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.
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.