Raw Material

by Sillitoe, Alan;

  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.

  All visible metal had to shine and look presentable for a blacksmith, to be appeased by polish and work. Whenever his married daughters visited the house he would not let them help in this, and neither could the men do it. It was a job solely for the unmarried girls.

  Burton believed that, since he worked, everybody should work. He was the one who set me to labouring as a child, whereas my own father had not been able to succeed in it. It offended the sight of Burton’s good eye to see even a child idle, so that from being a spectator of his own tasks in the garden I was soon hauling a barrow, weeding, digging, getting in coal, chopping wood, cleaning out pigeon coops, or darting down the lane on errands.

  Work was a virtue, the only one. Even the straight way he stood when at rest proclaimed it. And while the better half of me agreed with him it must have been the other side that led me to become a writer.

  6

  Rather than write the truth I will work mindlessly in the garden or slump into a fit of sloth that lasts for days, or flee from it in the car as fast as the twisting lanes will allow.

  And coming back to it, as one must, I will versify, falsify, elaborate, and boast, but be careful not to tell a significant lie in case someone should indicate how near to the truth it is. For lies are as plain as footprints left on a beach still wet from the sucked-out tide. It is difficult to tell lies if one is facing the truth.

  The fear that reaching some form of truth will reduce me to silence is an unbearable thought, but it would only shut my organ-box for a time, for after a while even the most stunning truth no longer shines or intimidates because of the familiarity it has meanwhile gained. One then denies it, and looks for it once more.

  It is impossible to find. Vacillation is the blood of life. A mind made up is a dead mind. To decide is to act, and to act is to commit an injustice. To search for truth proves how fickle
and disloyal one is, and untrustworthy to the earth. One is a member of the elect, in fact, a spiritual gypsy who must search for truth but be careful not to find it.

  At the same time one wants to tell the truth in a single sweep of speech or pen, just as one longed of old to give out a big lie that would flatten all others by its weight and precision, a manoeuvre of the subconscious, perhaps, that might have landed one at the threshold of truth but never did.

  The Big Lie consists of a million petty lies, and the Big Truth is made up of countless insignificant truths. All rules coalesce and ring true, and so are not to be trusted. Or maybe the Fat Complete Truth is merely a single unit of these myriad Big Truths, enlarged either by false brooding or grandiose boasting. The Big Lie can also be made out of innumerable small truths, and the most minute truth can grow from a million great lies.

  There is no set law of moral divination, no comfort to be offered. Truth and lies do not exist. One may get nearer to truth by approaching it as if there were no such thing, while taking care not to get too close and therefore be dazzled by it. The impossible task is to remove the important coal-burning Truth from the million Big Truths that are so insignificant they are not worth considering. It is a question of continuing a fruitless search that might lead around regions of madness, or staying in the comfort of half-truths with which one has managed well enough so far. Defeat is the only final truth one ever gets, though a search for truth promises the most valuable defeat because it has most to teach.

  Since everything is the truth, it becomes a matter of selection, and therefore distortion which, though it might be harmonious, gets to the antithesis of truth. But if there is no such thing as truth, one still has to search for it so as to prove it, and to know that one only hunts what does not exist, otherwise there would be no point in pursuing it. That which is plain before one’s eyes needs no pursuing.

  So it is tempting to believe that truth is fiction, yet fiction has nothing to do with the sort of truth I have in mind, since fiction is concerned with disguising the truth to such an extent that it becomes art, and is unrecognizable as the truth because it is even more powerful than the truth, depicting truth as something which it is not.

  A frequently employed word soon loses its significance and the word Truth does so more easily than most. The reality of truth, however, retains its meaning, though it is difficult to isolate and define such an illusive reality.

  There are as many truths on earth as there are individuals, and there are as many truths in each individual as there are individuals on earth.

  7

  One of Burton’s grown-up sons who went with him as a blacksmith down the pit would receive an occasional hard thump if he seemed to be slacking on the job, or if some piece of work wasn’t up to a good fit or a high polish.

  Burton had no time for the waywardness or irresponsibility of youth, and made it appear, with much success, as if he had never had any himself. Maybe he was jealous of it, or bitter about the fact that he had already lost it.

  Memory was not a function to which he gave free play, and so it seemed as if he had none, either for good things or bad. He never mentioned his parents or talked about the ‘good old days’. Like sweat, speech was valuable. The pride of such illiterates often led them to ignore the meaning of what was said, not only between boss and man but between equals. Burton would say something irrelevant in response to a statement, or merely nod, so as to let whoever made it know that he may or may not have taken it in, and that if by any chance he had he would understand it at his leisure. There would be time enough then to decide whether or not to reply. It was formal, high-minded, and mean.

  Being literate myself, though connected to several who were not by close and recent ties (my father was never able to read or write), causes me to wonder what mark it has left in me, even if reduced by now to an idiosyncratic quirk which someone on the same intellectual level might see as conceit or selfishness.

