Birthday

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Arthur dropped gear going downhill. ‘Trams clanked through here once upon a time. Then you got tracklesses. Now there’s ordinary buses. But it pays to have your own car. Saves hanging around.’

Brian’s bedtime reading, set in the smokey-hot olive groves of Greece, was a potent antidote to the sight of his home town. ‘I like driving from London in a couple of hours, to call on the family whenever the mood takes me.’

‘We’re always glad to see you,’ Arthur said. Trains at one time grumbled up and down the double line through Basford Crossing, from the main station in town to populous colliery places such as Bulwell and Kirkby and Sutton-in-Ashfield, not to mention Newstead, which Brian had noted long before he knew of the Abbey and Byron.

‘Coal smoke used to reek as if it would cure the flu,’ Arthur told Avril, out for the first time since her bout of chemotherapy. ‘Even when it makes you cough enough to think you’d got TB it was a tonic for us.’

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