Raw Material (11 page)

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.