  To move into the rich kingdoms of literacy in one generation is more complicated than I could have thought when first beginning to read and write. What I consider to be my slowness of perception is perhaps an unconscious though deliberate ploy to retain some of the defensive and often advantageous traits of my antecedents. If some meaningful remark is made, either good for me or otherwise, I do not at the moment I should get the full gist of it. A few minutes might go by before, having chewed it over like an Eskimo his piece of fat in the snow, I accept its full importance and decide to work up a suitable reply.

  It would seem true of a man like Burton that literacy might not be a great advance. To gain such a thing he would not be prepared to pay the price of giving up a certain central feeling of quality and aloneness. To recover from pneumonia after refusing an inoculation that promised to save you from what was said to be certain death might feel like victory indeed. And to live all one’s life without being able to read or write in a world that shouted how damned you were for not having these gifts must have given one an untouchable sensation of great value.

  At the same time Burton, being a qualified and talented blacksmith, realized his lack of education. Because of it he never felt able to join a society or a union, or any other organization. He knew that something was missing and yet, because of his obdurate character, there was nothing he could do about it.

  To learn reading and writing would mean relying on memory instead of instinct and second nature, and perhaps there were things in Burton’s life that he did not want memory to get at, and one of them could have been his youth, which might have led him back to childhood. And what he would have found there none of us could say.

  Perhaps he really had forgotten his younger days by the time he reached forty. He felt older to his sons than their friends’ fathers looked, though he was the same age. But he was less approachable in a human and fatherly manner, and if Burton did remember his youth it was only so that he could put the experience of it to such good use that his children stood little chance of enjoying their own in his presence.

  Everyone agreed that his cunning was formidable. He was once walking into town with a man who was said to be deaf, though Burton didn’t believe it. When he let a half-crown slip from his pocket the man turned abruptly at the noise. Burton picked it up, put it back, and went on without mentioning it.

  But cunning never goes by itself. There is always cruelty wrapped up in it somewhere. Often after work and as a way of earning extra money Burton would go to Wollaton Park to ring bulls and pigs, jobs which few could do unless they had prodigious strength. Yet even strong men shunned such work because it was regarded as one of the cruellest trades, though Burton was said not to mind it because he took delight in being cruel.

  Since he never talked about his own father no one had an inkling of what he’d been like. He died before my mother was born, so she couldn’t tell anything. Perhaps he was more humane than Burton, who might have modelled himself on one of his grandfathers. But if this was so I shall never know who it was, for if your spade tries to dig too deep it only swings freely in the air so that both Time and Truth draw back.

  When Burton wasn’t present his sons and daughters always referred to him by his surname, never ‘Father’ or ‘Ernest’—as if he were a fierce stranger who had been put in charge of them by some malevolent authority. It is possible that he did not model himself on anyone in particular, but simply emerged from the knotted roots of his past, and was finished off by his own self-centred inviolable opinion of himself, as in any person of strength, or of certain hidden weaknesses.

  Unlike many men of the present century he had never been in the army. He abominated such an institution and thought that anyone who joined or allowed himself to be ensnared into it was even lower than a dog. He did not feel threatened by foreign power or alien system, and he would not have protected any government which felt itself in danger or which told him that he was in danger. He owned no property and lived by his labour and skill, so saw little connection between the government and th
e people. When his eldest son Oliver enlisted during the Great War he only forgave him because he was killed, for even Burton was not so hard of soul that he could hate the dead.

  Until quite late in life he never worked for a boss, having been trained as a blacksmith by his father, so that he inherited the forge at Lenton. This was situated on a lane running beside the railway from Derby Road to Old Church Street. I remember passing it as a child, by which time Burton had given it up for lack of customers and gone to work at Wollaton Pit. Though the motor-car came in during his lifetime I never heard him complain that it had ruined his trade.

  I walked by the forge with my sister when we were children, on one of our long treks to the shores of the Trent in summer. The locked-up building seemed no more than a shed and looked as if it would soon fall down, though someone had put a strong lock on the rotten door to make sure no vandals went in and helped it to collapse over them.

  8

  When my nine-year-old son becomes ill, or hurts himself in any way, I am pitched into a turmoil of mental agony. I am the one who put him to whatever pain he might suffer during his time on earth. To cause someone to be born is to send them alone into the dark. Thus the most excruciating guilt comes with having given life to a child. The remorse of treachery, or the biting pain of having been betrayed, is nothing compared to this. A child can claim to have been betrayed by the biological forces of evolution if someone is cruel to him. The facts of life are no excuse for the infliction of injury or insult.

  These thoughts are hard to bear, yet every truth begets its opposite. He is not my son, I tell myself. As he grows older he is my friend and pupil. Beside the terrible fact that I presented him with the certainty of death is the wonderful and undeniable truth that I caused him to have life. I have given him everything, just as I received everything, though even by making these self-evident remarks I seem to be robbing him of the richness of his existence. Whatever I do for him, he owes me nothing.