Raw Material

1

In the beginning was the word, and Adam was the Printer’s Devil.

As a boy I walked into the middle of Nottingham, passing St Barnabas’ Cathedral on my way down Derby Road. In a deep niche of its grey-black wall sat a man with no legs, selling matches. The niche had a heavy wooden door to it, and he could lock the place securely every night before going home.

At the time of packing up I saw him put the money into his pocket without counting it — as if he had already noted every penny that dropped there during his long day. Then he folded the mat and set it at the back of the niche with his stock of matches. After a look to see that everything was tidy he came on to the pavement and locked the door. He propelled himself down the road by his two hands, the trousers of his brown suit pinned under his trunk. He wore a collar and tie, which somehow saddened his look of respectability.

His brown eyes watched people walking by all day long, and his single great indisputable truth was that the rest of the world had legs. He was privileged in having such an enormous and satisfying fact all to himself, but what a price he had had to pay for it. His features were a prison wall that held in his thoughts and everything he suffered. He smiled, but never talked.

His fate did not seem so terrible to me as I now think it was. He had a way of earning a living, shelter from the rain while doing it, and a fact about himself with which he could gainsay every other truth. I did not envy him, but in my simplicity as a child I realized that his truth would have been absolute if only he had given into it entirely by staying in his wall-cave during the night as well.

When I asked my parents how he had lost his legs my mother said he’d been run over by a tram as a boy. My father told me they had been blown from under him twenty years before at the Battle of the Somme. My grandmother heard he’d been born like that. Grandfather Burton thought it as good a way as any to dodge his share of proper work.

It was difficult to know which of these tales to believe, but they ceased to matter after a while. The man still had no legs, after all.

2

The man with no legs is the first thing that comes to me as I start to write. There is much more, because this book is called Raw Material, part novel, part autobiography, but all in all a book, a reading book, and non-committal in these aspects till I get to the end. It is an attempt at self-portrait in which I will leave out the expected run-throughs of the confessional because I assume that most have been used, suitably disguised or not, in novels and stories already finished.

In any case, my plain unblemished life-story would in no way guarantee an accurate design, because the ordinary occurrences since birth may be weighed down by the heavy blight of lost happenings that took up my parents or grandparents. The important particulars that moved them, if one can sort it out from this point on in time, may be more vital than the petty issues I have been involved in.

Those events which were overwhelming and decisive may account for my inability to wear a simple necktie, indicating that some criminal antecedent was hanged for stealing a sheep, when a Celtic judge from my father’s side did for some Jutish marauder on my mother’s — or vice versa, since both strands are inextricably ravelled. Or perhaps I don’t flash a tie because I am a rationalist and see no reason for it, or that it does not keep me warm and is therefore useless in the long run. If one sticks to the truth, all minor reasons need considering.

No matter what I call this book, everything written is fiction, even non-fiction — which may be the most fictional non-fiction of all. Under that heading are economic reports, international treaties, news items, Hansard accounts, biographies of ‘great people’, historical blow-by-blows of crises and military campaigns. Anything which is not scientific or mathematical fact is coloured by the human imagination and feeble opinion.

Fiction is a pattern of realities brought to life by suitably applied lies, and one has to be careful, in handling the laws of fiction, not to get so close to the truth that what is written loses its air of reality.

It is a hard test sailing so near the gale, but however this narrative is classified it bears no relationship either to golden truth or black lies. To pursue truth one minute while denying there is any such thing the next has the advantage of realism. Such vacillation divides the compulsively verbal persuaders from the writer who has neither time nor leaning to swing anybody. For the talkers there is only one truth, and they know it. They go on talking so long that it stokes them up and keeps their home fires burning. Manic continual speech prevents self-knowledge and the threat of facing the wasteland. As a way of taking in air, it inflates them and keeps the feet just that bit above the earth to maintain their confidence. Politicians are so good at telling lies that their faces are not even pock-marked to show they are not being deceived by them.

On the other hand those who see truth everywhere have great difficulty in selecting certain truths to make a pattern of wisdom from it. Language becomes more precious when truths proliferate. It is not so easy then to talk or write, for truth is difficult to pin down when it is everywhere. But those who exult in the truth turn into a river of semantic devastation.

No one can speak for anyone else, and whoever says differently is a mean-throated, twin-faced liar. Perhaps I am saying that only God can speak the truth, which may or may not be a useful yardstick, because though it invites chaos in by the front door if one does not believe in God, one can only explore that chaos and reduce it to some ordered arrangement by a strict pursuit of truth regarding one’s own attitude — so as to get out of the back door before the house falls in on both truth and lies together.

Having stated this, it seems unlikely at the moment that I shall ever get any truth from myself. But in case it becomes even more difficult in the future, through accident or loss of nerve, I had better attempt to do so now and get it over with, set my arms flailing and make a snatch at the truth with one or the other when any recognition of it seems possible in the distorting fog.

3

Outside on the window-ledge a wasp stings a fly into unconsciousness and walks off with it under its arm like a parcel. A few minutes later, a mistle-thrush waddles back across the grass from chasing a sparrow, and the way the bird moves I know she has an egg in her. The same sights could be seen a hundred years ago, and at any time since.

I sit at a table in my room, dreaming of far-off places, of vultures making clouds of letters in the sky, black against blue, cutting up the sun with scissor-wings. They turn and spin, swoop and spit their deepest bile at a tree that is still burning, ignited by the sun whose hot rays pierce to the earth as soon as the vultures move down and away from it and are no longer its shadow.

Each of my two eyes is a door that has locks but no keys, and I burst open each in turn to go through and see what they will show me. Sometimes it is landscape, now and again it is people; often empty sky.

I live in a Kent village eight miles from the English sea, and wonder at my reasons for buying this house. It is an equal distance from Dover and Newhaven, so that I can get out of the country and on to the mainland with little delay, as well as being fifteen minutes from Lydd Airport in case a lightning getaway is called for.

I long for a bridge to be built over the Channel or a tunnel dug under it to France so that I can drive as far as China without touching water. Better still if the Channel were filled in, and this island was connected to the mainland which is its rightful place, all the rubbish of Europe tipped into the sea until land joins land and cliff meets cliff. Two ample canals could be built through it for ships, and that would be that.

The house is set in the comparatively fresh air of the countryside, though I can get to London in under two hours, and stand in Oxford Street choking thankfully on petrol fumes. It is so strategically placed that the built-up mass of London blocks me off from my past and family in Nottinghamshire. There were other reasons as I studied the map, though some of them seem wrong-headed now. Certainly I don’t write better or worse than anywhere else, which is all that matters. There is enough space for me to accumulate quantities of books. When my eyes want to wander over the shelves I begin to wonder which I would abandon if I had to leave and could only take fifty with me, or whether I would worry overmuch if I had to clear out with none at all. It is a hypothetical though frequent question, being so close to the coast.

The few square miles of high land the village stands on are surrounded by marshes which are so flooded when the rains come that Oxney is again almost the island it once was in the Middle Ages. Acres of water on every side lap the borders of the few roads leading out from the island. Swans that float on it take off with a great fanning of wings and wild melancholy honkings that echo across the open spaces. Pink clouds reflected in the water remind me of the early morning rice fields outside Valencia.

In spring and autumn the sunsets are broad layers of snake-green and ox-blood on either side of the church tower, with no disturbing noise except for the occasional car. The colours are so thick and livid with tranquillity it seems I have only to reach beyond the bedroom window and peel them off in layers. But peace begets the opposite of truth, which cannot be found behind the deadening tints of a country dusk slowly torn apart by the flitting of numerous birds.

When frost comes the bushes and trees of the garden change from green to white. Even the smallest detail of leaves and grass blades shows up in the hoar frost. A freezing mist holds the patterns in their monochromatic place. By the end of the day it is like looking into a tank of milk, and I draw the curtain across it.

If the temperature rises slightly it brings white banks of snow lifting against the doors. But the house is solid and warm, a fit haven to deceive any man who thinks of getting the truth from it. He can sit there and ponder, knowing that when the snow melts he will be able to smell the earth again and find a little measure of truth and beauty in that, though never enough to satisfy.

All might be revealed if one goes back into the jungle, but the truth — never. Before a novelist comes into the open he must first find some trick of getting inside himself, and there is no other way to do it but go backwards, which is the only direction left if one is to rediscover the fictional truth that sprawls behind one’s spirit.

4

If I am tempted to say that nothing I have so far written has been of the truth, it is only so that I can question whether it is true or not. What I do know is that it is difficult to use the truth for getting at the deepest structural fibres of one’s spirit. Truth may not be the tool for it at all.

Not that I will tell lies. I have told many, of course, but lying is a generous and honest act in a writer, something he was born to do and is therefore bound to continue as well as he is able in order to get as close to the truth as possible. Telling lies to explain the truth is where Art and Conscience meet uneasily. Such a state is the other side of the coin to deception, like that island of such name in the South Atlantic which was thrown up by volcanic eruption and, being hollow inside, tricked ancient mariners into thinking it was larger and more important than it was, until they properly explored it and saw the true lie of the land, whereby it was confirmed that deception finally took in nobody, and that the island in any case was in continual eruption.

The older one gets the harder it becomes to lie with conviction. One’s heart hardens, and one refuses to prevaricate either to entertain people or to save someone you love from pain. In other words, one will not compromise. One’s integrity stiffens — though there is a danger of it becoming fossilized. The time when I could falsify with ease was a carefree golden age. I did not even have to think about it or make a decision to do so, but simply dissembled out of a positive joy of life. If I want to tell lies nowadays I have to start speaking the truth and wait for them to grow from that, though it makes little difference in the end.

Although it has become difficult to lie, self-interest prevents me telling enough truth to stop me living in the ease and comfort of creating fiction. And yet there is no danger, because I have been protected from speaking the truth. It hasn’t occurred to me to try and tell it, and I haven’t seen the need of it, nor felt it to be necessary. I thought I was already dealing with it, but realize that this is not so at all, because I didn’t know that the truth about myself existed. It seemed that I lived the truth and breathed the truth as far as I myself was concerned.

Even in those years of sham, gullery, and make-believe I was searching for the truth. He who lies does so only because he feels he has more need of the truth than he who keeps silent, or than he who pompously professes to speak only the truth, which is next to saying nothing.

So let me pick up another strand of my raw material, and begin to interweave several threads as I go along.

5

Grandfather Burton hated dogs. He despised people who loved them and even those who showed them kindness. He was blind in one eye, and that was the one he looked at animals with, unless they had hoofs or horns and might be tempted to go for him, in which case he fixed them with the other till he had stared them out and could afford to ignore them.

Dogs were as subservient and slavish as those who called them by name, petted and patted them. Such people were feminine and soft and did not know why they were on earth. They had to become friendly with dogs — as if dogs could ever tell them why or, more likely, inform them that it wasn’t necessary to question why they were on earth. Because of these blind and sweeping prejudices a large section of English humanity was cut off from him, which may have been exactly how he wanted it, though I think he had little opinion about it either way. If he kept dogs it was only because they had their uses, but they got little thanks for it.

He was hard on human nature because it had him in its grip, though it must be said at the same time that he did not totally lack it. In my view there are neither good people nor bad people, no total devils or complete devilesses. It is impossible to give a person the face and soul of reality without first picking away the bad and showing it to whoever is interested. It must be put back later, however, otherwise the created picture will hang lop-sided and at some time crash down into splinters.

Women who were close to Burton disliked and feared him, as did those members of his own family. Yet women unacquainted with his true side — if there was such a thing — were attracted by a certain distance he put between them, and occasionally fell in love across the gap of it, a space which could be well seasoned by his wry and bawdy sense of humour when it wasn’t filled by a dignified and possibly defensive silence.

In his prime and hey-day he was over six feet tall and extremely strong. There was no fat on him and not much muscle either, but he could twist an iron bar and shape steel, so that he might not have been as unfeeling as many people accused him of being. Nevertheless he was irascible and violent, and as rigid with others as he was rigorous with himself.

He was born in 1868, so perhaps this book is in some way a tardy monument to his centenary. What power he possessed came from the strength of his working arms, which enabled him to provide bread and shelter for his family when lack of such meant starvation or the workhouse. He swore that everyone but he was bone-idle, that they were, to use his favourite phrase, ‘as soft as shit’. But while his wife and eight children were said to hate the sight of him he was respected by others as a first-class blacksmith, having won many prizes in Nottinghamshire and neighbouring counties.

There was a showcase of exhibition horseshoes in his kitchen, and I have one on my desk for a talismanic object while I write. Burton was said to have so steady a hand and eye that he could ‘shoe Old Nick’s nag so that all four hoofs would come clattering back out of bloody Hell itself’. Known in the trade as a careful worker, his forge was always neat and tidy. He was a man who had to know exactly where every hammer and plier was, something his own father might have instilled into him as a youth but which continually made tension when he applied such a rule to his house.

Burton governed the roost of a five-roomed cottage which was made up of a large communal kitchen, a parlour, and three bedrooms upstairs — one for the parents which contained an old four-poster curtain-drawn bed, one for the three sons, and one for the five girls, though it was rare for all the children to be at home together after they were grown up.

Outside there was a lot of ground for such a small house, with a garden at the back and enough space in front for pigs, chickens, and pigeons to be kept. Burton dug a good plot of vegetables, and every Friday night, after he came home from work on his tall bicycle, he dragged a great iron shit-bucket from the outhouse opposite the kitchen door and carried it to the end of the garden for manure. He had a gun and could shoot well, in spite of one eye being dead.

