Raw Material

by Alan Sillitoe

  When I see a possibility of happiness coming to me I will not help to make it real, out of a fear that if I succeed I shall no longer have the moral stamina and rectitude to know that I am incapable of speaking the truth.

  Yet if I accepted the happiness that waits for me it would then cease to be the happiness I now imagine it would be, and I would still be armed and plagued with the necessity of searching for the truth.

  One must continually strive for happiness, because the unhappiness that comes with it will always be more fruitful than the unhappiness of non-endeavour one left behind. Paradise is a long way off.

  I try to get at the truth, as if to do so may bring a certain amount of happiness. At the same time I find myself utterly distrusting it. Sooner or later one must make up one’s mind.

  13

  I was treated well by Burton because, apart from being able and willing to labour physically, I also bothered myself industriously with books and writing paper. I sat on a chair in the kitchen, by the light of an oil lamp shining from a hook above the table, reading or drawing maps, and I know that he looked at me strongly now and again because he had not seen the like of it before. Sometimes he passed the newspaper and asked me to recite the latest news from Abyssinia, where ‘that swine Mussolini was knocking people about’.

  When I walked in on Sunday afternoon after playing in the garden or along the lane outside, Mary-Ann and Emily would already be laying the tea-table and waiting for that peculiar authoritative stamp of Burton as he came downstairs in his stockinged feet.

  If he saw the cat in front of the fire he would kick it clear—though it was often alert and leapt out of sight before he came into the room. If the dog stayed there, being near enough human to hope for better things, he would usually move that away also. But if he was in an affectionate mood he would grip the dog around its long mouth and hold the jaws fast, an action which, as well as being painful, induced in the poor animal a feeling of claustrophobia and panic, so that it struggled to get free, much to Burton’s delight and the loud protests of his wife and daughters. It whined and wriggled until he let it go with as friendly a pat as he could muster under the thwarting circumstances, a gesture which was the nearest I saw him get to an expression of guilt.

  And so he came in for his tea, having taken care to re-establish his reputation in front of the family so that normal life could be resumed once more. There would be salmon and cucumber and jam-pasty to eat, a combined smell of fish and vinegar and new-baked dough which was enough to make anyone’s mouth water. But he never had much of it, not being a big eater, in spite of his work. He would pull on his boots and go into the yard or garden to busy himself for an hour before walking off for an evening bout at some pub or other.

  He lived close to Nottingham, a lifetime spent within a few miles of the Goose Fair and Market Place. Born and bred, married and buried at Lenton, he was to live ten years at Bridge Yard, and later for many more at a block of three cottages on Lord Middleton’s land that were shown by the Ordnance Survey maps of the late nineteenth century as ‘Old Engine Houses’, though they were always known locally as Engine Town. Demolished in 1939, a few months after water-taps and electricity had been put in, they made way for the spread of bungalows from Nottingham.

  The cottages were connected by a motorable high-hedged sunken lane to Radford Woodhouse—a compact settlement of three streets—beyond which one went by paved road to the city. But to other localities there were only tracks across the fields. To reach Aspley or Basford one went up ‘Colliers’ Pad’, a leafy and narrow bridle-path that ran by an open space of undulating scrubland known as the Cherry Orchard, a way that was often used by miners going home from Radford or Wollaton Pits.

  Burton never thought of himself as an urban man, even when his house was on the actual city limits and he could find himself in Nottingham—so to speak—simply by walking to the end of the yard. There were still many fields to cross before coming to the packed houses of Old Radford and the first lively outlying pubs of the city. He watched them from behind the fence, as if daring them to come up and get him. He couldn’t be doing nothing for long, however, and before going back to what work there was he ceased his gazing and suddenly, to spite the lane a few yards away as well as shock it, he gobbed into the middle, and then turned his back on it. This gesture was characteristic, a spit at the bars of the fire to hear it sizzle, or down into the lane to pay it back for never moving. The fire was unbeatable as far as his saliva was concerned, but the lane couldn’t answer back. There was no contempt in his spitting. It was just an eternal testing of the forces of nature to make sure they were always as he expected them to be. Satisfied that they were, he could then go back to his work.

