Raw Material

33

My father’s parents died soon after I was born, so what their first names were I don’t know — and I saw no photographs of them. His family stories were unreliable or totally false, though it is certain that his father was an upholsterer from Wolverhampton in Staffordshire who, when he came to Nottingham, fitted out a workshop and ‘showroom’ on Trafalgar Street in Radford.

He was small in stature and had a short, pointed grey beard, and was said to be a hard and excellent worker except when he took to the whisky, though he rarely did so to the extent of getting blind drunk. Like all the Sillitoes he was tight-lipped, certainly not of the tribe that drinks beer or breathes with their mouths open.

He married a Nottingham girl called Christine Blackwell, whose first name only slips into mind as I write. By all accounts he did not treat her well. She came from a family of cigarette and cigar manufacturers and retailers, and had six sons and two daughters — eight being the figure of plenty in those days.

After he died his offspring were pleasantly surprised to learn that he had been the owner of several slum houses in Wolverhampton, and when these were sold by common filial agreement each flush heir received the sum of £40. To anguished cries that they had been robbed by thieving solicitors (and it really seemed that they had) they spent it in a few weeks to drown their grievance. My father, however, put his portion in an envelope and folded it for safety into his waistcoat pocket, snug notes ready to be used for a rainy day.

Employed as an exterior decorator, he was set to work high up a factory wall. It was dry weather, and a smell of suds and swarf came out of the window where he was painting on his piece of plank, himself and colour pots inadequately suspended by pulleys and a rather unstable set of ropes.

Shifting cautiously to one end of it, the contraption began to sink. His view of traffic passing below was a comfort to his precariousness, but that sickening look at it when he should have tried to grasp one of the ropes was a big mistake.

He spun thirty feet, landing stunned and crippled on the ground, covered in a spectrum of paint. By the time he reached hospital his clothes had dried hard as boards. They were cut open and prised off, and when he came back to consciousness the envelope with the money still in it was by his bedside. A few weeks later he hobbled out to spend it, before worse could happen.

One of his brothers was a lace-designer, two were upholsterers, and two became managers of butchers’ shops. They had nothing to do with the Burtons, imagining themselves a few steps above that sort of uncouth beer-drinking person. Yet neither did the Burtons get much value into their clan when my father married a daughter from it, because he was a man with neither craft nor calling, a labourer who was often unable to find any work at all.

He had been stricken with that disease of malnutrition and neglect known as rickets. It was a mystery why this should have been so in a family which was never badly off, though explanatory whispers put it down to the fact that my father was the youngest child. His brothers and sisters being grown up, he was unwanted and uncared for. The fable goes that he was stuck in a high chair as a baby and more or less forgotten for several years. When he was taken down he could not walk, and had to get about with irons on his legs until he was thirteen. At that age he was sent to school, with the help of two sticks, but a few months later his father ended this noble attempt to begin his education, so that he could stay at home and help in the shop. The hard work of shifting and carrying upholstered furniture made him immensely strong in the arms and shoulders, and by this he was qualified to labour satisfactorily until the end of his life.

He never talked of his parents. I think he felt deeply that one should ‘honour thy father and thy mother’, but knew with truth that he could not do so. The fact bred great bitterness in him, for he certainly needed the luxury of such sentiments.

But he did not complain and that, under the circumstances, was quality enough. He contented himself with cursing the Burtons at every opportunity, both to get back at my mother, as if in some way blaming her for his own birth, and also trying to make them pay for his parents’ deficiencies. He was so full of shame at such a thing having been done to him that he couldn’t even talk about it.

Maybe he sensed that one should not destroy one’s parents, no matter what they had done. You destroy them only to become them, and I don’t think he wanted to do that. But his lack of intelligence was directly linked to the amount of care he had not received as a baby and a child. Screaming his guts out for food, he had been ignored by his demented or indifferent mother until he was too exhausted to care.

None of his first questions were answered, nor those that came later, so he did not grow up with that minor civilized grace of curiosity. He was able to seek intelligent directions regarding the work he had to do, otherwise it was a case of ‘see all, hear all, say nowt’—with no compensation of self-expression.

He did not have the ability to tell much that was interesting, and merely enjoyed the syntactical equipment to swear or give orders to children. If the intelligence he had been born with had by any chance survived this early neglect it might have made him more disturbed that he actually turned out to be. And the kindness and generosity that did survive only served to torment him after he had bullied someone unjustly.

The one spiritual development possible was into ill-temper, melancholia, and obstinate self-spiting stupidity — all of which qualities, built into his congenital nature, he could in any case have done without. He was fastened in his high chair and unable to escape, an infant of sensibility (as all infants are) who did not even have the freedom of the jungle. People invariably suffer more from the torments inflicted by those who are too civilized to know how despicably savage they are.

His mother, having lived to be an old woman, went to sleep one night and woke in the morning with one of her eyes gone. So spin the family tales. The other was all right, but the lost luminary orb had fallen back into its socket and was never found again. She died a few months later, and it was said that her husband, as old as he was, had killed her by kicking her down the stairs, thus denying her the opportunity of dying from the cancer with which she was suffering.

34

My father gave little sign of being connected to his past. He did not need to, since it was in all the lines of his face and in every strand of his black hair. He mentioned that some grandfather (or maybe great-grandfather, he seemed by no means certain) had been the first man to paint on silk. I was assured that such a feat had been impossible up to that time. Another member of the family was said to have played the violin in a theatre orchestra of Wolverhampton or Birmingham.

I thought these stories were false, but never asked an uncle to settle my mind because I didn’t want to put such questions that would make me seem ridiculous in their staid eyes. Apart from the fact that they might laugh at such preposterous ideas coming from my father, I did not care to test his standards of truth, and didn’t think his stories were all that important anyway.

Still, they showed that my father was the sort of person who clung to such legends as a means of preserving a few rags of family identity. At the same time he was a grown-up who, having all power and some knowledge, didn’t need to do any such thing. Mostly I thought he was lying in order to entertain us children, but it might be that events simply take on more colour to an illiterate because that is his way of remembering them. Unfortunately I tended to disbelieve most of what he said. Historical circumstances enabled me as a child to feel superior to him, due to the fact that I had been instructed in how to read and write.

When one of his more educated brothers told me the following story there was no question of not believing him. A young man of the family from several laps back went to Oxford when he was eighteen. He was said to have been a brilliant student, though somewhat black in his melancholy, as he was indeed swart in complexion. There were positive high hopes of him, but he died of a brain tumour at twenty.

As the mother’s favourite son he was to have made all her earthly and matrimonial sufferings worth while. In the bleak twilight of life still left, though she wasn’t much older than forty, she thought to console herself with an enlarged oleograph of him and the contents of his box which had been sent back from university after the funeral.

She craved a look at his possessions, expecting a feast of recollection for her sombre mind. The husband was willing to leave her locked in grief, imagining such rich territory to be fair exchange for the freedom to live more openly with his mistress. But all the box contained was a leather bag of sovereigns and a collection of pornographic books, as well as the manuscript of a short and obscene novel called When the Diligence Stopped for Dinner written during a six-week holiday in Switzerland. This work was burned, along with the rest of the offensive matter, and his mother contrived to believe for the rest of her life that he had walked the ways of the Lord and died pure-hearted.

My father’s mother was a different kind of woman, but she also had a favourite son. The sun shone from between Edgar’s brows, as the saying goes, and he was the darling of the family, a slim and handsome young man whose fragile character was reflected in his wavering dark eyes. When the Great War began in 1914 he foolishly enlisted with the army, but when he found it was nothing but dysentery, haircuts, and barking dogs with human faces, he sensibly walked out of it, coming back to Nottingham one afternoon with a forlorn and bitter expression. His mother made him change into civilian clothes, and he was provided with a bicycle, food, some money, and a map, and sent to his sister Dolly who lived at Hinckley.

So that he would not get caught by the military police his father advised him to cycle along the tow-paths of the canals. Edgar and his brothers sat in the parlour with the map open and the curtains drawn plotting an escape route by the Trent and Mersey that would take him a good distance west before dipping to Burton-on-Trent. He had then to risk a seven-mile gap overland before getting back on to a canal which would twist its way through beautiful Leicestershire countryside to within a mile of his sister’s place.

He left Nottingham at five in the morning and rode fast, making it by late suppertime, cock-a-hoop at his success. Stretching his legs across the hearth after a well-earned meal, he heard Dolly promise he could stay as long as he liked, for he was safe with her, though he must be careful not to visit pubs or show himself in the street. Glad to have her brother in the house, at the same time she was uneasy about shielding a deserter, though when it was a question of choosing between family and country there was no doubt what she would do.

Dolly and her husband bred dogs, and Eddie went to sleep cradled in the noise of their barking, which must have been a fair relief from the yapping he had recently escaped. A few days later he was recaptured in a pub and sent back to his battalion, where he was met with an increased renewal of it.

He deserted again, and once more came home for succour. The trail was hotter for him because the British Army was obscenely desperate for flesh, never having enough men to throw into the carnage of Belgium and north-eastern France.

Edgar hid in Robins Wood beyond the Cherry Orchard, and my fourteen-year-old father biked there every day to take his food. Edgar had pitched a tent and camouflaged it with leaves and branches. Sitting outside on a log he received dishes of hot pudding and meat, and cans of tea lovingly prepared by his mother.

But a cyclist policeman followed my father, and Edgar was caught once more. He was bundled straight off to France, and sent ‘over the top’ with the 7th Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

35

Out of love for the earth’s surface, as fits somebody living in mists and deserts locked in a quest for the truth, I’ve always been fascinated by maps.

From as far back as I can remember I have felt inexorably drawn to printed representations of the earth’s shape, to those delineations of the land’s crust which have the achievements of civilization stamped on them in the same sense that beautiful women of certain primitive tribes show off the elaborate designs etched on to their bodies. The first time I saw a map I wanted to leave home.

In planning a way by car from London to Leningrad, from Calais to Cordoba, or from Kiev to Venice, I enter the realm of mathematical vectors, though on the actual journeys I hardly consult the maps so that, drawn into the fluctuations of traffic and the unexpected exigencies of topography, it becomes anything but a constricting vacation.

Nothing interests me more — now as when I was a child — than to hear of a highway built where one had not existed before, or a new railway, or a shipping route opened through the ice, or a new town settled on the edge of sandy or forest wastes.

While anthropologists moan the ruination of primitive tribes when a motor road is laid along the mountain backbone of New Guinea, or the conservationists bewail another sky of fresh air polluted beyond redemption, I cannot deny my excitement at the empty quarters being amplified and recreated by man’s endeavours, no matter how misguided this might seem in a more rational moment, just as at the same time I feel a sense of loss on hearing that deserts inexorably push their sand and barrenness into fertile oases.

In peering at maps of remote parts which lack the more intensive communications of Europe and the United States, I wonder where new roads could be built for the exploitation of mineral resources. By prolonged attention I plan my own routes, but will not actually mark the map to make the new roads or railways appear more possible. Being spitted upon the truth I keep myself feeding on many worlds.

I also like obsolescent maps so as to see what the relief colours looked like without the roads which now go in bold red lines over mountain ranges and through forests. I compare sheet with sheet, and see that where the dotted lines of primitive trails were, is now a motor-road or a single-track railway line. I imagine myself an engineer in charge of a new road, initiating surveys, sweating in a tent at dusk while glancing through the plans and elevations of another stage. I would draw them perhaps with the same attention to detail as my lace-designer Uncle Frederick put into his intricate patterns before they were set up on the Nottingham machines.

It is as if maps existed before roads and railways, Were showered from space so that men would be able to set out for contiguous lands and get in touch with neighbouring tribes. The technological perfection of human maps has something magical about it. Whether the land is wild or tamed does not matter, but the links for cultural mixing and the construction of new towns make me feel safer on the earth, for it is a defence against nature and a means of sustaining civilization.

But I also know that maps can be used as despicable instruments of oppression, for hunting and rounding up, for war and plunder. The civilization they helped to create often counts its success by the number of its prisons, and it is difficult to imagine a new road being made without such buildings close behind.

This conditional love of the earth’s topography and its meticulous representation on paper leads me to wonder about the inner configuration of myself, a curiosity which falters because I know there is no fixed shape and texture of the inner man, no settled tectonic picture of the soul, no solid-and-drift in the layers of my skin.

Yet this acute comparison with the landscape of the world is because the earth alone created the people who live on it, made man and all things out of soil and sea water, moulded him by air and fire and liquid matter, moved him by fear and hunger and violence. He is and will always be at the mercy of what formed him, a multiplicity of components which, as far as searching among them for the truth is concerned, are beyond analysis.

And if emotional uncertainties are the only truths that the soul can possibly consist of, it will be a feverish and disordered map I shall finish with, that of a swamp as dangerous and untenable as where I began, perhaps even worse, for one is more likely to sink into spiritual extinction at the end of a search than at the time of setting out.

It often happens that, just before going away, I start to write a story, or even a novel. The stimulus of planning and the upset of preparation turns the senses in a creative direction, and I am prompted to tell something, though I rarely know what the end of it will be because I have to leave off and begin travelling.

The trip itself may be for no good reason except the muscle-flexing pleasure of moving on, but it cannot be denied when the veins are all set for it. It is no use protesting that whatever I wanted to say can wait till I come back, because it will never be the same again. The blood will be in a different spiritual zone, the maps around the feet redrawn, the heart and the eyes in another country.

The journey I am now a little beyond the middle point of is not the sort that takes me overland, but into the guts and around the darkness of the tripes. Myself, the earth, and time are indivisible during this peregrination, but the older I get the more it is necessary to scrape into the soil of time, even if it means digging the ground from under my feet so that I drop into the hole I have made.

The hole is in France. It is ten feet across and five feet deep. Edgar lies in it, rotting with terror though still sound in every limb, encompassed by the squalid rammel of the battlefield. Three corpses are on the anal lip of the crater, their khaki uniforms stained red and purple. Before falling into it Edgar saw them lying asleep in clumps and rows. Others were still screaming in horrible dreams: the sky was reality but they could not reach it.

Another man is wounded by a shrapnel bullet entering his stomach. He tries to spit out his shoulder-blades but they won’t come loose, so he falls. Edgar has ammunition, but no rifle. The overcast sky is a vast and awful noise of bursting shells. The soil-and-chemical smell of explosions is as piercing as the sounds they make. It attacks another part of the senses. A massacre is taking place. Sixty thousand soldiers are being shot or blown to pieces for no reason at all, and Edgar wonders how as a human being he ever got into it.

36

The British Army has done for him — by hoping to move the battalion to which he belonged across a few inches of the 1:10,000 trench map — FONQUEVILLERS, SECOND EDITION, 57D N.E. SHEETS 1 & 2 (parts of) 1916.

His own officers, I heard him tell my father with a sort of crazed respect at their utter callousness, had lifted their revolvers to make sure the men went over the top. He remembered the voice petulantly barking as if they were cattle: ‘Get on! Get on, then! Get on! Come on, you, get on. Get on, then. Get on!’

During their move to the battlefront, Edgar had been singled out by his battalion commander for a special talk because he had been a deserter. He was told that if there was any shirking of duty now that he was on active service he would be court-martialled for it and shot. To ram home the threat he was a read a list of half a dozen names belonging to men who had so perished on that sector in the last month.

Two hundred and fifty of these heroes of common sense were murdered by their own firing-squads during the war, and many more were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The English war machine had spent nearly the whole of the nineteenth century limbering up for the super-butchery of the Great War. They tasted blood when Napoleon began his rampages, and had a go later in the Crimea, where thousands died. But the scores of minor colonial campaigns since then did not satisfy them, and they envied the Americans the slaughterous encounters of their Civil War. The great Henderson, who wrote so lovingly on Stonewall Jackson, theorized no end about it and regretted that the noble slave-owning south had lost. Observers were sent to the Russo-Japanese War, which was studied in every detail, so that the Army Office in London could produce the most intricate maps and monographs. But not until 1914 did the military caste hone up their ineptness, and sniff the possibility of real homebrewed slaughter — or as near to home as they thought it reasonable to get.

37

In the diversionary attack at Gommecourt the 5th and 7th battalions of the Sherwood Foresters came out of their trenches, which were a foot deep in mud, and went towards the German lines.

During the week prior to the attack both battalions, like the rest of the 46th Division, had been continuously soaked to the skin, set in pouring rain at the hardest physical labour on trenches and earthworks. None of them had a night’s sleep during this time, so that when they walked to their deaths on the morning in question they were like men only half alive. ‘I just went with the others,’ Edgar said to my father, ‘when the officer pointed his gun and shouted. None of us knew what we were doing. Or what to expect. We were all done in.’

If August 8th, 1918, was, as Ludendorff said, the blackest day in the annals of the German Army (and there is no reason to disbelieve him, though it was even blacker in 1945), it is equally true that July 1st, 1916, when Haig commenced his attack on the Somme, was a similarly dark day in the history of the British nation. Within ten minutes of the attack starting 60,000 men had fallen to the fire of a hundred German machine-gunners, and to their artillery. This is nearly as many casualties suffered by all sides during the whole day of the Battle of Waterloo.

