He was hard on human nature because it had him in its grip, though it must be said at the same time that he did not totally lack it. In my view there are neither good people nor bad people, no total devils or complete devilesses. It is impossible to give a person the face and soul of reality without first picking away the bad and showing it to whoever is interested. It must be put back later, however, otherwise the created picture will hang lop-sided and at some time crash down into splinters.
Women who were close to Burton disliked and feared him, as did those members of his own family. Yet women unacquainted with his true side — if there was such a thing — were attracted by a certain distance he put between them, and occasionally fell in love across the gap of it, a space which could be well seasoned by his wry and bawdy sense of humour when it wasn’t filled by a dignified and possibly defensive silence.
In his prime and hey-day he was over six feet tall and extremely strong. There was no fat on him and not much muscle either, but he could twist an iron bar and shape steel, so that he might not have been as unfeeling as many people accused him of being. Nevertheless he was irascible and violent, and as rigid with others as he was rigorous with himself.
He was born in 1868, so perhaps this book is in some way a tardy monument to his centenary. What power he possessed came from the strength of his working arms, which enabled him to provide bread and shelter for his family when lack of such meant starvation or the workhouse. He swore that everyone but he was bone-idle, that they were, to use his favourite phrase, ‘as soft as shit’. But while his wife and eight children were said to hate the sight of him he was respected by others as a first-class blacksmith, having won many prizes in Nottinghamshire and neighbouring counties.
There was a showcase of exhibition horseshoes in his kitchen, and I have one on my desk for a talismanic object while I write. Burton was said to have so steady a hand and eye that he could ‘shoe Old Nick’s nag so that all four hoofs would come clattering back out of bloody Hell itself’. Known in the trade as a careful worker, his forge was always neat and tidy. He was a man who had to know exactly where every hammer and plier was, something his own father might have instilled into him as a youth but which continually made tension when he applied such a rule to his house.
Burton governed the roost of a five-roomed cottage which was made up of a large communal kitchen, a parlour, and three bedrooms upstairs — one for the parents which contained an old four-poster curtain-drawn bed, one for the three sons, and one for the five girls, though it was rare for all the children to be at home together after they were grown up.
Outside there was a lot of ground for such a small house, with a garden at the back and enough space in front for pigs, chickens, and pigeons to be kept. Burton dug a good plot of vegetables, and every Friday night, after he came home from work on his tall bicycle, he dragged a great iron shit-bucket from the outhouse opposite the kitchen door and carried it to the end of the garden for manure. He had a gun and could shoot well, in spite of one eye being dead.
I took well to the long afternoons at Burton’s house, enjoying the boredom in that it was a time when nobody troubled me. Out of such boredom came enlightenment, for what it was worth, because I’d press my nose to the chicken wire and watch the well-padded white cock with his waving red comb stalking around the compound and spitefully darting his beak at the others. Then he would go among the hens (some of whom were almost as big as he) and peck them cruelly out of the way even when they weren’t bothering him — especially, it seemed, when they were minding their own business. I saw then that Burton was a like gaffer of the roost, who lorded it over his wife and daughters.
My memories have thrived on all else I’ve heard about him, but even his children are getting to be old men and women, and his grandchildren are middle-aged. Such distance might put truth on a pedestal, but truth is a dubious idol when made in the image of people who are either dead or far away. Each incident concerning him has more than one version, and so certain parts of this book are closer to a novel than others. Dealing with actualities, I see truth as riddled with the power of betrayal and broken with uncertainty. In such a dilemma time might be more reliable in that it reveals everything, even that which was never there, so that I end up with a bargain after all. And time also leaves everything behind. It has many uses. It cures a spiritual injury that treacherous truth inflicted, and drips such vital oil into the great machine of circumstance that nothing can be done without it.
But it doesn’t change the opinions of Burton’s children about what sort of a man he was. It is certainly true to say that he loved his children until they began to grow up and show what they were made of. If they revealed traits which came from the gentle subservience of the mother that was all right, but any that cropped up from him were put down with more than necessary harshness.
Burton was a tyrant but, as with all tyrants, the girls at least found ways of deceiving him. If one wanted to go out late in the evening to see a boy-friend she would throw her coat from the back bedroom window, then nip down through the front door as if on her way to the lavatory across the yard, treading quietly so that Burton, already in bed, would hear nothing. It was risky getting back into the house at midnight or after, but one of the other girls would respond to gravel at the window and open the door if it had been locked in the meantime.
When Burton sent one of his daughters to buy fried fish for his supper she didn’t return till eleven o’clock — having spent an hour with her boy-friend. Because she was so late he guessed what she had been up to, and in fact had only sent her out in order to confirm his suspicions. He gave her a good hiding and made sure she didn’t go free at night for a few weeks — though her coat went flying from the back window several times before the ban was lifted. There were some uses, after all, in having a lavatory set apart from the house.
His daughters were ill-treated because he expected them to follow the same pattern he had forced on his wife, and he didn’t know that times were changing. They fared badly because they rebelled, and they rebelled against Burton because the mother had not, and they saw where it had got her. By the time they reached twenty they had had enough of him, and they had enough of him in them not to put up with him a minute longer than they had to.
When Ivy came home one night at half past eleven Burton berated her for being the last in. ‘Well,’ she shouted back, ‘somebody’s got to be last in, ain’t they?’ He gave her a vicious clout across the face and didn’t speak to her for five years. The only recognition of her existence was that he would sometimes spit in her direction. She was thirty years old at the time.
Burton worked at Wollaton Pit after the Great War and occasionally at the end of the day he would send word to his wife, by one of the colliers who passed Engine Town on his way home, that he would be working till three in the morning. Mary-Ann therefore made up some food and got one of the girls to take it. Whoever this job fell to would walk the two miles along lonely Wollaton Road and, afraid of being jumped on from the dark, she would carry a bag of pepper to throw in the face of any man who might try to molest her. When she got to the pit Burton looked at her with surprise and irritation. ‘What the bloody hell are you doing here?’
‘I’ve brought you some supper.’
He gave a grunt and said: ‘You needn’t have bothered.’
And she walked back with his sour greeting rankling so much that she didn’t think once about the paper bag clutched in her hand. When she did, while opening the gate latch at home, it was only to wonder why she hadn’t thrown it in his face for talking to her like that.