On her visits to Engine Town she remembered that Ernest Burton wore a wide leather belt, and was always ready to take it off to members of his family or to his dogs. A funny quirk of his was that he invariably walked many paces ahead of his wife, as though she were not with him at all.
He would, however, put his hand on her mother’s arm, and still go in front of Mary-Ann. They usually went back to Leeds laden with marrows, potatoes, kidney beans, and rhubarb out of his garden. Burton made a great fuss of her mother, with whom he got on very well. He admired her, and treated her as something special, and she was said to be fond of him. He was indeed a peculiar man, though my correspondent added that the Tokinses, from whom my grandmother sprang, were said to be a stranger breed still.
22
The memory comes back to me of a seven-year-old boy building roads. I might have been younger, wandering alone to a nearby tip away from any houses, on which only waste sand and factory soot was laid, an area between the narrow River Leen and a few acres of swamp bordering the railway line, closed off from the lane by a stockade of high boards. I could get on to the tip by climbing a tree and leaping over the top of the fence, then scrambling down a huge bank of clean sand and gravel on the other side.
In the light of what I was later to become, such occurrences in childhood seem amusing, though this small laugh is merely to protect me from the daunting stab of whatever was relevant. Yet pulling truth out by the nettleheads so that roots snap free makes me realize that these memories are amusing simply because I imagine other people’s smiles if I mention them. My own already exist, and tell me that such laughter only points to another kind of truth.
Sometimes I would use guile instead of brawn, and get into the wasteland by waiting for a lorry to enter the gate. When the driver opened it before going in I would follow without being noticed, and hide myself behind rusty, dry-leaved tea-bushes. After he’d left I’d find an old piece of spade and start to build a new road quite independent of the main track of the lorries.
For an afternoon and part of the evening I was left in peace, levelling a pile of house-bricks and decorators’ rammel, and a mountain of black soot from some workshop chimney, widening and hardening the surface, macadamizing my road with spadesful of soot. Deciding where to guide it was always a problem, though when I came the next day to drive it forward another ten or twenty feet, it had been obliterated by lorries that had in the meantime dumped their stuff. I wasn’t called upon to commit myself, or to push a road through a morass as I now am, though I was quite prepared to do so had it been either necessary or possible.
In wondering why the lorry-driver had callously buried my road I could only believe that, from the godlike height of his cab, he hadn’t even noticed its feeble line. It was too narrow to be of use, or too unreal for him to see. In place of the paved highway I imagined to exist, there was in reality a piece of narrow track that might barely have served as a false lure into rugged mountain country, fit at the most for the feet of men and animals. Yet I wondered why he had tipped his load over it when there was so much unused space round about. Since something in him must have glimpsed the beginnings of a highway, proved by the fact that he had tried to blot it out, I couldn’t finally tell whether this disfigurement was to my spiritual gain or not.
In the darkness of childhood I did not go this far in my reasoning, but one step further and I feel certain I would have done. A child is a mystic, and what he lacks in intelligence and worldly knowledge he makes up for in earnestness and depth of feeling.
Every child is a prince ruling over a kingdom of half-dark and half-light, which only the revolution of age can inextricably mix up, and condemn him to the lie that he can recognize daylight when he sees it.
23
When I knew my grandmother she was sixty and had white hair, but in her younger days it had been reddish and golden. Being the youngest of a large family she was a girl of few opinions, but the many virtues she had lasted all her life. She was put into service at thirteen, and a few years later was working as a general help at the White Hart pub in Lenton.
Burton, the son of the local blacksmith, got to know her there. He was young and tall, though his strength alone was handsome — his eyes firm, his nose straight, his hair short and fair, a moustache worn as if to balance his strong chin. Like any farrier, he had a permanent spark in his throat from smithing, and no amount of beer could ever put it out. While asking for a pint at the bar he fell in love with this shy, plump girl called Mary-Ann, and told her so. She was busy and said nothing, and if she believed her ears it didn’t seem possible that he was more than joking. But as the weeks went by he said it again and again, not with any sentimental fervour, but straight out, as if he were saying he loved beer or pork.
Being a servant she wasn’t able to leave the pub more than once a month, and one day she took a fancy to a pair of black cotton gloves in a newspaper advertisement. Burton was surprised when, after saying he loved her and wanted her to marry him, she pushed a florin over the counter and asked if he’d go and get her a pair of black gloves from a shop down town. They’d cost one and elevenpence, she told him.
She thought he might wait till the weekend to do it, but he downed his pint and went straight away. When he came back two hours later he pushed the gloves across the bar with the florin she’d given him still on top of the packet. The next time he asked her to marry him she said yes.
After her marriage she hardly ever went to church, for fear of Burton’s scorn, though she believed in God, and was certainly superstitious. It is said that lightning never strikes a blacksmith’s house, and Burton averred so often enough in a bantering boastful tone when Mary-Ann showed herself full of dread at the onset of a bad storm. She felt that every lightning flash coming from the black sky was especially aimed at her, so maybe it was no bad thing that she married a man who stood in absolute fearlessness of it, though his mockery of the fear she felt did little to comfort her.
But while he was in the house it was true that she wasn’t so frightened. When he was at work, however, she would open the front door wide, in spite of the rain driving in, so that if a thunderbolt came spinning with vicious and dreadful power down the chimney and madlarked into the hearth it would be drawn by the gap of light to continue its journey harmlessly into the yard — without exploding and blowing the house to pieces.
Having taken that precaution she would retire to the dark place on the stairs with an oil lamp, even if her grown children were sitting in the kitchen. When the storm’s fearful rumbles ceased to penetrate into her hideaway and reach for her soul, she would open the stairfoot door and ask whether it was safe to come out.
She led a blameless life, and no one ever knew what there was for her to be frightened of. If anyone should have been afraid of being struck dead it ought to have been Burton, but Mary-Ann thought that the supernatural power behind the lightning bolts would not bother to sort out the good from the bad on finally deciding to aim a big one at his house. Or perhaps she sensed that if Any Being wanted to get back in the deadliest way at another, it would take the one nearest to him, and she was certainly that person to whom Burton was most attached. The price of marrying anyone is to pay for their sins, but he treated her as he would have treated himself if he had discovered the same weak traits in his own make-up, which is the highest form of injustice.