‘Still,’ Edgar went on, ‘we hadn’t far to go. Not much more than a quarter of a mile between us and the Jerries. About from the White Horse to the Boulevard pub. We might as well have been trying to get at the moon.’

Laden with 70 pounds of equipment they clambered over the parapets and walked across no-man’s-land in parade-ground formation, a fact which all official and many unofficial histories mention with pride. The Germans who watched them advance under a cloudless sky and shot whole lines of them down spoke highly of their courage. A seven-day bombardment before the attack had merely driven the Germans into their underground dugouts, some or which were forty feet deep and supplied with electric light, so that when on July 1st the bombardment stopped as a clear signal that the attack was about to begin, their machine-gunners rushed up to what remained of the parapets to meet the ‘flower of British manhood’.

At half past seven in the morning it came across no-man’s-land at a slow walk, having been led to believe that the guns had by this time smashed every living and resisting thing in their path, and that they more or less had only to stroll forward and ‘take over’ the German defences. In fact the walls of barbed wire had hardly been breached by millions of shells, which they discovered to their short-lived horror when they bunched up in hundreds at the few gaps open, and fell in heaps under the fire of the German gunners.

Those few who came back crawled across no-man’s-land at dusk, after waiting in shell-holes all day. Edgar wasn’t killed or wounded, and neither did he return to his own side. They would only have sent him on some other stunt, he said, which might really have killed him off, or he would have deserted on active service and got shot for it. With a dogged sort of insanity and courage he stayed in a shell-hole between the opposing trenches, hoping to surrender to the Germans as soon as it was possible.

Tortured by hunger and thirst, but above all fear, he many times wanted to go back to the comfort of his own unit but was afraid that, being unwounded and without his rifle, he would be caught on a charge of desertion. Cries of dying and wounded surrounded him. On the attack across no-man’s-land he had gone through rolls of wire as high as walls, and back through them again without knowing it. Just before dropping into the shell-hole he was aware of a young officer, his arm hanging bloodily loose, running by him and shrieking: ‘Hopeless! Hopeless!’

Edgar had collapsed through total exhaustion, and nobody bothered him because they were too intent on trying to save themselves, though few of them did. He did not know how long he lay in the crater, nor could he remember being picked up by the Germans, but after what seemed years he found himself sitting in one of their trenches, and recalled that they had treated him with every kindness.

When a German aeroplane on a mission of mercy and courtesy flew over the British front on July 4th and dropped a list of wounded and unwounded prisoners that their side had taken, Edgar’s name was on it.

Both battalions of Sherwood Foresters were wiped out in this diversionary attack. No gains were expected, and none were made. Blinds were drawn in every Nottingham street, for the battalions had suffered over 1,200 casualties on this small sector, and another Forester battalion lost 500 men further south. The only small advance was on the extreme right of the twenty-mile front where British troops, attacking in co-operation with the French left, had the assistance of their more efficient artillery.

The British staff considered the day’s battle a success because the New Armies, over which so much care was said to have been taken, had stood up well under fire. In other words, they had died rather than run away, though some officers were to complain afterwards how difficult and at times impossible it had been to get men who had been designated to carry wire into no-man’s-land to form up and become part of an attacking wave.

The assault might have proved more successful if they had been taught to stay alive — as all good soldiers should be — if they had dashed across at night, for example, with no equipment except a shovel and a few grenades, which would have achieved just as much, if not a great deal more. At such a time the British Army should have called on a nation of poachers instead of a nation of cricketers. It was war, not sport, but the casuality lists on this day or perhaps at some other time might have included the following group of names — though it was never sure whether they were killed, wounded, or simply missing:

Their demise was not reported in The Times, though in their disappearance they were not divided.

38

After the opening of the Somme battle it was plain that the British people were willing to accept the appalling casualties of their soldiers, and that the soldiers themselves would take whatever massacres were foisted on them by the incompetents in control. Such passive attitudes allowed the offensive to continue, and led to the Passchendaele carnage of the following year. No great voice was lifted against this internal ripping to pieces of a country.

The British were all right as long as they did the attacking and were being shot down or blown to pieces. It was as if casualties actually kept up their morale — at least one is led to believe so by those who did not do the fighting. It was the staff officers’ war. They stayed alive, and as such the war belonged to them. Those officers who did die perished willingly in the public school spirit. For the old men in command it was a game of tactics in which live pieces were used, though it soon degenerated into a penny dreadful for those other ranks who in their gloom and despair did not know how to end it except by getting killed themselves.

On the Somme the strongest part of the German line was selected for attack. For this reason the Germans doubted that it would after all be made there, in spite of the preparations. The clues that it might be the spot chosen could be seen as a feint, so the British prided themselves on having achieved strategical surprise, a useless advantage when the defences are impregnable. But the Germans held themselves ready, in case it should after all turn out to be the real thing.

The British commanders did not know how to keep the times of their attack secret, as if the more dead and wounded lying between the lines, the more successful the battle. There was no such thing as surprise, not only because of lengthy bombardments which advertised an attack loud and clear for days if not weeks beforehand but because it was always possible to trick the exact date of the offensive out of the British Army staff.

The French would not unreasonably want to know when their villages were going to be in danger from artillery replies and counterattack. But at the same time there may have been someone among them able to transmit information across to the Germans. The British staff, scornful of petty secrecy, were dangerous romantics who had never heard of spies. In any case, British grit was always supposed to triumph in the end, in spite of corpse-filled shell-holes, or bodies hanging like scarecrows on the barbed wire to rot in full view of eighteen-year-olds who had not yet ‘gone over the top’ but were soon to do so.

In February 1916 the inhabitants of Meaulte, close to the Somme and behind the front line, were ordered to evacuate their village, since they would be in peril when the big attack started. But the inhabitants did not want to leave, in spite of the danger, protesting that they would not only lose their livestock but, more important, the whole of the present year’s crop.

They sent an eloquent and moving petition to King George V in London, explaining their feelings on the matter. One of the king’s secretaries passed it back to Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander in France, who had the magnanimity to allow the French villagers to stay where they were, warning them however that they must remain in their houses for three days from July 1st. Months in advance, therefore, he had given away the exact date of the British attack. From then on the Germans began to strengthen their line which, even after 400,000 casualties and five months later, the British failed to break.

Yet on the first day of the Somme battle the British Army was at the height of its quality regarding the skill and spirit of the men. This was never to be regained, at any time during the rest of the war. It was wasted away in ten minutes. Though the soldiers of the Somme were only half-trained compared to the pre-war peacetime army, they could fire their rifles generally at a more rapid rate than those who came later. As volunteers they possessed ‘dash’ and intelligence, while those conscripts of the next two years became dogged and despairing, and tried to stay alive longer, though they had little chance of doing so. It was admitted by the staff that they did not have the quality of the men who went down on the Somme.

The blow finished Britain as a world power, and as a country fit for any hero to live in. The heroes and their heroic spirit was dead. If they had survived they would indeed have insisted after the war that England be made habitable for them. But such an insistence would have disturbed the old order too fundamentally for its comfort, which with sadistic prescience saw to it therefore that those heroes did not outlast them.

The men of the Somme did not die because they wanted to perpetuate the class structure of English cities and the English countryside, nor the power of those five per cent, who owned ninety-five per cent of the country’s wealth. As they went up to the front they thought some unwritten and unspoken agreement existed that this would be done away with for ever if they took part with all their might and main in the war.

They did not fight for England as it was. They fought to change England, as much as, if not more so than, to protect their country from the Germans with whom, deep down, they had no quarrel. The fact is that their deaths (which they did not expect) only made sure that the England they disliked would remain in the ascendant. In that sense they actually betrayed their country by going to fight for it. But it is difficult not to succumb to treachery when it is callous enough.

39

Reading the official history of the Battle of the Somme one is struck by the vast preparations that went on for months beforehand, of the immense labour of building roads, tramways, and narrow-gauge railways through the otherwise empty fields, and the erecting of tents, depots, and huts; the hauling of ammunition and guns, the sinking of wells for water, the siting and equipping of hospitals to receive the wounded, the allotting of so many trains per division for its supplies — all this meticulous timetable planning to create a superb and efficient factory for getting 300,000 men up to the front and into slaughter, an organization that covered the whole of northeastern France. The only trouble was that it didn’t work.

There were nearly a million and a half British soldiers in France and Belgium on June 30th, 1916, holding ninety miles of front, making an average of ten men of all arms to defend every yard of ground facing the Germans. On most sectors of the line this was much less, since the proportion on those parts where an offensive was being prepared — e.g. the Somme — had to be more or less double.

A linear city in which fighting almost never ceased during four years stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier. Some four million men on either side had to be provided with food, water, clothing, guns, and ammunition, as well as other impedimenta and necessities of ordinary life. It was Slaughter City stretched out over the fields for 400 miles, ammunitions wagons going one way, ambulances the other — the same on both sides.

All the so-called civilized and intellectual brains of Europe were engaged in trying to discover ways of breaking into the other half of this composite city of mud trenches, strongpoints, dugouts, tents, huts, and, further back, real houses and halls in towns and villages. Where the two civilizations met it was a waste-ground, a blood-soaked rammel-tip, a shanty-town of bones and death, a vast fearful stinking serpentine conglomeration of misdirected energy and talent which has since been commemorated as something glorious in thousands of shabby poppy-strewn pre-totalitarian war memorials up and down the country, and in every country in Europe.

40

At Messines Ridge, on June 7th, 1917, nearly a year after the first Somme battle, the British Army tried again. It blew up the German front line, and moved forward over the earthquake zone which had been created. Nine divisions of about 12,000 men in each took part in the attack, with three more in support.

‘Briefly,’ says the army manual on demolitions and mining, ‘the tendency of low explosives is to shift, and of high explosives to shatter.’ I did not know this when I read of the Messines assault, or when my father gloated over the sudden skyward direction of the Hill 60 part of the ridge.

Tunnels were dug under the German trenches, and loads of ammonal were stacked in their secret places. Ammonal is a slightly sticky substance like damp sugar. One might say that it is crystalline and doesn’t flow very well, and that though it is fairly dry it has to be kept from getting wet. For this reason it is packed in hermetically sealed tins, which must be placed close together so that the detonation waves will pass through and ignite the well-tamped cache. A detonator and primer is buried in the charge. Ammonal produces a lifting effect, and so is ideal for mined charges.

Nearly a million pounds of it — over 400 tons — were made ready for the attack, so packed that, after ignition, its force would go only upwards. There were 55 tons alone under Hill 60, the unsuspecting Germans snug in their bunkers above. When the 1,000,000 pounds went off at dawn the whole sky was — but the dreadful picture has been many times described.

Burrowing by British soldier-miners and uniformed navvies had been going on for eighteen months. The longest tunnel was over 700 yards, the deepest more than a 100 feet. Many of the explosions had a radius of destruction of 200 feet. Thousands of German soldiers were killed. Many went mad. Thousands more were taken prisoner.

And one more ridge was captured.

41

The explosions did their job. The dawn attack was successful. But though open land lay before the troops quite early in the morning they were paralysed by the vacillations of the inexperienced staff who examined maps with glazed eyes miles away in comfortable chateaux and manor houses. If the men were unable to exploit what they had bravely and painfully won — for the earthquake landscape still had to be fought over — it wasn’t entirely for lack of ability at bringing up reserves. Often they were immediately to hand, but the staff were crushed by the problems of moving them. They had not planned to break through, therefore when they did it was not exploited. Instead of advancing down the valleys on the other side of the ridge and throwing the German front into confusion by capturing Comines, the troops on their hard-won high ground, tired after the fighting and happy that they had survived, took off their tunics and lay in the sunshine because no one could tell them what to do, until the returning Germans began to pick them off in dozens, finding good targets in their white skins. One more attack, begun with such brilliancy and hope, fizzled miserably out. As has often been said before, and cannot be repeated too many times, the Germans considered that the British soldiers fought like lions, but were led by donkeys.

The gaps were occasionally there for the infantry to go forward, but the yeomen farmers and country gentlemen in uniform had the antique vision of galloping through on their horses to finish off the Germans with swords and lances! They couldn’t leave such ‘glory’ to the lower-class craftsmen and clerks and slum-dwellers. The élite of the army, the cavalry, must have its turn. They waited impatiently on their fine horses, cursing the infantry because they had not cut the wire properly, and the artillery for making so many holes in the ground that their horses would be held up, and their spotless tunics splashed with mud.

But the infantry made a big mistake when they broke open the German defences. They did not carry with them boxes of live foxes, to be released at the right moment so that the foxhunting cavalry commanders champing in the fields behind could begin a wild, tally-hoing, unstoppable chase. If the foxes had been sturdy and resourceful the foxhunters might have made it to the Rhine before the baffled German reserves had collected their wits and closed in, and driven them into the water.

Certainly the British infantry would have been glad to see them go, while those who were not could have followed them. Of the rest, the pigeon-fanciers might have sent back racers telling of the famous victory, and the ex-colliers celebrated with whippet races, while those still bored and unconvinced could have finished off the corpse-eating rats in no-man’s land — a combination of animal scenes worthy of the great Doctor Doolittle himself.

42

For every officer killed or wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, twenty-two other ranks fell with him. During the whole of the Boer War, in which the total British casualties were under 17,000, the proportion was one officer to eleven other ranks.

If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the British class war was fought out on the Western Front with real shells and bullets. The old men of the upper classes won by throwing the best possible human material into the slaughter, including their own high-spirited and idealistic young. But the masses who joined up were people who had been perfected by more than a century of the Industrial Revolution. In one sense they were indeed the flower of mankind: intelligent, technically minded, and literate, men of a sensibility whose loss sent England as a country into a long decline. When they died, as nearly a million did, they took their skills with them.

Such people were thrown away with prodigal distaste because they were coming to the point of stepping into their own birthright. Their potential was about to become manifest, and they would have demanded what had been denied them for so long. War seemed the only alternative to revolution, and the leaders of every nation were faced by the same cosmic problem.

They sided with destiny and chose war, but by the end of it revolution had come in any case, and the exhausted peace or truce soon brought in another round of war and revolution that began in 1939 and has by no means ended yet. Wars can be started, but revolutions can never be stopped, for whoever creates war makes revolution, which then seems the surest chance of winning peace, even after the longest of wars. ‘Only revolution can save the earth from hell’s pollution,’ said Byron, though one cannot believe that in their heart of hearts those key men of 1914 thought exactly that. Time goes more slowly than we think. The Great War has ended, but Europe is only now recovering.

To go back to the trenches is but a small step, and no one yet knows the true meaning of what went on there. The men of 1914 were slaughtered, and indeed allowed themselves to be slaughtered — which was the fatal flaw in their perfectability. The old men of the upper classes who were in command possessed the half-concealed knowledge that if they did not dispose of them in this sporting roulette-wheel fashion then those millions would turn round and sweep them away.

It was perhaps the last viciously competent task that the British upper class was to perform, and it is from the Great War that the drift between officers and men, governing and governed, between those lavish with the blood of others, and those frugal with the rich life they saw themselves on the point of beginning to enjoy, really began. Before 1914 a unity could have been possible, and the men might then have tried it. Joining up to fight was, in a sense, their way of saying yes, but the old men used this affirmation to try and finish them off.

In order to maintain a mythical ‘balance of power’ on the mainland of Europe, or to arse-lick over the humanly meaningless alliances concocted in some cosy office or dreamlike court, they destroyed the internal balance of the country. England was an imperial power that embarked on a war of aggressive defence. When there were no more colonies left to grab, the empires of the world went for each other’s throats. Germany tore the guts out of the British Empire, and choked on them.

The best that can be said is that the upper classes lacked the imagination to realize what they were doing, though their subconscious must have known well enough. Never before had such an assault been made of class against class, and the music of the German machine-guns and the percussion of their artillery on the Somme must have caused some ambiguous emotions in those who sent the men over, except that many heard the music from a distance, if at all.

For four years British soldiers were slung against the impregnable German defences, flesh against flying steel, and they never really succeeded in breaking through. The army did so in 1918 only because the Americans had started to bring their fresh skill and material into the war.

The nearest the British came to it was at Cambrai in 1917. This was due to the technical knowledge and the calm tenacity and bravery of the men in 400 tanks. They laid the German defences wide open, but the staff was so tragically incompetent that even with an armoured force that no one had ever seen before, and against which the Germans had as yet little defence, they could not take advantage of the silent and empty road leading into the abandoned city of Cambrai. They could not believe their luck and so, as always in such cases, luck continued to run against them. The other breakages of the German front, on the Somme on July 14th, 1916, later the same year at Flers, and at Third Ypres the following year could not be exploited because there were no live men left to push through the gaps.

But if the British had finally succeeded in breaking through, the staff would have sent the army into a disaster far greater than that of a failed attack. With patient, maladroit negligence they would have concocted humiliation as well as tragedy for the men. Something in their bone-heads must have warned them of the dangers in pushing on when the gap was opened, of getting a few divisions through into open country where they would be at the mercy of quick-moving German reserves, to be surrounded and hammered into annihilation. The army would lose so many men that they would be in no position to play at war with them much longer. The higher echelons of the staff might then have their own bodies threatened by shot and shell, and that was never their idea at all.

