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.
In wondering why the lorry-driver had callously buried my road I could only believe that, from the godlike height of his cab, he hadn’t even noticed its feeble line. It was too narrow to be of use, or too unreal for him to see. In place of the paved highway I imagined to exist, there was in reality a piece of narrow track that might barely have served as a false lure into rugged mountain country, fit at the most for the feet of men and animals. Yet I wondered why he had tipped his load over it when there was so much unused space round about. Since something in him must have glimpsed the beginnings of a highway, proved by the fact that he had tried to blot it out, I couldn’t finally tell whether this disfigurement was to my spiritual gain or not.
In the darkness of childhood I did not go this far in my reasoning, but one step further and I feel certain I would have done. A child is a mystic, and what he lacks in intelligence and worldly knowledge he makes up for in earnestness and depth of feeling.
Every child is a prince ruling over a kingdom of half-dark and half-light, which only the revolution of age can inextricably mix up, and condemn him to the lie that he can recognize daylight when he sees it.
23
When I knew my grandmother she was sixty and had white hair, but in her younger days it had been reddish and golden. Being the youngest of a large family she was a girl of few opinions, but the many virtues she had lasted all her life. She was put into service at thirteen, and a few years later was working as a general help at the White Hart pub in Lenton.
Burton, the son of the local blacksmith, got to know her there. He was young and tall, though his strength alone was handsome—his eyes firm, his nose straight, his hair short and fair, a moustache worn as if to balance his strong chin. Like any farrier, he had a permanent spark in his throat from smithing, and no amount of beer could ever put it out. While asking for a pint at the bar he fell in love with this shy, plump girl called Mary-Ann, and told her so. She was busy and said nothing, and if she believed her ears it didn’t seem possible that he was more than joking. But as the weeks went by he said it again and again, not with any sentimental fervour, but straight out, as if he were saying he loved beer or pork.
Being a servant she wasn’t able to leave the pub more than once a month, and one day she took a fancy to a pair of black cotton gloves in a newspaper advertisement. Burton was surprised when, after saying he loved her and wanted her to marry him, she pushed a florin over the counter and asked if he’d go and get her a pair of black gloves from a shop down town. They’d cost one and elevenpence, she told him.
She thought he might wait till the weekend to do it, but he downed his pint and went straight away. When he came back two hours later he pushed the gloves across the bar with the florin she’d given him still on top of the packet. The next time he asked her to marry him she said yes.
After her marriage she hardly ever went to church, for fear of Burton’s scorn, though she believed in God, and was certainly superstitious. It is said that lightning never strikes a blacksmith’s house, and Burton averred so often enough in a bantering boastful tone when Mary-Ann showed herself full of dread at the onset of a bad storm. She felt that every lightning flash coming from the black sky was especially aimed at her, so maybe it was no bad thing that she married a man who stood in absolute fearlessness of it, though his mockery of the fear she felt did little to comfort her.
But while he was in the house it was true that she wasn’t so frightened. When he was at work, however, she would open the front door wide, in spite of the rain driving in, so that if a thunderbolt came spinning with vicious and dreadful power down the chimney and madlarked into the hearth it would be drawn by the gap of light to continue its journey harmlessly into the yard—without exploding and blowing the house to pieces.
Having taken that precaution she would retire to the dark place on the stairs with an oil lamp, even if her grown children were sitting in the kitchen. When the storm’s fearful rumbles ceased to penetrate into her hideaway and reach for her soul, she would open the stairfoot door and ask whether it was safe to come out.
; She led a blameless life, and no one ever knew what there was for her to be frightened of. If anyone should have been afraid of being struck dead it ought to have been Burton, but Mary-Ann thought that the supernatural power behind the lightning bolts would not bother to sort out the good from the bad on finally deciding to aim a big one at his house. Or perhaps she sensed that if Any Being wanted to get back in the deadliest way at another, it would take the one nearest to him, and she was certainly that person to whom Burton was most attached. The price of marrying anyone is to pay for their sins, but he treated her as he would have treated himself if he had discovered the same weak traits in his own make-up, which is the highest form of injustice.
He derided her soft heart, especially when she couldn’t bear to see him kicking the dogs or knocking his children about, so it is possible that she had more humility instilled into her than she had been born with, and therefore more fear of everything. She continually worried, though it was of a sort that would never break her down, and in fact most likely kept her going. It tormented her, yet made her strong, because it demanded such great effort.
She was in many ways weak, but effort is often the only effective fuel of the weak, and a lasting impression is that she must have been as strong as iron to put up all her life with someone as hard as Burton. When he was about forty she saw him in a pub talking to two women. This was no surprise to her because something had been said already of his carryings on. She walked up to the bar and threatened that if he didn’t come home straight away she would go back and set fire to the house.
He laughed, and told her to leave him alone. When she stood there, wondering why she had bothered to tackle him, he pushed her outside with everyone looking on. In her tears she repeated the threat, and though Burton went back to his two women he eventually lost his nerve, afraid that she might actually do as she said.
She was still in the yard when he caught her, not far from the house door. His consciousness roamed around behind his eyes like a tiger unshackled by the chain of words or reason. He grasped her by the hair, dragging her back in a wild rage and spinning her round as his fists flew. The children came up at her screams, and began howling. Burton’s last furious punch caught her in the mouth and knocked two of her front teeth out. He then went in and locked the door behind him, staying till conscience nagged sufficiently for him to go and see to her.
Nobody knew why she put up with him. Though so much injustice had been done to her she didn’t let anything unjust go by without comment—at least not in my presence. All harshness from without, and uncertainty within, registered on the lines of her brow. Headaches continually plagued her and the daughters. The sons were affected by weak stomachs, which showed how Burton had got on their nerves from birth, though they were all fit men and lived a long time, as it turned out.