  On Saturday night he donned his best suit. In fact he had two, which seemed an unparalleled luxury compared to the state of my own father at the time. There was a black one and a brown one—with boots to match each, of the sort that laced high and covered the ankles. Their good-quality leather glistened from the shine I had just given them as, in the chosen pair, he made his way down the dry or muddy lane, according to season, and on under the long tunnel-like railway bridge whose darkness at six o’clock on gloomy winter mornings had so much frightened my mother on her way to the lace factory in Nottingham where she worked from the age of fourteen.

  Burton would stop at the beer-off in Radford Woodhouse for his first pint, then go on by the disused lime kilns up to Wollaton Road. His son Oswald lived in a cottage near the junction, and he would call in to see if everything was all right, then continue the two-mile walk into Nottingham. In his own world he was without fear, and he despised anyone who was not the same, though he would occasionally condescend to talk to them for reasons of work or business. Those who were similar in stature might be lucky to get a passing nod from time to time, for he was exceedingly conscious of his height, and held himself accordingly.

  As a child I once caught a glimpse of him at a saloon bar when someone going in opened the pub door. Burton was standing up, talking to other men, the upper half of his tankard arm held well into his side, the beer pot straight at his mouth when he drank, though the stance and picture was by no means a stiff one. Then I dodged out of sight in case he should see me.

  At Sunday dinner a quart bottle would be set on the table, which only he was allowed to drink. If his grown-up sons wanted to take beer at the same meal they had to go and buy a pint of their own, though they could only bring a glass to the table, never the actual bottle. If they did there would be ructions which would end in them getting knocked down if they didn’t take it away.

  He’d send me out on Sunday morning to the Woodhouse for his ale, and I remember the smell of it as the handsome but hurried young woman at the beer-off poured it into the white enamel funnel she held over the bottle. He once rewarded me with a glass when I got back, though I should have known there was some trick in it, for he was delighted when I staggered away from the meal half drunk. On another occasion he tempted me to a pinch of snuff, which set me sneezing around the house and yard for hours. I was one of the few who appreciated his sense of humour, for he was universally known among his family as a ‘rotten old swine’, mostly because all his actions added up to the fact that he liked making people dance to his tune.

  14

  Vindictive parasitic thorn-bushes tangle with free-growing evergreens along two sides of the garden. Physical work relieves the pressure. I still occasionally take a leaf out of Burton’s book.

  Using a short thin-bladed Swedish handsaw to cut through the trunks close to the soil I then (wearing gloves) grip each spiked creeper in turn and pull with all my strength so that its dozen long tentacles slowly ungrasp from the bushes and trees round about. I spend much of the day at this, making a huge pyre of disentangled briars ready for burning in the morning.

  The creepers are no longer strangling the veins and sinews of the bushes, so the greenery will grow more resplendently when spring fully comes. In this work I had no diffic
ulty knowing that the brambles had to be separated from the bushes, and that the bushes were the only kind of truth I wanted to see.

  Yet the creepers also had an existence. They choked and fed off the trees, and their small triangular thorns fetched blood when they scraped my wrist or ran in through a hole in the glove. They too have a tenacious life that has to be dragged out, but because most of the roots are left they will grow and spread everywhere again. The truth of the trees and bushes would not be complete without them.

  Such reality cannot be perceived without struggle or blood being spilled. The heart must be bruised before truth comes out. How else can one find it? When the long thorn-covered tendrils were tugged from the bushes, leaves flew off and twigs snapped. If truth is to have any significance it can only be as a blood-brother.

  Yet when this quest for truth begins to be answered, and these verities are made known after effort and illumination, I give in to the temptation to say they are lies, and find an excuse to disown them.