43

Too high a standard was set for the men in the line by officers who never went near it. The front was regarded by the General Staff as a temporary fixture which was liable to alter at any time, for when the big push came and the breakthrough happened, no more trenches would be needed because the troops would lead the staff in a fine dash towards Potsdam. And it was liable to come at any minute, for one never knew when the Germans would crack.

Consequently, the British trenches were rarely allowed to become too comfortable for fear the soldiers would get soft, or that they wouldn’t want to leave them when told to get up and attack the Germans. They must never be corrupted by the defensive spirit while one more useless sacrifice could be wrung from them. In 1917 the Russian Army voted with its feet for peace by getting out of the line as fast as it could. The British Army on the Somme and at Passchendaele voted with its corpses for death.

The staff must have been a preening, self-conscious lot, and imagined every soldier to be the same, for they made sure that their positions were always overlooked by the Germans. They liked being chiked at from hilltops and ridges. All along the front, from the high dunes of the Belgian sea-coast, south via the hills near Ypres, the Messines Ridge, Vimy Ridge, and the uplands before Bapaume, it was indeed a theatre of war to the Germans, who were invariably permitted by the gallant British staff to have the best seats in it.

The British Army was used as a battering ram against an unbreakable door. The soldiers who formed it looked bitterly at high ground up which they would have to advance. Every year of the war they were led out on an annual bloodbath, and though the door of the German defences creaked and cracked, it never burst open.

In spite of the French troubles at Verdun, the British should not have attacked for at least another two years, so that the New Army could have been trained to the standard of its opponents and, more important, so that its officers could have been properly instructed. The German war machine, dangerous as it was, could have been slowly bled to death by the many Allies, instead of being continually and suicidally attacked.

More sensibly, the British Army should have gone on to the defensive in the spring of 1915, and at the same time tried to make peace. The Germans would not have accepted the terms of withdrawal to their own frontiers at that time, but perhaps after two more years of stalemate they might have seen it as the only possible course. But the British believed in the suicidal maxim that the best defence lies in the attack — which it does, but only if you can be sure of winning. Otherwise it leads to frustration, reaction, and stubbornness — this latter a fatal quality in the British character when it is given a free run, for it crushes fresh thought, destroys flexibility, and scoffs at improvisation.

More than two years were to go by before Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash showed how an attack could be made without incurring massive casualties — in the offensive before Amiens by the Australians and Canadians on August 8th, 1918. Monash, if any man can be singled out for such an honour, was the person responsible for Ludendorff’s cry that ‘August 8th was the blackest day of the German Army in the history of the war’. A few more generals with the intellect of Monash might have saved the British Army hundreds of thousands of casualties, and brought some kind of victory to it as well. But such people were rare, and the fools and criminals were too many.

Monash made his men train in combination with the actual tank crews before they went into battle together. When the attack opened and his men moved forward he arranged for ammunition to be dropped by parachute. The artillery barrage was only to begin on the day of the attack, and not a week before.

It was as if the longer the casuality lists became, the closer the staff must have thought they were to wearing down the Germans, and to victory. It never came in the sense they sought it, not finally until 1945, when the Bolshevism they loathed had had twenty-five years to stiffen the Russian character which was said in 1917 to have let the Allies down so badly. The Germans were finally finished off as a military nation at Stalingrad and Kursk.

The British battalion commanders in the First World War did not like the uncomfortable mud, but death and replacements made them feel they were actually getting somewhere. Raids and minor attacks were constantly launched to keep up the spirits of their men and foster the tigerish grit of aggression in them. But as soon as they had to stop much of this, in the eerie winter of 1917–18, and go on the defensive because they really had no more men to throw away, the Germans came back and broke through with comparative ease, on March 21st, 1918.

Haig, Britain’s number one war criminal, expected the Germans to advance in this attack at the same slow pace of his own clumsily-planned assaults. The remnants of the Fifth Army were hardly able to save themselves because it had been insisted that the British soldiers should have no training in the art of retreat. By this time the army was so weakened in morale that it could not be trusted to do it properly. If it couldn’t attack, then it had to fight and die where it stood.

This senseless edict took away their chance of life, for tens of thousands were killed. In actual fact the British Army excelled in the art of retreat — as in the fighting withdrawal of 136 miles in thirteen days from Mons in 1914, when the small British Expeditionary Forced faced several Germany Army corps which attempted to envelop and destroy it. The retreat to Dunkirk in the Second World War, and the subsequent evacuation, was a great military feat.

With encouragement and planning a similar operation might have been repeated in 1918, but there was panic and rout in what was left of the Fifth Army as it fell back — with the usual acts of great and unquestionable bravery. Discipline cracked, and only the French divisions, recently recovered from their own mutinies, saved the British from disaster.

Brute force was used to bring the soldiers to heel. Redcaps and officers held gangs of stragglers at gunpoint to herd them back into the fight. Not all casualties were caused by the Germans. The full story of the retreat has yet to be written, though it probably never will be. Many old scores were settled in the confusion. Men shot their own officers and sergeant-majors with more readiness than usual — though one heard of this happening during the rest of the war as well, such frequent tales that there must have been truth in them.

44

Most of those who came back from the war did not want to talk about it, were embarrassed if one questioned them, became furtive in their recollections, as if they had taken part in something shameful.

It was left to the self-confident, extrovert, unimaginative commanding officers to arrange for the military histories of their units to be written, perhaps in order to wipe away some of the shame that they might otherwise have felt. Men I spoke to in childhood were savagely wry: ‘Never again. They only sent us to France because they wanted to get us killed.’ Not for them the regimental histories, to pore over with their hearts that had been steeped in the bitter realism of war. If they could have bothered with any reminiscences at all they might have preferred the highlighted accounts of disillusioned poets who were, after all, humanly closer to them.

They were sour and sad because they had been dragged into war by the foetid, super-efficient ruling-class machine that for a thousand years had perfected its grip on their souls — but which did not know how to win a war when it came to fighting one, or how to stop it when the blood-bill ran too high. And the men were angrier at the fact that they had allowed themselves to be betrayed, final proof that their manhood had gone and, with it, that supreme self-confidence which had only become apparent to them when they had already offered themselves up to the war, by which time it was too late.

To give the impression, as history books do, that the British nation volunteered for the war ‘as one man’ is false. Perhaps one man can do so. After one man, another will follow, and even if the time gap is infinitesimal, it cannot be said that they went to the recruiting centres together — though it was to the advantage of government propagandists to have the population believe that this was so. I would like to think that one followed another like sheep, or that a hundred men were paid by the War Office to stand outside a recruiting centre and have their photographs taken, than that they sprang to it like automatons.

All sorts of tricks and pressures were employed to get men into the army in the two years before conscription came. Those of a certain class who did not hurry to join up finally capitulated when nanny met them in the street and handed them a white feather for cowardice. My Uncle Frederick, who said that this became quite common, was offered one on the top deck of a tram by an elderly woman. Instead of blushing with shame he gave her a violent push: ‘Leave me alone, you filthy-minded old butcher!’

Then he made his way off the tram expecting to be pursued by howls of ‘universal execration’ from other passengers, but they were embarrassed and silent, so that he walked down the steps unmolested.

This nanny appeared to have mistaken him for some type which he clearly was not. They seemed determined, he told me, to get their revenge on those young gentlemen whom they had been forced to spoil and mollycoddle as infants. They also possessed more than a residue of spite against the parents they had been bullied by, and retaliated now by hurrying their pet sons into the trenches — or any sons they could get their hands on, for that matter. It was one more example, he added, of how war puts the final touch of degradation on certain people in whom it has already got a fair grip. Not that this was meant to malign the women. Far from it. Men did the fighting, after all.

In war it is the worst of a country that persuades the best men to die. It is easier to deceive the best than the worst. But if it is true that the best men are fools and go with ease, while the worst are cunning and find it easy to hold back, what else can war be but an utterly sure method of destroying a country? Uncle Frederick argued against this, and said that any who went deserved exactly what they got. I was inclined to take his word for it, for he himself never put on any uniform, and so bolstered my faith in humanity. He thought it was a case of the old wanting their revenge against the young. Those young men who fight and come back will then grow up to revere the values of the old who made sure they went — so the old in their deadly wisdom fondly imagine. And who can say they are wrong? The geriatrics stay behind to cheer them on, while the less senile put their black-hearted experience into smoothing out the paths that lead to the splintered sinews and dereliction of the battlefield.

One does not want to be unjust to those who took part in the war, but I do not see why the dead need war memorials, since they are already dead and so have no more requirements of this world. Perhaps the living want them more, to try and justify the feeling of guilt they have towards the dead, the guilt that eats at the living because they survived. No dishonour is done to the dead by wanting to see all war memorials destroyed. As for survivors still sound in wind and limb, they wouldn’t want them either if they hadn’t been worked on to desire them by those self-same people who manipulated their sentiments and got them into the war in the first place.

What about the maimed, blind, gassed, and limbless who, after all, paid the most? The only real voice they have left is that which enables them to cry out now and again for a living pension or pittance with which to sustain themselves. I feel sure that, knowing what it is to be maimed for a lifetime, they would not go into that war or any war if they could have their lives over again.

One might say, in ranting against the awful waste and slaughter, that the officers and members of the government, the priests, scholars, and authors who promoted the enterprise, are no longer alive and here to listen, so why shout? And if they were, it would make no difference, because they would not hear.

Yet people exactly like them are still here today and would do the same again — conditions permitting — in different ways, using other means, if given the chance. Every time it happens it seems as if it has never happened before. The same people are still either crushing or perverting the people. One must resist all authority, regimentation, law, and dehumanizing sameness — whether it comes from a government itself, or the backside of its soul called the silent majority. One can never say: ‘All that sort of thing is finished’—because nothing is ever finished without eternal vigilance and united action when the ugly head of unthinking patriotism is raised.

45

The loud voices of the birds told me it would soon be light, but I hadn’t really been asleep, due to an unexplained sharp click from the dashboard of the car that disturbed my brain every few minutes of the short and chilly night.

I thought it came from the clock but couldn’t be sure. It was a coma rather than good slumber. Huge lorries roared along the motorway by which I was parked, going to Lille or Paris, and taking a few minutes to cross the battlefield of the Somme, some of whose acres were now buried under this broad, swathing highway.

Stirring myself, I took a gulp of brandy. It was half past three, with a faint light in the east, and I thought that a dawn attack at this time of the summer would have meant no rest at all, men dying in a half dream as they stumbled forward, or only waking to the pain of being wounded.

I drove along the empty road to Bapaume, and then southeast up to Flers and Longueval, where the outlines of hedges and fields were sharply enough etched for me to switch off the car lights. It was four o’clock, and no one was yet awake, all shutters being closed. Heavy mist lay in the hollows, but the land was wide open and rolling, high against the sky, with intensely dark patches of wood here and there. Faint scars showed where fighting took place, particularly on the edges of Delville Wood, in which thousands perished on both sides.

The same could be said of High Wood, and I drove to it slowly from Longueval, the sky leaden and the birds still noisy, but the half-kilometre flank of packed trees facing south was formidable up the gentle slope, stolid and uninviting even now in the dawn. The British, led for once by the cavalry, captured it on July 14th, 1916, but, owing to the failure to take it several hours earlier than they did, when it was empty, and to get up reinforcements to hold it properly, they were thrown out. Waves of attacking infantry passed through it, or stayed in it, and it was not finally taken till after two months of the most dogged and costly fighting of the war.

I walked up the lane hoping to enter the wood, but it was fenced off and, as of old, one needed wire-cutters to get into it. Words on a board stated that trespassers would be prosecuted. Perhaps similar notices had been there in 1916 when the British unexpectedly broke through to it. Had the soldiers wondered, in any case, when they were launched in attack after attack, what had been the name of the man who owned the wood? Where was he at the time? Did he know that British soldiers were being mown down in hundreds because they were trying to get his wood back from the Germans?

Did he realize, wherever he was and whoever he was, that they were being bled and mangled for the sake of his half-kilometre square of tree-covered land? If he had seen them dying outside the wood, and burning to death inside, would he have wanted them to go on trying to get it back for him? What property was worth so much? Surely it would have been better to have gone up to the Germans under a flag of truce and made some attempt at paying them to get out.

And when those British battalions at last captured that bit of smoking, tree-ruined land, considering the price they had had to pay, who would it belong to then? It was the sort of awkward question my Uncle Frederick liked to put. Should it not have been theirs? It could surely be nobody else’s after that big shindig. But they’d been brought up to respect other peoples’ property, even to die for it in thousands, which was a somewhat unfathomable passion since none of them had any of their own. The most they’d say perhaps is that if anybody deserved High Wood it was the dead, but that was a trick, because since the dead were dead and had no say, and in any case couldn’t read notices saying that trespassers would be prosecuted, then it must go back to its private owner, waiting to claim its few charred trunks. One might say that a notice such as faced me is better than a hail of bullets, but either way, one can’t get in, which makes one wonder what it was all for.

Even a man who had allowed himself to become a soldier should never do anything unless he first asks himself: ‘Why?’—and tries to square the action he is about to take with his own conscience. To disobey orders is a virtue, and if one is then alone after taking the responsibility of it, one exists in a state of grace, and becomes a hero of humanity.

46

I thought of walking in the field where my Uncle Edgar had lain while waiting to be captured, but I didn’t want to disturb his shadow which must still have been on it. So at a later hour on Sunday morning I went into Aveluy Wood, in the valley of the Ancre.

The trees were grown up again, but not to any great stature, though inside it was dark enough to keep out the light. The pitted ground had no recognizable paths among the livid summer greenery, whereas the pre-1914 maps showed many. Banks of earth were piled above shallow yet distinct trenches. Bits of rusty wire and iron spikes, pieces of shovel and decaying steel were scattered under the leaves. If I dug I would have found bones, but I walked over ground that four battalions of West Yorkshire men had taken cover in before making their futile attack against Thiepval on July 1st, 1916.

Like other belligerent nations of the Great War the British have no defence against the charge of internal slaughter, of self-indulgent flag-waving, of a national patriotic suicidal lemming-rush, of the right hand smashing the left with such unfeeling brutality that both arms are still crippled more than half a century later. These are the unstated views of people I grew up among, of Frederick and his brother Edgar, the composite reactions to catastrophe of those whose words are not supposed to matter as far as history is concerned. But these myths have soaked themselves into the backbone of the country, and such unwritten emotional history will take generations to defuse.

The wood was defended by London battalions of the 47th Division when the British front swung away from the Germans at the beginning of April 1918, and there was savage hand-to-hand fighting with heavy loss of life on both sides. Undoubtedly there were many bones under the soil. Northern France is a vast bone-yard — British, German, and native French — and four million corpses rotted there. Why had they left their wives, children, and parents to fight and die in this patch of wood? Were they so bored that they became belligerent and patriotic to cure it? Or was it true, as many said, that war was invented to keep massacre away from the homely fireside?

England, for so long the balcony from which one observed European revolutions, was dragged into an unnecessary revolution in 1914 by the scruff of its own neck, off with a wave and a smiling cheerio to help gallant little Belgium and clamorous Gaul. The upper classes were bored after late-Victorian stagnation and Edwardian good living, and wanted at the same time to cup the stirring body of the oppressed country. It seemed to fit in so well, everything coming together with such force that it almost makes one believe in God, in order to think that the Devil got into them.

Yet I come across the stray but galling reflection that if I had been alive at the time and twenty years of age I too might have allowed myself to be drummed into the slaughter — unless, being like my Uncle Frederick, I opted out with the closely-guarded integrity of my native sense. I am enough like him to have done that, though no one can finally say.

I picked up a marlin spike and for a moment considered taking it as a souvenir, but the idea seemed ludicrous so I threw it down. My feet were occasionally trapped in the undergrowth, legs buckling when some hidden trench or shell-hole opened below. There were ghosts all around — though I laughed at the insane notion of it — and no noise except for the brush of my own passing, and the crack of dead, overfed twigs. I stood and listened, and couldn’t get away from Edward Elgar’s music which kept coming into my mind. I disliked it at such a time, but there was nothing to be done about it. Let the ghosts haunt the ghosts, and spiders weave their webs. It was bad to be alone in such a place.

But the time of the world was up, when the blood-letting came among these trees. Apart from the matter of revolution, the emotional sensuousness that was matched to a hundred years of romanticism and repression burst into a slaughterhouse. The music of Sibelius and Mahler led straight into the trenches. They didn’t see it then, but we can see it now. Truth (for what it was worth) hauled the uniformed masses over the top by the scruff of the neck and the grip of the genitals. We haven’t finished here yet, nor in any way understood it.

What happened indeed to the peace one was supposed to find in the middle of a wood? I walked in the direction I had come, hoping it would take me to the car, though by keeping a straight line I would obviously reach some lane or other, and escape from this verdant spirit-haunt.