I took well to the long afternoons at Burton’s house, enjoying the boredom in that it was a time when nobody troubled me. Out of such boredom came enlightenment, for what it was worth, because I’d press my nose to the chicken wire and watch the well-padded white cock with his waving red comb stalking around the compound and spitefully darting his beak at the others. Then he would go among the hens (some of whom were almost as big as he) and peck them cruelly out of the way even when they weren’t bothering him — especially, it seemed, when they were minding their own business. I saw then that Burton was a like gaffer of the roost, who lorded it over his wife and daughters.

My memories have thrived on all else I’ve heard about him, but even his children are getting to be old men and women, and his grandchildren are middle-aged. Such distance might put truth on a pedestal, but truth is a dubious idol when made in the image of people who are either dead or far away. Each incident concerning him has more than one version, and so certain parts of this book are closer to a novel than others. Dealing with actualities, I see truth as riddled with the power of betrayal and broken with uncertainty. In such a dilemma time might be more reliable in that it reveals everything, even that which was never there, so that I end up with a bargain after all. And time also leaves everything behind. It has many uses. It cures a spiritual injury that treacherous truth inflicted, and drips such vital oil into the great machine of circumstance that nothing can be done without it.

But it doesn’t change the opinions of Burton’s children about what sort of a man he was. It is certainly true to say that he loved his children until they began to grow up and show what they were made of. If they revealed traits which came from the gentle subservience of the mother that was all right, but any that cropped up from him were put down with more than necessary harshness.

Burton was a tyrant but, as with all tyrants, the girls at least found ways of deceiving him. If one wanted to go out late in the evening to see a boy-friend she would throw her coat from the back bedroom window, then nip down through the front door as if on her way to the lavatory across the yard, treading quietly so that Burton, already in bed, would hear nothing. It was risky getting back into the house at midnight or after, but one of the other girls would respond to gravel at the window and open the door if it had been locked in the meantime.

When Burton sent one of his daughters to buy fried fish for his supper she didn’t return till eleven o’clock — having spent an hour with her boy-friend. Because she was so late he guessed what she had been up to, and in fact had only sent her out in order to confirm his suspicions. He gave her a good hiding and made sure she didn’t go free at night for a few weeks — though her coat went flying from the back window several times before the ban was lifted. There were some uses, after all, in having a lavatory set apart from the house.

His daughters were ill-treated because he expected them to follow the same pattern he had forced on his wife, and he didn’t know that times were changing. They fared badly because they rebelled, and they rebelled against Burton because the mother had not, and they saw where it had got her. By the time they reached twenty they had had enough of him, and they had enough of him in them not to put up with him a minute longer than they had to.

When Ivy came home one night at half past eleven Burton berated her for being the last in. ‘Well,’ she shouted back, ‘somebody’s got to be last in, ain’t they?’ He gave her a vicious clout across the face and didn’t speak to her for five years. The only recognition of her existence was that he would sometimes spit in her direction. She was thirty years old at the time.

Burton worked at Wollaton Pit after the Great War and occasionally at the end of the day he would send word to his wife, by one of the colliers who passed Engine Town on his way home, that he would be working till three in the morning. Mary-Ann therefore made up some food and got one of the girls to take it. Whoever this job fell to would walk the two miles along lonely Wollaton Road and, afraid of being jumped on from the dark, she would carry a bag of pepper to throw in the face of any man who might try to molest her. When she got to the pit Burton looked at her with surprise and irritation. ‘What the bloody hell are you doing here?’

‘I’ve brought you some supper.’

He gave a grunt and said: ‘You needn’t have bothered.’

And she walked back with his sour greeting rankling so much that she didn’t think once about the paper bag clutched in her hand. When she did, while opening the gate latch at home, it was only to wonder why she hadn’t thrown it in his face for talking to her like that.

His three sons, who also became qualified farriers, did no better, in that Burton demanded the same standards from them that he had lived by himself, though setting them for his sons was one way of not having to follow them as thoroughly as others were expected to, since they were doing it for him. They had to saw logs on the horse by the pigsty and chop them into sticks, fetch buckets of water with a yoke from the well up the slope behind the garden 300 yards away, as well as feed the pigs and clean out the sty. They didn’t take well to this, though the only form of rebellion open to them was a stubborn idleness when orders fell too thick and fast.

On Sunday morning the brass candlesticks and ornaments were lifted from the fireplace shelf and, together with the horseshoes that were unhooked from inside the cabinet, spread over the table to be polished by Burton’s two daughters still with the family. Cleaning the brasses and the table ‘silver’ was made into a ritual because it had to be done, and because nobody liked doing it. Ritual was easier than just plain work, and kept the house to a good standard for the family as well as Burton, though they would have felt happier doing it had he been less tyrannical.

All visible metal had to shine and look presentable for a blacksmith, to be appeased by polish and work. Whenever his married daughters visited the house he would not let them help in this, and neither could the men do it. It was a job solely for the unmarried girls.

Burton believed that, since he worked, everybody should work. He was the one who set me to labouring as a child, whereas my own father had not been able to succeed in it. It offended the sight of Burton’s good eye to see even a child idle, so that from being a spectator of his own tasks in the garden I was soon hauling a barrow, weeding, digging, getting in coal, chopping wood, cleaning out pigeon coops, or darting down the lane on errands.

Work was a virtue, the only one. Even the straight way he stood when at rest proclaimed it. And while the better half of me agreed with him it must have been the other side that led me to become a writer.

6

Rather than write the truth I will work mindlessly in the garden or slump into a fit of sloth that lasts for days, or flee from it in the car as fast as the twisting lanes will allow.

And coming back to it, as one must, I will versify, falsify, elaborate, and boast, but be careful not to tell a significant lie in case someone should indicate how near to the truth it is. For lies are as plain as footprints left on a beach still wet from the sucked-out tide. It is difficult to tell lies if one is facing the truth.

The fear that reaching some form of truth will reduce me to silence is an unbearable thought, but it would only shut my organ-box for a time, for after a while even the most stunning truth no longer shines or intimidates because of the familiarity it has meanwhile gained. One then denies it, and looks for it once more.

It is impossible to find. Vacillation is the blood of life. A mind made up is a dead mind. To decide is to act, and to act is to commit an injustice. To search for truth proves how fickle and disloyal one is, and untrustworthy to the earth. One is a member of the elect, in fact, a spiritual gypsy who must search for truth but be careful not to find it.

At the same time one wants to tell the truth in a single sweep of speech or pen, just as one longed of old to give out a big lie that would flatten all others by its weight and precision, a manoeuvre of the subconscious, perhaps, that might have landed one at the threshold of truth but never did.

The Big Lie consists of a million petty lies, and the Big Truth is made up of countless insignificant truths. All rules coalesce and ring true, and so are not to be trusted. Or maybe the Fat Complete Truth is merely a single unit of these myriad Big Truths, enlarged either by false brooding or grandiose boasting. The Big Lie can also be made out of innumerable small truths, and the most minute truth can grow from a million great lies.

There is no set law of moral divination, no comfort to be offered. Truth and lies do not exist. One may get nearer to truth by approaching it as if there were no such thing, while taking care not to get too close and therefore be dazzled by it. The impossible task is to remove the important coal-burning Truth from the million Big Truths that are so insignificant they are not worth considering. It is a question of continuing a fruitless search that might lead around regions of madness, or staying in the comfort of half-truths with which one has managed well enough so far. Defeat is the only final truth one ever gets, though a search for truth promises the most valuable defeat because it has most to teach.

Since everything is the truth, it becomes a matter of selection, and therefore distortion which, though it might be harmonious, gets to the antithesis of truth. But if there is no such thing as truth, one still has to search for it so as to prove it, and to know that one only hunts what does not exist, otherwise there would be no point in pursuing it. That which is plain before one’s eyes needs no pursuing.

So it is tempting to believe that truth is fiction, yet fiction has nothing to do with the sort of truth I have in mind, since fiction is concerned with disguising the truth to such an extent that it becomes art, and is unrecognizable as the truth because it is even more powerful than the truth, depicting truth as something which it is not.

A frequently employed word soon loses its significance and the word Truth does so more easily than most. The reality of truth, however, retains its meaning, though it is difficult to isolate and define such an illusive reality.

There are as many truths on earth as there are individuals, and there are as many truths in each individual as there are individuals on earth.

7

One of Burton’s grown-up sons who went with him as a blacksmith down the pit would receive an occasional hard thump if he seemed to be slacking on the job, or if some piece of work wasn’t up to a good fit or a high polish.

Burton had no time for the waywardness or irresponsibility of youth, and made it appear, with much success, as if he had never had any himself. Maybe he was jealous of it, or bitter about the fact that he had already lost it.

Memory was not a function to which he gave free play, and so it seemed as if he had none, either for good things or bad. He never mentioned his parents or talked about the ‘good old days’. Like sweat, speech was valuable. The pride of such illiterates often led them to ignore the meaning of what was said, not only between boss and man but between equals. Burton would say something irrelevant in response to a statement, or merely nod, so as to let whoever made it know that he may or may not have taken it in, and that if by any chance he had he would understand it at his leisure. There would be time enough then to decide whether or not to reply. It was formal, high-minded, and mean.

Being literate myself, though connected to several who were not by close and recent ties (my father was never able to read or write), causes me to wonder what mark it has left in me, even if reduced by now to an idiosyncratic quirk which someone on the same intellectual level might see as conceit or selfishness.

To move into the rich kingdoms of literacy in one generation is more complicated than I could have thought when first beginning to read and write. What I consider to be my slowness of perception is perhaps an unconscious though deliberate ploy to retain some of the defensive and often advantageous traits of my antecedents. If some meaningful remark is made, either good for me or otherwise, I do not at the moment I should get the full gist of it. A few minutes might go by before, having chewed it over like an Eskimo his piece of fat in the snow, I accept its full importance and decide to work up a suitable reply.

It would seem true of a man like Burton that literacy might not be a great advance. To gain such a thing he would not be prepared to pay the price of giving up a certain central feeling of quality and aloneness. To recover from pneumonia after refusing an inoculation that promised to save you from what was said to be certain death might feel like victory indeed. And to live all one’s life without being able to read or write in a world that shouted how damned you were for not having these gifts must have given one an untouchable sensation of great value.

At the same time Burton, being a qualified and talented blacksmith, realized his lack of education. Because of it he never felt able to join a society or a union, or any other organization. He knew that something was missing and yet, because of his obdurate character, there was nothing he could do about it.

To learn reading and writing would mean relying on memory instead of instinct and second nature, and perhaps there were things in Burton’s life that he did not want memory to get at, and one of them could have been his youth, which might have led him back to childhood. And what he would have found there none of us could say.

Perhaps he really had forgotten his younger days by the time he reached forty. He felt older to his sons than their friends’ fathers looked, though he was the same age. But he was less approachable in a human and fatherly manner, and if Burton did remember his youth it was only so that he could put the experience of it to such good use that his children stood little chance of enjoying their own in his presence.

Everyone agreed that his cunning was formidable. He was once walking into town with a man who was said to be deaf, though Burton didn’t believe it. When he let a half-crown slip from his pocket the man turned abruptly at the noise. Burton picked it up, put it back, and went on without mentioning it.

But cunning never goes by itself. There is always cruelty wrapped up in it somewhere. Often after work and as a way of earning extra money Burton would go to Wollaton Park to ring bulls and pigs, jobs which few could do unless they had prodigious strength. Yet even strong men shunned such work because it was regarded as one of the cruellest trades, though Burton was said not to mind it because he took delight in being cruel.

Since he never talked about his own father no one had an inkling of what he’d been like. He died before my mother was born, so she couldn’t tell anything. Perhaps he was more humane than Burton, who might have modelled himself on one of his grandfathers. But if this was so I shall never know who it was, for if your spade tries to dig too deep it only swings freely in the air so that both Time and Truth draw back.

When Burton wasn’t present his sons and daughters always referred to him by his surname, never ‘Father’ or ‘Ernest’—as if he were a fierce stranger who had been put in charge of them by some malevolent authority. It is possible that he did not model himself on anyone in particular, but simply emerged from the knotted roots of his past, and was finished off by his own self-centred inviolable opinion of himself, as in any person of strength, or of certain hidden weaknesses.

Unlike many men of the present century he had never been in the army. He abominated such an institution and thought that anyone who joined or allowed himself to be ensnared into it was even lower than a dog. He did not feel threatened by foreign power or alien system, and he would not have protected any government which felt itself in danger or which told him that he was in danger. He owned no property and lived by his labour and skill, so saw little connection between the government and the people. When his eldest son Oliver enlisted during the Great War he only forgave him because he was killed, for even Burton was not so hard of soul that he could hate the dead.

Until quite late in life he never worked for a boss, having been trained as a blacksmith by his father, so that he inherited the forge at Lenton. This was situated on a lane running beside the railway from Derby Road to Old Church Street. I remember passing it as a child, by which time Burton had given it up for lack of customers and gone to work at Wollaton Pit. Though the motor-car came in during his lifetime I never heard him complain that it had ruined his trade.

I walked by the forge with my sister when we were children, on one of our long treks to the shores of the Trent in summer. The locked-up building seemed no more than a shed and looked as if it would soon fall down, though someone had put a strong lock on the rotten door to make sure no vandals went in and helped it to collapse over them.

