It would seem true of a man like Burton that literacy might not be a great advance. To gain such a thing he would not be prepared to pay the price of giving up a certain central feeling of quality and aloneness. To recover from pneumonia after refusing an inoculation that promised to save you from what was said to be certain death might feel like victory indeed. And to live all one’s life without being able to read or write in a world that shouted how damned you were for not having these gifts must have given one an untouchable sensation of great value.
At the same time Burton, being a qualified and talented blacksmith, realized his lack of education. Because of it he never felt able to join a society or a union, or any other organization. He knew that something was missing and yet, because of his obdurate character, there was nothing he could do about it.
To learn reading and writing would mean relying on memory instead of instinct and second nature, and perhaps there were things in Burton’s life that he did not want memory to get at, and one of them could have been his youth, which might have led him back to childhood. And what he would have found there none of us could say.
Perhaps he really had forgotten his younger days by the time he reached forty. He felt older to his sons than their friends’ fathers looked, though he was the same age. But he was less approachable in a human and fatherly manner, and if Burton did remember his youth it was only so that he could put the experience of it to such good use that his children stood little chance of enjoying their own in his presence.
Everyone agreed that his cunning was formidable. He was once walking into town with a man who was said to be deaf, though Burton didn’t believe it. When he let a half-crown slip from his pocket the man turned abruptly at the noise. Burton picked it up, put it back, and went on without mentioning it.
But cunning never goes by itself. There is always cruelty wrapped up in it somewhere. Often after work and as a way of earning extra money Burton would go to Wollaton Park to ring bulls and pigs, jobs which few could do unless they had prodigious strength. Yet even strong men shunned such work because it was regarded as one of the cruellest trades, though Burton was said not to mind it because he took delight in being cruel.
Since he never talked about his own father no one had an inkling of what he’d been like. He died before my mother was born, so she couldn’t tell anything. Perhaps he was more humane than Burton, who might have modelled himself on one of his grandfathers. But if this was so I shall never know who it was, for if your spade tries to dig too deep it only swings freely in the air so that both Time and Truth draw back.
When Burton wasn’t present his sons and daughters always referred to him by his surname, never ‘Father’ or ‘Ernest’—as if he were a fierce stranger who had been put in charge of them by some malevolent authority. It is possible that he did not model himself on anyone in particular, but simply emerged from the knotted roots of his past, and was finished off by his own self-centred inviolable opinion of himself, as in any person of strength, or of certain hidden weaknesses.
Unlike many men of the present century he had never been in the army. He abominated such an institution and thought that anyone who joined or allowed himself to be ensnared into it was even lower than a dog. He did not feel threatened by foreign power or alien system, and he would not have protected any government which felt itself in danger or which told him that he was in danger. He owned no property and lived by his labour and skill, so saw little connection between the government and the people. When his eldest son Oliver enlisted during the Great War he only forgave him because he was killed, for even Burton was not so hard of soul that he could hate the dead.
Until quite late in life he never worked for a boss, having been trained as a blacksmith by his father, so that he inherited the forge at Lenton. This was situated on a lane running beside the railway from Derby Road to Old Church Street. I remember passing it as a child, by which time Burton had given it up for lack of customers and gone to work at Wollaton Pit. Though the motor-car came in during his lifetime I never heard him complain that it had ruined his trade.
I walked by the forge with my sister when we were children, on one of our long treks to the shores of the Trent in summer. The locked-up building seemed no more than a shed and looked as if it would soon fall down, though someone had put a strong lock on the rotten door to make sure no vandals went in and helped it to collapse over them.
8
When my nine-year-old son becomes ill, or hurts himself in any way, I am pitched into a turmoil of mental agony. I am the one who put him to whatever pain he might suffer during his time on earth. To cause someone to be born is to send them alone into the dark. Thus the most excruciating guilt comes with having given life to a child. The remorse of treachery, or the biting pain of having been betrayed, is nothing compared to this. A child can claim to have been betrayed by the biological forces of evolution if someone is cruel to him. The facts of life are no excuse for the infliction of injury or insult.
These thoughts are hard to bear, yet every truth begets its opposite. He is not my son, I tell myself. As he grows older he is my friend and pupil. Beside the terrible fact that I presented him with the certainty of death is the wonderful and undeniable truth that I caused him to have life. I have given him everything, just as I received everything, though even by making these self-evident remarks I seem to be robbing him of the richness of his existence. Whatever I do for him, he owes me nothing.
At the moment he trusts me as no one else can. The better world I hope to see on earth will not come in time to make his life secure. It is no secret that what I would like for him is only what I desire for myself. I want him to inherit paradise, just as I would like all others to inhabit it. Since this is impossible, the next best thing is to hope that he will strive as I do to create it for everybody, to construct it in himself as an example for others. That is the only way open, and since I often hesitate to touch it, how can I hope that he will do better?
Why is it that any giving of the truth turns my guts to coal and pitch? It paints a patch on my lung, blows my heart to pieces. I hate the truth. I do not feel righteous or happy when I think of searching for it. Whatever scraps I drag out, however many gems I get to, only makes me feel more defeated than when, paddling along in neither truth nor falsehood, I at least lived in the easy half-light of enjoyment.
It leads me to question whether or not truth is my enemy, who beckons now and again but only to strike when I go towards him and get too close. Is it necessary to wallow in oblivion if one wants to keep even that little shred of happiness which one occasionally seems content with?
Don’t touch the truth. Don’t strive for it. Let it fester helplessly at the dim limits of the consciousness. The truth ruins itself if it is left alone. It becomes harmless. It eats itself to death if you don’t search for it. Even lies vanish, I tell myself, knowing that they do not.
It is an admission of defeat to turn towards the lit-up city of great truth and hope for anything beneficial from it. If up to now one has been formed by the continual accretion of slapdash falsehood and social indoctrination that has been built upon the inherited factors of oneself, what hope is there of crawling out from it at this late hour?
9
At the end of the lane on which Burton’s forge once stood was a field-gun from the horse-artillery, set on a concrete exhibition platform beyond some railings and surrounded by beds of flowers. This satanic memo from the Great War that had finished twenty years before was placed in front of some alms-houses erected for the widows of heroes whom the world was fit for, but who perished in the war to end wars. It was the badge of what had warped the women’s lives, and they could dwell on that machine from their bedroom or parlour windows, and maybe reflect that it was a similar gun on the German side that had blown up their husbands.