But it is impossible to escape from Elgar — whether or not one is in Aveluy Wood. He is a real artist, a man of complete conscience, England’s greatest composer certainly, for he not only sent the men into the trenches but greeted them when they came out. He beat in the other ranks with the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, and nodded the commissioned officers in to the Introduction and Aleggro for Strings. When they returned he met those broken men with the infinite sadness and pity of the Violincello Concerto in E minor. This work contains the broken bones of Edwardian glory and an attempt at semi-jovial rebirth, never taken seriously, as if he could not get over the fact that his most enduring work was to be built on a million corpses.

He wants to be gay in the second movement, but the Angel of Mons is too much in the ascendant. There is a crater under his heels which he edges warily away from. In the third section his tetric phrases meander through the ranks of his million ghosts. In his bucolic English way he expresses sorrow and regret that the world had gone the way it did — even though he may have been in some small way responsible.

But finally the energy overcomes him and he says: ‘I am an artist and so can’t be to blame. If I set your subconscious to music, much as I might with any poet’s words, then I am only being myself as an artist.’

The vibrant yet wistful strength of the body slowly rises. As a composer his best works show him to be a man of the people, but of the whole people. As an artist he tried to unify — that was his purpose — as any artist’s must be. That was his wish, and I suppose at various times of his life, particularly before 1914, he thought that he might even be succeeding. But like any artist, part of him was blind, and it wasn’t till 1918 that he saw how wrong he had been, and that some disaster had occurred which had smashed his beloved England for a long time to come. So his concerto is a work of sadness, regret, and hope. The broken body of England was dragging itself back through the mud of Passchendaele. It still haunts the resurrected woods of the Somme.

History, meantime, goes on. We love Mahler, we crave to hear Sibelius. They are artists, after all. And bourgeois capitalism is cured of its worst rampages of war because the Bomb, an effective weapon of peace, threatens not only people with total destruction, but all property, and no nation can bring itself to risk such a price. Property is God, and this age-old enemy of the people turns out at last to be its final safeguard, behind which we can go on enjoying the works of our favourite artists and try to live.

Walking through the cemetery of Gommecourt and the vast collection of graveyards around Ypres, where tens of thousands rest under crosses or the occasional Star of David, the feeling is one of bewilderment and pity that brings tears like a wall of salt up to the eyes. When there are too many people in the world the dead take up less space than the living. Even those who hate war have their idea of a just war, a war that people in the future will no doubt pronounce to have been as stupid as the rest.

I was lost, and began to wonder if I would ever get out. No longer amused at my lack of orientation, I stopped and lit a cigarette. There had been too many murders here in Aveluy Wood, too many state-sanctioned, church-blessed killings, too much confused death, too many mistakes — society’s mincing-machine for its unwanted energy and talent.

Yet I knew there could be many surprises in the journey after death, especially for a soldier. The killing in the Great War was on so massive a scale that a decent number of corpses could be collected into cemeteries and put under the soil, a final resting place as far as we know. Many dead of the Napoleonic Wars, however, went through a different fate, as I was reminded on reading the following paragraph from The Observer of November 18th, 1822:

‘It is estimated that more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe into the port of Hull. The neighbourhood of Leipsig, Austerlitz, Waterloo and of all the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and the horse which he rode. Thus collected from every quarter, they have been shipped from the port of Hull and thence forwarded to the Yorkshire bone grinders who have erected steam-engines and powerful machinery for the purpose of reducing them to a granulary state. In this condition they are sold to the farmers to manure their lands.’

I was alive, so through the treetops of Aveluy Wood took a healthy line on the sun — still easterly in the sky — and walked till I came to a lane. Using a map, I soon reached the open, glad to be away from trees that had smelled so many corpses they seemed almost human.

47

A photograph of my Uncle Frederick, which he had taken before 1914 and which blended neatly with the older man I came to know, shows an acute and ironic expression, a face both forceful and sensitive, with thin down-curving lips which could not have boded too well for anyone who became emotionally involved with him, nor indeed for the man who actually wore such a face.

He was about thirty when the Great War began, a small man like his father, but handsome and well educated, with dark hair and brown eyes, the eldest and most cultured son of the family. He was gifted in his trade of lace-designer, and travelled in it a good deal before 1914. Finding it difficult to sell his patterns in Nottingham, or being dissatisfied with the prices offered, he went to London, and bought a second-class return ticket for £5 11s 8d to the German textile town of Chemnitz, hoping for better luck. The 700-mile journey took thirty-five hours, and on arrival he set to work making appointments.

One firm was impressed by his designs, and the manager took him to a meal at the opulent Stadt Gotha Hotel while they were being examined by the directors. But when they returned to the office the manager gave the designs back, regretting that his factory would be unable to use them, though hoping he would bring more in the future. This was a big dip from their first enthusiasm. He politely accepted his portfolio, but then said to the directors who had come to wish him goodbye: ‘Would you now give me back the copies you made of my drawings while I was out at the hotel?’

The atmosphere was so tense, he said, that you could have chopped it with a battle-axe. But when he repeated his sentence in even blunter English their anger at his accusation gave way to embarrassment, and then to humour when they realized he had seen through their trick. They bought his patterns, and paid him well, and he went to Chemnitz many times until the Great War put a stop to it.

He left for England only hours before war was declared. On the way from Berlin he witnessed the manoeuvres of the Imperial German Army near Magdeburg, and made a dramatic farewell to the country because the police tried to arrest him at Bremerhaven for what he had seen. The ship pulled out from the quay just as they came into view. If they had collared him he would have been interned for four years in Germany, and thus saved himself some bother in trying to avoid the war in his own country. The sea crossing was so appallingly rough that he was unable to leave his cabin.

When call-up came in 1916 he would have nothing to do with it, averring that a person who refused to get killed for his country is more patriotic than a mad keen bravo who rushes into death for it, that a man is of more value to everyone else if he stays alive. He was not alone in his reluctance to go, for in the first six months of conscription 100,000 men failed to appear for call-up, and another 750,000 hurried to claim exemption.

His wife belonged to the Christadelphian Sect and Frederick had converted to it. Assiduously studying the Bible and learning to read Hebrew, he hoped one day to become a preacher. His allegiance therefore led him to stand as a conscientious objector — an educated phrase that was unintelligible to most ordinary people, which would have been better understood as ‘a hater of war’.

Facing the tribunal of old, true-blue British dunderheads who looked upon him with a sort of patriarchal distaste and offended class unction because he was staunchly refusing the honour of being sent to fight for what they held dear, and would no doubt lavishly enjoy after many of those who had gone to do so were dead, he simply stated his religious principles and folded his arms against them with such mute and obstinate belligerence that it caused one mellower gentleman to regret that such unyielding brass could not be turned against the Germans.

Having long ago weighed up his own talent as a lace-designer and painter of pictures, Frederick quoted his profession before these men as that of artist, upon which the mellower gentleman brightly wondered why he had not joined the Artists’ Rifles when the war began, whose fine battalions did wonderfully dreadful work against the Hun.

Frederick broke his silence, though he had gritted his teeth for some minutes against doing so. ‘There wasn’t one artist in the Artists’ Rifles,’ he said sharply, and so angrily that he had to fight against his own blood to keep to the point of what he wanted to say. ‘They stopped being artists as soon as they put on a uniform. No true artist picks up a gun to kill his fellow-men. Whoever had the idea to form battalions of artists was a devil. He was anti-Christ. It was Satan’s trick, to get rid of those artists who might otherwise stay behind and make trouble — or keep a breath of sanity in this country. If any artists are still fighting they are poor deluded fools who don’t deserve their talent. In all likelihood they never had any.’

The two sides were without meeting point, and instead of being sent into the army Frederick spent two years shovelling shit — as he put it — on a farm in Lincolnshire.

‘Man chooses,’ he said, ‘though God disputes his right to it. Freedom of choice is given to everyone, and if I lived in the moderate comfort of a hayloft instead of cringing in a mud-trench in Flanders, then I betrayed no one, because everybody else could have done the same. They made the wrong choice, and it led to the biggest disaster in the history of the world, because the Second World War came out of the first, and the Jews were almost destroyed by Hitler and his lunatic pan-Germans, and by all those others who didn’t say a big No when they should have done. The only things you can say yes to in this world are love and work, and even then you’ve got to be intelligent and careful about it. God knows, I’m not made of such stuff that my life’s been all that successful, but I’ve never killed or injured anybody.’

During his agricultural life he and his companions were awakened from the hayloft opposite the house at five each morning to the tune of a bully-farmer cracking a whip below, and cursing so richly that it might have sounded picturesque if it hadn’t been aimed at them. To the farmer they were workhorses, and weak ones who did not have the necessary patriotic feeling to go and fight for their country so that he could stay behind and make a profit from it. They were scum, worse even than prisoners of war, who might at least have fair reason for being out of the fighting.

Nocturnally roaming around and into remote sheds of the farm Frederick and a friend discovered a small trunk hidden under a heap of sacks. On shaking it they rightly guessed that it contained several hundred gold sovereigns. As the Great War went on the government needed gold to pay its debts, so a law was passed that such coinage was to be handed in to the banks, who would then issue the equivalent in paper money. It was illegal to hoard such metal, though many did — so as to sell it after the war when its value would be much increased.

Next day the conscientious objectors carried the box to the farmer’s door. When he came at the jingle of it, Frederick said in his most pompous and grating tone that they expected his behaviour to improve from now on, as a reward for finding his long-lost gold. But if the farmer was not the real owner of it, then it should be taken to the police station in Louth. If he was, which seemed likely because they had found it on his property, then it should be put into a bank for safe keeping.

The farmer disliked them, but accepted his gold and treated them more reasonably afterwards. He never found out who had broken the lock of the shed where the box had been kept, though he had his suspicions. As Frederick said, delicate fingers can always be put to good use.

48

We lived in a room on Talbot Street whose four walls smelled of leaking gas, stale fat, and layers of mouldering wallpaper. My father’s thirty-year-old face was set like concrete, ready to hold back tears of humiliation that he must have been pleased to find were not there when the plain clothes police came to take him away.

From the side I saw two of him as he combed his black hair in the mirror. The face looking into the glass seemed about to smile, but that reflected from it showed the bafflement of his brown eyes, and lips that were thinner when he was unhappy. In both images his flesh was grey.

He had especially gloated over his brother Frederick’s haughty manner with creditors. Being dunned as a young man during one of his indigent phases after his release from the servitude of the Great War, Frederick stood at the door of his father’s shop on Trafalgar Street with, as my father remembered: ‘Hardly any bleddy shoes to his feet,’ shouting at a tradesman waiting hopefully on the pavement: ‘I only pay my bills quarterly! Do you understand? Quarterly!’

That night a pantechnicon was loaded to the gills by my father and the driver, Frederick looking on because his hands were too fine to lift such heavy goods and furniture on which little more than a deposit had been paid. The pantechnicon went to London where, as far as the creditors were concerned, Frederick was never heard of again, London being a long way from Nottingham in those days.

Years later, when my father was married, unemployed, and already had three kids to feed, he tried the same scheming stunt of running up bills for food that he had no hope of paying, an imitation of his elder brother which turned out to be the highest form of folly, for he lacked Frederick’s superior mobility and ways of speech when the shopkeeper asked him to pay up or get taken to court. But even when he came back from prison he was glad his brother had been able to beat the system from time to time, and often gloated over it to me.

Frederick followed his trade of lace and embroidery designer in London, and for a while he was a court embroiderer, though I ommitted to ask at what court because I suspected he was exaggerating his claim to grandeur — which might have been doing him an injustice. But there was a great slump in his trade by the middle thirties, and he was thrown as much out of work as were Burton and his sons when motor-cars finished off blacksmithery.

In 1936 he met a column of unemployed miners that had stopped to rest at some open ground before continuing their march to the middle of London. Various members of it went among the spectators with collecting boxes, gathering funds to buy food and shoes for the men. A great many police stood at various points of the concourse, not expecting purple revolution to break out there and then so much as to intimidate them into knowing their place by the time they reached the middle of London — where hosepipes were waiting for them anyway. Frederick, moved by the men’s plight, put the large sum of half a crown into a box, at which a police inspector told him brusquely to get out of the way and move on.

In a tone of congenital intransigence Frederick retorted that it was his right to give to whom he pleased. The policeman left him alone, and went after the man with the collecting box. Telling me about it fifteen years later, the incident still infuriated him more, I think, because a man in uniform had dared to accost him on any pretext whatsoever, than that the hunger-marchers had been harried.

He was widely read, and the most politically radical of the family, though his radicalism was of a somewhat uncertain brand — when he allowed it to show through. Perhaps his intensive reading of the Old Testament made him so, and his experiences as a conscientious objector left him as bitter against government, British or otherwise, of past, present, and future, as any soldier who by a miracle had survived four years in the trenches.

Parting from his wife and two daughters, he came back to Nottingham in 1936. He also broke with the Christadelphian sect (after more than twenty years of it) and turned an atheist. When I first met him in 1949 I had started to think of myself as a writer. ‘A good short story,’ he advised me, ‘is what people want. It’s what editors are looking for, as well.’ To back up his point he sent me to Nottingham Central Library with lists of books to take out and read.

He was sixty-five years old, and worked at his studio desk with a skullcap on the back of his bald head. Having a thin, wax-like face, his features resembled those of Voltaire’s death-mask (a plaster copy of which hung from the wall above his desk as a measure of his admiration for that great man) if one caught him asleep or having just woken up.

Though quite prosperous for certain periods of his life, Frederick had dressed well but never really ate properly, as if that side of good comfort didn’t interest him. So he kept a frail unhealthy aspect, though he fetched more than eighty years of age.

He talked for hours on painting and art. His drawings were fine and meticulous. Now and again I would sit for him, and much of his work must still be scattered around Nottingham, for the only way he earned money at that time was by selling landscapes and doing portraits. Needing little at this part of his life made him a man of independent means, in the sense that those who have little, but which is all they need, can afford the most freedom.

An obsessional expatiator, he wanted a listener, and there was none better than an incipient writer for whom he could dip into his reminiscences and tap endless pipelines of information. He told me about a spiritual exercise by which he viewed any troublesome problem in its own utter light, and therefore went much of the way to solving. He concentrated his mind until there was nothing left in it, then went on to force this nothingness to an even greater pitch of vaccuity, so that in the blinding light of emptiness the problem suddenly reappeared with such clarity that the answer was obvious. Think of nothing, was how he put it, and think on that.

He loved England, but did not like it, and would lunge at the good name of its indwellers as often as some sharp light flashing from past or present forced him to:

‘The English are a nation of form-fillers,’ he would say, putting a few flourishes to the cloud of a half-finished landscape. I remembered this picture as a remote, mellow, dreamlike hilly country without people or even animals, some peaceful therapeutic land he could escape into after spending too much time on the close-up details of his portraits.

‘In some countries,’ he went on, pausing a moment to get into his best hectoring rhythm, ‘when the backbone has cracked, they live by taking in each other’s washing. In dear old England they exchange forms to fill in. Give somebody a form and he won’t tear it up and throw the bits back at you. Not your Englishman he won’t. He’ll get out his pen and wonder how to fill it in so as to please and satisfy whoever made it up. They’ll let authority put chains on them as long as it respects their privacy. They don’t want to be touched, ergo — ergot — (or is it argot?) — they’ll sign anything.’

‘Well,’ I said, not really objecting to his statement, nor his punning, ‘you’re English. And so am I. You can’t get away from it.’

‘True,’ he admitted. ‘At least I expect it is. I was born on the island, and that’s a fact. You still have time to get off it, if you look sharp in the way of saving yourself. In any case, I’m an artist. I’m independent. But think about it: the war’s been over six years, and the English still put up with rationing and conscription. Anybody who tries to get a tiddly bit of food above his fair share is denounced as a traitor and a black-marketeer, whereas it’s only a healthy and normal reaction to an unnecessary restriction. And don’t think they won’t always be like this, even when such vicious things are finished with. Scratch an Englishman and you find a — no, not only a Turk — but a ration book, or an identity card, or a pay-book, or a census form or even a form from the back of the Radio Times to order a greenhouse or potting shed. In other words, a form to fill in lets them know their place, and they love that.’

‘Every country is the same,’ I said, to see whether or not he had finished. ‘It’s called modern civilization, in case you don’t know.’

‘Civilization, my arse!’ he cried, throwing his brush aside and reaching out to fill the kettle — or shutting off his monologue with acerbity when he wanted to clear his room and get down to work: ‘It’s killed too many innocent people in the last fifty years for any intelligent man to think there’s much good in it.’

Those were his final words — on that occasion. He certainly didn’t seem like my father’s brother, yet there was little doubt that he was.

49

A nest of brothers is a dangerous thing, whether or not they are different, especially to the man who spermed them out. Bert was the second eldest and, at seventeen, during a savage quarrel with his father, picked up a hobbing-iron from the floor of the upholstery shop and threw it with all his might towards the head he could no longer stand the sight of.

He missed — a failure he regretted for the rest of his life. Ashamed of the regret, whose twinges came sharply on him as soon as he saw his father’s whitened face still intact, he rushed out of the house swearing never to come back.