8

When my nine-year-old son becomes ill, or hurts himself in any way, I am pitched into a turmoil of mental agony. I am the one who put him to whatever pain he might suffer during his time on earth. To cause someone to be born is to send them alone into the dark. Thus the most excruciating guilt comes with having given life to a child. The remorse of treachery, or the biting pain of having been betrayed, is nothing compared to this. A child can claim to have been betrayed by the biological forces of evolution if someone is cruel to him. The facts of life are no excuse for the infliction of injury or insult.

These thoughts are hard to bear, yet every truth begets its opposite. He is not my son, I tell myself. As he grows older he is my friend and pupil. Beside the terrible fact that I presented him with the certainty of death is the wonderful and undeniable truth that I caused him to have life. I have given him everything, just as I received everything, though even by making these self-evident remarks I seem to be robbing him of the richness of his existence. Whatever I do for him, he owes me nothing.

At the moment he trusts me as no one else can. The better world I hope to see on earth will not come in time to make his life secure. It is no secret that what I would like for him is only what I desire for myself. I want him to inherit paradise, just as I would like all others to inhabit it. Since this is impossible, the next best thing is to hope that he will strive as I do to create it for everybody, to construct it in himself as an example for others. That is the only way open, and since I often hesitate to touch it, how can I hope that he will do better?

Why is it that any giving of the truth turns my guts to coal and pitch? It paints a patch on my lung, blows my heart to pieces. I hate the truth. I do not feel righteous or happy when I think of searching for it. Whatever scraps I drag out, however many gems I get to, only makes me feel more defeated than when, paddling along in neither truth nor falsehood, I at least lived in the easy half-light of enjoyment.

It leads me to question whether or not truth is my enemy, who beckons now and again but only to strike when I go towards him and get too close. Is it necessary to wallow in oblivion if one wants to keep even that little shred of happiness which one occasionally seems content with?

Don’t touch the truth. Don’t strive for it. Let it fester helplessly at the dim limits of the consciousness. The truth ruins itself if it is left alone. It becomes harmless. It eats itself to death if you don’t search for it. Even lies vanish, I tell myself, knowing that they do not.

It is an admission of defeat to turn towards the lit-up city of great truth and hope for anything beneficial from it. If up to now one has been formed by the continual accretion of slapdash falsehood and social indoctrination that has been built upon the inherited factors of oneself, what hope is there of crawling out from it at this late hour?

9

At the end of the lane on which Burton’s forge once stood was a field-gun from the horse-artillery, set on a concrete exhibition platform beyond some railings and surrounded by beds of flowers. This satanic memo from the Great War that had finished twenty years before was placed in front of some alms-houses erected for the widows of heroes whom the world was fit for, but who perished in the war to end wars. It was the badge of what had warped the women’s lives, and they could dwell on that machine from their bedroom or parlour windows, and maybe reflect that it was a similar gun on the German side that had blown up their husbands.

Artillery was the most efficient killer of the Great War, according to the mad and fascinating statistics of the official histories. While forty per cent of the casualties were caused by bullets, sixty per cent of the men were killed or mangled by shellfire. That gun I stared at as a child turned the air raw, and I could never resist pressing my face against the cold railings and gazing for a long time at its grisly and intricate mechanisms.

But I did not see a woman looking from a window of the building itself, nor going into any of the doors. The place always seemed decorously deserted. On Armistice Day the gun would be surrounded by wreaths of Flanders poppies made by the crippled in their factories and workshops. I believe that during the Second World War the gun was hauled off for scrap, or taken away in case German parachutists should drop from the sky and start to use it on the shabby landscape round about.

Burton’s daughter Edith married a gunner in the Great War, and he was killed after leaving her with one child. But she didn’t live at the almshouses because she then married another gunner who unfortunately survived the war — because no man could have been worse to her. The savagery that he brought home from the mud of the Ypres Salient (but which no doubt had been fed on much that was there before) was execrated even by Burton, who was respectable and civilized by comparison.

The man’s name was also Ernest, but he was known to everyone as ‘Blonk’, a mysterious label put on to him by his childhood friends from Radford Woodhouse, which lasted him till the day of his death. He was a demon with boots and fists, and he used both on his wife, together with the blackest language his brain could muster. He worked alternately as a bricklayer’s labourer and a coalminer, changing jobs as the mood took him and indulging his passion for playing football whenever a spell of unemployment came between. The expression of his face was tough and cunning, and he had a head of springy and grizzled hair, his whole bearing an image of impacted strength. When Burton told Edith, just before she married Blonk, that he was no good and would be sure to lead her a dance, she naturally thought he was trying to keep her under his thumb as he had always done, and so ignored his warning.

Wayward Edith had already been a few years in service, and wouldn’t listen to her father. In fact the three of Burton’s girls who married young were wayward, and were not made so entirely by his bullying. It is said that such girls do not marry well — whatever that may mean. They are never satisfied, being too mettlesome either to get a good husband, or to be content with a bad one. Perhaps they deserved neither, and should not have married at all. They did because many men found that flighty trio of blacksmith’s daughters attractive, and sooner or later they succumbed to wedlock in order to get out of Burton’s clutches.

A hard time was had by husbands and wives alike, some of it due to the era they lived in, though all three women are now alive, while their husbands are dead. Yet Edith, who was one of the best, was said to have got the worst.

Burton’s inevitable confrontation with Blonk ended in Edith and her eight children being more or less cut off from her parents. It was a ban that Burton put on the husband more than his daughter, for whenever better-off members of the family from Leeds or St Neots heard of her plight and brought clothes for the children, he always saw that she got them.

And he did occasionally have a kind word when he met her children in the fields around Engine Town. His wife would never turn them empty-handed from the door, though they were often afraid to go there for fear of meeting Burton, who could be fiercesomely harsh if he was in a bad mood.

Edith was his favourite daughter, being the most high-spirited and independent in getting away from him sooner than any of the others. She was tall, with reddish hair and blue eyes, and a well-formed body. Throughout my childhood she had a great knack of organizing food for her children, and whenever I was near her house at mealtimes, which was often, there was always the chance of getting some. She never complained at seeing me queue up with the rest, though there was little enough to go round. Why she appeared more profoundly connected to me than anyone else in my family I don’t know, but when I was some weeks old a malfunctioning of the heart got me in its grip which turned my face and body blue so that I appeared to be at the point of death. My mother was also ill, and March did not go out like a lamb that year, because snow was drifting down and lay thick everywhere. Edith wrapped me in a shawl, put on her coat, and set off with me across the quarter-mile stretch of the park to the doctor’s place beyond. She told me a long time afterwards that there was no knowing whether I would be dead or alive when the shawl was opened in his surgery.

A few years later she and my mother got hold of tickets for an organ recital at the Albert Hall in Nottingham. They took me with them, saying we were going to hear some thunder and lightning. We stayed half an hour at the concert, and then withdrew from my first experience of listening to Bach.

10

Truth menaces the soul, and to turn to it for illumination will only increase its monolithic power. Having done long enough without it, and not lived totally in the night of my own falsehoods, I don’t need help from it now. Nor does it crave any assistance from me. The truth ignores those who do not recognize defeat. It can only help those who are able to do without it — though they may still yearn for its support to keep them on the switchback motorway through life.

Truth is the novelist’s enemy. If I steer a positive course towards it I forfeit the greater use of inspiration. To decide firmly for one or the other is to make the best of a bad job, but a writer who seeks truth betrays his talent, abandoning the divine for a mundane quality that deadens intuitive power, and ruins his conjuring tricks. He accepts morality but relinquishes his soul. Everything has its price.

Yet one occasionally employs truth in order to cement and solidify chaotic constructions. Everything has its uses, also. Without some concept of truth one would be unable to say yes or no, and it is necessary to say yes or no in order to make decisions, without which power one cannot be free. But to speak the truth so as to say everything in a single sentence is an impossibility.

If God manifested Himself, claiming to be the Truth, He would be quickly disowned. God is life, perhaps, but not the Truth. As soon as one claims to speak the truth one becomes a politician, or a historian, or a bully, or a bore, or all put together — but certainly not a novelist. Refusing to speak the truth (being unable to do so), one is thrown back on the imagination, on uncertainty and exploration. One becomes picturesque in spirit, and not to be relied upon, and condemned to die a slow life.

The wish to create a single sentence of universal wisdom or truth is laudable, but such an achievement, even if it were possible, would leave one heartless and without blood, a dry skin of emptiness, all but dead and frozen in the mind, while at the same time seeming to be most alive at having spoken what one imagined to be the truth.

There are those who have in their hearts a simple truth, some political mountain or emotional fact, but it is nearly always another’s truth which they try and live by, or several truths drawn together into a few drab maxims of equal falsehood which they try to make everybody else believe in. If it were their own truth they would not be so happy, or so totally dedicated. They who live by the word shall perish by the word. Life exposes you to death, but Truth rots the spirit.

An artist cannot formulate the one truth, any more than he can live by one truth. The only truth he can cling to is that there are no lies. Every sentence that comes to him is the truth, no matter how weird or contradictory, how sacred or antithetical to all human values, or even how true it appears to be. One can live without believing in anything, but only so as to respect everything.

This is a single truth out of millions. A writer who finds it necessary to construct some edifice around himself can only rely on inspired natural selection, sorting out those innumerable truths that he cannot otherwise control.

One drills deep into the mind in search of some truth with which to intensify life, driving down through soil and subsequent rock so that right from the start hard resistance flies to the drill as if to pulverize its power and break it to pieces. One must go where the rock is hardest, cut into it with the utmost power of concentrated thought and recollection. If the drill doesn’t break, one isn’t even trying.

Truth does not come from wanting it. And as a phantom it melts away when I try to take hold. Sometimes it comes unasked if I think on nothing. At the same time there are truths about myself that might never be revealed in this or any other way, and it is necessary to realize that truth can also play one false by concealing secrets never to be obtained by leaving truth alone.

All this is to say that I do not know, and by admitting it I build up more confidence in myself and feel further advanced by time and spirit than if I definitely and positively swore by all the fixed stars that I knew, and put forth an opinion that I defied anyone to gainsay.

The first step in the search for truth is not to know, to accept the dilemma of uncertainty rather than bite the sour truth of polluted bread.

11

Burton voted from time to time at General Elections. In the 1890s he ‘supported’ the successful Liberal candidate for the West Nottingham constituency, a Mr J. Yoxall, who stood on a platform of House of Lords reform, rural education, and industrial insurance. Later in life Burton voted Labour. Much to his chagrin his wife Mary-Ann voted Conservative and they had many loud arguments about it, though this was one issue over which he couldn’t finally have his own way, no matter how jeeringly he went on, which was probably why Mary-Ann persisted in it.

He did not believe that politics could have much effect on his existence. It was as if he had been born before the age of politics, knowing in his deeper self that they could alter nothing, though somewhere wanting to believe that they could. While there were horses in the world, used as the prime force of haulage, he was his own master, and no system could change that. At least it did not for most of his life.

He was never patriotic, and seeing me once with a Union Jack flag that had been given out at school for some jubilee or other, he told me sharply to ‘hurl that bloody thing away’. He was too proud and sure of himself, too skilled in his work to get hooked by any concept of job-lot nationalism. You were soft in the head and the backbone if you were for queen and country, or for king and country. To believe in that sort of thing was a sure form of bum-sucking. You’d got no guts. You were frightened of the dark. As a man you had your work and your family — though you may well like one and not the other. But the country you lived in, in the form of its government, was always threatening both with destruction, so he did not see how anyone could be wet-eyed about it.

Being a man with few friends, everybody in the district knew him. It wasn’t as if they were afraid of him, or distrusted him exactly, but he was recognized as the smith, the man apart, a person with secrets they could never share. It was as if he had come to the country hundreds of years ago, and then forgotten he had done so, and where it was he had come from, but that look in his eyes as he gazed at the woods in the distance was as empty and far-seeing as if some part of him did after all remember that he had undergone a tremendous and difficult migration. He worked much and talked little, so perhaps that accounted for him having more aquaintances than friends.

The only foreigners he knew were a couple of Belgian refugees billeted on them during the Great War, and his one observation was that they were a ‘rum pair’—though he never said as much to their faces. His wife Mary-Ann remarked that they had to have chocolate to drink instead of tea, which seemed extremely strange to her.

Burton had no belief in God. And after death it was the end, nothing, a disaster you went to sleep under before it hit you, if you were lucky. Nevertheless, his children were packed off to Sunday School for nearly ten years of their lives, the result of which was a glass-fronted case of books in the parlour recess, sober volumes they had brought home as prizes, and the first such collection I’d seen in a private house. From time to time Mary-Ann would give me one to take home and keep.

Burton only bundled the kids off to bible class so as to get the house clear and make free with his wife without too many inquisitive ears wondering what they were up to and what those noises were. If the Sunday Schools of England in all their Godly work did not produce a nation of Christians they at least helped, when living-space was intolerably cramped, to keep a bit of private love-life on the go. One wonders if those sanctimonious men and women really knew what they were up to, or whether they didn’t just look upon Sunday School teaching as a sure way of keeping themselves out of mischief.

Even in their sixties Burton and Mary-Ann, when I used to stay here, went upstairs on Sunday afternoon ‘for a bit of a sleep’ as they put it Burton tried to get me off to Sunday School with the Ollington children who lived in a cottage on the edge of Robins Wood, across the Cherry Orchard, but I came out with the statement that I did not believe in God, a straight answer which amused him so much that he winked at Mary-Ann, laughed loudly, and didn’t mention it again.

He either recognized me in him, or gave in to the unknown part of me stemming from my father, whom he implacably disliked — though he never said so. Rather than face the truth he preferred to keep silent, and thereby enrich himself in the only way possible.

