The rain was stultifying during the hour it took. My feet were saturated because I wore plimsolls, though I soon ignored the discomfort and got stuck in. Nothing could have put me into that school, for even if I’d had a vague chance of getting through this troubling initiation, my spirit wasn’t ripe for it. I didn’t want it, and it didn’t want me, and I believe we were made to sense this by the fools walking about in caps and gowns—which seemed a senseless piece of ritual and intimidation to me and my friends, like something thrown up from the magistrates’ court or the Spanish Inquisition. Certainly we had not seen the like of it before. So there was no hard feeling on my side, because when told that I wouldn’t be going to such a school I had no regrets.
But I took the test again a year later, and failed that too, proving to me for the last time that I wasn’t the right material for higher education. My grandmother may have been disappointed, though I never saw any sign of it. The experience certainly put me against any form of examination for children.
30
The only time Mary-Ann slipped off her track of high principles was when she spent the remaining week’s budget-money on one-armed bandits at some beer-off in Radford, where she had called on her way home with the Co-op groceries. One of her daughters talked her into coming out, saying that otherwise Burton might get to know. But she didn’t leave until every last penny had gone.
When someone told him, he took it as an act over which he had no control, and therefore one temptation against which Mary-Ann could not have been expected to show much sense either. In other words, he thought it a bit of a joke, saying: ‘Well, I’ll be boggered!’—though keeping a tighter grip on her from then on in case she got into debt from it and had them run out of house and home by the bum-bailiffs.
Mary-Ann knew who’d shopped her, because while she was busy at the handle she’d seen Florrie Voce’s face reflected in the glass. When tackled about it later Florrie denied it all, but called Mary-Ann an old cow for accusing her of such a thing. Normally good-natured and pacific, Mary-Ann went into the house, and came out with a cup, which she threw with full force and deadly aim at Florrie who has hanging washing up in the yard.
The group of houses abutted the school, and the silence of the classrooms was shattered by a squealing such as could only come from a pig in the process of being slaughtered, or a person whose throat was being unjustly cut. A young lady teacher, rattled by the sound, sent one of Mary-Ann’s daughters out to see what was the matter.
Such noise from Bridge Yard was not unusual, but this time it was prolonged for what seemed beyond reason—it being that the cup hurled by Mary-Ann had caught Florrie full in the eye, and cut her both above and below it. A policeman was fetched, and Mary-Ann had to appear at the Guildhall on a charge of breaching the peace and common assault, for which she was fined the sum of £2.
Not that this caused any final rupture between the two women, because a few years later Florrie Voce came to Oliver’s funeral and was the loudest wailer at it. They knew that you couldn’t make enemies in your own backyard, though you had your ructions now and again. And a £2 fine would never convince Mary-Ann that she’d paid for the cardinal sin of committing violence on a neighbour, a pass she’d got herself into which was right out of character, and which she never did again.
She was a kind, hardworking woman, and thought more about other people than herself. Because of this she was seen as a simple person—a deceptively simple judgement which isn’t worth much comment.
She used to collect the coloured cards from Burton’s cigarettes and store them in the spice cupboard. They lay there for weeks and months until she had enough to make it worth while presenting them to me in an empty Robin packet. They were impregnated with the smell of curry and pepper, aloes and cloves, sage and thyme. A few years before she died she gave the same cupboard to me and I kept my first collection of books in it.
With a touching and solemn expression she also gave me a stick of oak about six inches long, no more than a piece of kindling, assuring me that it had been part of the ship in which the Good Lord Nelson had died. She had paid the exorbitant sum of sixpence for it to some cunning old robber who had once come to her door. I don’t remember what happened to it. No doubt I treasured it for a while, then lost it on the long road my itching feet have since travelled.
It is good for the self-confidence of a child to be spoiled when young. The awful word ‘spoil’ only means love and care, and freedom from unreasonable restrictions so that any good qualities can develop. To do good is the only way to teach others to do good, and to spoil is not to ruin, for it gives a child a sense of his own significance that will strengthen him to face the world and survive.
The reason people don’t know what they want, and therefore do not know what to do at certain vital moments of their lives, is because they were told too often as children exactly what they could have and do, and not left enough to their own usually innocent choices. Parents may spoil a child yet not ruin it, though many are too frightened to try. It is usually left to the grandparents, who need to love a child in order to go on living themselves, and who often spoil grandchildren to make up for having been too harsh with their own. They can also spoil a grandchild so as to make life hard for its parents when that child grows up and begins to assert itself, but that is another matter, and nothing to do with the relatively uncomplicated Burton morality.
On a summer’s afternoon I can smell newly-baked bread coming out of a heated oven. In a state of grace I get that warm and floury whiff as my grandmother laid the tins on the table. I shall always be able to smell it, as if no one else can, and as if I am the last person in the world to recall it.