  They create too much uncertainty, telling me they are not the truth because there are so many million truths, and that my judgement may have been at fault in picking the wrong ones. Every man has to make his own choices, not wait on God to do it. And if I think I have selected wrongly, the truths thus isolated must be lies. All one can believe in is the falsity of truth, and start again.

  But fake truth carries the sheen of hope and optimism—like a counterfeit light before the dawn out of which the real day is bound to grow. A sham truth brings exhilaration, because even though I have decided that it is not the real truth, and have discarded it, at least I can persuade myself that I am getting closer to acceptable veracity.

  The first failure is always the surest sign that I will find what I want, I tell myself, swallowing the light so as not to vomit. In my lit-up state I curse the truth I was so ardently seeking before the blaze of its falsity struck me, before I was lured from the real path that was not solid enough to support the truth but where I was secure in the right of my own heart. Truth is a machine that turns the heart into a computer on which anyone can play a tune.

  This halfway incandescence of the spirit is a safeguard. It can only be my downfall if I go beyond it. Yet if I do outdistance it I must keep possession of my own live backbone, because as a writer it is my vocation, for the benefit of myself and others, to bypass this self-evident falsity of truth and find out what exactitudes might exist in the furthest wilderness.

  The greatest intoxication comes when I realize that there is no downfall. Such a possibility does not exist. I never go down. I do not fall. I can die, shrivel up, perish, rave in anguish at the soil and the sky. But I do not fall. This is so evident a truth that I accept it and know it to be true without any conditions whatsoever. It provides a sense of power and confidence, as well as a desperate strength to go on in face of all disappointments and disasters.

  An artist who sees that the falsity of truth is nothing better than a trap must sooner or later decide what it is he wants. If truth is not everything to him, it must be nothing, but if truth is nothing, then what is fit to take its place?

  15

  Burton was to regret the hard times he’d given Oliver, his eldest son.

  As a youth, Oliver was led the fiercest dance of all, ‘got kicked from pillar to post’ because he had the misfortune to be Burton’s firstborn and prime competitor. After one terrible bout he walked out and took a job as a blacksmith at Browns’ Sawmills near Wollaton, and none of the family knew where he slept, for he had no money to get lodgings. His mother managed to send some dinner every day by one of his sisters—each time with a message imploring him to come home and make it up with his father. Burton had already grudgingly agreed to it, because if there was one thing worse than having an argumentative son in the house, it was having him away from it so that he could no longer be got at.

  After a week Oliver relented, preferring to share a bed with his brothers than sleep on the newly seasoned planks in one of the lofts. But he kept his job at the sawmill. A year or so later he started courting, but when his girl-friend came to call for him one day, Burton, in his forty-seventh year, took a fancy to her. She appears to have fallen for him, being a loose and saucy Radford tart, and the iron peace of the family was shattered. Burton went off with her for a few days to some place in Derbyshire. Oliver, who had been in love with the girl and was now in despair at everyone’s perfidy, enlisted with the army as a blacksmith, for the Great War had begun.

  So at forty-eight years of age Burton received news of his eldest son, and accounts differ as to how it came. One says that a white-faced twelve-year-old daughter went to the forge with the black tidings. How did he take it? He was shoeing a horse and, stunned by her own emptiness after the words of the telegram, she was afraid to interrupt his work, imagining it was more important to them and the world than what she had been fetched out of school to tell.

  Her mother was at home, crying one minute, stunned and silent the next, clinging to the flickering light of disbelief whenever she had the strength—while blinds at the house had already been drawn.

  Burton had seen her, and wondered why she was out of school, for he had insisted that none of his children should miss a minute of it. She couldn’t tell whether he scowled especially at her, or whether he was niggled by the horse unable to hold still, an animal that could sense before any of them the awful news in the air.