After a few days on the streets there seemed nothing else to do but go for a soldier, which he did with the South Notts Hussars, who were being fitted up for service in the Boer War. When his mother got wind of his enlistment she wrote to the Army Office to say he was too young for active service, and had him called off the troopship at Southampton an hour before it left.

It was as well he didn’t go, for the regiment supposedly disgraced itself in South Africa by refusing to charge at well-hidden and deadly Boer rifles, many troopers having already been killed and wounded because of the slovenly tactical arrangements of their officers. It was due to these casualties that Lord Roberts, one of the commanders in the war, was booed and hissed when he led a parade into Nottingham at the end of it.

Bert went home to an uneasy parental truce and got work with a firm of upholsterers. He enlisted as a cavalryman when the Great War began, and was on guard at a camp outside Boulogne when the horses broke loose one night during an air-raid. One of them kicked so violently that his arm was broken in three places, and he was stunned by agony, unable to get off the ground. An officer who saw him lying there shouted that he was trying to hide from the bombs, adding that if he didn’t stand up like a man and go about his business he would have him court-martialled.

Bert’s response was not clear enough to be heard through the noise of gunfire and bombs, and the officer thought he was being insolent instead of explanatory, so lifted his stick with the intention of hitting him if he didn’t get back to work. Night, uneasy horses, loud bangs of anti-aircraft guns, and the sweat of fast-running panic created a permanent nightmare. To Bert war seemed to have spread over everything human and animal, even back to the dreamy recesses of his past life — which now seemed idyllic. It was as if it had gone for ever in the great rattle-bang of the midnight sky, and he blamed the young but bloodshot face fixed near by.

Rage overcame his pain and shot him to his feet, and he threatened to smash the officer with his one good fist if he didn’t get out of the way. He was surprised at the effect of his action, but glad nevertheless, for the officer sidestepped him and walked quickly to another part of the camp in case his historical ability to restore order should be impaired at the present place before it had had time to go into action there. Bert never forgave him for thinking he was a coward, and for treating him, he said, as German officers were said to treat their own men.

In the darker moments of his subsequent life he was haunted by the encounter, which he worked into a well-endowed focus for his personal hatred. The officer fully intended to have him court-martialled for insubordination but desisted when told of the smashed arm, though he did not apologize or make any comment. Such was the way in which the ‘splendid material of the New Armies’ was treated. For the first time men of self-respect were brought up against the brutal realities of what they had committed themselves to defend.

Perhaps the Great War conveniently used up Bert’s excess of spirit, for when it finished he was content to work at his craft as upholsterer. He did not want to take over his father’s business, though only he had the skill and perseverance to do so, but stayed the rest of his life at one firm. He was an elderly man when I knew him, a quiet person who had the reputation of keeping very much to himself. By then he was proud of the fact that he had been employed for so long at the same place, one of whose workshops had his own name over the door.

Yet he had more inner turmoil to contend with than his brothers, a restlessness that curbed any ambition, so that he needed all his energy to live a normal life. It was hard to imagine, seeing that bald, glint-eyed man sitting by the fire with a pipe between his teeth which he wouldn’t always take out to talk in his clear and measured voice, that he’d joined the cavalry during two wars, and had been a daredevil in horsemanship.

His brothers testified to his prowess as a rider, saying that his absolute way with horses was due to human strength, animal sympathy, and a cunning that blended both. Frederick said he’d taken well to the military life from time to time, even describing him as something of a martinet, which may have been because he was the only one of the six sons to rebel against his father.

But there was something of the tethered horse in him too, of a man who knew how to tame a horse and who realized that he also had been broken in, and placed firmly under the domestic saddle. Perhaps life would have been insupportable if he hadn’t, yet in an unguarded moment he allowed one to see his unsettled eyes wondering what he was doing in the imprisoning parlour where he sat and told his tale. He was the only one of my father’s family who was connected in spirit to the Burtons, though as far as I know he never met any of them.

50

Edgar snubbed the roses of Picardy by surviving the Great War as a prisoner of the Germans, then went back to work for his father. He married some time during the twenties, but his wife left him after a few months. She accused him of leading her an unspeakable life, while he in his brooding silence could not begin to fathom what she meant.

My sister talked about life at the Sillitoes when I saw her in Nottingham City Hospital just before she died of cancer. She remembered further back than ever before, and recalled a visit to their shop when she was four or five. I must have been with her as well but, being barely two years of age, had no memory of it.

We spent much of the time playing on the stairs while sharp arguments went on in one of the rooms. The ground floor of the house consisted of the shop and work-alcoves. On the next floor was a large lounge and the living quarters, and the top storey was occupied by several bedrooms.

Perhaps they were talking about who should take over the business when the old man died, an honour which eventually fell to my father. It meant little that he could not read or write, because in those days there were many such men who nevertheless prospered. And he had been reasonably trained as an upholsterer, perhaps to make up for the early neglect.

However Edgar wanted it for himself, and talked him out of it with little difficulty, since my father was particularly softhearted where family affairs were concerned.

But Edgar lost control of the flourishing business in less than half a year because of his drinking. The shop — as my sister put it — had to be sold under him, and he then took up odd-jobbing and journeying in the upholstery trade. This might have given him a fair living, but he needed the oblivion or good-feeling of being drunk, and boozed all that he earned.

In our part of the family he was known as ‘Eddie the Tramp’, and now and again would come and bed down with us a few nights. As we were often destitute he must really have been at the end of his tether, though maybe it was the company of a brother and a few children he wanted, rather than the cups of tea and pieces of bread he’d get by way of food.

On each occasion he probably hoped to stay longer than he did, but my parents never managed his company for more than one night, suddenly deciding he drank too much, or stank too much, or said too little, or took up too much space in the small room, or stared at them when in fact he was only looking emptily at the wall. And then there’d be shouting, and he’d snatch at his cap and bag of tools, and be out of the door before either my sister or I knew what was going on.

He once spent Christmas with us when he hadn’t slept in a bed for months, and smelled like it. My father gave him his spare shirt, and my mother sent him to the public baths before they closed, telling him not to call in any pub on the way back or there’d be no hot dinner for him.

We children were excited that Uncle Eddie was going to stay at such a time, because nobody had done that before. In spite of his greasy raincoat, and cap the colour of ancient nicotine, and the fact that he’d come to us like a broken-down tramp, he had money on him, and the sum he mentioned so far exceeded the amount of my father’s dole that we hoped he’d bring us comics and toffees on his way back from the baths. Being a gentle and quiet-spoken person who looked at us with respect, almost as if he were afraid of us, there was a chance he wouldn’t forget. We also admired him because he’d got a trade, though at the same time it didn’t seem much good to him.

He returned with two quart bottles of beer, plus sweets and comics, and a piece of meat wrapped in newspaper. His dark hair was neatly combed under his cap, and he’d had a shave at the barber’s, a sprucing up which turned him back into a passably handsome youngish man of forty.

That night he slept on the sofa, and a bit of fire glowed in the grate for him. The next day there was cheerful talk of staying for good and paying a small amount for his board and lodging. He would have regular meals and be provided with a clean shirt every week, while the money he contributed would help us.

In the afternoon my sister and I sat at the table with pencil and paper, and Eddie amused us by drawing pictures of German soldiers, complete with the traditional helmets and rifle. A frosty wind was blowing up the valley of the Leen, but the house was warm and for us four children it was a good place to be.

But on Boxing Day some inexplicable quarrel erupted between the two brothers, and my father threw him out. Both my parents were glad to be rid of him, as if he’d been with us six months, though my sister and I were in tears because we knew he had nowhere to go in the bitter cold.

So he lived alone, and never washed or changed, in order perhaps that the sharp and pungent smell would give him a clearer sense of his own identity, and at the same time protect him from those who did not need him. During the Second World War, when money was easier to come by and he took his earnings into the noisy pubs — the Albany, the Eight Bells, or the Trip to Jerusalem, built snug against the sandstone sides of the Castle — he was a somewhat lugubrious free-spender, treating and tipping as if he thought it unlucky to get change from notes or silver, though nobody could seem as down on his luck when it was all gone and he was walking around the pubs and cinemas for more seating to mend or recondition.

His reputation for skill was well known on the circuit he had built up, and he could have jobs for the asking, though those who employed him were careful not to hand out any payment before he had finished. On moneyless nights he would occasionally receive a pint at the bar from some generous American soldier, who clearly saw a free-born Englishman down on his luck — odd gifts which Edgar gratefully accepted, for he too would treat soldiers when he had money.

I often earned good cash on piece-work, so when we met I’d give him a few bob if he was broke, which I usually knew him to be by the depressed look of his lips. Sometimes I was mistaken, and if he had money he would take nothing, and even with delicate frankness ask if I needed anything.

I last saw him on the top deck of a bus going from Radford into the middle of Nottingham. When we got off at Chapel Bar I gave him a copy of my first book of poems, called Without Beer or Bread, and he smiled at the title as he put it into his mackintosh pocket. I was about to go when, from an inside waistcoat, he brought an old fob-timepiece which he wanted me to have in exchange for the poems.

‘I can’t take your watch.’

He smiled, the few teeth left in his mouth gone rotten. ‘It’s only gold-plated zinc. It was with me at Gommecourt, and in Germany. Went all the time I was under fire. Would you believe it? Hasn’t gone for years now.’

I looked at its clean Roman numerals on a round white face, a plain style I’d always liked, its two hands stopped at four o’clock. ‘I often meant to get it going,’ he said, ‘but the pawnshop was closer than the watchmaker! They’d let me have a few bob on it but I’d allus redeem it before the time ran out.’

‘Let me give you some money for it,’ I offered, knowing this wouldn’t insult him if he was broke, and that he’d be offended if I didn’t take the watch. He tapped his pocket with my book in it: ‘Exchange is no robbery. Buy a chain for it, and get it ticking. I’d like to think the old thing’s going to go again some time.’

A year later I had it mended, and bought a chain from a Polish watchmaker at the top of Drury Lane in Nottingham. I still wear it, and it keeps fair time. I never knew why Edgar’s soul had been so much battered, and at times I disliked his better-off brothers intensely for not helping him more. They hadn’t been exactly generous, and my father was all but ignored by them during his hard-up days. Only at Christmas did they give us a few toys left from the previous year. None of them came to my father’s funeral, though an announcement had been put in the newspaper to give the date. Yet they had helped Edgar from time to time, and he usually sold or pawned the clothes they gave, spending the money on drink. So they got fed up and didn’t bother with him.

He was knocked down by a bus and died alone in hospital at sixty years of age, worn out by his life. It was a miracle he survived so long.

51

The hardworking, self-righteous faction of the Sillitoe brothers — whom I shall lump under the generic name of Joseph — did not like the free-roaming, feckless Eddie nor the fly-by-night Frederick who called himself an artist. He considered these two, whom I give no common label because they were individuals right to the end, to be lax and rotten limbs of the clan. Fighting hard not to be like them, Joseph did not care to be reminded of their existence in case it impaired his upright resolution.

Despite Frederick’s vicissitudes, and Edgar’s hand-to-mouth life, they were thought to have it too easy. By similar standards my father should also have been disliked, but his unemployed state was known to be no fault of his own, and in any case Joseph Sillitoe saw him as being backward in the head, and more to be pitied then blamed — as it was superciliously put.

I call these brothers ‘Joseph’ so as to cloak them under the anonymity of fiction, the only fashion in which truth can be protected against the inclement sky of fact. As a name it suits their common image, and because it came to me without thought I accept it to be pictorially true. Joseph of Genesis stood by his brothers in times of famine and stress, and so there is no connection between him and the present Joseph. But just as Joseph would not have been highlighted had his brothers never been born, neither would the composite Joseph Sillitoe have been at all vivid in his idiosyncrasies without the other three, less righteous males of the family.

Not that I’m drawing parallels. Two such lines do not meet even in infinity, and without a meeting there can be no truth. The only use of parallels is that you can see one from the other, and see it clearly, and in this alone they might be useful.

52

Eddie and Frederick should know better, Joseph thought. They realized all too well what they were on about, damn and blast them, but just didn’t care to alter their ways, both to spite their family first, and to ruin themselves second. To Joseph they possessed Free Will, and he thought them wrong not to use it so as to dispossess themselves of it, as he had been forced to do.

It was not pleasant to see his own hidden yearnings given some benefit of liberation in others. Yet Joseph would have been unhappy with that freedom. He did not have the moral stamina to sustain such breadth, which therefore stopped him getting it, and which led him to condemn it in those who had got it — who in any case were not happy, though in his limited vision he did not realize this. It was better to condemn others, as a sure way of hiding his own faults.

There was a tight and lonesome streak in him, a need to stay by himself with what he had got, as if to be in life at all called for a sustained and painful effort. He wanted nothing more than to be left alone and looked after, like a baby still warm in the amniotic fluid. Even a neighbour knocking at the back door turned him into a tense, poised animal about to shout them abusively to hell.

Joseph fitted silently and resentfully into his occupation, grudging the near presence of his fellow-workers so much that in order to stay apart from them he laboured with a dedicated frenzy of industrious skill that made him invaluable to any customer or boss. Such an individualist was, of course, antisocial, paying no dues and joining nothing. If he had to buy a licence or fill in a form it was a wicked infringement of his personal liberty. A slight twist of humanization might have made him a good anarchist, but for that slight twist to come about the planets would have to alter in their tracks.

Many might call him a typical Englishman, and if there was such a thing they could easily be right. Knowing the blood that ran in him I have always thought that an anti-social person was one hair’s breadth from hating foreigners. He was certainly patriotic, for though he wasn’t a ‘joiner’ he could always be persuaded to put on uniform in times of war. Without being loud about it he knew he must be patriotic because it would never do for his tight little world to be altered by any foreign or revolutionary influence. His safe cocoon might be upset. He might actually have to meet other people, people who were new to him what’s more, strange people, the dark people, people not actually and absolutely like him, people who stood with their mouths open or who sweated when they worked, people who might not be as prepared as he was to leave everybody else alone — people, in fact, who might imagine they not only had a perfect and easy-going right to stop him in the street and ask the way to Sneinton Market, but also to talk to him about the weather afterwards.

And yet one must give him his due, for perhaps he thought, with that modesty which is the opposite side of the coin to black conceit, that his soul was of value only to himself, and that he ought not to bother anyone else with it. A frustrated hermit, he suffered because he was forced to live through the muted agony of ordinary life, for which he did not feel himself fitted in any way, though he made a courageous attempt to go on with it.

He became so good at suffering in silence that the real wounded were those who were forced to live close to him, such as his own family, which served as a sort of lightning conductor. The pain of suppressed violence, emotional and otherwise, was etched on to the face of his wife and children, which enabled his set features to present a tight-lipped dignity to the world.

The real violence pent inside was sufficiently curbed by society, and he had the one good quality of being law-abiding, and therefore willing to allow society to influence him, in that by saving him from the realization of his own wild and sombre fantasies it at the same time protected others. Providing the laws were good, he was reasonable, but if ever the laws became unjust to a certain portion of the community, and the law was on his side, he would be a demon.

At the same time, and to himself, he saw too much worth in his own soul. A man who overvalues his soul and nurtures it alone — pets it, indulges it, allows it to grow and get to full flower untampered as much as possible by society, who keeps it free and proud, and believes it to come straight out of the soil loving the wind and the smell of its own earth — is the hermit, the ascetic, the monument of selfish ecstasy, the bigot, and the patriot for himself alone.

He is the man who calls on God from his imprisoning parlour, which he sees as his very own and golden field and thinks is heaven on earth. But he would kill God if God appeared — after condemning him for lack of pride in condescending to approach a mere and lowly mortal such as himself. Calling to God in an ecstasy of self-approbation, the man in the middle of the field is too involved to help anybody. He has already given up hope of his fellow-men, which means that he never had any of God.

By way of an opposite we have the man who lives by the best of those moral laws inscribed in the various holy books of the world, the social man who interacts and confronts nature both as a communal act and to get his food. Such people can be more tolerant and civilized, more sceptical and rational, and less dangerously dogmatical, servants of God but not enamoured of the mystical soil, more religious in a family sense, and in a way more civilized. He would help a stranger as well as his neighbour. And he who helps a stranger will make sure his neighbour does not die alone. His brother certainly would not.

53

Joseph was dark-haired when young, and inclined to be stocky in middle age. Unlike the Burtons, who kept good heads of hair throughout their lives, he went bald by his late thirties, so that he was fairly pink on top when I knew him as a child. He had the eyes and forehead of a lawyer, or the discontented manager of a small provincial department store. His light-brown eyes betrayed the unrest within, indicating what great reserves of honesty were needed to control such potent turmoil. His fine sensitive fingers seemed to hold proof of the skill that saved him from himself.

He was a useful and talented craftsman, good with hands and eyes. Two of his brothers relinquished the family trade to become managers of butchers’ shops, and on slack afternoons they would look forlornly at the traffic-flowing world over trays of chops and sausages, as if wondering how they came to be where they were, and whether they would ever get out of it except through the grave.

