Artillery was the most efficient killer of the Great War, according to the mad and fascinating statistics of the official histories. While forty per cent of the casualties were caused by bullets, sixty per cent of the men were killed or mangled by shellfire. That gun I stared at as a child turned the air raw, and I could never resist pressing my face against the cold railings and gazing for a long time at its grisly and intricate mechanisms.
But I did not see a woman looking from a window of the building itself, nor going into any of the doors. The place always seemed decorously deserted. On Armistice Day the gun would be surrounded by wreaths of Flanders poppies made by the crippled in their factories and workshops. I believe that during the Second World War the gun was hauled off for scrap, or taken away in case German parachutists should drop from the sky and start to use it on the shabby landscape round about.
Burton’s daughter Edith married a gunner in the Great War, and he was killed after leaving her with one child. But she didn’t live at the almshouses because she then married another gunner who unfortunately survived the war — because no man could have been worse to her. The savagery that he brought home from the mud of the Ypres Salient (but which no doubt had been fed on much that was there before) was execrated even by Burton, who was respectable and civilized by comparison.
The man’s name was also Ernest, but he was known to everyone as ‘Blonk’, a mysterious label put on to him by his childhood friends from Radford Woodhouse, which lasted him till the day of his death. He was a demon with boots and fists, and he used both on his wife, together with the blackest language his brain could muster. He worked alternately as a bricklayer’s labourer and a coalminer, changing jobs as the mood took him and indulging his passion for playing football whenever a spell of unemployment came between. The expression of his face was tough and cunning, and he had a head of springy and grizzled hair, his whole bearing an image of impacted strength. When Burton told Edith, just before she married Blonk, that he was no good and would be sure to lead her a dance, she naturally thought he was trying to keep her under his thumb as he had always done, and so ignored his warning.
Wayward Edith had already been a few years in service, and wouldn’t listen to her father. In fact the three of Burton’s girls who married young were wayward, and were not made so entirely by his bullying. It is said that such girls do not marry well — whatever that may mean. They are never satisfied, being too mettlesome either to get a good husband, or to be content with a bad one. Perhaps they deserved neither, and should not have married at all. They did because many men found that flighty trio of blacksmith’s daughters attractive, and sooner or later they succumbed to wedlock in order to get out of Burton’s clutches.
A hard time was had by husbands and wives alike, some of it due to the era they lived in, though all three women are now alive, while their husbands are dead. Yet Edith, who was one of the best, was said to have got the worst.
Burton’s inevitable confrontation with Blonk ended in Edith and her eight children being more or less cut off from her parents. It was a ban that Burton put on the husband more than his daughter, for whenever better-off members of the family from Leeds or St Neots heard of her plight and brought clothes for the children, he always saw that she got them.
And he did occasionally have a kind word when he met her children in the fields around Engine Town. His wife would never turn them empty-handed from the door, though they were often afraid to go there for fear of meeting Burton, who could be fiercesomely harsh if he was in a bad mood.
Edith was his favourite daughter, being the most high-spirited and independent in getting away from him sooner than any of the others. She was tall, with reddish hair and blue eyes, and a well-formed body. Throughout my childhood she had a great knack of organizing food for her children, and whenever I was near her house at mealtimes, which was often, there was always the chance of getting some. She never complained at seeing me queue up with the rest, though there was little enough to go round. Why she appeared more profoundly connected to me than anyone else in my family I don’t know, but when I was some weeks old a malfunctioning of the heart got me in its grip which turned my face and body blue so that I appeared to be at the point of death. My mother was also ill, and March did not go out like a lamb that year, because snow was drifting down and lay thick everywhere. Edith wrapped me in a shawl, put on her coat, and set off with me across the quarter-mile stretch of the park to the doctor’s place beyond. She told me a long time afterwards that there was no knowing whether I would be dead or alive when the shawl was opened in his surgery.
A few years later she and my mother got hold of tickets for an organ recital at the Albert Hall in Nottingham. They took me with them, saying we were going to hear some thunder and lightning. We stayed half an hour at the concert, and then withdrew from my first experience of listening to Bach.
10
Truth menaces the soul, and to turn to it for illumination will only increase its monolithic power. Having done long enough without it, and not lived totally in the night of my own falsehoods, I don’t need help from it now. Nor does it crave any assistance from me. The truth ignores those who do not recognize defeat. It can only help those who are able to do without it — though they may still yearn for its support to keep them on the switchback motorway through life.
Truth is the novelist’s enemy. If I steer a positive course towards it I forfeit the greater use of inspiration. To decide firmly for one or the other is to make the best of a bad job, but a writer who seeks truth betrays his talent, abandoning the divine for a mundane quality that deadens intuitive power, and ruins his conjuring tricks. He accepts morality but relinquishes his soul. Everything has its price.
Yet one occasionally employs truth in order to cement and solidify chaotic constructions. Everything has its uses, also. Without some concept of truth one would be unable to say yes or no, and it is necessary to say yes or no in order to make decisions, without which power one cannot be free. But to speak the truth so as to say everything in a single sentence is an impossibility.
If God manifested Himself, claiming to be the Truth, He would be quickly disowned. God is life, perhaps, but not the Truth. As soon as one claims to speak the truth one becomes a politician, or a historian, or a bully, or a bore, or all put together — but certainly not a novelist. Refusing to speak the truth (being unable to do so), one is thrown back on the imagination, on uncertainty and exploration. One becomes picturesque in spirit, and not to be relied upon, and condemned to die a slow life.
The wish to create a single sentence of universal wisdom or truth is laudable, but such an achievement, even if it were possible, would leave one heartless and without blood, a dry skin of emptiness, all but dead and frozen in the mind, while at the same time seeming to be most alive at having spoken what one imagined to be the truth.
There are those who have in their hearts a simple truth, some political mountain or emotional fact, but it is nearly always another’s truth which they try and live by, or several truths drawn together into a few drab maxims of equal falsehood which they try to make everybody else believe in. If it were their own truth they would not be so happy, or so totally dedicated. They who live by the word shall perish by the word. Life exposes you to death, but Truth rots the spirit.