The clatter within went silent at my bizarre and extensive vocabulary, and I took it to mean they were actually listening to what I had to say, so continued bawling obscene nonsense to my first captive audience. When one of the serving women could stand it no longer she came and punched me away from the window until I went off, bewildered and only slightly ashamed.
That was my first taste of wanting to become a writer, and an incipient edging towards the desire for truth. Though it was the false kind, yet it is the first sort one encounters on the long road towards real truth. In any case I had with unknowing perception equated as early as could possibly be expected the news coming over the radio with common irrelevant obscenities.
If and when one attains truth it can never be spectacular or in any way comforting. Everyone is born dead, and truth is no more than a search to restore life. As soon as a person feels the desire for truth beginning to stir within him, in no matter what subconscious or underhand way, he is starting to become alive. One is only alive when the search for truth begins.
To question every single point of existence demands a fundamental stability of the heart. One must know not only why one is alive and inhabiting the earth but also why one will perform the next simple action coming into one’s mind. It is an attempt to perceive clearly the connection between the two, and find a common formula uniting them. Until one can do this one is only half alive, but until one begins to embark on this search one is not alive at all.
We are born alive as infants but quickly become dead — after the first smack and cry for air — even though the flesh still moves. But if one was born alive and then becomes dead, one does not live again until the search for truth begins. The only truth from a dead man who has not set out on a search for the truth is that which he shouts in an incantatory fashion when dancing on the grave of his alive self that he killed because he despises the truth. This state also is part of me. This rhythmic inspirational speech is the kind of truth that can never be relied upon to protect the creative spirit. One is afraid because it is God’s truth but not Man’s, and what use is God’s truth to a man? It moves the poet and the shaman but will not affect the person who feels the acid of self-knowledge eating through his stomach.
It is often necessary and satisfying to spew forth the golden words that shift other people, but one needs an opening to the words that move oneself. Is this wanting too much? Is it a betrayal of one’s own spirit to hope for this further truth which seems to be a desire to unite the two?
There are more questions than answers in any quest for the truth. If not, mistrust that truth. But a beginning has been made, though to hope for progress is to deny the absolute value of what one is striving for. Such a journey breaks the heart, but a broken heart means that chains are snapping. It is a painful liberation of the spirit. If a person suffers through love or from treachery so that the heart is broken (as it is called) people pity him. They should celebrate and envy him, for his spirit is one move nearer to freedom.
Whatever is done to the heart, and whatever the heart does back, it must be trusted and obeyed absolutely. The only protector is your own heart. It will lead you into the wilderness, but carry you through peril and despair. And if it finally betrays you, you will only have lived in the way you were meant to live.
One sometimes starves in order to prevent the spirit withering away, but one continually searches for food.
29
Mary-Ann never turned a beggar away from the door, and solemnly told me never to do so, either.
If there wasn’t a penny to give she’d make a cup of tea, or fetch some bread and fat bacon from the pantry. I didn’t know how uncommon a trait it was, though it certainly rubbed itself off on her daughters, because when a man walked along our backyard in the hard-up thirties calling out if anybody could spare a cup of tea for a bloke on the tramp, my mother would shout from the back door, or through the window if it was summer: ‘Come on, then, duck, and let’s see what we’ve got’—though only if my father wasn’t there, which went to show in my eyes how good the women were but not the men.
Being a child of parents with widely differing souls, I sometimes follow the precepts of one, and occasionally the uncharitable response of the other, never knowing what I am going to do till I do it. Burton would certainly have bawled a beggar away from his door, telling him to go and find work if he wanted anything to eat.
Mary-Ann suggested I do my best to get into a grammar school instead of slogging off to work at fourteen. I think that since her grandson Howard had already died — and the same track had been broached for him — I was the next one suitable. So on a wet autumn morning I sat in a room of Nottingham High School to do the tests. The atmosphere seemed quite outside me, though I was there with a couple of friends and didn’t feel particularly uneasy. The problems were like pages of Chinese ideographs, and I could make nothing of them at first because I had gone through no preparation beforehand. I can’t say that I expected to pass, though after puzzling out some of the answers I hoped that by a miracle I would so so.
The rain was stultifying during the hour it took. My feet were saturated because I wore plimsolls, though I soon ignored the discomfort and got stuck in. Nothing could have put me into that school, for even if I’d had a vague chance of getting through this troubling initiation, my spirit wasn’t ripe for it. I didn’t want it, and it didn’t want me, and I believe we were made to sense this by the fools walking about in caps and gowns — which seemed a senseless piece of ritual and intimidation to me and my friends, like something thrown up from the magistrates’ court or the Spanish Inquisition. Certainly we had not seen the like of it before. So there was no hard feeling on my side, because when told that I wouldn’t be going to such a school I had no regrets.
But I took the test again a year later, and failed that too, proving to me for the last time that I wasn’t the right material for higher education. My grandmother may have been disappointed, though I never saw any sign of it. The experience certainly put me against any form of examination for children.
30
The only time Mary-Ann slipped off her track of high principles was when she spent the remaining week’s budget-money on one-armed bandits at some beer-off in Radford, where she had called on her way home with the Co-op groceries. One of her daughters talked her into coming out, saying that otherwise Burton might get to know. But she didn’t leave until every last penny had gone.
When someone told him, he took it as an act over which he had no control, and therefore one temptation against which Mary-Ann could not have been expected to show much sense either. In other words, he thought it a bit of a joke, saying: ‘Well, I’ll be boggered!’—though keeping a tighter grip on her from then on in case she got into debt from it and had them run out of house and home by the bum-bailiffs.
Mary-Ann knew who’d shopped her, because while she was busy at the handle she’d seen Florrie Voce’s face reflected in the glass. When tackled about it later Florrie denied it all, but called Mary-Ann an old cow for accusing her of such a thing. Normally good-natured and pacific, Mary-Ann went into the house, and came out with a cup, which she threw with full force and deadly aim at Florrie who has hanging washing up in the yard.
The group of houses abutted the school, and the silence of the classrooms was shattered by a squealing such as could only come from a pig in the process of being slaughtered, or a person whose throat was being unjustly cut. A young lady teacher, rattled by the sound, sent one of Mary-Ann’s daughters out to see what was the matter.