He spun thirty feet, landing stunned and crippled on the ground, covered in a spectrum of paint. By the time he reached hospital his clothes had dried hard as boards. They were cut open and prised off, and when he came back to consciousness the envelope with the money still in it was by his bedside. A few weeks later he hobbled out to spend it, before worse could happen.
One of his brothers was a lace-designer, two were upholsterers, and two became managers of butchers’ shops. They had nothing to do with the Burtons, imagining themselves a few steps above that sort of uncouth beer-drinking person. Yet neither did the Burtons get much value into their clan when my father married a daughter from it, because he was a man with neither craft nor calling, a labourer who was often unable to find any work at all.
He had been stricken with that disease of malnutrition and neglect known as rickets. It was a mystery why this should have been so in a family which was never badly off, though explanatory whispers put it down to the fact that my father was the youngest child. His brothers and sisters being grown up, he was unwanted and uncared for. The fable goes that he was stuck in a high chair as a baby and more or less forgotten for several years. When he was taken down he could not walk, and had to get about with irons on his legs until he was thirteen. At that age he was sent to school, with the help of two sticks, but a few months later his father ended this noble attempt to begin his education, so that he could stay at home and help in the shop. The hard work of shifting and carrying upholstered furniture made him immensely strong in the arms and shoulders, and by this he was qualified to labour satisfactorily until the end of his life.
He never talked of his parents. I think he felt deeply that one should ‘honour thy father and thy mother’, but knew with truth that he could not do so. The fact bred great bitterness in him, for he certainly needed the luxury of such sentiments.
But he did not complain and that, under the circumstances, was quality enough. He contented himself with cursing the Burtons at every opportunity, both to get back at my mother, as if in some way blaming her for his own birth, and also trying to make them pay for his parents’ deficiencies. He was so full of shame at such a thing having been done to him that he couldn’t even talk about it.
Maybe he sensed that one should not destroy one’s parents, no matter what they had done. You destroy them only to become them, and I don’t think he wanted to do that. But his lack of intelligence was directly linked to the amount of care he had not received as a baby and a child. Screaming his guts out for food, he had been ignored by his demented or indifferent mother until he was too exhausted to care.
None of his first questions were answered, nor those that came later, so he did not grow up with that minor civilized grace of curiosity. He was able to seek intelligent directions regarding the work he had to do, otherwise it was a case of ‘see all, hear all, say nowt’—with no compensation of self-expression.
He did not have the ability to tell much that was interesting, and merely enjoyed the syntactical equipment to swear or give orders to children. If the intelligence he had been born with had by any chance survived this early neglect it might have made him more disturbed that he actually turned out to be. And the kindness and generosity that did survive only served to torment him after he had bullied someone unjustly.
The one spiritual development possible was into ill-temper, melancholia, and obstinate self-spiting stupidity — all of which qualities, built into his congenital nature, he could in any case have done without. He was fastened in his high chair and unable to escape, an infant of sensibility (as all infants are) who did not even have the freedom of the jungle. People invariably suffer more from the torments inflicted by those who are too civilized to know how despicably savage they are.
His mother, having lived to be an old woman, went to sleep one night and woke in the morning with one of her eyes gone. So spin the family tales. The other was all right, but the lost luminary orb had fallen back into its socket and was never found again. She died a few months later, and it was said that her husband, as old as he was, had killed her by kicking her down the stairs, thus denying her the opportunity of dying from the cancer with which she was suffering.
34
My father gave little sign of being connected to his past. He did not need to, since it was in all the lines of his face and in every strand of his black hair. He mentioned that some grandfather (or maybe great-grandfather, he seemed by no means certain) had been the first man to paint on silk. I was assured that such a feat had been impossible up to that time. Another member of the family was said to have played the violin in a theatre orchestra of Wolverhampton or Birmingham.
I thought these stories were false, but never asked an uncle to settle my mind because I didn’t want to put such questions that would make me seem ridiculous in their staid eyes. Apart from the fact that they might laugh at such preposterous ideas coming from my father, I did not care to test his standards of truth, and didn’t think his stories were all that important anyway.
Still, they showed that my father was the sort of person who clung to such legends as a means of preserving a few rags of family identity. At the same time he was a grown-up who, having all power and some knowledge, didn’t need to do any such thing. Mostly I thought he was lying in order to entertain us children, but it might be that events simply take on more colour to an illiterate because that is his way of remembering them. Unfortunately I tended to disbelieve most of what he said. Historical circumstances enabled me as a child to feel superior to him, due to the fact that I had been instructed in how to read and write.
When one of his more educated brothers told me the following story there was no question of not believing him. A young man of the family from several laps back went to Oxford when he was eighteen. He was said to have been a brilliant student, though somewhat black in his melancholy, as he was indeed swart in complexion. There were positive high hopes of him, but he died of a brain tumour at twenty.
As the mother’s favourite son he was to have made all her earthly and matrimonial sufferings worth while. In the bleak twilight of life still left, though she wasn’t much older than forty, she thought to console herself with an enlarged oleograph of him and the contents of his box which had been sent back from university after the funeral.
She craved a look at his possessions, expecting a feast of recollection for her sombre mind. The husband was willing to leave her locked in grief, imagining such rich territory to be fair exchange for the freedom to live more openly with his mistress. But all the box contained was a leather bag of sovereigns and a collection of pornographic books, as well as the manuscript of a short and obscene novel called When the Diligence Stopped for Dinner written during a six-week holiday in Switzerland. This work was burned, along with the rest of the offensive matter, and his mother contrived to believe for the rest of her life that he had walked the ways of the Lord and died pure-hearted.
My father’s mother was a different kind of woman, but she also had a favourite son. The sun shone from between Edgar’s brows, as the saying goes, and he was the darling of the family, a slim and handsome young man whose fragile character was reflected in his wavering dark eyes. When the Great War began in 1914 he foolishly enlisted with the army, but when he found it was nothing but dysentery, haircuts, and barking dogs with human faces, he sensibly walked out of it, coming back to Nottingham one afternoon with a forlorn and bitter expression. His mother made him change into civilian clothes, and he was provided with a bicycle, food, some money, and a map, and sent to his sister Dolly who lived at Hinckley.