Joseph was a man of neither God nor Party, but if a man has no religion, one might ask, what then is left? His own soul, would be the reply. If a man has (in general) no patriotic feeling, what remains? His own country. If a man has no love to give, what can take its place? His own family. Their basic questions and answers could only have fallen out like that. And if the roots of Joseph’s family were fused and burned down for him there was only the sharp, debilitating, aching desire to find or meet some woman of cosmic force and passion to fall in love with who would alter everything. Death, life, death: in his dreams he saw a round-faced mature woman with reddish hair and small white teeth. Could that be anything to do with happiness?

Joseph and his brothers were non-men who had dragged themselves from the Welsh hills, or the misty marshes close by, and had made a go of it in Staffordshire because they could not go back to where they came from. Being not of this world they seemed to be more English than the Burtons, sole survivors of some lost tribe still too shattered by an unexplained disaster that had bitten at their tails.

Pride they had, but pride is a means of self-preservation when at bottom you are not sure of what there is to preserve. Or if you do have something to preserve then an excess of pride indicates that you feel yourself in danger of losing it. Pride is an encircling moat that you dig around yourself and fill with the muddy water of self-esteem.

Joseph was excessively proud and self-centred, and it was a far more concentrated pride than that of the Burtons, a meaner pride that not only drew the head back but also pulled in the stomach — which was just as well because Joseph was a rather sedentary and self-indulgent person. One felt that in order to get out of a tricky situation Burton would tell lies, while Joseph would tighten his face like jaundiced steel and grit his teeth as the leaden sky dropped in on him.

Burton was like a ramrod in his walk, born that way, it seemed, but Joseph was a turkey-cock who had to know he was proud, and constantly tell himself so, before he actually appeared proud to other people. His eyes then burned with the self-importance of the little man who believes he is the centre of the earth and of society around him.

He acted his part with panache, and a certain amount of swagger, a show-off who is often recognized as the lynchpin and asset of a tight society afraid of falling to pieces. He was considered to be noteworthy and attractive enough, a by no means common attainment that lifted him — in his estimation — from the crowd round about. Where the Burtons might at most get stomach ulcers, the Sillitoes were prone to cancer.

As brothers they lived for themselves alone, not as a clan and for each other, but imprisoned in the airless cells of their families, which usually consisted of one or two children, except for my father, who was illiterate and had five. The fate of Joseph’s wife would be a tale all of its own if he had not been so self-righteously discreet in his treatment of her. Full information rarely emerged. Edgar’s wife abandoned him to melancholia and idleness, and to his frequent tears brought on by memories of Gommecourt. Frederick left his wife after twenty years of marriage, to devote himself to art and freedom, though it may have been a mutual parting. An early scene of home-sweet-home is of my mother bending over a bucket to let the blood run into it after my father (a real Sillitoe, so the Burtons said) had used the usual overforce of his energy when he hit her on the head with a shoe.

What agony of the heart did he go through before the hand lifted to strike? I hope it lasted for a decently long time, though I suppose that after the first blow they came on call, almost with pleasure on both sides, as the barrier went down and the fist pounded. And if the pain of my father’s soul seemed to have plagued him for an eternity before he picked up the shoe or clenched his fist, maybe it was really only a few minutes, in spite of how long it felt when he fought the great fight to leash back his vicious urges.

Joseph turned against women because, having an aversion for his own life, he held them to blame for his birth, unwilling to get up courage and turn such wrath on the father who was equally responsible — or to set it at no one at all, but to do the impossible and live reasonably ever after.

He held his wife down more effectively than by knocking her about. He did it by sheer force of demonic personality. He oppressed her by oppressing himself even more, and there is no more final way of doing it than that. In other words, he did it at any price. He spited himself to crush his wife, and perhaps he thought it eminently worth while, since it held in check the parts of himself he was afraid of, but which were nothing more than the surviving freedom of his spirit which society had trained him to despise.

54

Joseph imagined that if he lived alone he would live longer, and that family life was cruelly shortening the number of his years on earth, time that would be blissfully untrammelled if he had no such domestic commitments. This fact, unjust to everyone, gnawed at his vitals. It was one of those fundamental untruths which had moulded his features — but became true after it had fixed them for ever. He could not know that if women want to stop living in the jungle with men, and if men care to ease their fang-and-claw existence with women, then they have to be together in peace, and start chopping the trees down instead of each other. Like most people, he could not see beyond the limits of his own conflict. If he could, it might no longer be there — and then what would he have to live for?

On his wedding day Joseph committed the minor and understandable fault of drinking too much whisky. When the guests left he turned on the wedding presents and smashed them to pieces. Or maybe it was something else, I’m not too sure. Whatever it was, it would have been easier on his wife if Joseph had been able to forget it. Then she might have forgotten it also.

But memory feeds on guilt, and guilt on memory. Without memory there is no guilt: without guilt — no memory. Guilt attacks those least able to bear it, and who have done least to deserve it. It takes the energy of the weak who are trying to be strong. The monsters of history are immune to guilt. Those with long memories remember guilt till their dying hour. A harmless and repressed desire becomes an obsession that can turn into a crime, either quick and homicidal, or one that lasts forty years and leaves no obvious or open wound. So the women suffer more, because they are made to remember the wrong the husband is supposed to have committed by the continual phenomenon of his guilt, by which he leaves her in no doubt that he did whatever it was only because of meeting and marrying her. He implies that no one but she can be held responsible for it, though the nominal blame stays entirely his because he wants it that way, and won’t let anyone forget it.

Guilt is that unacknowledged feeling at having come out of the slime, a useless sensation which drives the innocent into apathy and sloth. It begets the crime that creates another, and so it is compounded into a monstrous black tangle in the soul allowing no other person to live close by — unless they infect themselves with the same malaise, so as to be able to fight back and prevent themselves going dead under it. Joseph was guilty of nothing more than the harmless desire for a freer life. But he thought that to achieve it would utterly wreck his peace of mind, and maybe that of everyone near by, whereas in reality it would have liberated them as well, or at least made their lives more tolerable.

In a sudden rage he would hit the wall with his fist, while Burton, who did not recognize rage because he lost his temper far too easily, and who assumed absolute right to be on his side anyway, and who didn’t need the fuel of guilt to get the best out of life, would hit his children. Is there much to choose between them? Joseph was bitter and timid. He lived in a twilight world of hard work and respectability, being the sort of person who decided early on in life that it was easier to pick up a cash book than a hod of bricks. He rarely worked hard enough for his labour to call forth much sweat, and even when he did, rather than mop his brow, he would stand and look as if he were bone dry, like someone not accustomed to sweating, in which case he would get dry sooner than if he took to wiping at the sweat assiduously — though he had the sort of skin that did not sweat much anyway.

He clung to his tight principles for fear he would drop into hell — hell being a chaotic place where he wouldn’t be able to tell one person from another. He never made any contact with the Burtons, being geographically divided from them by the spiritual barrier of the Pennines — which assumed the same height and ruggedness as the Alps which cut off the Romans from the Numidians, until Hannibal pushed a way through the passes with elephants. Beyond the Pennines lay the flat, open lands of the Trent and the Fens, where the Burtons and all their like could stay for ever, part of that tribe of pikers who dealt in coneys and ponies and other such pastoral low life.

Joseph believed in the freedom of the individual in such a way that instead of being a slave to others he was a slave to himself. It was certainly a case with him that though self-pity corrupts, ordinary human pity corrupts absolutely because it would lead him into more contact with people. He would not get out into the world and compete with others. Competition was anathema and death, indignity and dishonour. He knew that safety lay in hard but ambitionless work, and with his combined qualities of tenacity, loyalty, application, and skill he could appear proud without being put upon.

Though he was too sure of himself to compete, it was also true that he was riddled with envy. This was what stopped him competing, because with such a black dog on his back he could not be sure of success. So all he could do was hold down that envy with the jackboot of self-satisfaction.

There was a certain advantage to this exercise in repression. Knowing that envy was not a good trait, and that it ought to be resisted, he was able to take part in an honourable fight. This gave him a feeling of self respect — which he might not otherwise have had, and which came by refusing to go into the common world and compete with it.

This absolute refusal to compete was in fact his strength. The inability to set himself against other men, to pitch himself into the jungle of ambition, to elbow his way up some shaky ladder of strife and success was his one saving virtue, no matter how it came about. If the coiled spring of his spirit had shot him across to America, or down to the Antipodes, he might have found such release from the English paralysis of class structure that he could have striven for a better life without being robbed of his dignity — as he felt he would have been had he tried the same thing at home.

55

My Uncle Frederick renamed himself Silliter when he came back to Nottingham in the thirties, in case his creditors of the previous decade should think to catch up with him. Fifteen years was not a long absence. The Market Place had changed, as had many of the buildings round about, but the prominent names of the stores he had, shall we say, traded at told him that so many years might shrink to very few if a manager from one of them should spot him in the street.

Having been born a plain Church of England Christian, and spent twenty years as a Christadelphian, and then lapsed into atheism, Frederick had never shown much moral responsibility to the community at large — no more perhaps than most people. But it seemed strange to me in my pre-sophistication days that, while priding himself on having learned Hebrew, he should have made several anti-semitic comments during the year or so in which I knew him. Perhaps they were rather too trivial to recall, because to be fair his words were harmless, in that they might have come after long association with Jewish colleagues who had made those same remarks in his presence. But when retailed to me (sheepishly, as I now recall, and possibly to test me) I could not be sure how serious he was.

My father used to say, in a tone that combined both envy and condemnation, that the Jews always helped each other. Much later in his life I heard him make a more open remark which shocked my Burton mother. I could not knock him down because one side of his head was dark from the bruises of cancer, and he died soon afterwards.

To forgive the dead is the first step towards illumination. In some ways it is easier, as well as more necessary, to understand the dead than the living, because the life of the dead is actually rounded off so that it becomes no more than a memory. They can neither disappoint nor deceive, but having existed they still live, and to comprehend their spirit one has to bring them back to a sharper portrayal than they were awarded while solidly moving. If you want them to return through the barrier they went beyond it is almost as if you have to go in and fetch them, get into their spirit and draw them out by an act of imagination and justice.

My father did too many kindnesses not to deserve forgiveness. He too had much to forgive, so that understanding was needed all round. What small harm he did was kept in his family, as society meant it to be, and he was never in a position to act out any of those poisonous hatreds which came from the Edwardian ethos in which he and his brothers had grown up. He was not anti-semitic, because he did not possess that combination of intelligence and absolute rottenness. He was anti-everything in his black despair, and my feeling is of sadness at his hard life, and for what was done to him by his parents. In such family conflicts one can neither withdraw nor take revenge. Savage or unthinking parents leave one merely paralysed, like an outsider.

In his tolerable moments he wanted to do good. When I was a child he got into debt to buy books for me, and money I gave when working later in a factory could never repay it. If you have seen your father suffer it is impossible to hate him, or to be afraid of him. The only thing you can do is try to understand, because not to do so will leave a large part of yourself in the wilderness. It is the same with others you dislike. You can never understand them, which means that much of yourself is lost to you, for you can only know yourself by knowing others.

In any case nothing attaches you more to a person than hatred. Those you hate have you more in their power than those you love. If you want to imprison someone in your own spirit, give them cause to hate you — and you have them for a long time, if that’s how you feel. Universal and benign love would give everyone the greatest freedom of all, but people are unable to give this love because they are afraid of the freedom which is its price.

56

Just after the Second World War my father bought a bull-terrier. All his life he had wanted a dog, and in his middle forties he became the proud owner of one.

When he was walking up Ilkeston Road one day it snapped the lead and ran against a bus. It was fatally injured, and he came home weeping with it in his arms, as if it had been a child.

He laid it on a barrel inside the back door, and went for the vet, in the hope that the comatose and bleeding animal could be brought back to life. Yet any belief in miracles had gone from his heart generations ago. Tolerance of Biblical Job-like suffering had reasserted itself for a while during his middle years, but by now it was worn away because it did not have much moral strength to feed on. Faith in life had given way to sentimental hope.

When the vet came he jabbed a shot of pentathene into the dog’s paw as it lay on the barrel. He talked to my father for a few minutes, putting him wise as to where he might get another dog, and also to calm him down. Then he gave the dog a dose of strychnine which finished it off.

My father didn’t buy another dog. Never having got out of the nursery, as it were, there was only room for one woman in his life, no matter what the pain. And there was only room for one dog as well, as representative of a certain kind of creature, so that he could not start again on another. It would not be the same.

One of his favourite pictures was taken from a calendar. It was a coloured reproduction photo of a young woman standing at a cottage window on a sunny day in the country. She wore a yellow dress, and had a girl of about three years of age in her arms. They were looking together at a robin perched on the branch of a tree close by, both of them warm and loving with each other, and enraptured at the bird.

My father liked this picture. Such a scene went straight to his heart. It stayed there, a sort of imprint of paradise which he neatly framed with black passe-partout tape and hung on the wall, and took from house to house when we moved. He liked it because he identified himself with the little girl in the woman’s arms — certainly not with the woman herself, or with the bird.

57

The River Leen was sinewy and narrow, though its Celtic name of ‘lleven’ also suggests ‘smooth-surfaced’. But the root of the word may be ‘linn’ meaning ‘still deep pool’, and it certainly is that in places. Whenever I heard the phrase ‘still waters run deep’ either about me or somebody else, I always flashed my picture-mind to the River Leen, whose water I would recently have looked on from the brick parapet of the bridge. While playing on its steep bank I once fell into it from an imperfect balance on the bough of a tree, and though its waters were not still they certainly stank, having come through mills and collieries most of the way from Robin Hodd’s hills near Mansfield.

Early expeditions over the fields to the Burtons at Engine Town took me across the River Leen, and then a railway which ran along its shallow, wide valley. These two obstacles both hemmed me in and tempted me out, and made the advance beyond into an adventure of the spirit, as well as an exploration of new territory.

Crossing the railway I would sit on the fence by its side, watching coal-trains pulling trucks from Nottinghamshire collieries. In those days before the mines were nationalized I read the names painted broadly and plainly on each truck as it went by, one strange word after another, some so quick and difficult that I had to see them several times before my memory held them. Nevertheless, the words came fast, forming an eternal telegram that was never sent, but which still occasionally spins into my head:

romantic place-labels, almost as if they had come from Italy or Abyssinia, and while they showed me the headstocks of their collieries, like the one I could see just up the line, I did not also visualize — as I no doubt should have done but am pleased that I did not — row upon row of miners’ houses that would be clustered round about. Or if I did, they were set in the sunshine of hilltop situations, and were altogether more picturesque and salubrious than those among which I lived.

I recited their names like a litany for the rest of my way to the Burtons, as I broke through hedges and leapt streams. They kept me company when the sky darkened and it began to thunder. I remember the smell of bacon frying on damp Sunday mornings in summer. And when I slept at the Burtons’ on Saturday night, those big white words on the coal trucks rode by in my dreams.

The stuff and fibre of peoples’ language is made up of names. Total history is nothing less than an accounting of every name in it — not just a few, but all of them. Without a name nothing exists — neither place, person, nor piece. Names cement the regions and generations in such a way that time becomes timeless, and only words are important, the labels that pinpoint a person’s soul, the backdrop and bedrock of languge.

Names mean life and matter that is always on the go. They decay and change, fret and vanish, then come up somewhere else and grow again. Those who hold their names too tight get buried with them — just as raindrops, glorying too much in their own moisture, melt on meeting soil.

Names remain. The passing years pile up and give them tales and weight, or bleed them white and take out all significance. When you can’t tell one name from another all men look the same. The more people there are, the more you know them by their names or not at all. An increase in breeding broadens the tongue. We must know one from another — man and name — if civilization is to take hold and properly accumulate true richness.

When the wild and conquering hordes settled down to their fields they contemplated each other and gave out names that would last. A cycle is complete and now expands. Poets take over. Tillage and metre rule. The seasons and the moon dominate utterly when every place and person has a name — some of which eventually ride by on coal trucks through disordered childhood dreams.

58

When I told my father I was going to have a novel published he said: ‘That’s bloody good. You’ll never have to work again’—as if I’d been given a million pounds in exchange for colic on the heart. A dozen books later I still see what he means. ‘You’ve got an aim in life now,’ he added, though with more truth than before.

But to write books is not to have an aim in life. It is a camouflage under which a real aim can wither before it is even understood. By blind chance I became a writer, and unknowingly sidestepped a career which might have turned out more useful and satisfying. It is a futile thought that occasionally flashes in, but as long as my proper fate stays with me — as it presumably does — I shan’t complain.

Any true aim perished in the blinding light of emptiness when I tried to understand it, and so my spirit withdrew from the struggle as if it were burned, and took refuge in the greater comfort of the periphery, where the process of writing begins. And if in spite of this I still mull on it and wonder why I became a writer, I’m careful not to make the mistake of driving straight to the empty middle and search for the truth there.

Having sorted among the aborted tributaries of my family it is no use coming back into the core of myself to get at the truth. It would be a sentimental head-on clash, to be avoided at all costs. It is better to chase the indirect and apparently unimportant as being more worth while, to keep my thoughts clear and insignificant, rather than boringly definitive.

