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 soul. 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.