Raw Material (4 page)

9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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