Headaches and bad stomachs became a thing of the past when Burton died. His children then took on the residue of toughness and longevity that, perhaps in spite of himself, he left them with.
24
When I built a secret road on the rammel-tip I hoped in my reasonably young heart that a lorry would drive along, and that the man inside would use it to take him to a new place on which he could dump more rubble and add to my highway.
To try and write the truth, and at the same time make it more attractive for those who might read it, would be to commit a lie, an unforgivable act when set on a self-conscious furrowing. To refuse the responsibility of a lie means pushing art out of the way, for it is only possible to create art when seeking to make raw truth believable.
I wanted to make a road for other people to use. But the zone of ground between river and railway, long since covered in factory warehouses, figures once more in my landscape of truth. My mother knew one of the lorry-drivers, and even before I used to go there alone I went to it holding her hand, younger than seven years of age. She waited for him outside, and when he came he would open the gate for us. They were both young, and be must have been good enough looking, for he preferred to talk rather than eat, and I watched him open his lunch-box and take out an apple and a piece of cake.
Any attempt to soften what I am about to say will put me at the beginning of a lie. Nevertheless, I will lift belief to a higher plane by making it dependent on truth and not lies. It is as if truth were a crime that I am burning to commit, but the only crime would be to distort the truth knowingly no matter what amount of lip-service is paid to lies. But I am intending to commit this crime for myself alone, and not for the benefit of anyone around me. It might feel like a sudden advent of religion, when God is seen to be of Truth, his stern and precipitate appearance promising me an increase of faith in myself providing I placate him with my own hollow spirit by the time I have finished writing.
I wasn’t even hungry, but did as I was told and went to the other end of the tip with my apple and cake. After I had eaten I started to build my first road, and was lost in the work of it when my mother said we must go because the gate was about to be locked. I took her hand, but she was too distracted to be with me on the way back, because she must have been worrying about my father. She needn’t have bothered though, because she had, after all, only taken me out for a walk.
25
When Howard was nine and out to buy a comic he saw a trolley-bus on Wollaton Road whose poles had come loose. Running across to look he was struck by another bus, which so mangled his leg that he had to have it off.
His father was Oswald, Burton’s second son who had married a Catholic girl called Nellie. While the whole family moaned the loss of Howard’s leg, they tried to console the parents by saying that at least he hadn’t been killed—while Burton was heard to remark that it might have been better if the poor little bogger had. The only reply to shut him up was when Ivy said that though he had but one eye he still liked living. He didn’t deny this, but went on thinking he was right.
Howard sat in the parlour because he could not tolerate the light, much like Burton for another reason. He passed the time sifting piles of silver paper collected by all the family so that he could take it to the hospital on days when he went for treatment. He had been learning the piano but wouldn’t play it any more, sat on its stool unable to lift the lid.
Ivy took him to the Elite cinema a year after the accident. In the middle of the film he complained of pain in his leg. He was a stoical boy, so she knew something was wrong, and took him home. In bed he sang beautiful songs, words and music of his own making, his face animated but his eyes closed. It was impossible not to weep on hearing them. He died a fortnight later with a heart no longer strong enough to support him.
Howard was a year older than me and I had not been encouraged to play with him because I was considered too rough. I called at the house some time after he had died, on my way to Engine Town. It was early morning, and Nellie was still in bed, while Oswald was getting ready to go on duty as a sort of guardian on the nearby canal, where he worked because there was no longer much for him to do as a blacksmith. He was a tall, thin man like Burton, but there was a more human and vulnerable handsomeness about him, a sensitive enough man because he had some of the Tokinses complexity and pity in him passed on by his mother. He told me to finish the bacon left from his breakfast, and I looked at the plate of rinds with the hard cold fat still attached, and the slice of bread he generously cut. Although I hadn’t eaten I couldn’t touch it. The food was good, and in another house I would have scoffed it, but my appetite would not rise.
Nellie tried to console herself by going down town to St Barnabas’ Cathedral, and by drinking bottles of stout, but the grief was so great that nothing succeeded. When we met on the street she stopped and took my hand, holding it in her warm one. She was a gentle person, with long dark ringlet-hair, her face bright and eager with a despair she would not let go of. Her melodious voice was almost breaking as she asked: ‘Where do you think Howard is now?’
I was embarrassed, and didn’t want to remind her of his death, because she knew very well
where he was. I stood still and said nothing.
She eventually let go: ‘He’s in Heaven, that’s where he is!’
There was nothing Nellie wanted more than to follow him. When death takes someone for no reason, in a situation other than war or battle, it often kills the will to resist a similar fate in those close by. Yet Nellie was allowed to live on into old age, and had no other child.
I wondered why Howard ran into the road to be maimed and killed, what he was running towards or escaping from. Maybe Christ did take him to his bosom, as Nellie liked to think, meaning as far as I was concerned that it was pure senseless chance. Burton felt the echo of his own dead son, stood up even straighter when the shock began to gnaw and it was seen in his face as one more blow against the family.
Nellie made me feel helpless, so I stopped being sorry and avoided her in that ruthless way children have when they are afraid. It wasn’t my fault Howard had died, and I couldn’t bear to have his mother wonder why I was alive and he was dead. I’m sure she never thought this, for her soul was good, but I felt it myself. In any case, she did not believe he was finally dead. He was in Heaven, and had been taken away for a while—forty-five years to be exact.
The Burtons felt that, because she was a Catholic, she brought colour into their lives and gave them something to talk about. There was always a need to get off the eternal subject of their father; and godless people such as Burton are tolerant enough of those who have a religion to look up to, as long as it is not the one they were born with and feel guilty at not showing respect for. It is one step up the ladder from sloth to myth.
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