12

To define the hidden truth is to change life for the better. One becomes more aware and more alive when it is no longer concealed, and a truth that reveals other hidden truths expands the limits of consciousness in such a way that it would seem one was hardly born before that first truth became apparent.

The greatest truth of all would be to control the visionary light that flares in the mind for a split second at the point of dying, but which is put out for ever by death — and so is denied to us. I ask too much. Burton, who was strong in other things, was unfortunate enough not to realize that such questions existed. In one sense he was too strong to think they were necessary. Where illiterates ignore many things, literates question them so as to bask in the comfort of ignorance when they get no answer.

To want truth is the beginning of defeat. To distrust truth is the first step to paradise. Life ends where truth begins. The search for truth is a momentary aberration that will not last, though a person should not refuse any experience that clamours to mind, for it may be a lock on the canal of life, carrying him to a higher level of consciousness, or at least suggesting it to him.

Paradise, desired by everyone, is a place where neither truth nor lies exist, and where all is provided. But paradise can never be real, though the desire for it is. The truth this leads to is unimportant in that sense. But I am different from Burton, able to believe that an answer of yes or no to such a question may produce the first truth that will open the door to this search, or make me so despair of it that I will give up and go on in the darkness as before. People who cannot make decisions are in the hands of destiny. Those who do not ask questions are in their own hands.

Life, like art, is the only way of approaching the truth. An artist can never say that art is not enough, though he may often be tempted to. If one were not tempted one would have to admit that the breath of truth had passed one by, in which case one would not even reach that zone of chaos in which everything might be understood.

When I see a possibility of happiness coming to me I will not help to make it real, out of a fear that if I succeed I shall no longer have the moral stamina and rectitude to know that I am incapable of speaking the truth.

Yet if I accepted the happiness that waits for me it would then cease to be the happiness I now imagine it would be, and I would still be armed and plagued with the necessity of searching for the truth.

One must continually strive for happiness, because the unhappiness that comes with it will always be more fruitful than the unhappiness of non-endeavour one left behind. Paradise is a long way off.

I try to get at the truth, as if to do so may bring a certain amount of happiness. At the same time I find myself utterly distrusting it. Sooner or later one must make up one’s mind.

13

I was treated well by Burton because, apart from being able and willing to labour physically, I also bothered myself industriously with books and writing paper. I sat on a chair in the kitchen, by the light of an oil lamp shining from a hook above the table, reading or drawing maps, and I know that he looked at me strongly now and again because he had not seen the like of it before. Sometimes he passed the newspaper and asked me to recite the latest news from Abyssinia, where ‘that swine Mussolini was knocking people about’.

When I walked in on Sunday afternoon after playing in the garden or along the lane outside, Mary-Ann and Emily would already be laying the tea-table and waiting for that peculiar authoritative stamp of Burton as he came downstairs in his stockinged feet.

If he saw the cat in front of the fire he would kick it clear — though it was often alert and leapt out of sight before he came into the room. If the dog stayed there, being near enough human to hope for better things, he would usually move that away also. But if he was in an affectionate mood he would grip the dog around its long mouth and hold the jaws fast, an action which, as well as being painful, induced in the poor animal a feeling of claustrophobia and panic, so that it struggled to get free, much to Burton’s delight and the loud protests of his wife and daughters. It whined and wriggled until he let it go with as friendly a pat as he could muster under the thwarting circumstances, a gesture which was the nearest I saw him get to an expression of guilt.

And so he came in for his tea, having taken care to re-establish his reputation in front of the family so that normal life could be resumed once more. There would be salmon and cucumber and jam-pasty to eat, a combined smell of fish and vinegar and new-baked dough which was enough to make anyone’s mouth water. But he never had much of it, not being a big eater, in spite of his work. He would pull on his boots and go into the yard or garden to busy himself for an hour before walking off for an evening bout at some pub or other.

He lived close to Nottingham, a lifetime spent within a few miles of the Goose Fair and Market Place. Born and bred, married and buried at Lenton, he was to live ten years at Bridge Yard, and later for many more at a block of three cottages on Lord Middleton’s land that were shown by the Ordnance Survey maps of the late nineteenth century as ‘Old Engine Houses’, though they were always known locally as Engine Town. Demolished in 1939, a few months after water-taps and electricity had been put in, they made way for the spread of bungalows from Nottingham.

The cottages were connected by a motorable high-hedged sunken lane to Radford Woodhouse — a compact settlement of three streets — beyond which one went by paved road to the city. But to other localities there were only tracks across the fields. To reach Aspley or Basford one went up ‘Colliers’ Pad’, a leafy and narrow bridle-path that ran by an open space of undulating scrubland known as the Cherry Orchard, a way that was often used by miners going home from Radford or Wollaton Pits.

Burton never thought of himself as an urban man, even when his house was on the actual city limits and he could find himself in Nottingham — so to speak — simply by walking to the end of the yard. There were still many fields to cross before coming to the packed houses of Old Radford and the first lively outlying pubs of the city. He watched them from behind the fence, as if daring them to come up and get him. He couldn’t be doing nothing for long, however, and before going back to what work there was he ceased his gazing and suddenly, to spite the lane a few yards away as well as shock it, he gobbed into the middle, and then turned his back on it. This gesture was characteristic, a spit at the bars of the fire to hear it sizzle, or down into the lane to pay it back for never moving. The fire was unbeatable as far as his saliva was concerned, but the lane couldn’t answer back. There was no contempt in his spitting. It was just an eternal testing of the forces of nature to make sure they were always as he expected them to be. Satisfied that they were, he could then go back to his work.

On Saturday night he donned his best suit. In fact he had two, which seemed an unparalleled luxury compared to the state of my own father at the time. There was a black one and a brown one — with boots to match each, of the sort that laced high and covered the ankles. Their good-quality leather glistened from the shine I had just given them as, in the chosen pair, he made his way down the dry or muddy lane, according to season, and on under the long tunnel-like railway bridge whose darkness at six o’clock on gloomy winter mornings had so much frightened my mother on her way to the lace factory in Nottingham where she worked from the age of fourteen.

Burton would stop at the beer-off in Radford Woodhouse for his first pint, then go on by the disused lime kilns up to Wollaton Road. His son Oswald lived in a cottage near the junction, and he would call in to see if everything was all right, then continue the two-mile walk into Nottingham. In his own world he was without fear, and he despised anyone who was not the same, though he would occasionally condescend to talk to them for reasons of work or business. Those who were similar in stature might be lucky to get a passing nod from time to time, for he was exceedingly conscious of his height, and held himself accordingly.

As a child I once caught a glimpse of him at a saloon bar when someone going in opened the pub door. Burton was standing up, talking to other men, the upper half of his tankard arm held well into his side, the beer pot straight at his mouth when he drank, though the stance and picture was by no means a stiff one. Then I dodged out of sight in case he should see me.

At Sunday dinner a quart bottle would be set on the table, which only he was allowed to drink. If his grown-up sons wanted to take beer at the same meal they had to go and buy a pint of their own, though they could only bring a glass to the table, never the actual bottle. If they did there would be ructions which would end in them getting knocked down if they didn’t take it away.

He’d send me out on Sunday morning to the Woodhouse for his ale, and I remember the smell of it as the handsome but hurried young woman at the beer-off poured it into the white enamel funnel she held over the bottle. He once rewarded me with a glass when I got back, though I should have known there was some trick in it, for he was delighted when I staggered away from the meal half drunk. On another occasion he tempted me to a pinch of snuff, which set me sneezing around the house and yard for hours. I was one of the few who appreciated his sense of humour, for he was universally known among his family as a ‘rotten old swine’, mostly because all his actions added up to the fact that he liked making people dance to his tune.

14

Vindictive parasitic thorn-bushes tangle with free-growing evergreens along two sides of the garden. Physical work relieves the pressure. I still occasionally take a leaf out of Burton’s book.

Using a short thin-bladed Swedish handsaw to cut through the trunks close to the soil I then (wearing gloves) grip each spiked creeper in turn and pull with all my strength so that its dozen long tentacles slowly ungrasp from the bushes and trees round about. I spend much of the day at this, making a huge pyre of disentangled briars ready for burning in the morning.

The creepers are no longer strangling the veins and sinews of the bushes, so the greenery will grow more resplendently when spring fully comes. In this work I had no difficulty knowing that the brambles had to be separated from the bushes, and that the bushes were the only kind of truth I wanted to see.

Yet the creepers also had an existence. They choked and fed off the trees, and their small triangular thorns fetched blood when they scraped my wrist or ran in through a hole in the glove. They too have a tenacious life that has to be dragged out, but because most of the roots are left they will grow and spread everywhere again. The truth of the trees and bushes would not be complete without them.

Such reality cannot be perceived without struggle or blood being spilled. The heart must be bruised before truth comes out. How else can one find it? When the long thorn-covered tendrils were tugged from the bushes, leaves flew off and twigs snapped. If truth is to have any significance it can only be as a blood-brother.

Yet when this quest for truth begins to be answered, and these verities are made known after effort and illumination, I give in to the temptation to say they are lies, and find an excuse to disown them.

They create too much uncertainty, telling me they are not the truth because there are so many million truths, and that my judgement may have been at fault in picking the wrong ones. Every man has to make his own choices, not wait on God to do it. And if I think I have selected wrongly, the truths thus isolated must be lies. All one can believe in is the falsity of truth, and start again.

But fake truth carries the sheen of hope and optimism — like a counterfeit light before the dawn out of which the real day is bound to grow. A sham truth brings exhilaration, because even though I have decided that it is not the real truth, and have discarded it, at least I can persuade myself that I am getting closer to acceptable veracity.

The first failure is always the surest sign that I will find what I want, I tell myself, swallowing the light so as not to vomit. In my lit-up state I curse the truth I was so ardently seeking before the blaze of its falsity struck me, before I was lured from the real path that was not solid enough to support the truth but where I was secure in the right of my own heart. Truth is a machine that turns the heart into a computer on which anyone can play a tune.

This halfway incandescence of the spirit is a safeguard. It can only be my downfall if I go beyond it. Yet if I do outdistance it I must keep possession of my own live backbone, because as a writer it is my vocation, for the benefit of myself and others, to bypass this self-evident falsity of truth and find out what exactitudes might exist in the furthest wilderness.

The greatest intoxication comes when I realize that there is no downfall. Such a possibility does not exist. I never go down. I do not fall. I can die, shrivel up, perish, rave in anguish at the soil and the sky. But I do not fall. This is so evident a truth that I accept it and know it to be true without any conditions whatsoever. It provides a sense of power and confidence, as well as a desperate strength to go on in face of all disappointments and disasters.

An artist who sees that the falsity of truth is nothing better than a trap must sooner or later decide what it is he wants. If truth is not everything to him, it must be nothing, but if truth is nothing, then what is fit to take its place?

15

Burton was to regret the hard times he’d given Oliver, his eldest son.

As a youth, Oliver was led the fiercest dance of all, ‘got kicked from pillar to post’ because he had the misfortune to be Burton’s firstborn and prime competitor. After one terrible bout he walked out and took a job as a blacksmith at Browns’ Sawmills near Wollaton, and none of the family knew where he slept, for he had no money to get lodgings. His mother managed to send some dinner every day by one of his sisters — each time with a message imploring him to come home and make it up with his father. Burton had already grudgingly agreed to it, because if there was one thing worse than having an argumentative son in the house, it was having him away from it so that he could no longer be got at.

After a week Oliver relented, preferring to share a bed with his brothers than sleep on the newly seasoned planks in one of the lofts. But he kept his job at the sawmill. A year or so later he started courting, but when his girl-friend came to call for him one day, Burton, in his forty-seventh year, took a fancy to her. She appears to have fallen for him, being a loose and saucy Radford tart, and the iron peace of the family was shattered. Burton went off with her for a few days to some place in Derbyshire. Oliver, who had been in love with the girl and was now in despair at everyone’s perfidy, enlisted with the army as a blacksmith, for the Great War had begun.

So at forty-eight years of age Burton received news of his eldest son, and accounts differ as to how it came. One says that a white-faced twelve-year-old daughter went to the forge with the black tidings. How did he take it? He was shoeing a horse and, stunned by her own emptiness after the words of the telegram, she was afraid to interrupt his work, imagining it was more important to them and the world than what she had been fetched out of school to tell.

Her mother was at home, crying one minute, stunned and silent the next, clinging to the flickering light of disbelief whenever she had the strength — while blinds at the house had already been drawn.

Burton had seen her, and wondered why she was out of school, for he had insisted that none of his children should miss a minute of it. She couldn’t tell whether he scowled especially at her, or whether he was niggled by the horse unable to hold still, an animal that could sense before any of them the awful news in the air.

He hammered in the last four nails of the shoe, and even then she did not dare shout what she had come to tell, because three or four other people were standing around. She had thought on her way there to go up and whisper it, but was more afraid of that than doing it any other way. When the horse was pushed unwillingly backwards between the cart-shafts she called out: ‘Oliver’s dead, our dad.’

‘What did you say?’

He stopped in picking up his tools, but heard the first time, and his question was only a means of keeping himself steady, and the preparation for him to stand bolt-still for a few seconds in the silence created by the information among the men waiting around, and for him to say in a sharp voice that astonished them all, and made them realize how terrible the by now not unusual news would be: ‘I bloody well knew it!’

