This is the most recent article to appear in the Derby Telegraph:
I mentioned my Auntie Mabel's
Chocolate Sponge cake with plum jam filling last time, as an effective
incentive to go out to the wilds of Holbrook and "get some fresh air into
your lungs", as my Mum would exhort.
I'm not saying that this was the only reason for going, but it was
pretty high on the list!
Having been born and brought up
in Burton upon Trent, and spent all of my childhood within roughly the same
square mile of that town, the appeal of the countryside was lost on me. You see, I knew Burton like the back of my
hand. I knew where to go and where to
avoid. I knew the cinemas and the
library, the shops and the museum, in fact, just about every 'crook and
nanny'. The countrysde, however, was a
mystery to me.
Do you know Holbrook? I believe it is a much larger affair now than
it was back in the early 1960s, when I could be found lurking around Pond
Road. What amazed me about the village
was how everybody seemed to know everybody else. Coming from a town that made 'keeping
yourself to yourself' practically an art form, this was a shock to the
system. Holbrook might have been a
foreign country as far as I was concerned.
I certainly used to actively yearn for the comforting certainties of town
life and, when I was old enough to be let out on my own, I used to take the bus
to Belper. Now I accept that Belper is
hardly a throbbing metropolis, either now or then (unless, of course, you came
from Holbrook) but I found it had some of the aspects of town-life that I
enjoyed, like traffic and people.
My invariable routine was to plod
up and down the High Street, look at the shops, buy a packet of Dentyne chewing
gum (because I never saw it on sale anywhere else, and it was the nearest I was
prepared to get to 'cool' gum chewing) and invest in a chocolate milk shake in
a café. Then it was back to the Bus
Station and Holbrook.
Actually, being given the chance
to stay at Auntie Mabel's was really an act of considerable generosity on their
part. Not only did it mean an extra
mouth to feed, in addition to their three children, but it also placed a
considerable strain on the sleeping arrangements.
Being of the male persuasion, I
was something of an oddity on Mum's side of the family. Auntie Mabel was one of Mum's two sisters and
she, herself, had had three daughters.
In a three-bedroomed house, this did not leave much scope for
accommodating nephews.
Accordingly, I was billeted at
the foot of Auntie Mabel and Uncle Leslie's own bed, in a sort of early version
of a sofa bed. I seem to recall that it
was a dark green, buttoned, high-backed chair with wooden arms, and the whole
thing folded down into a bed that would just about contain a child. The buttoning effect on the upholstery made
the 'mattress' support somewhat sporadic, and the wooden arms with their Barley
Twist struts gave the effect of, at best, being back in a cot and, at worst,
being in prison. Nevertheless, I usually
slept well, probably as a consequence of having "that fresh air in my
lungs" and being prodded into taking more exercise (in the sense of
country walks, trailing after my youngest cousin) than I would normally
take.
The difficulty arose if I had not
gone to sleep quickly enough, usually due to clandestine reading of my cousins'
collection of Enid Blyton books and Rupert Annuals. I had no desire whatsoever to see either my
Auntie or Uncle prepare for bed, and I was pretty sure that they would find it
disconcerting, to say the least, if they knew I was awake. So, with my eyes as tightly shut as they were
for Santa's visit on Christmas Eve, I awaited the turning off of the light and
the regular breathing that would indicate that proper decorum had been
restored.
Jambalaya, Philip's first foray into book-length humorous fiction, is
now available at www.amazon.co.uk
