Though he was too sure of himself to compete, it was also true that he was riddled with envy. This was what stopped him competing, because with such a black dog on his back he could not be sure of success. So all he could do was hold down that envy with the jackboot of self-satisfaction.
There was a certain advantage to this exercise in repression. Knowing that envy was not a good trait, and that it ought to be resisted, he was able to take part in an honourable fight. This gave him a feeling of self respect — which he might not otherwise have had, and which came by refusing to go into the common world and compete with it.
This absolute refusal to compete was in fact his strength. The inability to set himself against other men, to pitch himself into the jungle of ambition, to elbow his way up some shaky ladder of strife and success was his one saving virtue, no matter how it came about. If the coiled spring of his spirit had shot him across to America, or down to the Antipodes, he might have found such release from the English paralysis of class structure that he could have striven for a better life without being robbed of his dignity — as he felt he would have been had he tried the same thing at home.
55
My Uncle Frederick renamed himself Silliter when he came back to Nottingham in the thirties, in case his creditors of the previous decade should think to catch up with him. Fifteen years was not a long absence. The Market Place had changed, as had many of the buildings round about, but the prominent names of the stores he had, shall we say, traded at told him that so many years might shrink to very few if a manager from one of them should spot him in the street.
Having been born a plain Church of England Christian, and spent twenty years as a Christadelphian, and then lapsed into atheism, Frederick had never shown much moral responsibility to the community at large — no more perhaps than most people. But it seemed strange to me in my pre-sophistication days that, while priding himself on having learned Hebrew, he should have made several anti-semitic comments during the year or so in which I knew him. Perhaps they were rather too trivial to recall, because to be fair his words were harmless, in that they might have come after long association with Jewish colleagues who had made those same remarks in his presence. But when retailed to me (sheepishly, as I now recall, and possibly to test me) I could not be sure how serious he was.
My father used to say, in a tone that combined both envy and condemnation, that the Jews always helped each other. Much later in his life I heard him make a more open remark which shocked my Burton mother. I could not knock him down because one side of his head was dark from the bruises of cancer, and he died soon afterwards.
To forgive the dead is the first step towards illumination. In some ways it is easier, as well as more necessary, to understand the dead than the living, because the life of the dead is actually rounded off so that it becomes no more than a memory. They can neither disappoint nor deceive, but having existed they still live, and to comprehend their spirit one has to bring them back to a sharper portrayal than they were awarded while solidly moving. If you want them to return through the barrier they went beyond it is almost as if you have to go in and fetch them, get into their spirit and draw them out by an act of imagination and justice.
My father did too many kindnesses not to deserve forgiveness. He too had much to forgive, so that understanding was needed all round. What small harm he did was kept in his family, as society meant it to be, and he was never in a position to act out any of those poisonous hatreds which came from the Edwardian ethos in which he and his brothers had grown up. He was not anti-semitic, because he did not possess that combination of intelligence and absolute rottenness. He was anti-everything in his black despair, and my feeling is of sadness at his hard life, and for what was done to him by his parents. In such family conflicts one can neither withdraw nor take revenge. Savage or unthinking parents leave one merely paralysed, like an outsider.
In his tolerable moments he wanted to do good. When I was a child he got into debt to buy books for me, and money I gave when working later in a factory could never repay it. If you have seen your father suffer it is impossible to hate him, or to be afraid of him. The only thing you can do is try to understand, because not to do so will leave a large part of yourself in the wilderness. It is the same with others you dislike. You can never understand them, which means that much of yourself is lost to you, for you can only know yourself by knowing others.
In any case nothing attaches you more to a person than hatred. Those you hate have you more in their power than those you love. If you want to imprison someone in your own spirit, give them cause to hate you — and you have them for a long time, if that’s how you feel. Universal and benign love would give everyone the greatest freedom of all, but people are unable to give this love because they are afraid of the freedom which is its price.
56
Just after the Second World War my father bought a bull-terrier. All his life he had wanted a dog, and in his middle forties he became the proud owner of one.
When he was walking up Ilkeston Road one day it snapped the lead and ran against a bus. It was fatally injured, and he came home weeping with it in his arms, as if it had been a child.
He laid it on a barrel inside the back door, and went for the vet, in the hope that the comatose and bleeding animal could be brought back to life. Yet any belief in miracles had gone from his heart generations ago. Tolerance of Biblical Job-like suffering had reasserted itself for a while during his middle years, but by now it was worn away because it did not have much moral strength to feed on. Faith in life had given way to sentimental hope.
When the vet came he jabbed a shot of pentathene into the dog’s paw as it lay on the barrel. He talked to my father for a few minutes, putting him wise as to where he might get another dog, and also to calm him down. Then he gave the dog a dose of strychnine which finished it off.
My father didn’t buy another dog. Never having got out of the nursery, as it were, there was only room for one woman in his life, no matter what the pain. And there was only room for one dog as well, as representative of a certain kind of creature, so that he could not start again on another. It would not be the same.
One of his favourite pictures was taken from a calendar. It was a coloured reproduction photo of a young woman standing at a cottage window on a sunny day in the country. She wore a yellow dress, and had a girl of about three years of age in her arms. They were looking together at a robin perched on the branch of a tree close by, both of them warm and loving with each other, and enraptured at the bird.
My father liked this picture. Such a scene went straight to his heart. It stayed there, a sort of imprint of paradise which he neatly framed with black passe-partout tape and hung on the wall, and took from house to house when we moved. He liked it because he identified himself with the little girl in the woman’s arms — certainly not with the woman herself, or with the bird.
57
The River Leen was sinewy and narrow, though its Celtic name of ‘lleven’ also suggests ‘smooth-surfaced’. But the root of the word may be ‘linn’ meaning ‘still deep pool’, and it certainly is that in places. Whenever I heard the phrase ‘still waters run deep’ either about me or somebody else, I always flashed my picture-mind to the River Leen, whose water I would recently have looked on from the brick parapet of the bridge. While playing on its steep bank I once fell into it from an imperfect balance on the bough of a tree, and though its waters were not still they certainly stank, having come through mills and collieries most of the way from Robin Hodd’s hills near Mansfield.