Oliver had not been killed at the Battle of the Aisne, or in the senseless slaughter at Loos, but on a moor in Norfolk. Some of his boisterous soldier-mates had, by way of a joke, fed rum to a string of mules he was to lead across the moor at dusk. Enlivened too much, they kicked him to death, and he wasn’t found till the middle of the following day.

Another account, and probably the right one, says that he and his pals were taking a drink outside a pub near Hungerford in Berkshire. One soldier dared a maid to feed whisky to one of their horses and, being gentle and persuasive, she managed to do it.

The animal ran wild, galloping around the yard with such energy that it seemed they would never get it back to barracks. Oliver tried some tackling, and was killed by a blow at the head from one of its hooves. The horse had to be shot, and the girl who had given it whisky got into great trouble for her mindless action.

All nine of the Burtons were sitting at Sunday dinner, a large joint of meat about to be carved. A knock sounded at the door, and Mary-Ann came back with a telegram saying that Oliver had been killed.

His body, clothed as the soldier he had been, was brought to them in a coffin which lay open for a day in the living-room. The children stood around, though some of the girls dared not at first come down from the bedroom to look. Burton made them, and gave orders that none of them was to cry. ‘Anybody starts blubbering,’ he said, the bones standing out from his unnaturally white face, ‘and I’ll kick ’em from arse-hole to breakfast time. There’ll be no bleddy blawting in this family.’

He made such impossible demands, sometimes only to hear the sound of his own voice, and when they objected he was then committed to getting obedience, even though it might not matter to him whether he was obeyed or not. If only they had let him speak, and not cringed before every word, he might have had something to thank them for.

And they tried not to cry as they surrounded Oliver’s coffin and looked at his twenty-two-year-old face. He was that rare youth who was liked by all his sisters, as well as loved by them. In spite of everything, he was also Burton’s favourite son, and Burton knew he’d never been liked by him, though Burton had thought that one day Oliver would make as good a blacksmith as himself.

There was a strange, chemical smell in the room. Two neighbours had come quietly in, and now the door burst open, and Florrie Voce from next door pushed through them and looked into the coffin. Her round flat Radford face suddenly bunched like a withered apple. ‘What the bloody hell does she want?’ Burton thought, and from her came a loud screaming of agonized distress which filled the whole house as if to split all the walls.

The effect was to tear into the children’s hearts so directly that they too began to weep and wail, as if Oliver was finally getting his rightful dues. Mary-Ann resumed the quiet sobbing that had stricken her ever since hearing the news, and finally Burton himself — as they all witnessed — ‘cried like a baby’, his soul torn out of him at last.

The coffin was taken to Lenton cemetery on a gun-carriage, where Oliver was buried with full military honours to the tune of the Last Post.

When he could bear to talk about it Burton said to Mary-Ann that if he’d been with Oliver on that day, the bloody horse wouldn’t have kicked him to death. He had a few tricks by which to tame it or keep it off. He slept with the vision of saving his son from all harm at its vicious antics, only to wake up in the morning and face the further reality of his death. He was eventually buried next to him in the same churchyard.

As a child I used to go with my aunts to put flowers on Oliver’s grave. They did so every week, even twenty or thirty years after he had died. The last time Burton went out of the house as an old man of nearly eighty, before his first and last illness which brought on death too suddenly for him to beat it or have much say in the matter, was to visit Oliver’s grave and set flowers by it. Unlike his wife and daughters he would never put them in a vase of water, but merely lay them on the grave itself, stay a moment or two, grunt, and walk away.

Burton did not believe in God, but his family, at both times equally grief-stricken, said that God had got back at him twice. Once when He took his son, and again when He put out his eye.

16

I knew an extremely kind person who believed that everything people said to him was the truth, simply because it pained him to hear it. Such nobility of spirit could not exist for long. He suffered too much at hearing so many sad stories. I think everyone must have met him, and spilled their troubles. His sensibility was legendary, but for him it was a permanent wound. His receptive and unselective spirit continually bled. He was a real man, being full of sympathy, and because of this people would not leave him alone, but continually kept at him with their plans and complaints.

By liking others and respecting their suffering, he did not hate himself. He considered it infantile to hate oneself, to analyse motives, take oneself to pieces with dislike and hold one’s nostrils at the smell. It would mean splitting himself in two, and the part which did the splitting had no real interest in it except self-hatred which, like self-love, is a flame that shrivels you up.

He was tempted, however, to let that other part of himself take him to pieces and tell him the truth. I suspected all the time that he had let it do this to him anyway, and that the experiment had failed. At least he hadn’t got what he expected. But he insisted he had kicked that other self out quite early on, and had no more truck with it. I am one person only, he said, not two. I am myself alone and myself only with me, and no other self can be allowed to come on me at this hour. The more you know, especially about yourself, the sooner you grow old.

So he gave himself up to the benefit of other people who, he felt, were less fortunate than he. But if I had been he, which I am not and never could be, he would have laid barbed-wire around his house, bought a gun and shot them down as they came at his defences with wirecutters and implements for tunnelling. If he had believed in self-preservation he would have filled their ears with his sufferings instead. But he secretly hoped, in his blind pride, to defeat them by endless patience and pity, to go on listening all his life, to bleed them white of the red complaining blood of their speech and change them into ghosts so that he could be free of them at last, and turn himself into a saint.

One morning, just before dawn — he lived alone — he lit the gas to make coffee after spending all night trying to get to sleep — thinking about the numerous years of listening he had done. When the water boiled he turned off the gas and filled the coffee pot. With the usual care he poured a cupful, put in milk, then sugar. He was still listening to the voices, hoping even at this late hour to get something from them.

His friends did not need to be near him any more for him to listen to them speaking their truths. And when they had nothing to say he went on making it up himself, on and on, in their voices, the nonsensical truths they continually talked, and which at last, considering the action he had in mind, were beginning to make sense.

He saw now that the world was full of truth. Everything was the truth. Every word spoken anywhere and everywhere was the truth. He should have been a priest listening to confession in order to find out that the truth was not the truth, that the truth in fact did not exist, no matter how much you worried it, or grieved about it. But it was too late. While the coffee in his cup still steamed, he turned on the taps again and lay down on the floor.

He was a writer, but the more people talked to him, and confessed to him, and complained to him, the less he would write. He felt that every sentence from them took a week off his life, and he was right, for the more he received the stab of their sentences, the more he was driven to take his own life, because he could not think of one sentence to save himself that he had not already heard from somebody else.

17

Burton was working in the blacksmith’s shop at the pit one day when a piece of burning steel flew into his eye. He staggered back and put a hand to the wound. Then he dabbed at it and went on working.

At the end of the shift he walked out as if nothing had happened. He did not go to the doctor, and neither did he claim compensation — which he could have done. He went blind in that eye, and took the piece of steel in it to the grave with him.

He lived many of his days in the thirty years that followed in appalling pain, which almost certainly accounted for much of his harshness and short temper in the latter part of his life, by which time he might otherwise have mellowed a little.

He was no iron man, and felt pain with the same intensity as anybody else. He was also no hero, for if he had been he might have kept a stiff upper lip and been as light-hearted as the rest of his family wanted him to be. Or he would have said nothing unmerciful and allowed them to live as peacefully as they would have liked. But he believed in spreading his suffering, and putting up with it by making others suffer. Whether they liked it or not, they had to share it with him. At the same time they were never allowed to mention the cause of it, in return for which they did not hear it from his own lips either.

He’d sit in a darkened room when he could bear the affliction no longer, a bottle of whisky at his side, and even when he was over seventy I remember being told not to go into the parlour because he wanted to be by himself.

His family said he was not capable of love, that he had never loved anyone and never would, though to me he seemed tender to his wife, and calm enough when I knew him and they were elderly. Going out together he made Mary-Ann walk some paces behind, and this caused much comment, though he never altered in his habit. At the same time he could not live without her — or let her out of his sight. When she went on a week’s visit to her family at St Neots he followed her down after two days, leaving the children (some of whom were grown up) to fend for themselves.

In the prime of their married life he gave her as little money as possible to keep all ten. When they lived at Bridge Yard (a house on Wollaton Road between the school and a coal-loading wharf on the canal), she took in washing to try and make ends meet. Her complaints made no difference to Burton, who seemed impenetrable, and couldn’t even understand he was being unkind. She needed money for the house, but he had to have cash for beer, without which he could neither work nor live. Burton was opaque and unjust, but he was a poor man all his life, and though he worked at a skilled trade, he was always on the edge of poverty. He made horseshoes of great beauty and ability and no doubt sold them dirt cheap, even for that time. Only in his late fifties did existence become easier — though not much, for times never stop being hard for the working man. In the thirties where were four other wage-earners in the family, so that the house seemed reasonably well off to me.

But when his children were young they said he took more care at feeding his half-dozen pigs than he did over them. People who came to the house with buckets of slops and baskets of crusts would get a penny or two from Burton, who would tell one of his children to carry them to the sty. On the way there he or she would search for bits still fit to eat, but Burton never knew this, otherwise they would have got a good kick for daring to rob their own father. And nobody would tell him to his face that they were hungry.

He worked unbelievably hard. Blacksmithery was a trade that demanded it, in which it was said that some smiths occasionally went blind from the spirit-breaking labour of their toil. Yet for all that, Burton appeared a sensitive man to me. Perhaps as a child, and a grandchild at that, I was able to get through to a part of him that he could never open to his own children or even to himself. His one good eye, extraordinarily alive, missed nothing. His mouth was permanently ironic, turning down at each end but as if it didn’t really want to. Wicked lips, when closed, were ready to play any trick, or to let one be done.

Every face has a fixed look which is not only based on the formation of the features themselves but is also moulded by the qualities of the inner spirit. It was stamped there at some moment of truth, which may have been at the point of conception, when the two expressions on the parents’ faces fused into that of the conceived soul. This was modified at the child’s shock on coming out of the womb and into the air, and further altered by the environmental pounding of its first few years.

A person can never let go of this self-image by which the inner complex is recognizable to the percipient observer. Burton was too sure of himself ever to think of escaping from his. He simply dug deeper and deeper into it, and stayed that way.

18

In spite of this necessary but unthinking loyalty to his own identity, most of it maintained at the expense of others, Burton’s children ended up diffident and civilized, good-natured, and with a sense of humour. This was certainly due more to the benign influence of Mary-Ann than the stern eye and often hard fist of their father.

The youngest of his three sons was also no scholar, and when I was a child and he was about thirty, he asked me to teach him to read. I tried hard to, but it was impossible for a boy of ten to fight against the random core of illiteracy in my parents’ families. Eventually, his wife taught him to read and write. He married late, and sang hymns and songs at his own wedding, being the only Burton who had any kind of voice and a fondness for music.

The most consistent charge levelled against Burton was that he ‘interfered too much’. Whatever happened in the house and family he would comment on, usually in a derogatory fashion, poking his nose into things with such dominant advice that he was remembered only as a bully by his grown-up children.

One of the daughters he was not allowed to hit or rail at as a child, for she was a little backward until later in life. Mary-Ann loved her the most, and would not leave her alone for a moment in Burton’s presence, but took her everywhere. Nevertheless, she grew up in fear of her father, though with no sign of open resentment like the others. She did not become mentally ill, as she undoubtedly would have but for her mother’s care, and was able to earn her living and maintain a certain humour against the world. She went occasionally to church, but only after Burton died, for then he no longer paralysed them by his silent presence, or damned them by his nagging. Two of his daughters never married while he was alive — which they blamed on him.

‘Burton’ is an old gypsy or didacoi name, though I never heard it said that he actually came from such people. Nor did he step out of any entertainment of the Arabian nights, or show much interest in the anatomy of melancholy. I know that when I lived in the Hertfordshire countryside ten years ago the pubs had signs on the doors saying NO GYPSIES OR DIDACOIS SERVED HERE. I suppose the landlord imagined that they posed some threat to himself and his genteel customers.

Gypsy or not, Burton did have a way with animals, horseshoes, and women. He also smoked, drank, filled himself with fat, and died at nearly eighty. Idleness was hell, and he would rather be ill than idle — though there was never a sickness in his life, because he wouldn’t allow it. In his terms of reference there was only a cold or a headache, neither of which was a strong malady, and so were easily cured by waiting for them to go away.

Luckily, they always did. When he woke up groggy and out of sorts the day would break him of it, and by nightfall he would be better from his irreversible dosage of work. Three remedies that kept him fulsomely active were Friar’s Balsam, Fuller’s Earth, and Epsom Salts. He smoked Robin cigarettes, though often sat at the parlour table making his own. He was a good customer of Shipstone’s Ales.

Nobody knows where he has gone to, though some said that there was only one place for a man like him. He’s vanished, but not without trace, and since I can’t light candles, I write words, for in spite of all that was said about him he was my grandfather on my mother’s side.

Not long ago, at the bottom of the dream-pit, I was inside a large barn-like building. Using great force, I twisted a piece of new wood from a banister rail, and it was satisfying to pick at its freshly splintered surface.

I showed it to Burton: ‘You see how vigorous and alive the wood is?’

‘Yes,’ he answered readily, with all-knowing irony, ‘but it’s rotten. Look at it.’

And staring close I saw that, just beneath its surface, the wood was pullulating with tiny winged insects and maggots. ‘Well,’ I told him, as usual trying to make the best of something catastrophic, even in a dream, ‘David will be able to examine them under his microscope. I’ve just bought him a new one.’