  He hammered in the last four nails of the shoe, and even then she did not dare shout what she had come to tell, because three or four other people were standing around. She had thought on her way there to go up and whisper it, but was more afraid of that than doing it any other way. When the horse was pushed unwillingly backwards between the cart-shafts she called out: ‘Oliver’s dead, our dad.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  He stopped in picking up his tools, but heard the first time, and his question was only a means of keeping himself steady, and the preparation for him to stand bolt-still for a few seconds in the silence created by the information among the men waiting around, and for him to say in a sharp voice that astonished them all, and made them realize how terrible the by now not unusual news would be: ‘I bloody well knew it!’

  Oliver had not been killed at the Battle of the Aisne, or in the senseless slaughter at Loos, but on a moor in Norfolk. Some of his boisterous soldier-mates had, by way of a joke, fed rum to a string of mules he was to lead across the moor at dusk. Enlivened too much, they kicked him to death, and he wasn’t found till the middle of the following day.

  Another account, and probably the right one, says that he and his pals were taking a drink outside a pub near Hungerford in Berkshire. One soldier dared a maid to feed whisky to one of their horses and, being gentle and persuasive, she managed to do it.

  The animal ran wild, galloping around the yard with such energy that it seemed they would never get it back to barracks. Oliver tried some tackling, and was killed by a blow at the head from one of its hooves. The horse had to be shot, and the girl who had given it whisky got into great trouble for her mindless action.

  All nine of the Burtons were sitting at Sunday dinner, a large joint of meat about to be carved. A knock sounded at the door, and Mary-Ann came back with a telegram saying that Oliver had been killed.

  His body, clothed as the soldier he had been, was brought to them in a coffin which lay open for a day in the living-room. The children stood around, though some of the girls dared not at first come down from the bedroom to look. Burton made them, and gave orders that none of them was to cry. ‘Anybody starts blubbering,’ he said, the bones standing out from his unnaturally white face, ‘and I’ll kick ’em from arse-hole to breakfast time. There’ll be no bleddy blawting in this family.’

  He made such impossible demands, sometimes only to hear the sound of his own voice, and when they objected he was then committed to getting obedience, even though it might not matter to him whether he was obeyed or not. If only they had let him speak, and
not cringed before every word, he might have had something to thank them for.

  And they tried not to cry as they surrounded Oliver’s coffin and looked at his twenty-two-year-old face. He was that rare youth who was liked by all his sisters, as well as loved by them. In spite of everything, he was also Burton’s favourite son, and Burton knew he’d never been liked by him, though Burton had thought that one day Oliver would make as good a blacksmith as himself.

  There was a strange, chemical smell in the room. Two neighbours had come quietly in, and now the door burst open, and Florrie Voce from next door pushed through them and looked into the coffin. Her round flat Radford face suddenly bunched like a withered apple. ‘What the bloody hell does she want?’ Burton thought, and from her came a loud screaming of agonized distress which filled the whole house as if to split all the walls.

  The effect was to tear into the children’s hearts so directly that they too began to weep and wail, as if Oliver was finally getting his rightful dues. Mary-Ann resumed the quiet sobbing that had stricken her ever since hearing the news, and finally Burton himself—as they all witnessed—‘cried like a baby’, his soul torn out of him at last.

  The coffin was taken to Lenton cemetery on a gun-carriage, where Oliver was buried with full military honours to the tune of the Last Post.

  When he could bear to talk about it Burton said to Mary-Ann that if he’d been with Oliver on that day, the bloody horse wouldn’t have kicked him to death. He had a few tricks by which to tame it or keep it off. He slept with the vision of saving his son from all harm at its vicious antics, only to wake up in the morning and face the further reality of his death. He was eventually buried next to him in the same churchyard.

  As a child I used to go with my aunts to put flowers on Oliver’s grave. They did so every week, even twenty or thirty years after he had died. The last time Burton went out of the house as an old man of nearly eighty, before his first and last illness which brought on death too suddenly for him to beat it or have much say in the matter, was to visit Oliver’s grave and set flowers by it. Unlike his wife and daughters he would never put them in a vase of water, but merely lay them on the grave itself, stay a moment or two, grunt, and walk away.