31
Burton was always looking for something bigger than he was to break himself against, though he would have perished rather than admit to such a thing. He never did find that bigger force. He looked for it, and at the same time kept it at bay with fundamental Burton guile. The closest he got was when he met and married Mary-Ann Tokins, and she would never admit to it either, though she may have thought about it from time to time.
When Burton died, he died in bed, and all his guts came up, red and black, through his mouth. Like any blacksmith, he kept his silence, knowing that Old Nick had got him at last. And Old Nick was riding a horse that had been shod by somebody else, a fact which accounted for the look of shock on Burton’s face.
Just after he died Mary-Ann said to one of her daughters that she wanted to go herself, that there was nothing to live for now that he had gone and she had lasted long enough to see him at rest in his grave. She died in her sleep a year later. There was no place on earth for her without him, just as there had been no peace on earth for her with him. What greater love is there than that?
32
A circle is a straight line to me. A straight line is a circle. My desire forms a straight line, my thoughts run in a circle. The circle imprisons me, the straight line takes me out of it. But I always return to the circle, if only to embark once more on a straight line. The circle is my bloodstream, pumped through the heart. The straight line is the invisible path I follow. The sun is a circle; a tree is a straight line. The world is a circle at the equator; the horizon is straight when I look at it from a hilltop. My sphincter is a circle; my penis is straight. A circle is not a straight line to me; a straight line is not a circle. The straight line of my desire breaks out of the circle. In searching for truth, whether it takes me on a straight line, or endlessly round in a circle, I am no longer a prisoner. My emblem is that of a straight line through a circle. Will the straight line ever leave the circle behind? The circle is my fundamental self. The straight line is my searching spirit. The circle pushes the straight line forward. The straight line drags the circle with it. They are eternally locked together.
PART TWO
33
My father’s parents died soon after I was born, so what their first names were I don’t know—and I saw no photographs of them. His family stories wer
e unreliable or totally false, though it is certain that his father was an upholsterer from Wolverhampton in Staffordshire who, when he came to Nottingham, fitted out a workshop and ‘showroom’ on Trafalgar Street in Radford.
He was small in stature and had a short, pointed grey beard, and was said to be a hard and excellent worker except when he took to the whisky, though he rarely did so to the extent of getting blind drunk. Like all the Sillitoes he was tight-lipped, certainly not of the tribe that drinks beer or breathes with their mouths open.
He married a Nottingham girl called Christine Blackwell, whose first name only slips into mind as I write. By all accounts he did not treat her well. She came from a family of cigarette and cigar manufacturers and retailers, and had six sons and two daughters—eight being the figure of plenty in those days.
After he died his offspring were pleasantly surprised to learn that he had been the owner of several slum houses in Wolverhampton, and when these were sold by common filial agreement each flush heir received the sum of £40. To anguished cries that they had been robbed by thieving solicitors (and it really seemed that they had) they spent it in a few weeks to drown their grievance. My father, however, put his portion in an envelope and folded it for safety into his waistcoat pocket, snug notes ready to be used for a rainy day.
Employed as an exterior decorator, he was set to work high up a factory wall. It was dry weather, and a smell of suds and swarf came out of the window where he was painting on his piece of plank, himself and colour pots inadequately suspended by pulleys and a rather unstable set of ropes.
Shifting cautiously to one end of it, the contraption began to sink. His view of traffic passing below was a comfort to his precariousness, but that sickening look at it when he should have tried to grasp one of the ropes was a big mistake.
He spun thirty feet, landing stunned and crippled on the ground, covered in a spectrum of paint. By the time he reached hospital his clothes had dried hard as boards. They were cut open and prised off, and when he came back to consciousness the envelope with the money still in it was by his bedside. A few weeks later he hobbled out to spend it, before worse could happen.
One of his brothers was a lace-designer, two were upholsterers, and two became managers of butchers’ shops. They had nothing to do with the Burtons, imagining themselves a few steps above that sort of uncouth beer-drinking person. Yet neither did the Burtons get much value into their clan when my father married a daughter from it, because he was a man with neither craft nor calling, a labourer who was often unable to find any work at all.
He had been stricken with that disease of malnutrition and neglect known as rickets. It was a mystery why this should have been so in a family which was never badly off, though explanatory whispers put it down to the fact that my father was the youngest child. His brothers and sisters being grown up, he was unwanted and uncared for. The fable goes that he was stuck in a high chair as a baby and more or less forgotten for several years. When he was taken down he could not walk, and had to get about with irons on his legs until he was thirteen. At that age he was sent to school, with the help of two sticks, but a few months later his father ended this noble attempt to begin his education, so that he could stay at home and help in the shop. The hard work of shifting and carrying upholstered furniture made him immensely strong in the arms and shoulders, and by this he was qualified to labour satisfactorily until the end of his life.
