Such noise from Bridge Yard was not unusual, but this time it was prolonged for what seemed beyond reason — it being that the cup hurled by Mary-Ann had caught Florrie full in the eye, and cut her both above and below it. A policeman was fetched, and Mary-Ann had to appear at the Guildhall on a charge of breaching the peace and common assault, for which she was fined the sum of £2.
Not that this caused any final rupture between the two women, because a few years later Florrie Voce came to Oliver’s funeral and was the loudest wailer at it. They knew that you couldn’t make enemies in your own backyard, though you had your ructions now and again. And a £2 fine would never convince Mary-Ann that she’d paid for the cardinal sin of committing violence on a neighbour, a pass she’d got herself into which was right out of character, and which she never did again.
She was a kind, hardworking woman, and thought more about other people than herself. Because of this she was seen as a simple person — a deceptively simple judgement which isn’t worth much comment.
She used to collect the coloured cards from Burton’s cigarettes and store them in the spice cupboard. They lay there for weeks and months until she had enough to make it worth while presenting them to me in an empty Robin packet. They were impregnated with the smell of curry and pepper, aloes and cloves, sage and thyme. A few years before she died she gave the same cupboard to me and I kept my first collection of books in it.
With a touching and solemn expression she also gave me a stick of oak about six inches long, no more than a piece of kindling, assuring me that it had been part of the ship in which the Good Lord Nelson had died. She had paid the exorbitant sum of sixpence for it to some cunning old robber who had once come to her door. I don’t remember what happened to it. No doubt I treasured it for a while, then lost it on the long road my itching feet have since travelled.
It is good for the self-confidence of a child to be spoiled when young. The awful word ‘spoil’ only means love and care, and freedom from unreasonable restrictions so that any good qualities can develop. To do good is the only way to teach others to do good, and to spoil is not to ruin, for it gives a child a sense of his own significance that will strengthen him to face the world and survive.
The reason people don’t know what they want, and therefore do not know what to do at certain vital moments of their lives, is because they were told too often as children exactly what they could have and do, and not left enough to their own usually innocent choices. Parents may spoil a child yet not ruin it, though many are too frightened to try. It is usually left to the grandparents, who need to love a child in order to go on living themselves, and who often spoil grandchildren to make up for having been too harsh with their own. They can also spoil a grandchild so as to make life hard for its parents when that child grows up and begins to assert itself, but that is another matter, and nothing to do with the relatively uncomplicated Burton morality.
On a summer’s afternoon I can smell newly-baked bread coming out of a heated oven. In a state of grace I get that warm and floury whiff as my grandmother laid the tins on the table. I shall always be able to smell it, as if no one else can, and as if I am the last person in the world to recall it.
31
Burton was always looking for something bigger than he was to break himself against, though he would have perished rather than admit to such a thing. He never did find that bigger force. He looked for it, and at the same time kept it at bay with fundamental Burton guile. The closest he got was when he met and married Mary-Ann Tokins, and she would never admit to it either, though she may have thought about it from time to time.
When Burton died, he died in bed, and all his guts came up, red and black, through his mouth. Like any blacksmith, he kept his silence, knowing that Old Nick had got him at last. And Old Nick was riding a horse that had been shod by somebody else, a fact which accounted for the look of shock on Burton’s face.
Just after he died Mary-Ann said to one of her daughters that she wanted to go herself, that there was nothing to live for now that he had gone and she had lasted long enough to see him at rest in his grave. She died in her sleep a year later. There was no place on earth for her without him, just as there had been no peace on earth for her with him. What greater love is there than that?
32
A circle is a straight line to me. A straight line is a circle. My desire forms a straight line, my thoughts run in a circle. The circle imprisons me, the straight line takes me out of it. But I always return to the circle, if only to embark once more on a straight line. The circle is my bloodstream, pumped through the heart. The straight line is the invisible path I follow. The sun is a circle; a tree is a straight line. The world is a circle at the equator; the horizon is straight when I look at it from a hilltop. My sphincter is a circle; my penis is straight. A circle is not a straight line to me; a straight line is not a circle. The straight line of my desire breaks out of the circle. In searching for truth, whether it takes me on a straight line, or endlessly round in a circle, I am no longer a prisoner. My emblem is that of a straight line through a circle. Will the straight line ever leave the circle behind? The circle is my fundamental self. The straight line is my searching spirit. The circle pushes the straight line forward. The straight line drags the circle with it. They are eternally locked together.
PART TWO
33
My father’s parents died soon after I was born, so what their first names were I don’t know — and I saw no photographs of them. His family stories were unreliable or totally false, though it is certain that his father was an upholsterer from Wolverhampton in Staffordshire who, when he came to Nottingham, fitted out a workshop and ‘showroom’ on Trafalgar Street in Radford.
He was small in stature and had a short, pointed grey beard, and was said to be a hard and excellent worker except when he took to the whisky, though he rarely did so to the extent of getting blind drunk. Like all the Sillitoes he was tight-lipped, certainly not of the tribe that drinks beer or breathes with their mouths open.
He married a Nottingham girl called Christine Blackwell, whose first name only slips into mind as I write. By all accounts he did not treat her well. She came from a family of cigarette and cigar manufacturers and retailers, and had six sons and two daughters — eight being the figure of plenty in those days.
After he died his offspring were pleasantly surprised to learn that he had been the owner of several slum houses in Wolverhampton, and when these were sold by common filial agreement each flush heir received the sum of £40. To anguished cries that they had been robbed by thieving solicitors (and it really seemed that they had) they spent it in a few weeks to drown their grievance. My father, however, put his portion in an envelope and folded it for safety into his waistcoat pocket, snug notes ready to be used for a rainy day.
Employed as an exterior decorator, he was set to work high up a factory wall. It was dry weather, and a smell of suds and swarf came out of the window where he was painting on his piece of plank, himself and colour pots inadequately suspended by pulleys and a rather unstable set of ropes.
Shifting cautiously to one end of it, the contraption began to sink. His view of traffic passing below was a comfort to his precariousness, but that sickening look at it when he should have tried to grasp one of the ropes was a big mistake.