Raw Material (2 page)

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

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

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

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I've brought you some supper.'

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

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

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

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