened easily — no electronic devices here, anyway. It seemed to take half an hour to walk up the drive, and by the time I reached the top I was breathing hard.
I rang the bell, hoping that no one would answer. No one did. Perhaps it was my lucky day. While I waited, I weighed up the front door. Georgian style, but good wood, not those that they sell for tuppence at the DIY stores. The frame and lintels looked pretty solid. This property had gone up in the days when blokes knew how to build a house, before they started using papier maché bricks held together with chewing gum because it’s cheaper.
Getting no answer again after a second attempt, I walked round the side of the house, taking a quick peek through the front windows as I went.
There was oak furniture, a bit dark for my taste. A grand piano and a big open fire that looked as though it was never used except for roasting chestnuts at Christmas. The paintings on the wall certainly hadn’t come from Woolworth’s and didn’t show Spanish ladies or kids with runny eyes. In fact, one didn’t show much at all — just a few splashes of colour. This was someone with more money than sense, then. Unfortunately, art isn’t my field, so I didn’t know whether one of those paintings was worth nicking while I was there.