Raw Material

by Alan Sillitoe

  Burton did not believe in God, but his family, at both times equally grief-stricken, said that God had got back at him twice. Once when He took his son, and again when He put out his eye.

  16

  I knew an extremely kind person who believed that everything people said to him was the truth, simply because it pained him to hear it. Such nobility of spirit could not exist for long. He suffered too much at hearing so many sad stories. I think everyone must have met him, and spilled their troubles. His sensibility was legendary, but for him it was a permanent wound. His receptive and unselective spirit continually bled. He was a real man, being full of sympathy, and because of this people would not leave him alone, but continually kept at him with their plans and complaints.

  By liking others and respecting their suffering, he did not hate himself. He considered it infantile to hate oneself, to analyse motives, take oneself to pieces with dislike and hold one’s nostrils at the smell. It would mean splitting himself in two, and the part which did the splitting had no real interest in it except self-hatred which, like self-love, is a flame that shrivels you up.

  He was tempted, however, to let that other part of himself take him to pieces and tell him the truth. I suspected all the time that he had let it do this to him anyway, and that the experiment had failed. At least he hadn’t got what he expected. But he insisted he had kicked that other self out quite early on, and had no more truck with it. I am one person only, he said, not two. I am myself alone and myself only with me, and no other self can be allowed to come on me at this hour. The more you know, especially about yourself, the sooner you grow old.

  So he gave himself up to the benefit of other people who, he felt, were less fortunate than he. But if I had been he, which I am not and never could be, he would have laid barbed-wire around his house, bought a gun and shot them down as they came at his defences with wirecutters and implements for tunnelling. If he had believed in self-preservation he would have filled their ears with his sufferings instead. But he secretly hoped, in his blind pride, to defeat them by endless patience and pity, to go on listening all his life, to bleed them white of the red complaining blood of their speech and change them into ghosts so that he could be free of them at last, and turn himself into a saint.

  One morning, just before dawn—he lived alone—he lit the gas to make coffee after spending all night trying to get to sleep—thinking about the numerous years of listening he had done. When the water boiled he turned off the gas and filled the coffee pot. With the usual care he poured a cupful, put in milk, then sugar. He was still listening to the voices, hoping even at this late hour to get something from them.

  His friends did not need to be near him any more for him to listen to them speaking their truths. And when they had nothing to say he went on making it up himself, on and on, in their voices, the nonsensical truths they continually talked, and which at last, considering the action he had in mind, were beginning to make sense.

  He saw now that the world was full of truth. Everything was the truth. Every word spoken anywhere and everywhere was the truth. He should have been a priest listening to confession in order to find out that the truth was not the truth, that the truth in fact did not exist, no matter how much you worried it, or grieved about it. But it was too late. While the coffee in his cup still steamed, he turned on the taps again and lay down on the floor.

  He was a writer, but the more people talked to him, and confessed to him, and complained to him, the less he would write. He felt that every sentence from them took a week off his life, and he was right, for the more he received the stab of their sentences, the more he was driven to take his own life, because he could not think of one sentence to save himself that he had not already heard from somebody else.

  17

  Burton was working in the blacksmith’s shop at the pit one day when a piece of burning steel flew into his eye. He staggered back and put a hand to the wound. Then he dabbed at it and went on working.

  At the end of the shift he walked out as if nothing had happened. He did not go to the doctor, and neither did he claim compensation—which he could have done. He went blind in that eye, and took the piece of steel in it to the grave with him.

  He lived many of his days in the thirty years that followed in appalling pain, which almost certainly accounted for much of his harshness and short temper in the latter part of his life, by which time he might otherwise have mellowed a little.

  He was no iron man, and felt pain with the same intensity as anybody else. He was also no hero, for if he had been he might have kept a stiff upper lip and been as light-hearted as the rest of his family wanted him to be. Or he would have said nothing unmerciful and allowed them to live as peacefully as they would have liked. But he believed in spreading his suffering, and putting up with it by making others suffer. Whether they liked it or not, they had to share it with him. At the same time they were never allowed to mention the cause of it, in return for which they did not hear it from his own lips either.

  He’d sit in a darkened room when he could bear the affliction no longer, a bottle of whisky at his side, and even when he was over seventy I remember being told not to go into the parlour because he wanted to be by himself.

  His family said he was not capable of love, that he had never loved anyone and never would, though to me he seemed tender to his wife, and calm enough when I knew him and they were elderly. Going out together he made Mary-Ann walk some paces behind, and this caused much comment, though he never altered in his habit. At the same time he could not live without her—or let her out of his sight. When she went on a week’s visit to her family at St Neots he followed her down after two days, leaving the children (some of whom were grown up) to fend for themselves.

  In the prime of their married life he gave her as little money as possible to keep all ten. When they lived at Bridge Yard (a house on Wollaton Road between the school and a coal-loading wharf on the canal), she took in washing to try and make ends meet. Her complaints made no difference to Burton, who seemed impenetrable, and couldn’t even understand he was being unkind. She needed money for the house, but he had to have cash for beer, without which he could neither work nor live. Burton was opaque and unjust, but he was a poor man all his life, and though he worked at a skilled trade, he was always on the edge of poverty. He made horseshoes of great beauty and ability and no doubt sold them dirt cheap, even for that time. Only in his late fifties did existence become easier—though not much, for times never stop being hard for the working man. In the thirties where were four other wage-earners in the family, so that the house seemed reasonably well off to me.

  But when his children were young they said he took more care at feeding his half-dozen pigs than he did over them. People who came to the house with buckets of slops and baskets of crusts would get a penny or two from Burton, who would tell one of his children to carry them to the sty. On the way there he or she would search for bits still fit to eat, but Burton never knew this, otherwise they would have got a good kick for daring to rob their own father. And nobody would tell him to his face that they were hungry.

  He worked unbelievably hard. Blacksmithery was a trade that demanded it, in which it was said that some smiths occasionally went blind from the spirit-breaking labour of their toil. Yet for all that, Burton appeared a sensitive man to me. Perhaps as a child, and a grandchild at that, I was able to get through to a part of him that he could never open to his own children or even to himself. His one good eye, extraordinarily alive, missed nothing. His mouth was permanently ironic, turning down at each end but as if it didn’t really want to. Wicked lips, when closed, were ready to play any trick, or to let one be done.

  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 s
oul. 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.