In someone of low intelligence sentimentality is pathetic. In those of high intelligence it is obnoxious, even dangerous. I will not decide which of these categories I fit into, but state them so as not to get entangled — and send each one into that great central fire of emptiness where they can burn into gas and ashes, while I stay on the rich outside.

A writer is born without God, and his centre has been taken over so that he is a god. It could be that he then spends his life writing in order to hold off the fear of dying and death, and keeps writing so as not to expose himself to the danger of having his questions answered and therefore of having to accept God.

The ultimate aim is to phrase questions, not to solve them, for if you show people what to ask, they will soon find their own solutions. A question is not a question unless it contains the seeds of its answer, and when this phenomenon occurs to a primitive or uneducated person he overcomes his fear of the world and makes a fundamental break with his past. For a writer, another sort of fear comes with the questions, because he is afraid that the questions may desert him. It also stays because fear is a birthmark of life. Those who do not have it are not yet born. Whoever says ‘I am not afraid’ has grown old before his time. Who cannot suffer morally, perishes physically. Lack of fear bursts the heart, which is the worst of diseases. If the bravest of the brave replies that fear makes the face ugly, and takes all honest beauty from it, and that the earth will despise the fearful and pull him more quickly to his death, he is wrong. To be fearful is to be able to love. To lie three days in no-man’s-land as Edgar did, with every minute full of terror from the rats, men, and unseen dismemberment, was a feat of adoration for the scarred earth he clung to. It was a love that drove him almost out of his mind, a state of question without answer he chose to live with for the rest of his life.

The soil also pulls you under out of love, and since death is the end it is better for it to be welcoming than ward you off. It will cool and cushion those who are hot from dying, or merely warm you if the chill of crossing that terrible barrier is still present.

59

A simple man is a person who cannot express his complexities. A writer expresses them for him and still lets him keep the illusion of his simplicity. The Burtons are the simple men in me, but they had illusions of complexity that could never break out. The Sillitoes are the complex men, but they had illusions of simplicity that could not prevent the complexities from tormenting them.

The qualities of one family shift onto the other. They merge and cross-fertilize, become a running sore, ruining memory in a sea of psychic pain — which I distrust. Truth is like the tip of an iceberg: one-tenth of it based on nine-tenths lie. When I am out walking I sometimes feel the sallow Sillitoe blackness gaining the upper hand over the optimistic, energetic, easy-going Burton lot. At such times the two forces separate, and leave me in the middle of an expanding emptiness.

The past is fiction, what bits of it can be remembered. The present is illusion, what pains of it can be felt. Only the future exists, because it is yet to happen. When it does, it also is full of flickering uncertainties impossible to latch on to, so that with necessary speed it fades into the fiction of the past. Yet out of this past which has become fiction I fish for the truth, and even knowing a great deal about my grandparents, it is impossible to say for certain where I come from, or where I belong. A man only knows he comes out of his mother, and has to be satisfied with that. To dispute it and want to believe otherwise means to accept the maxim that emotion is tempered by reason — before conclusions can be drawn.

But emotion tempered by reason is a perfect excuse for pride of place and faint-of-heart. Emotion, it is true, smothers reason. And reason emasculates emotion. The uneasy combination, if ever it is achieved, is the very body of reaction. If reason goes forward like the patrols of an advancing army, emotion in full body catches up to wield its destructive victory. If the emotional vanguard goes on ahead, reason eventually overtakes and robs it of any achievement. Sooner or later, reason and emotion rend each other, and leave a desert. They are terms of mutual annihilation. Is this emotion? Or is it reason? A jointure of the two makes it no better. Both reason and emotion are too near the surface to be properly controlled and matched.

As if born in a state of spiritual decapitation a writer wants to join his head back on to his body, the Scipio on to the Africanus, the first name on to the second, to sew the soul into the stomach and throw them together into the river of life, there to rend each other, to sink or swim. Perhaps he only succeeds in unifying himself when he is about to die, by which time it is too late. He fears death because it means that his life as an earthly god will come to an end. And if after life there is still more life, there can be no more final death for a writer.

If anything exists in the burning middle it is an alchemical brazier of the soul, driven white by a salt wind coming from the sea. Both gale and blaze thrive on each other and never let go. In the storm’s centre I ask myself what I am, but cannot say. Forty days or forty years can be spent in the attempt, but if one doesn’t know without even asking, then all further tries are bound to collapse.

Yet the more unsuccessful, the fuller in spirit one becomes, the greater the overall richness of life will be. If I look in a mirror and ask this question I get a blank look, or enough of a shocked expression to remind me that it is not a question but a riddle. The half-smile that lingers in the mirror after I have turned my head tells me that I still have a sense of humour, which is the last defence against the truth.

To go bull-headed at the riddle means I’ll never get an answer. I am a writer because I do not know what or who I am, though in trying to find out I may by a fluke help others to know who they are. If so I trust it will persuade them to go on living and not despair about the fate of the world or themselves.

You have to go beyond the limits of despair to reach the truth. Certainly you cannot get close to it by standing still, or by locking yourself into an idiot-gaze against the warm and comforting fireplace. You move a finger, stare at the hand and lift it with a movement of the arm, and then you stand up and feel the pressure of the ground in both legs, and you shift across the room and look through the window and go to the door and open it and walk outside to smell the sky and let the wind into the brain. The senses waken as the odour of fields and marshes rushes in. While gleaning for the truth, despair calls from one side and hope beckons at the other, and they try and draw you apart. When such horse-mares struggle for your inner vision you manage to walk, or take a spade and dig the soil over.

To be without hope, in the belief that nothing is worth living or working for is an act of murder against the human spirit, self-willed or not. One must learn to suffer without taking to despair, for despair is a killer, a suicide-monger, the mongrel-devil who does not hand out any consolation, even in death. Yet if those who fall into this trough have no control against being brought to it, they are in a state of grace and waiting to be saved. The axis of the world’s goodness depends on them, and upon those with the strength and will to help.

The sphere of white fire spins, an illumination of truth which can never be reached simply by wanting to. I use it to see by. It dazzles and blinds when I reach out and try to use it: it uses me. Art is order made out of chaos; false art is chaos made out of the false order already in existence.

If I am to go forward I must switch round and get free of the cul-de-sac, otherwise I do violence to the soul. There is a part of every book which turns out to be a dead-end, and you need sooner or later to reverse from it. I entered this one on a trip into the past, and to reach clear space once more I must fight against all the purples of the spectrum.

Geometry exists so that the fringes of chaos can be surveyed, and the remotest zones of confusion explored and classified. All mysteries are encountered, but few have their meanings revealed, and even then they cannot be understood. The route pencilled on the map is like a question mark upside down.

60

The conscious and the subconscious come twice in the same sphere, and Man’s soul is as complete as the zones and seasons of the earth.

There is a consciousness in the northern hemisphere hemmed in by the cold subconscious of the Arctic, and by the subconscious of the heat between Cancer and the Equator.

There is a consciousness in the southern hemisphere bounded by the subconscious of the Antarctic ice and the subconscious of the tropics between Capricorn and the Equator.

Thus there is more than one consciousness, and more than one subconscious. There is a consciousness trapped between the heat and cold of the northern hemisphere. There is a consciousness caught by the heat and cold of the southern hemisphere.

There is a consciousness and a subconscious in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the earth and of the soul.

Under this vast conscious-subconscious crust is the seething reservoir at the centre of man’s earth-soul that fuses both the conscious and the subconscious, and from which all the facets of the personality emerge — or do not, depending on how it is treated.

Consciousness holds itself between ice and heat, the Pole and the Equator in both north and south. My subconscious is of the ice and finally frozen too deeply to become tractable. My subconscious is of the tropics, and only rarely cools itself enough to be understood. The consciousness in both cases keeps the two walls of the subconscious apart. The subconscious in both cases wants to cross over the zones of the consciousness and meet, but the integuments of the consciousness prevent this. At the same time it wants to pull in the subconscious on to itself, but though it may wish to draw them together in a merging of the whole, this is impossible unless one’s consciousness has the equivalent in spirit of Samson’s superhuman strength — who was said to be so strong that he could uplift two mountains and rub them together like two clods of earth.

This is the universe of the shaman, the geography of fire and ice, the equating of strength in the arm with air that comes out of the mouth. The conscious zone between the borders of the subconscious is a region both turbulent and temperate, fragile and sensitive, prone to freeze with the ice or melt with the heat. The membranes of the heart can burst because of an increase of one degree, or split when it goes down a shade, the sensitive zone that draws all the subtleties of chills and fevers, fits and miseries, screams and dreams against it, tissues through which everything can be learned, and in which one feels the grail and mystery one clings to for fear of falling down the side of the earth and going still living into the blackness.

Thus the conscious, that which is supposed to be on top and in sight — the obvious; and the subconscious, that which is hidden and of which we are not often aware — the unknown and menacing. They have their own geography, not the normal top-and-bottom Freudian kind that I might have learned to live with if I had not been born to search after my own truth, but a more complicated, geopsychic flux of forces, of a globe whose maps show a constantly shifting tectonic surface.

This chart of the soul indicates that the ultimate truth will never show itself, no matter how long the search goes on. To penetrate one subconscious is difficult, but to cut a way into two is not feasible. One moment they help each other, the next minute they compete and intermix, hinder and pull apart.

The double meeting of ice and heat generate their own phosphorescence, a forked illumination from two batteries, twin sources of power. Though one light makes for clarity, two create confusion. They cross-dazzle and blind, and closing the eyes in order to escape it only sends you back into the dark, in which the heat fights the cold in an eternal battle of opposites.

From this prism of the soul grows understanding. This system of the conscious and the subconscious increases confusion. There is a purpose in everything. It is either an excuse for not being able to get at the truth, or it is done in the belief that truth can only be pulled from chaos, not from the false truths already in existence. Having a subconscious in the ice of the northern pole, and another in the intense heat of the Equator, I am able to draw on more than one consciousness, and be fed by more than one subconscious. One hemisphere of the conscious-subconscious is inhabited by the Sillitoe ethos, and the second contains that of the Burtons. The devils of both fight the angels of both.

This might be sure proof of madness — if I believed in madness, which I do not. It is said that someone who is mad has so many souls in the greater soul that he is unable to control them properly. They heave and push, like the hemispheres closing in, and one soul hasn’t the knack of playing off the other as it has in a person who can contain them.

The circle never breaks. It explodes from time to time and takes us forward, but constantly reforms. Chaos is the source of life and richness. Order is not possible without chaos. It is the combustible charge that energizes the arteries of the mind. Through such raw material one can travel back to anyone and any condition, and forward without fear into another chaos, to touch the heat of more raw material for a moment before returning laden with this loot of the spirit.

One must do it without fear, and to get rid of fear one needs to find the truth. The nearer we get to the truth, the further away it is. Like trying to reach the most distant star of the universe, there will always be another beyond it. Our fingertips are not made of the right stuff to touch the end of all experience, nor our wide-open eyes to see it. We can only put forward stepping stones to extend the limits of our understanding into as many colours and complexities as it will take without being crushed in on itself, set a compass towards infinity, but not into it; go in the pursuit of truth but never get close enough to touch it.

61

I sit and write at a somewhat unstable table with one of Burton’s horseshoes in front of me, and Edgar’s open-faced Gommecourt watch to keep the time. The third and small hand on the dial of it pushes the seconds behind as it hurries on an endless donkey-like journey into the future. There’s no doubt about the truth of that.

The table is old and rickety, found in the garage among lots of rubbish abandoned by the last people who lived here, but I like its large rough surface on which I spread notebooks and papers, ashtray, inkwell, and bric-à-brac lavishly. It is dangerously active with splinters, but I can spill ink over it with impunity, and it stretches the whole length of the double window, to face trees and bushes beyond.

It is inevitable that I should wind back to my workroom in a quiet country house — not always silent when a gale blows as if to bump it flat. To spend the time while trying to write I have my playthings of gramophone and tape-recorder. On another table is a high-powered black and magic box of a wireless receiver that weighs 60 kilos and can barely be carried from the removal van at each change of house. An ex-service communications set, it brings in wonderfully clear and amplified morse so that I listen to wireless-telegraph stations, and write down telegrams from ships to see if any information suggests a story or poem.

It never does, of course, though it is a relaxing pastime. A 100-foot wire running up the side of the house and across the garden to a tree helps me to hear Peking or Australia, Japan or the Voice of Zion from Jerusalem — loud and clear — giving the illusion of being in touch with the world.

The mechanical effect of taking morse at telegraphic speed persuades me I could still be useful as a radio-operator. Even though trained for it over twenty years ago I read it as fast and accurately as ever. Perhaps I come from families where economy of sweat and effort was paramount, and nothing taken in as a trade or job should be wasted, because it might one day come in handy and show its value again. However it was, the basic morse rhythms never left my brain, and I don’t suppose they will, having been programmed on to it. The symbols for certain letters being absolute facts, maybe I am attracted by it for this reason. The alphabet has a sound rhythm, a drumbeat construction as it cuts through the ether and forces my brain to change it into words, makes my hand decipher it like a form of magic, which it is though, as with all magic, it is only the result of prolonged learning. At dusk, when birds send out territorial and mating calls, I hear their sounds as more signals. Each bird has its own set letter of the alphabet going like a superheterodyne spark among the long shadows.

After nightfall and the curtains are drawn I can switch on and listen to Mendelsohn or Prokofiev, Mozart or Shostakovitch or Elgar, or the rich and sombre voice of Chaliapin singing his peasant songs and arias. There is also a record given to me in Russia, with Tolstoy reading a few paragraphs of War and Peace, and Yesenin and Mayakovsky reciting their poems, and Maxim Gorki giving a speech. Though I only understand a few words, their spirits fill the room.

A small rack of treasured and personal books includes a copy of the Bible given to me before the assembled school for ‘proficiency in Biblical knowledge’. I was embarrassed at having to go up and get it, but it is a volume with a fine soft leather cover which I always have with me. Years ago I tore out the New Testament and threw it away, so that only the Masoretic text remains. I have read the old books several times, and prefer their poetry to the propaganda of the Christian part, leave myself with a thousand pages of great verse, from the awesome openings of Genesis to the ultimate words of the Prophets, an exaltation of life to comfort me through all existences.

Other titles in my bookcase of specialities are dictionaries by Skeat and Halliwell, Isaac Taylor and Bardsley; as well as Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and a couple of works on the history and topography of my home county. The dozen or so publications of my own I keep well away, not because I have anything against them, but I don’t want to be reminded of their existence while I’m writing something new, so that I can treat each book in progress as if it’s my first novel.

Apart from bookshelves, the wallspace shows maps like beds of flowers: a street plan of Nottingham, a large-scale trench-map of the Gommecourt salient in 1916, marked by the advancing death-lines of the Sherwood Foresters, a relief chart of Deception Island, and a topographical map of Israel flanked by the Mediterranean and the Jordan River — different regions I cannot shut my eyes to.

Books and life and maps and ink, and time to write and think and dip in my pen before pulling it across the paper with my left hand: can any truth come out of that? A writer writes what he likes, and it is vital that he does so — anything from theology to pornography, from politics and comics to sapphics and classics — no matter what world-system he lives under. Every man’s truth is his own secret, but the only secret he can afford to have is that he has no truth.

62

Feckless Celts wandered across the face of Europe from the Caspian over the Carpathians, from Bavaria to Brittany, only to be pounded into a dull and baffled astuteness when they reached Albion, from which they soon lost the will to get free but not the picturesque desire to do so.

I was surprised to read a recent newspaper article in which some true-blue English person was quoted as saying that as far as she was concerned all Celts were foreigners. Being more than half Celt I thought there might be some truth in it. Indeed I hoped there was, for such a way-out Little English idea could explain the yearning for travel I have often too plainly felt — the need to get away from it by rail, road, or even bicycle, to walk out on foot if the worst came to the worst.

The pictures reflected in the eyes of Joseph and his brothers were of landscapes not people. Their religion was freedom, but because society totally stamped on it they could only worship in secret, like a resistance movement that had lost all hope, as if realizing that direct access to the life they craved would blow them either to pieces or into paradise. When the raw material started to eat its own raw material they would move, but somehow their courage never allowed them to start chewing. Freedom pointed in the wrong direction, and their lack of courage became a means of self-preservation. They needed to communicate with themselves but had no way of achieving it.

The generous and lecherous spirit of the eighteenth century, crushed for more than a hundred years by the descending death-trap ceiling of tight-arsed Victorian hypocrisy and repression is at last trying to break free. It did not begin in Joseph’s life, though his melancholia came from thinking it was time to start pounding off the lid, but not being able to.

At school I was once taunted as a foreigner because my name was thought to be Italian. I did not mind this, though fought successfully against it since I refused to be humiliated for any reason. My father’s idea that the family way back in time had come from Italy was only another of his flights of fancy. How my surname originated I’ll never know or care about but, foreigner or not, if I were split down the middle by God’s axe the Celtic part of me might happily turn into the Eternal Wanderer and walk purposefully away, glad to get out of this island and into the world before all Celts were rounded up and marched off to the gas chambers.