David is my son. One of his great-grandfathers, and a contemporary of Burton, was a cantor in a synagogue in Bukovina. Burton, happy at the sight of him coming towards us, gave a smile of uncomplicated pleasure that he’d never been able to put on with an adult. The main person in a dream is always oneself, no matter who it is. David was myself as a child in this dream, and also himself as he is now.

One can’t have one’s grandparents all one’s life, for if this were so one wouldn’t then have them to look back on, and childhood would not have been what it was. But of all those now dead of my family, Burton is the one whom I would like to know that I had become a writer, and whom I would happily read novels and stories to.

I ought to stop writing about him because I do not want to become in any shade similar, or feel encapsulated by his spirit. He was too real a person, and so I will pull gradually away. With a straightforward tale it would be possible and necessary to become him in order to write about him. I’d feel entirely easy in it, and sense no danger tunnelling my way through such a yarn, because I would be certain to come out empty on the other side.

One’s grandparents are more important in every way than one’s parents.

19

The truth is difficult to get at, as if it’s locked in a near-impregnable first-class Vauban fort that one is only let into on humble sufferance — hauled up the sheer scarps in a wicker basket, as it were. But one doesn’t want to go in on such terms or make any fuss about it. Truth comes in flashes, forgotten pictures that it blesses us with. The fact that it comes at all makes it generous.

As an old man of nearly eighty, Burton went to visit one of his married daughters in Kent. It couldn’t have been too long before he returned to Nottingham and died, though there was no sign of it until close to the end. He stood with another of his grandsons watching combine-harvesters circling the wheat, and when the field was small some bystanders began throwing missiles at rabbits running for safety. Burton saw one in the chaff close by and made a grab for it. At that moment a piece of slate smashed into the back of his hand, inadvertently hurled by someone who did not see him.

Burton made no complaint. He kept his grip on the rabbit, which he hit sharply at the back of the neck and killed. He stood up and said nothing, then walked off with his grandson to the doctor’s house a few miles away to get his hand put right, blood trailing on the ground from his shattered veins, the dead rabbit swinging from his pocket.

20

So as not to share the same fate, metaphorically or otherwise, of that erstwhile friend of mine who flipped on the gas-taps, I have to ask sooner or later: ‘Where do I begin?’

It comes as something of a shock to realize that I have already done so. The path to truth is well advanced, though little has been said. The mists of uncertainty show how far and wide I have strayed, but broken vision is a promising phenomenon, in that the fabulous can be perceived in it, something that never comes from an open sky or a precise landscape. When all things around stand out bright and clear, there is little possibility that one’s own personal truth will take shape.

The first stage is over when the taps are tightened in a clockwise direction. One can act when the maps are burned, the plans forgotten, when schemes have disintegrated, and the obscuring particles close in. One does not get an inch closer to truth by the age-old tactic of self-murder. To end life out of despair means that one hasn’t even started to sift the galaxies of truth-dust.

One can talk continuously for fifteen hours, and cause whoever listens to commit suicide, but still not touch the central core of boiling fire, nor its periphery, though one’s whole life-story might have been through the wringer.

Yet out of this mist a story of sorts may be forming itself, a personality emerging from the amniotic fluid.

21

The fluid is gritty, covers a vast area, and goes deep. Sometimes it floods my mouth with a foul taste. But I won’t indulge in autobiography, that flagrant telling of my own flat tale. I refuse to write the Madman’s Guide to Europe, or compile a history of the Hundred Years War in ninety-nine pages, though if I scribble about my grandparents and their children I cannot be forced into birth for the crime of going back on my word.

The reliability of these sentences is more uncertain than any map, and are only to be used with extreme unction. But caution is a bad dream, a high-waisted lady with a withered bust holding in her left hand a flower for Miss Midnight. Is a desire to tell the truth merely a wish to burn oneself prematurely out?

At dusk the grey-white belly and wings of a house-martin flits by the window. The young are being fed in their mud nests under the eaves. Once you leave home, you’ve got no home: all of them fly south in the autumn, though next year they will return to the exact places in which they spent the summer, except those who die on the way.

Just as each of the numerous families of house-martins is different, to judge by their talk and their coming and going, so can every person say, ‘Ours is a unique family because there isn’t another one like it.’ That may be the only good point about such miniature para-military dictatorships in which the head of it is imprisoned even more firmly than the rest, though he at least has the dubious pleasure of wielding power. But until the New Age dawns — and its approach has not yet been reported from any distant planet — the importance of families can hardly be overrated.

I know more about the antecedents of Mary-Ann who married Burton, than my other three grandparents, though the information came to me only when both Burton and his wife had been dead twenty years.

A woman from Leeds wrote me a letter saying that in a certain novel of mine she had been struck by amazing coincidences that related to her own life. It turned out that the grandfather described in the early chapters resembled a relation of hers called Burton, who she used to visit with her mother as a child, and also later in her teens.

She described Burton, her mother’s uncle by marriage, as a tall, thin, dour man who seemed to have a cast in one eye and was always called by his surname. His family lived in fear of him and, being a child, she also was terrified of such a man.

The last time she saw him was in the late 1920s when he went to Leeds and stayed two nights for the funeral of Mary-Ann’s brother, Bill Tokins, who lived at Horseforth and had worked as a railway porter all his life. Bill was a big, rather miserable and overbearing type who was not liked by many. The Tokins men at his funeral were over six feet tall, handsome men with raven-black hair and blue eyes, and Burton stood out among them because, though he was as tall, he had fair hair and brown eyes. She was impressed by the collective height and bulk of these men who filled the small parlour of dead Bill Tokins’s house.

On her visits to Engine Town she remembered that Ernest Burton wore a wide leather belt, and was always ready to take it off to members of his family or to his dogs. A funny quirk of his was that he invariably walked many paces ahead of his wife, as though she were not with him at all.

He would, however, put his hand on her mother’s arm, and still go in front of Mary-Ann. They usually went back to Leeds laden with marrows, potatoes, kidney beans, and rhubarb out of his garden. Burton made a great fuss of her mother, with whom he got on very well. He admired her, and treated her as something special, and she was said to be fond of him. He was indeed a peculiar man, though my correspondent added that the Tokinses, from whom my grandmother sprang, were said to be a stranger breed still.

22

The memory comes back to me of a seven-year-old boy building roads. I might have been younger, wandering alone to a nearby tip away from any houses, on which only waste sand and factory soot was laid, an area between the narrow River Leen and a few acres of swamp bordering the railway line, closed off from the lane by a stockade of high boards. I could get on to the tip by climbing a tree and leaping over the top of the fence, then scrambling down a huge bank of clean sand and gravel on the other side.

In the light of what I was later to become, such occurrences in childhood seem amusing, though this small laugh is merely to protect me from the daunting stab of whatever was relevant. Yet pulling truth out by the nettleheads so that roots snap free makes me realize that these memories are amusing simply because I imagine other people’s smiles if I mention them. My own already exist, and tell me that such laughter only points to another kind of truth.

Sometimes I would use guile instead of brawn, and get into the wasteland by waiting for a lorry to enter the gate. When the driver opened it before going in I would follow without being noticed, and hide myself behind rusty, dry-leaved tea-bushes. After he’d left I’d find an old piece of spade and start to build a new road quite independent of the main track of the lorries.

For an afternoon and part of the evening I was left in peace, levelling a pile of house-bricks and decorators’ rammel, and a mountain of black soot from some workshop chimney, widening and hardening the surface, macadamizing my road with spadesful of soot. Deciding where to guide it was always a problem, though when I came the next day to drive it forward another ten or twenty feet, it had been obliterated by lorries that had in the meantime dumped their stuff. I wasn’t called upon to commit myself, or to push a road through a morass as I now am, though I was quite prepared to do so had it been either necessary or possible.

In wondering why the lorry-driver had callously buried my road I could only believe that, from the godlike height of his cab, he hadn’t even noticed its feeble line. It was too narrow to be of use, or too unreal for him to see. In place of the paved highway I imagined to exist, there was in reality a piece of narrow track that might barely have served as a false lure into rugged mountain country, fit at the most for the feet of men and animals. Yet I wondered why he had tipped his load over it when there was so much unused space round about. Since something in him must have glimpsed the beginnings of a highway, proved by the fact that he had tried to blot it out, I couldn’t finally tell whether this disfigurement was to my spiritual gain or not.

In the darkness of childhood I did not go this far in my reasoning, but one step further and I feel certain I would have done. A child is a mystic, and what he lacks in intelligence and worldly knowledge he makes up for in earnestness and depth of feeling.

Every child is a prince ruling over a kingdom of half-dark and half-light, which only the revolution of age can inextricably mix up, and condemn him to the lie that he can recognize daylight when he sees it.

23

When I knew my grandmother she was sixty and had white hair, but in her younger days it had been reddish and golden. Being the youngest of a large family she was a girl of few opinions, but the many virtues she had lasted all her life. She was put into service at thirteen, and a few years later was working as a general help at the White Hart pub in Lenton.

Burton, the son of the local blacksmith, got to know her there. He was young and tall, though his strength alone was handsome — his eyes firm, his nose straight, his hair short and fair, a moustache worn as if to balance his strong chin. Like any farrier, he had a permanent spark in his throat from smithing, and no amount of beer could ever put it out. While asking for a pint at the bar he fell in love with this shy, plump girl called Mary-Ann, and told her so. She was busy and said nothing, and if she believed her ears it didn’t seem possible that he was more than joking. But as the weeks went by he said it again and again, not with any sentimental fervour, but straight out, as if he were saying he loved beer or pork.

Being a servant she wasn’t able to leave the pub more than once a month, and one day she took a fancy to a pair of black cotton gloves in a newspaper advertisement. Burton was surprised when, after saying he loved her and wanted her to marry him, she pushed a florin over the counter and asked if he’d go and get her a pair of black gloves from a shop down town. They’d cost one and elevenpence, she told him.

She thought he might wait till the weekend to do it, but he downed his pint and went straight away. When he came back two hours later he pushed the gloves across the bar with the florin she’d given him still on top of the packet. The next time he asked her to marry him she said yes.

After her marriage she hardly ever went to church, for fear of Burton’s scorn, though she believed in God, and was certainly superstitious. It is said that lightning never strikes a blacksmith’s house, and Burton averred so often enough in a bantering boastful tone when Mary-Ann showed herself full of dread at the onset of a bad storm. She felt that every lightning flash coming from the black sky was especially aimed at her, so maybe it was no bad thing that she married a man who stood in absolute fearlessness of it, though his mockery of the fear she felt did little to comfort her.

But while he was in the house it was true that she wasn’t so frightened. When he was at work, however, she would open the front door wide, in spite of the rain driving in, so that if a thunderbolt came spinning with vicious and dreadful power down the chimney and madlarked into the hearth it would be drawn by the gap of light to continue its journey harmlessly into the yard — without exploding and blowing the house to pieces.

Having taken that precaution she would retire to the dark place on the stairs with an oil lamp, even if her grown children were sitting in the kitchen. When the storm’s fearful rumbles ceased to penetrate into her hideaway and reach for her soul, she would open the stairfoot door and ask whether it was safe to come out.

She led a blameless life, and no one ever knew what there was for her to be frightened of. If anyone should have been afraid of being struck dead it ought to have been Burton, but Mary-Ann thought that the supernatural power behind the lightning bolts would not bother to sort out the good from the bad on finally deciding to aim a big one at his house. Or perhaps she sensed that if Any Being wanted to get back in the deadliest way at another, it would take the one nearest to him, and she was certainly that person to whom Burton was most attached. The price of marrying anyone is to pay for their sins, but he treated her as he would have treated himself if he had discovered the same weak traits in his own make-up, which is the highest form of injustice.

He derided her soft heart, especially when she couldn’t bear to see him kicking the dogs or knocking his children about, so it is possible that she had more humility instilled into her than she had been born with, and therefore more fear of everything. She continually worried, though it was of a sort that would never break her down, and in fact most likely kept her going. It tormented her, yet made her strong, because it demanded such great effort.

She was in many ways weak, but effort is often the only effective fuel of the weak, and a lasting impression is that she must have been as strong as iron to put up all her life with someone as hard as Burton. When he was about forty she saw him in a pub talking to two women. This was no surprise to her because something had been said already of his carryings on. She walked up to the bar and threatened that if he didn’t come home straight away she would go back and set fire to the house.

He laughed, and told her to leave him alone. When she stood there, wondering why she had bothered to tackle him, he pushed her outside with everyone looking on. In her tears she repeated the threat, and though Burton went back to his two women he eventually lost his nerve, afraid that she might actually do as she said.

She was still in the yard when he caught her, not far from the house door. His consciousness roamed around behind his eyes like a tiger unshackled by the chain of words or reason. He grasped her by the hair, dragging her back in a wild rage and spinning her round as his fists flew. The children came up at her screams, and began howling. Burton’s last furious punch caught her in the mouth and knocked two of her front teeth out. He then went in and locked the door behind him, staying till conscience nagged sufficiently for him to go and see to her.

Nobody knew why she put up with him. Though so much injustice had been done to her she didn’t let anything unjust go by without comment — at least not in my presence. All harshness from without, and uncertainty within, registered on the lines of her brow. Headaches continually plagued her and the daughters. The sons were affected by weak stomachs, which showed how Burton had got on their nerves from birth, though they were all fit men and lived a long time, as it turned out.

Headaches and bad stomachs became a thing of the past when Burton died. His children then took on the residue of toughness and longevity that, perhaps in spite of himself, he left them with.

24

When I built a secret road on the rammel-tip I hoped in my reasonably young heart that a lorry would drive along, and that the man inside would use it to take him to a new place on which he could dump more rubble and add to my highway.