He never talked of his parents. I think he felt deeply that one should ‘honour thy father and thy mother’, but knew with truth that he could not do so. The fact bred great bitterness in him, for he certainly needed the luxury of such sentiments.
But he did not complain and that, under the circumstances, was quality enough. He contented himself with cursing the Burtons at every opportunity, both to get back at my mother, as if in some way blaming her for his own birth, and also trying to make them pay for his parents’ deficiencies. He was so full of shame at such a thing having been done to him that he couldn’t even talk about it.
Maybe he sensed that one should not destroy one’s parents, no matter what they had done. You destroy them only to become them, and I don’t think he wanted to do that. But his lack of intelligence was directly linked to the amount of care he had not received as a baby and a child. Screaming his guts out for food, he had been ignored by his demented or indifferent mother until he was too exhausted to care.
None of his first questions were answered, nor those that came later, so he did not grow up with that minor civilized grace of curiosity. He was able to seek intelligent directions regarding the work he had to do, otherwise it was a case of ‘see all, hear all, say nowt’—with no compensation of self-expression.
He did not have the ability to tell much that was interesting, and merely enjoyed the syntactical equipment to swear or give orders to children. If the intelligence he had been born with had by any chance survived this early neglect it might have made him more disturbed that he actually turned out to be. And the kindness and generosity that did survive only served to torment him after he had bullied someone unjustly.
The one spiritual development possible was into ill-temper, melancholia, and obstinate self-spiting stupidity—all of which qualities, built into his congenital nature, he could in any case have done without. He was fastened in his high chair and unable to escape, an infant of sensibility (as all infants are) who did not even have the freedom of the jungle. People invariably suffer more from the torments inflicted by those who are too civilized to know how despicably savage they are.
His mother, having lived to be an old woman, went to sleep one night and woke in the morning with one of her eyes gone. So spin the family tales. The other was all right, but the lost luminary orb had fallen back into its socket and was never found again. She died a few months later, and it was said that her husband, as old as he was, had killed her by kicking her down the stairs, thus denying her the opportunity of dying from the cancer with which she was suffering.
34
My father gave little sign of being connected to his past. He did not need to, since it was in all the lines of his face and in every strand of his black hair. He mentioned that some grandfather (or maybe great-grandfather, he seemed by no means certain) had been the first man to paint on silk. I was assured that such a feat had been impossible up to that time. Another member of the family was said to have played the violin in a theatre orchestra of Wolverhampton or Birmingham.
I thought these stories were false, but never asked an uncle to settle my mind because I didn’t want to put such questions that would make me seem ridiculous in their staid eyes. Apart from the fact that they might laugh at such preposterous ideas coming from my father, I did not care to test his standards of truth, and didn’t think his stories were all that important anyway.
Still, they showed that my father was the sort of person who clung to such legends as a means of preserving a few rags of family identity. At the same time he was a grown-up who, having all power and some knowledge, didn’t need to do any such thing. Mostly I thought he was lying in order to entertain us children, but it might be that events simply take on more colour to an illiterate because that is his way of remembering them. Unfortunately I tended to disbelieve most of what he said. Historical circumstances enabled me as a child to feel superior to him, due to the fact that I had been instructed in how to read and write.
When one of his more educated brothers told me the following story there was no question of not believing him. A young man of the family from several laps back went to Oxford when he was eighteen. He was said to have been a brilliant student, though somewhat black in his melancholy, as he was indeed swart in complexion. There were positive high hopes of him, but he died of a brain tumour at twenty.
As the mother’s favourite son he was to have made all her earthly and matrimonial sufferings worth while. In the bleak twilight of life still left, though she wasn’t much older than forty, she thought to console herself with an enlarged ol
eograph of him and the contents of his box which had been sent back from university after the funeral.
She craved a look at his possessions, expecting a feast of recollection for her sombre mind. The husband was willing to leave her locked in grief, imagining such rich territory to be fair exchange for the freedom to live more openly with his mistress. But all the box contained was a leather bag of sovereigns and a collection of pornographic books, as well as the manuscript of a short and obscene novel called When the Diligence Stopped for Dinner written during a six-week holiday in Switzerland. This work was burned, along with the rest of the offensive matter, and his mother contrived to believe for the rest of her life that he had walked the ways of the Lord and died pure-hearted.
My father’s mother was a different kind of woman, but she also had a favourite son. The sun shone from between Edgar’s brows, as the saying goes, and he was the darling of the family, a slim and handsome young man whose fragile character was reflected in his wavering dark eyes. When the Great War began in 1914 he foolishly enlisted with the army, but when he found it was nothing but dysentery, haircuts, and barking dogs with human faces, he sensibly walked out of it, coming back to Nottingham one afternoon with a forlorn and bitter expression. His mother made him change into civilian clothes, and he was provided with a bicycle, food, some money, and a map, and sent to his sister Dolly who lived at Hinckley.
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