In a way I was flattered by the woman’s remark. Having wanted to leave home and country almost from the cradle I nursed a secret ambition to be a foreigner, to become a man without nationality or passport but with the freedom to drift wherever I wanted. Shed of all ties and connections I would go my way alone on the travel-lanes of the world, a ghost of selfishness wallowing in so much land he eventually sees no people in it, and whom in turn nobody sees, a man so gripped by his infatuation for the form and smell of the earth that all love goes from him except inordinate fondness for himself.

It is an impulse to be resisted, though to desire such freedom is innocent enough because it keeps me imprisoned in an inner turmoil conducive to the act of writing. That is one way of doing it, after all. On the other hand, to actively pursue that vast and empty form of liberty would be an escape route into the death of the soul. Such a release from the anchored spirit could be done as a religious exercise perhaps, but since I am not one of the faithful it would turn it into an act of negation. My main purpose on earth is to be myself, which means getting closer to people, not away from them.

I circle around and spiral down, conjuring more dreams out of myself, numberless demons, becoming more empty, or more calm. If I believe my spirit is formed by my parents and their families — plus that alchemical mixing that can never be explained — the zig-zag switch-about for truth must go on, not to fill the emptiness of which I am not afraid, but so that the more void the emptiness becomes the more alive it gets with that potent electricity of the mind that keeps a person free of cant, lies, and tyranny.

When the different streams of my grandparents come flowing in I feel indeed that I am the product of a mixed marriage, the crux of two merging deltas, and if I ask in this white heat why I became a writer I say that the poetry comes out of the Burton side of the family, while the force that pushes it through is drawn from my father’s.

Everything which concerns these various relations has some truth, whether or not I was directly involved in it. To detail the sum of these items is a circuitous way of pointing out traits which might bear on my own half-buried character, and with this in mind it is impossible to say which particular person I favour or ‘take after’, though I plainly attached myself most to those who had some skill and knowledge to impart: to Frederick the designer and artist, and to Burton the farrier.

63

Deception Island lies in a particularly eruptive area of the Antarctic Ocean and is all that remains of a volcanic cone suddenly pulled under by some insufferable whim of the earth. Most of it, except for whaling buildings and a scientific station, is composed of mountainous ash and ice, peaks, crevices, and sheer walls dropping into the sea.

The crater is not quite a full circle of land. It is broken at the mouth, part of its lip having gone with the general subsidence, leaving a gap so that its final shape is of a distorted horseshoe — a long way from the perfect specimen done by Burton in his prime which presses down the pile of written sheets on my table.

As unpredictable as a volcano, Burton created a primeval shoe-tool for the sacred horse, with iron that had been scraped out of the earth itself. Taking his piece from the fire he pounded the burning ore and made sparks live and die, plying his weight over the shape it was going to be. As he gripped the tongs and held his hammer, no thought entered his mind to spoil the meeting of anvil and nascent horseshoe. They came together with the built-in skill of his craft, producing an object he would set against the finest of any other smith.

During the Great War, when meat was scarce, Burton would not eat the horse-flesh which was sold in the shops, nor allow it into the house. The idea of it horrified his family as well, as if to consume such meat was little different to cannibalism. He loved horses, having in his trade learned to control them more thoroughly than any woman. His hatred of the canine species (above all other animals) may have been because the dog was once a wolf, and the mythical enemy of both horse and man.

When man tamed the horse, blacksmiths made iron shoes for it, drove the nails in through seven holes for each foot, making twenty-eight all told — one for every day of the complete moon — that the horse pressed to the earth as a testament to man’s dependence on the soil and the glowing guardian of the night sky.

Blacksmithery was a deified trade, honoured by Vulcan and Tubal-Cain. When he made sparks fly a blacksmith was said to be in touch with the underworld, risking his soul by working in iron and having traffic with the Devil. Thus the blacksmith can be related to poets, who are also in thrall to moon, earth, and underworld, and consume themselves utterly by the medium of their work.

The horseshoe on my desk is a well-made artefact of seven holes for seven nails, and my consciousness tames the wild horse that the junction of the two disparate psyches lets loose in me. Seventy years later the horseshoe Burton made lies heavy and cold, its perfect form pressing down the phrenetic scrapings from the back of a brain that Burton would never have connected himself with — aphorisms, observances, slick clippings, stray poems, and fragments that could not have come anywhere but out of a Burton.

Passed on to me, the horseshoe of his spirit is as misshapen as the map of Deception Island pinned to my wall.

64

Burton’s horseshoe holds down the notes and mulch-thoughts that come to me at midnight and after. One says that a writer is an old man who picks up a pen instead of garrulously speaking his words into thin air. If in need of a certain sort of painkiller he bites on words instead of bullets. I was a premature old man as a child, which is one reason why Burton and I hit it off so well together. A writer has no age but old age, though he only becomes senile if he stops writing, and when that happens he usually finds some way to die, not matter how old he is.

Vanity inscribes such secret thoughts, but they are a way of formulating the frequent question as to why one became a writer. The pile of papers underneath the horseshoe may provide a clue to this elusive puzzle: I can see it as a grand travelling trunk of raw material, and me lifting the lid occasionally to make a lucky dip or pick a winning number out of the raffle-bag.

No writer should take drugs, it says, or drink too much, or get psychoanalysed. Such things are for the others. If he feels himself going mad it is only part of the creative process — the soul rebelling at some offence against the sacred code, or showing a new direction for his talent. Madness is to be welcomed, and shared with no one.

A writer’s reality is other people. His hell is himself, whom he is continually trying to get away from, or explain into extinction. But he cannot escape, because the long exploration which lasts all his life, from alef to tav, takes him deeper into that skin-enclosed world of visionary shade and colour, badger-runs of memory, and all inventions of the soul. He goes to find out what is there, and organize it into any sense he can. From such material he creates his golems and sends them on to the sidewalks.

Close to heaven and hell, the writer paces a narrow lane between the frontiers of both, with a passport for neither place. To sidestep his own demon by choosing one or the other means death. A writer is a born and sometimes eloquent loser — a person who cannot win. He is never satisfied with what he does because he is always trying for the impossible, to remake himself according to a dream of perfection that he felt close to since birth, and to keep himself as alive as the language which surrounds him. He is attacked continually by his basic self, and so is forced into a never-ending quest for the truth by which he can be remoulded into the ideal man — meaning the most ordinary of men.

The impulse behind his endeavour is one of gnawing uncertainty, which would not leave him alone even if by a miracle he finished his task. So he compromises, tries to delineate an emotion or experience beyond the limits of what he had done before, to make reality out of a dream, to turn a vision into ordinary experience, to think complicated and write plain, to refabricate life and construct people because he cannot take himself to pieces like a clock, and find out what makes the world go.

He became a writer because there was no other way out of the dilemma, which in any case was insoluble. There is no single explanation. The feeling of being a born loser turned him into the only endless direction that was open, so he began to write and accepted the role of scapegoat and sacrifice, fate’s potlatch, doomed never to tackle the fundamental problems of his life or finally explain them.

To make his existence supportable he finds it easier to tackle the despair of others than mend his own disabilities. This binds him tightly to humanity. His attempts to write instead of perish help to keep him and the world sane, give people something to live for, provide them with a fragment of hope in a desperate planet when they might otherwise think that universal extinction is the answer.

Too many occurrences of actual life rob him of time which would be better spent writing, though to use this as an ideal merely brings down the troubles he hopes to avoid. There is no way out of that one, but the argument that experience widens his spirit is false. In the beginning his spirit is a door, which opens more and more of its own accord as he gets older. A writer has to go further back than that. He should match the suffering of others with his fresh imagination, mix in with his tribulations, and illuminate the fused result with that third and holy eye which not only guards the past as he goes forward but watches for treachery from it, keeping it clear and well-balanced in his own iron-wrought truth.

65

Being a writer is the one great fact, my only love, a love which I had to feel before I could fall in love with anything or anyone else. It had to be there even before I could fall in love with myself.

I can only write about people I love, even if they are crooks, cowards, scoundrels, weaklings, and renegades whom the rest of society abominates. The evil and the cynical in me also has its favourite characters which it likes showing to others. One falls in love with that which can either destroy or save, knowing that in the end there will be no difference between either state of the brain or backbone.

At the beginning I felt an air of mystery and importance at being a writer — of hardly caring whether I was a writer or not, because an inner fire that I hadn’t yet uncovered but which kept me faithful to it knew that I was and would be, no matter what happened. It was pure and naïve enthusiasm, a feeling of youthful love that did not come and go in a month or year but went on like real love till it turned underground in order to survive. Like real love it is still there, and always will be, but I can never forget the time when it made me happy, in spite of all adversities and turmoil, just to tell myself that I was a writer, even though ten years were to go by before anything was printed. If any other person detected it they might have thought it was because I was in love.

To lose one’s naïvety is to say goodbye to part of one’s soul. Youth has vanished, leaving an ashen disaster. If enthusiasm in its first rush is cut down by the sword of cynicism, or by reality, or common sense, or critical praise, or reviewers’ dislike, or an acceptance of any truth, it is a great misfortune, and wrong indeed to allow it. A writer is open, vulnerable, a prey to derision, and it is good for him that he stays so, otherwise he will never get respect from those who matter to him, nor any from himself. Those who clamour for nothing but the truth, who demand easy and unconsidered opinions as well as form and style and deadly academic care, only want to spread his guts out in the sun to see what he is made of. They scatter sawdust over his remains with gestures of disgust when they see that he is built the same as everyone else except them.

The great poet David had a verse for it, when he realized the true nature of man’s most sacred possession: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward, and put to confusion, that desire my hurt.’

A writer must search for the integral large space of his soul and, once he has found it, never abandon it, and be always sure to write with his own true voice, and not reflect the shallow guidelines of society. If there comes a time when he cannot distinguish between the two, then he should no longer call himself a writer. He must break through the thin gauze of the social fabric and get to what exists underneath, to that which has more meaning. It may not be easy to pick out the truth, but it is not difficult to distinguish the lies. If a writer is awarded some form of authority by the society in which he lives, and he believes in that authority, he loses blood, and indulges in artistic suicide. He slits his wrists in the warm bath of society’s approval, and dies with a flaccid smile on his face.

No writer should agree to the simplicities and deceptions of the society in which he lives, and if he is true to himself he must fight against bourgeois culture, communist or otherwise, for with its lifeboats of surrealism and socialist realism it is a culture of deadness and mediocrity, sadism and self-praise imposed by those who came into the world with the truth on their lips and with nothing human in their hearts.

Some writers cannot go below the skin of their perceptions, so keep within standard lines of behaviour, and stick to the fossilized social patterns created for them. Others use the imagination as a way of exploring chaos, employing examples of archetypal myths that belong to both the past and the future. A writer may not be popular in this, but he is brought near the edge of sanity on beginning to write. His mind splits, becomes fragmented, and creates an agony which forces his pen to move in an attempt to reassemble it and so attain the peace of putting on paper what did not exist before. He is driven up to the holy frontier by the barbs of madness, but once there he is serene, writing with honesty and fire, and as near the truth as he can get.

66

If the writer is to preserve his integrity and inspiration he must be concerned with life beyond such public arenas as the boxing ring or the cockpit, out of range of groans or cheers from people who are in thrall to such anaesthetical comfort. They are beguiled by a brash and clamorous truth which is not theirs, truth which is too much in the present, and exploits them because it is somebody else’s. Purveying what it believes to be the basic truths of the people, it deliberately puts them out in a monstrously exaggerated fashion, thus pampering the people into a sort of craven inanition, or a self-satisfying acceptance of all their vices. It stuns their senses, and no one can deny that they like its tune, for it takes them away from their own realities, which are less intoxicating, and more troublesome to all concerned.

How far must one go in fighting those who believe in the white truth, the absolute truth, their especial creed by which they seek to enslave others and force them into a ruination of their dignity? A writer can only live by his own truth if he is able to exist without offending his moral conscience. Otherwise he must fight, and in battling to preserve the integrity of the artist, he struggles to maintain the freedom of all individuals. This is another truth I will accept, but though I keep it small so that it tyrannizes no one, I hope to keep it big enough to fight all tyranny. You can only contend against unjust laws by breaking the law. There is no other way. Most laws are not made for the smooth running of society, but to keep people unnecessarily docile. Society could run itself, but those in power make laws, and thereby impose a tyranny which seeks to fix everyone in his place. Such domination destroys energy, talent, and any tangible freedom.

The great virtue of the English (especially the so-called lower classes) is that they are still expected to know their place in the social hierarchy created for them. The simple English workman is much honoured if he stays where he belongs. But it is not like that any more. Nowadays he is beginning to examine the basis of that discriminating society which has imposed injustice upon him, and to question himself who so willingly accepted it. It has been left too long, however, so that only the bitter, liberating energy to declare war and wreck everything for everybody is left. Most of the workers have not yet got into the way of wanting to take over the riches (i.e. the means of production) for themselves. They would like to, but they don’t know how. Baffled and smouldering with rage, and a terrifying historical sense of injustice, they know that to enjoy such riches they would need to control and maintain them — before sharing out the results.

They have not been trained to do this, nor educated to expect it. They are stalled, frustrated, unable to tolerate being what they are, or to make a long revolutionary effort for their own and everybody else’s benefit. The men who organized the Somme massacres, and those toadies who attended to the gruesome detail of it, still run the country. The same dead brains proliferate. The same morality governs. The same incompetence rules. Those who see themselves as masters, those who hate the poor because they want to enjoy more of life and are therefore seen as a threat, those keepers of the nation’s traditions, the bitter old-mannish intransigents and narrow-gutted guardians of privilege, the sham and shallow pontificators in the courts and churches and in parliament, those who accuse the British working man of sloth and deviousness, yet continue to live off his back (little knowing that if they were not on his back he might again become one of the best workmen in the world), those who are afraid of losing what they have aquired by system and not by intelligence and work — will have to die off or step into the background unless there is to be civil war. The country is creaking fit to crack.

Five per cent of the population owns ninety per cent of the wealth — a more wicked proportion than in any other European country. That is what the old men of 1914 sought so successfully to prolong. That was the victory of 1918, the fruits of which are still being enjoyed, but not by the men who died, and neither by those who survived, nor by their descendants. No Labour government since then has done anything to change it.

The working men of today do not trust those middle class and no doubt sincere socialists to help them and give justice, for they see socialism of that sort as perhaps the last defence of the ruling class against the working class, the only system that will effectively stop the workers getting at their throats. To accept this kind of help might be to lay themselves open to an oppression as bad as what they have now, for such socialists could then say: ‘This is what you yourselves wanted’—and what greater tyranny is there than that? We must become each other’s equals, and treat each other as fellow human beings. It is a fundamental attitude that must be stated, but also one which can alter in a very short time if the battle is joined.

67

A mountain of uncertainties makes one unstable stepping-stone across a river, or a single drop of water in the desert. Beware of a man who always says no. He’ll enslave you as he too has been enslaved. Look out for a man who continually shouts yes. He’ll destroy you before doing away with himself. How can clarity come except out of confusion? How can one decide except through indecision? Seven negatives make a positive. If you dream you don’t act. If you act, you can’t dream. That rare and lucky person who does both lives in a world of angels. But he is further from the truth than anyone else.

All roads are set at the truth, whether it is down the valley of dereliction that filters back to the past, or up on to the saddle of exultation that leads into the future. Or take it the other way round, that chaos signifies neither comfort nor satisfaction. Toss the coin of limbo, throw the dice of confusion for any number from one to six. Win or lose, you may not choose, but move you must, until rest is a forceput, and not of your own selecting either. All valleys are exalted, and all hills have good views except when the mists of inbuilt obstinacy cloud them.

It is necessary for every person to explain himself. I do so halfway through my writing life (being if nothing else an optimist) for my own benefit, and as a way of burning bridges. The surviving cinders are visible at the bottom of deep water. It is also a journey, and all journeys are sentimental, whether towards truth, or a trace of smoke on the horizon that vanishes as soon as you look at it. Destinations are illusory, but the point of departure is a mountain of such living rock that you cannot help but set out from it.

And yet, reading what I have written, where has it got me, except to the end of a normal story told in a roundabout way? Wrapped in verbal peregrinations are the lives of several people who stand on an island across the dark and violent sea. From it a light shines, sometimes clear, occasionally obscure. Often it does not show.

All truth is fiction, all fiction is the truth. This book is no more than a novelist’s shape of fiction, a misshapen truth, a broad, swamp-bordered Lake Chad whose outlets are narrow flows of myself and little else. I have written about a particular stream, but it is a channel which never expands sufficiently for much truth to be born. If I claimed to write the truth I would have told a lie. If I said I had written lies it would not have been the truth.

It is, perhaps, a historical novel in that people are given real names, while others come out of my imagination. Ordinary people also deserve the benefit of history. And since I cannot guarantee that there is not one lie in the whole of it I have no alternative except to call it a novel.

What, then, is it all for? Life, work, love, living. It is inevitable that I should end on a question, for only questions are divine, the urge to question everything and never take any answer. To accept an answer is to condemn those who provide it to silence, and so you give them tyrannical power over you. The good people in this novel know that you must never do that.