To try and write the truth, and at the same time make it more attractive for those who might read it, would be to commit a lie, an unforgivable act when set on a self-conscious furrowing. To refuse the responsibility of a lie means pushing art out of the way, for it is only possible to create art when seeking to make raw truth believable.

I wanted to make a road for other people to use. But the zone of ground between river and railway, long since covered in factory warehouses, figures once more in my landscape of truth. My mother knew one of the lorry-drivers, and even before I used to go there alone I went to it holding her hand, younger than seven years of age. She waited for him outside, and when he came he would open the gate for us. They were both young, and be must have been good enough looking, for he preferred to talk rather than eat, and I watched him open his lunch-box and take out an apple and a piece of cake.

Any attempt to soften what I am about to say will put me at the beginning of a lie. Nevertheless, I will lift belief to a higher plane by making it dependent on truth and not lies. It is as if truth were a crime that I am burning to commit, but the only crime would be to distort the truth knowingly no matter what amount of lip-service is paid to lies. But I am intending to commit this crime for myself alone, and not for the benefit of anyone around me. It might feel like a sudden advent of religion, when God is seen to be of Truth, his stern and precipitate appearance promising me an increase of faith in myself providing I placate him with my own hollow spirit by the time I have finished writing.

I wasn’t even hungry, but did as I was told and went to the other end of the tip with my apple and cake. After I had eaten I started to build my first road, and was lost in the work of it when my mother said we must go because the gate was about to be locked. I took her hand, but she was too distracted to be with me on the way back, because she must have been worrying about my father. She needn’t have bothered though, because she had, after all, only taken me out for a walk.

25

When Howard was nine and out to buy a comic he saw a trolley-bus on Wollaton Road whose poles had come loose. Running across to look he was struck by another bus, which so mangled his leg that he had to have it off.

His father was Oswald, Burton’s second son who had married a Catholic girl called Nellie. While the whole family moaned the loss of Howard’s leg, they tried to console the parents by saying that at least he hadn’t been killed — while Burton was heard to remark that it might have been better if the poor little bogger had. The only reply to shut him up was when Ivy said that though he had but one eye he still liked living. He didn’t deny this, but went on thinking he was right.

Howard sat in the parlour because he could not tolerate the light, much like Burton for another reason. He passed the time sifting piles of silver paper collected by all the family so that he could take it to the hospital on days when he went for treatment. He had been learning the piano but wouldn’t play it any more, sat on its stool unable to lift the lid.

Ivy took him to the Elite cinema a year after the accident. In the middle of the film he complained of pain in his leg. He was a stoical boy, so she knew something was wrong, and took him home. In bed he sang beautiful songs, words and music of his own making, his face animated but his eyes closed. It was impossible not to weep on hearing them. He died a fortnight later with a heart no longer strong enough to support him.

Howard was a year older than me and I had not been encouraged to play with him because I was considered too rough. I called at the house some time after he had died, on my way to Engine Town. It was early morning, and Nellie was still in bed, while Oswald was getting ready to go on duty as a sort of guardian on the nearby canal, where he worked because there was no longer much for him to do as a blacksmith. He was a tall, thin man like Burton, but there was a more human and vulnerable handsomeness about him, a sensitive enough man because he had some of the Tokinses complexity and pity in him passed on by his mother. He told me to finish the bacon left from his breakfast, and I looked at the plate of rinds with the hard cold fat still attached, and the slice of bread he generously cut. Although I hadn’t eaten I couldn’t touch it. The food was good, and in another house I would have scoffed it, but my appetite would not rise.

Nellie tried to console herself by going down town to St Barnabas’ Cathedral, and by drinking bottles of stout, but the grief was so great that nothing succeeded. When we met on the street she stopped and took my hand, holding it in her warm one. She was a gentle person, with long dark ringlet-hair, her face bright and eager with a despair she would not let go of. Her melodious voice was almost breaking as she asked: ‘Where do you think Howard is now?’

I was embarrassed, and didn’t want to remind her of his death, because she knew very well where he was. I stood still and said nothing.

She eventually let go: ‘He’s in Heaven, that’s where he is!’

There was nothing Nellie wanted more than to follow him. When death takes someone for no reason, in a situation other than war or battle, it often kills the will to resist a similar fate in those close by. Yet Nellie was allowed to live on into old age, and had no other child.

I wondered why Howard ran into the road to be maimed and killed, what he was running towards or escaping from. Maybe Christ did take him to his bosom, as Nellie liked to think, meaning as far as I was concerned that it was pure senseless chance. Burton felt the echo of his own dead son, stood up even straighter when the shock began to gnaw and it was seen in his face as one more blow against the family.

Nellie made me feel helpless, so I stopped being sorry and avoided her in that ruthless way children have when they are afraid. It wasn’t my fault Howard had died, and I couldn’t bear to have his mother wonder why I was alive and he was dead. I’m sure she never thought this, for her soul was good, but I felt it myself. In any case, she did not believe he was finally dead. He was in Heaven, and had been taken away for a while — forty-five years to be exact.

The Burtons felt that, because she was a Catholic, she brought colour into their lives and gave them something to talk about. There was always a need to get off the eternal subject of their father; and godless people such as Burton are tolerant enough of those who have a religion to look up to, as long as it is not the one they were born with and feel guilty at not showing respect for. It is one step up the ladder from sloth to myth.

There was no doubt that Oswald loved Nellie all his life and pitied her more than he did himself for the tragedy she’d been forced to share. She was ill and partially paralysed for her last dozen years, and Oswald was a strong man who generously wore himself out nursing, lifting, doing everything for her. Over seventy years old, he fell dead from a heart attack one morning. He had meticulously prepared his garden for the spring planting of vegetables, and all the seeds for it were laid out by the back step of his prefab at Bilborough. Nellie lived two more years, and left a thousand pounds to the church.

It seems centuries since I saw them, almost as if what occurred never happened, events slung up from the great unconscious into a spreading and ramifying dream that for once I can remember. Burton lost another grandson called Phillip, the youngest child of Edith, who at the age of five fell into a canal and was drowned. He slipped in quietly one winter’s morning, and his friends of the same age ran away frightened, not telling about it till they were questioned in the evening.

It is bound to be little else but death and turmoil in a backward scoop to the jungle of where one came from. Death is rolling towards everyone underfoot. I am deceived at the solid feel of the earth — which is waiting to pull me like a trapped fox into its soil. Death is the final black clapper of life, and maybe it doesn’t bother me because I can’t bear to think about it. It might also be that those who see death as the end are the ones who fear it most.

As for calling that dreamlike far-back zone — in which the first-seen people of my life appeared — a jungle, it certainly was exactly the opposite of a desert, due to its green richness and many traps, and its instilling of lifelong love. Those whom I knew so well are part of my corporate identity. Such mixing creates the mystery that makes every soul unique, and safe beyond the deathly probing of sociological scholarship. They are the segments that fix the truth of anyone, and it can be done in no other way.

When that line of thick forest is stabilized at my back, the way will be clear before me. Seed from its trees will drift off and fertilize the plain in front, so that my heart will burst when I cross it. One does not exist unless the heart is full. One crumbles into dust, and that is the only real death.

26

I suppose I was born into the world wanting to love my parents. I knew my father wouldn’t like my mother to be seen talking with somebody else, and realized how silent I had to keep about her conversations with the lorry-driver by the rammel-tips. It was difficult to look my father in the eye, and when he hit her for what I knew to be true I had reason to hate him for the rest of his life, though a few days later I had forgotten all about it.

It taught me to keep a secret and initiated me into the feat of being able to prevent ice from melting in the middle of a fire. I developed cunning and deceit, though it might have come later, or started much earlier. Still, I couldn’t hold it against her for doing it on my father, if that is what happened, for whoever lived with him had to survive, and that was a fact.

When a little truth has been found there is no reason to condemn people. They existed and did what they did only so that one day I would be able to find the truth. How else can you look at it if you are continually fighting against falsehoods in yourself?

The liars who run society can condemn people. Let the judges and magistrates go rotten with injustice and iniquity. Those who seek after truth have no right to condemn, while those who think they have found it do little else. Perhaps those who search for the truth lack the courage or are too lazy to condemn. One small truth leads to another, and once it begins there is no stopping. It is difficult to say whether seeking after truth is a self-abuse of the spirit, or a holy flight of fancy that grows into a way of life — which is something to be prevented at all costs.

But nothing is too painful if it can be remembered. Memories have already been screened and released in the pit of the mind before they are splashed on to the brain with such force that they cry out to you, and make you cry out when you feel them. They are sent as the only signposts to truth, and to remind you that truth is still possible. If you ignore them they go away either gracefully or with flesh in their mouths, but they always return in another form, at another time, behind another picture, possibly more acceptable, yet maybe with even sharper teeth.

Memories are part of yourself and, peaceful or not, your eternal friends, for if they lead you to some sort of truth it is only with the object of completing your wholeness, the humanity that will protect you against the world while at the same time making you more vulnerable to yourself.

I used to believe that as far as getting at the truth was concerned my subconscious could be relied on, but now I know that such a way is not for me. Waiting year after year for the subconscious to spew out its truth is a negative attitude that has to be overcome by a deliberate and forceful attempt to get at the truth in other ways, for the subconscious can be just as big a liar as the most wordy politician.

At the same time the subconscious should be held in awe and respect. It has power, its own rights, an entire republic. Through it a man is capable of doing evil if he recognizes what his subconscious is prompting him to do yet tells those around him that he intends to act otherwise — and even persuades himself of it. Under the machinations of self-control he hides the progress of what destiny intends for him.

In other words he is able to let his subconscious do its subterranean work at the rate it will be most effective and deadly, in the way primal human matter works out its own evolutionary role. Having mastered patience and wisdom, he may decide to let it go into evil instead of good, becoming sly and full of such self-control that it is nothing more than perversity and malice.

Once the subconscious gets you in its power it is impossible to escape, or to disown it if it threatens you with harm, or to save those whom you ought to love. An intelligent man can thus be taken over by a wolf. He perceives everything but is controlled by the mechanism of an animal, and has no defence against it.

Driving back alone in the dark from London I lost all idea of where I was going and where I was coming from. It was not a new feeling. I’ve had it often before, of not belonging anywhere, or to anyone except myself. It is a precious and salutary sensation, like driving an aeroplane towards the Himalayas. The soft roar of the Peugeot lulled me on the motorway. I passed the tail-lights of another car as if they were sparks.

It was like lifting into the sky. In a motor-car one flies along, encapsulated in a comfortable seat, breathing stale air, all heaters burning, maps locked in the glove-box, headlights shining on a road that does not alter and so gets you nowhere. I am in a womb, sheltered, warm, and only half safe, waiting for the death-crash of being born, or the birth-crash of being dead, hoping whatever happens that I have loved my parents.

27

A man called Bill Gosse drove up from Cambridgeshire in a Rolls-Royce to visit the Burtons at Engine Town. Gosse’s wife was a niece of my grandmother, and his family enjoyed their trips to Nottingham in the thirties.

He parked his car on the unpaved lane, by a fence that stood at a crazy angle but never fell down. I felt sick when he took me for a ride so we had to turn back before getting very far. It wasn’t that my squeamish soul disliked his smooth machine, because I’d go pale in trolley-buses as well. It was simply that my inherited Tokinses stomach played up to its role.

As a young man Bill Gosse opened a small shop in a village near Peterborough. A craftsman saddler, he later stocked push-bikes and did repairs. He then took up cars via motor-cycles, and went on to install the first petrol pump in his village. After a while he moved into larger premises, and began to deal in second-hand vehicles.

Perhaps the Rolls-Royce was one of these, but its presence in the lane by Burton’s house made them seem fabulously rich, though Gosse and Burton were equal enough when they strolled down the lane together. But people who sold bicycles and cars looked to me like the gaffers of the world. They had no worries because they could buy a packet of fags without thinking twice about it, and didn’t need to know where their next meal was coming from since it was waiting for them on a warmed-up plate.

You could see it in their faces as they climbed from the car with royal nonchalance when they arrived before Sunday dinnertime, wearing caps and trenchcoats, scarves and shawls. Nobody held it against them, and there was a friendly atmosphere at Engine Town for this exotic branch of the family, good sports and fine mixers who made a more than fair living in the motor trade.

Charles and Mary Tokins shipped over from County Mayo during the potato famine of the 1840s and settled in St Neots with their six sons. For luggage they had a trunk, a hat-box, and a score of bundles. Three of the sons went on the land as agricultural workers, while the father and the rest became railway labourers in the days when tracks were being laid all over England and tens of thousands of navvies were needed for the rapid shifting of earth, clay, and stone. It was if the government of the day did nothing to curb the excesses of the Irish famine simply to drive enough men of muscle and intelligence to England at a time when the native energies of the Industrial Revolution were on the wane.

A grandson of Charles Tokins met and married Anne Gilbert of St Neots, and one of their children, born about 1870, was Mary-Ann whose fate led her to Nottingham and into the arms of Ernest Burton.

The Tokinses were always a family for railways, and maybe it is their blood that stirs in me when I hear train hooters in the night, noises which bring unquiet longings and fix me so much into the network of the world that I am never happily settled in the place where I happen to be.

Of Mary-Ann’s two brothers who worked on the railway, Bill was a porter in Leeds, and Ted had a similar job seventy miles down the line at Grantham. The same hat-box that had come over from County Mayo was filled with fresh Yorkshire bread baked by Grandma Tokins at Leeds in the morning, and sent in the guard’s van to Grantham.

