Raw Material (7 page)

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

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

18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19

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

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

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

20

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

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

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

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

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

21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22

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

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

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

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