* * *
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 Midlands too, of course, although Brummies are very different from us. And our coalmines were very profitable. So yes, we’ve contributed quite a bit really.’
‘Okay. Now I’d like to take it one step further, perhaps going further back in history.’ I’m beginning to sound like Melvyn Bragg on In Our Time on Radio 4. ‘If I said to you, human civilisation first developed in North Nottinghamshire, what would you say? Does that sound likely, Mum?’
‘Erm …’
‘If I told you that the wheel was invented in Mansfield, for instance.’
‘Yes, I could believe that. A lot of damn good engineers have come from Mansfield. There was a lot of talent in Blidworth – not much in Sutton, of course … Was the wheel invented in Mansfield, Robbie?’
‘It hasn’t been disproved.’
‘Well, we’ve got Robin Hood anyway,’ concludes my mother, growing weary. ‘I’m going to put the kettle on.’
* * *
Actually, how much longer Nottinghamshire and the Midlands will have Robin Hood is open to question. Ever since someone noticed that the early ballads mention a few locations across the border in Yorkshire – principally Barnsdale – there’s been a campaign to turn the original Nottinghamshire Man in Tights into a Salt-of-the-Earth NorthernerTM. Not so long ago, a Yorkshire MP could be heard demanding that roadside signs proclaiming Nottinghamshire ‘Robin Hood Country’ be taken down. ‘We believe very strongly that Robin Hood was a Yorkshireman and we are aggrieved to read that we are now entering Robin Hood country [when we drive south into Nottinghamshire],’ David Hinchliffe, the absurdist ex-Member for Wakefield, was quoted as saying in the New York Times in 2004. ‘It’s a very, very serious business. The way things are going, the signs are going to get torn down by angry Yorkshiremen.’ Perhaps it was the report in the NYT that gave Russell Crowe the idea of basing his accent on Michael Parkinson’s dour growl when he played the lead in the most recent Hollywood Robin Hood movie, or perhaps it was the fact that Doncaster in Yorkshire suddenly developed a ‘Robin Hood Airport’ in 2005. If Yorkshire nationalists get their way, one day in the not too distant future ’Oodie is likely to find himself transformed into a plain-talking Yorkshireman, with a whippet instead of a bow under one arm and a flat cap instead of a green feathered hat on his head. There’s a small conceptual problem that might need to be addressed before that can happen, though. It’s hard to see how Robin Hood’s reputation for stealing from the rich to give to the poor can be reconciled with the stereotype of Yorkshire folk as tight-fisted – an image that’s been actively embraced and promulgated by many of the natives of ‘God’s own county’ (such modesty!). As the ‘Yorkshireman’s