Ted had a boy cycle home with the hat-box, whereupon his wife returned it to the station laden with new-culled Lincolnshire vegetables. These were put into the luggage van of the next train making the right connections with Leeds, and sent back up in the afternoon. This specimen of inter-family co-operation went on for over twenty years, and Bill, at the Leeds end, was the man whose funeral Burton was seen at with Mary-Ann in the twenties.

There are many such tales bursting from the genealogical rigmarole of the Tokinses line, telling of the ‘queer streaks’ certain limbs of it had. Maybe Burton felt out of it among that numerous lot, though he had two brothers, one a farrier with a forge at Ruddington Grange, the other with a smithy at Carlton.

Another grandson of the first itinerant Tokinses from Ireland became a prosperous builder. At sixty-eight he threw up normal domestic life, left his wife and three daughters, and went into the nearest workhouse much as another sort of man might enter a monastery.

A photograph taken during his sojourn there shows a large, broad-faced, flat-nosed man, a Tolstoyan figure with a bushy white beard, wearing a workman’s cap. Hands clasped, half-sitting on a full dustbin, he stares at the camera with an air of philosophical contentment. Behind is a flight of steps, and propped against a wall nearby is a long-poled sweeping brush I’m sure he never used. The sun shines as if on no one else in that place, and the photo is a good quality memento mounted on a piece of board. Between the name of the Leeds firm and a royal crest it says: PHOTOGRAPHERS TO THE LATE QUEEN.

He had ordered the cameraman in for himself alone, and paid out of his own pocket, for he was rich by any standards. When he died at the age of eighty he left £60,000 to the workhouse, and not a penny to his wife and daughters.

28

Ever since I can remember I have wanted to leave home, to pack up and go. This desire to tread places other than the one I lived in was so deeply implanted that it gave more power to the womb than was good for me, making it hard to avoid reckoning with. The only real journey away from it is death, which merely takes one back to it.

I also wanted to tell people things that they would believe in, a fatal (though honest) admission from someone who is searching for the truth. The wish to convince them makes it impossible for me to get at the truth. One can only state the truth as it appears to oneself, and if others get comfort out of recognizing it, then my difficulties are honoured. But I cannot claim that my own truth is good for anyone else — otherwise I run the risk of them turning on the gas taps like the friend of mine already mentioned.

A desire to tell the wrong kind of truth manifested itself at an early age, when I was fascinated by the news being read on the radio. What was said seemed of high interest and importance, dealing as it did with frightening items of oncoming war. I thought that the man allotted to make such announcements must be a great person indeed. But it was a phase of listening to his master’s voice which I soon threw off, though when my mother in an odd moment asked what I wanted to do when I grew up I confessed I’d like to be a news reader.

At eight years of age I used to go to a ‘dinner centre’ during the midday break from school to have a free hot meal. I went in at the first sitting, and then came out with the rest so that the second hungry group could take our places. For some reason I was possessed to put my head to the window and, thought it was shut, shout through the glass, so that I could be heard clearly, all the rich swearwords I had so far learned.

The clatter within went silent at my bizarre and extensive vocabulary, and I took it to mean they were actually listening to what I had to say, so continued bawling obscene nonsense to my first captive audience. When one of the serving women could stand it no longer she came and punched me away from the window until I went off, bewildered and only slightly ashamed.

That was my first taste of wanting to become a writer, and an incipient edging towards the desire for truth. Though it was the false kind, yet it is the first sort one encounters on the long road towards real truth. In any case I had with unknowing perception equated as early as could possibly be expected the news coming over the radio with common irrelevant obscenities.

If and when one attains truth it can never be spectacular or in any way comforting. Everyone is born dead, and truth is no more than a search to restore life. As soon as a person feels the desire for truth beginning to stir within him, in no matter what subconscious or underhand way, he is starting to become alive. One is only alive when the search for truth begins.

To question every single point of existence demands a fundamental stability of the heart. One must know not only why one is alive and inhabiting the earth but also why one will perform the next simple action coming into one’s mind. It is an attempt to perceive clearly the connection between the two, and find a common formula uniting them. Until one can do this one is only half alive, but until one begins to embark on this search one is not alive at all.

We are born alive as infants but quickly become dead — after the first smack and cry for air — even though the flesh still moves. But if one was born alive and then becomes dead, one does not live again until the search for truth begins. The only truth from a dead man who has not set out on a search for the truth is that which he shouts in an incantatory fashion when dancing on the grave of his alive self that he killed because he despises the truth. This state also is part of me. This rhythmic inspirational speech is the kind of truth that can never be relied upon to protect the creative spirit. One is afraid because it is God’s truth but not Man’s, and what use is God’s truth to a man? It moves the poet and the shaman but will not affect the person who feels the acid of self-knowledge eating through his stomach.

It is often necessary and satisfying to spew forth the golden words that shift other people, but one needs an opening to the words that move oneself. Is this wanting too much? Is it a betrayal of one’s own spirit to hope for this further truth which seems to be a desire to unite the two?

There are more questions than answers in any quest for the truth. If not, mistrust that truth. But a beginning has been made, though to hope for progress is to deny the absolute value of what one is striving for. Such a journey breaks the heart, but a broken heart means that chains are snapping. It is a painful liberation of the spirit. If a person suffers through love or from treachery so that the heart is broken (as it is called) people pity him. They should celebrate and envy him, for his spirit is one move nearer to freedom.

Whatever is done to the heart, and whatever the heart does back, it must be trusted and obeyed absolutely. The only protector is your own heart. It will lead you into the wilderness, but carry you through peril and despair. And if it finally betrays you, you will only have lived in the way you were meant to live.

One sometimes starves in order to prevent the spirit withering away, but one continually searches for food.

29

Mary-Ann never turned a beggar away from the door, and solemnly told me never to do so, either.

If there wasn’t a penny to give she’d make a cup of tea, or fetch some bread and fat bacon from the pantry. I didn’t know how uncommon a trait it was, though it certainly rubbed itself off on her daughters, because when a man walked along our backyard in the hard-up thirties calling out if anybody could spare a cup of tea for a bloke on the tramp, my mother would shout from the back door, or through the window if it was summer: ‘Come on, then, duck, and let’s see what we’ve got’—though only if my father wasn’t there, which went to show in my eyes how good the women were but not the men.

Being a child of parents with widely differing souls, I sometimes follow the precepts of one, and occasionally the uncharitable response of the other, never knowing what I am going to do till I do it. Burton would certainly have bawled a beggar away from his door, telling him to go and find work if he wanted anything to eat.

Mary-Ann suggested I do my best to get into a grammar school instead of slogging off to work at fourteen. I think that since her grandson Howard had already died — and the same track had been broached for him — I was the next one suitable. So on a wet autumn morning I sat in a room of Nottingham High School to do the tests. The atmosphere seemed quite outside me, though I was there with a couple of friends and didn’t feel particularly uneasy. The problems were like pages of Chinese ideographs, and I could make nothing of them at first because I had gone through no preparation beforehand. I can’t say that I expected to pass, though after puzzling out some of the answers I hoped that by a miracle I would so so.

The rain was stultifying during the hour it took. My feet were saturated because I wore plimsolls, though I soon ignored the discomfort and got stuck in. Nothing could have put me into that school, for even if I’d had a vague chance of getting through this troubling initiation, my spirit wasn’t ripe for it. I didn’t want it, and it didn’t want me, and I believe we were made to sense this by the fools walking about in caps and gowns — which seemed a senseless piece of ritual and intimidation to me and my friends, like something thrown up from the magistrates’ court or the Spanish Inquisition. Certainly we had not seen the like of it before. So there was no hard feeling on my side, because when told that I wouldn’t be going to such a school I had no regrets.

But I took the test again a year later, and failed that too, proving to me for the last time that I wasn’t the right material for higher education. My grandmother may have been disappointed, though I never saw any sign of it. The experience certainly put me against any form of examination for children.

30

The only time Mary-Ann slipped off her track of high principles was when she spent the remaining week’s budget-money on one-armed bandits at some beer-off in Radford, where she had called on her way home with the Co-op groceries. One of her daughters talked her into coming out, saying that otherwise Burton might get to know. But she didn’t leave until every last penny had gone.

When someone told him, he took it as an act over which he had no control, and therefore one temptation against which Mary-Ann could not have been expected to show much sense either. In other words, he thought it a bit of a joke, saying: ‘Well, I’ll be boggered!’—though keeping a tighter grip on her from then on in case she got into debt from it and had them run out of house and home by the bum-bailiffs.

Mary-Ann knew who’d shopped her, because while she was busy at the handle she’d seen Florrie Voce’s face reflected in the glass. When tackled about it later Florrie denied it all, but called Mary-Ann an old cow for accusing her of such a thing. Normally good-natured and pacific, Mary-Ann went into the house, and came out with a cup, which she threw with full force and deadly aim at Florrie who has hanging washing up in the yard.

The group of houses abutted the school, and the silence of the classrooms was shattered by a squealing such as could only come from a pig in the process of being slaughtered, or a person whose throat was being unjustly cut. A young lady teacher, rattled by the sound, sent one of Mary-Ann’s daughters out to see what was the matter.

Such noise from Bridge Yard was not unusual, but this time it was prolonged for what seemed beyond reason — it being that the cup hurled by Mary-Ann had caught Florrie full in the eye, and cut her both above and below it. A policeman was fetched, and Mary-Ann had to appear at the Guildhall on a charge of breaching the peace and common assault, for which she was fined the sum of £2.

Not that this caused any final rupture between the two women, because a few years later Florrie Voce came to Oliver’s funeral and was the loudest wailer at it. They knew that you couldn’t make enemies in your own backyard, though you had your ructions now and again. And a £2 fine would never convince Mary-Ann that she’d paid for the cardinal sin of committing violence on a neighbour, a pass she’d got herself into which was right out of character, and which she never did again.

She was a kind, hardworking woman, and thought more about other people than herself. Because of this she was seen as a simple person — a deceptively simple judgement which isn’t worth much comment.

She used to collect the coloured cards from Burton’s cigarettes and store them in the spice cupboard. They lay there for weeks and months until she had enough to make it worth while presenting them to me in an empty Robin packet. They were impregnated with the smell of curry and pepper, aloes and cloves, sage and thyme. A few years before she died she gave the same cupboard to me and I kept my first collection of books in it.

With a touching and solemn expression she also gave me a stick of oak about six inches long, no more than a piece of kindling, assuring me that it had been part of the ship in which the Good Lord Nelson had died. She had paid the exorbitant sum of sixpence for it to some cunning old robber who had once come to her door. I don’t remember what happened to it. No doubt I treasured it for a while, then lost it on the long road my itching feet have since travelled.

It is good for the self-confidence of a child to be spoiled when young. The awful word ‘spoil’ only means love and care, and freedom from unreasonable restrictions so that any good qualities can develop. To do good is the only way to teach others to do good, and to spoil is not to ruin, for it gives a child a sense of his own significance that will strengthen him to face the world and survive.

The reason people don’t know what they want, and therefore do not know what to do at certain vital moments of their lives, is because they were told too often as children exactly what they could have and do, and not left enough to their own usually innocent choices. Parents may spoil a child yet not ruin it, though many are too frightened to try. It is usually left to the grandparents, who need to love a child in order to go on living themselves, and who often spoil grandchildren to make up for having been too harsh with their own. They can also spoil a grandchild so as to make life hard for its parents when that child grows up and begins to assert itself, but that is another matter, and nothing to do with the relatively uncomplicated Burton morality.

On a summer’s afternoon I can smell newly-baked bread coming out of a heated oven. In a state of grace I get that warm and floury whiff as my grandmother laid the tins on the table. I shall always be able to smell it, as if no one else can, and as if I am the last person in the world to recall it.

31

Burton was always looking for something bigger than he was to break himself against, though he would have perished rather than admit to such a thing. He never did find that bigger force. He looked for it, and at the same time kept it at bay with fundamental Burton guile. The closest he got was when he met and married Mary-Ann Tokins, and she would never admit to it either, though she may have thought about it from time to time.

When Burton died, he died in bed, and all his guts came up, red and black, through his mouth. Like any blacksmith, he kept his silence, knowing that Old Nick had got him at last. And Old Nick was riding a horse that had been shod by somebody else, a fact which accounted for the look of shock on Burton’s face.

Just after he died Mary-Ann said to one of her daughters that she wanted to go herself, that there was nothing to live for now that he had gone and she had lasted long enough to see him at rest in his grave. She died in her sleep a year later. There was no place on earth for her without him, just as there had been no peace on earth for her with him. What greater love is there than that?

32

A circle is a straight line to me. A straight line is a circle. My desire forms a straight line, my thoughts run in a circle. The circle imprisons me, the straight line takes me out of it. But I always return to the circle, if only to embark once more on a straight line. The circle is my bloodstream, pumped through the heart. The straight line is the invisible path I follow. The sun is a circle; a tree is a straight line. The world is a circle at the equator; the horizon is straight when I look at it from a hilltop. My sphincter is a circle; my penis is straight. A circle is not a straight line to me; a straight line is not a circle. The straight line of my desire breaks out of the circle. In searching for truth, whether it takes me on a straight line, or endlessly round in a circle, I am no longer a prisoner. My emblem is that of a straight line through a circle. Will the straight line ever leave the circle behind? The circle is my fundamental self. The straight line is my searching spirit. The circle pushes the straight line forward. The straight line drags the circle with it. They are eternally locked together.