Life, like art, is the only way of approaching the truth. An artist can never say that art is not enough, though he may often be tempted to. If one were not tempted one would have to admit that the breath of truth had passed one by, in which case one would not even reach that zone of chaos in which everything might be understood.
When I see a possibility of happiness coming to me I will not help to make it real, out of a fear that if I succeed I shall no longer have the moral stamina and rectitude to know that I am incapable of speaking the truth.
Yet if I accepted the happiness that waits for me it would then cease to be the happiness I now imagine it would be, and I would still be armed and plagued with the necessity of searching for the truth.
One must continually strive for happiness, because the unhappiness that comes with it will always be more fruitful than the unhappiness of non-endeavour one left behind. Paradise is a long way off.
I try to get at the truth, as if to do so may bring a certain amount of happiness. At the same time I find myself utterly distrusting it. Sooner or later one must make up one’s mind.
13
I was treated well by Burton because, apart from being able and willing to labour physically, I also bothered myself industriously with books and writing paper. I sat on a chair in the kitchen, by the light of an oil lamp shining from a hook above the table, reading or drawing maps, and I know that he looked at me strongly now and again because he had not seen the like of it before. Sometimes he passed the newspaper and asked me to recite the latest news from Abyssinia, where ‘that swine Mussolini was knocking people about’.
When I walked in on Sunday afternoon after playing in the garden or along the lane outside, Mary-Ann and Emily would already be laying the tea-table and waiting for that peculiar authoritative stamp of Burton as he came downstairs in his stockinged feet.
If he saw the cat in front of the fire he would kick it clear — though it was often alert and leapt out of sight before he came into the room. If the dog stayed there, being near enough human to hope for better things, he would usually move that away also. But if he was in an affectionate mood he would grip the dog around its long mouth and hold the jaws fast, an action which, as well as being painful, induced in the poor animal a feeling of claustrophobia and panic, so that it struggled to get free, much to Burton’s delight and the loud protests of his wife and daughters. It whined and wriggled until he let it go with as friendly a pat as he could muster under the thwarting circumstances, a gesture which was the nearest I saw him get to an expression of guilt.
And so he came in for his tea, having taken care to re-establish his reputation in front of the family so that normal life could be resumed once more. There would be salmon and cucumber and jam-pasty to eat, a combined smell of fish and vinegar and new-baked dough which was enough to make anyone’s mouth water. But he never had much of it, not being a big eater, in spite of his work. He would pull on his boots and go into the yard or garden to busy himself for an hour before walking off for an evening bout at some pub or other.
He lived close to Nottingham, a lifetime spent within a few miles of the Goose Fair and Market Place. Born and bred, married and buried at Lenton, he was to live ten years at Bridge Yard, and later for many more at a block of three cottages on Lord Middleton’s land that were shown by the Ordnance Survey maps of the late nineteenth century as ‘Old Engine Houses’, though they were always known locally as Engine Town. Demolished in 1939, a few months after water-taps and electricity had been put in, they made way for the spread of bungalows from Nottingham.
The cottages were connected by a motorable high-hedged sunken lane to Radford Woodhouse — a compact settlement of three streets — beyond which one went by paved road to the city. But to other localities there were only tracks across the fields. To reach Aspley or Basford one went up ‘Colliers’ Pad’, a leafy and narrow bridle-path that ran by an open space of undulating scrubland known as the Cherry Orchard, a way that was often used by miners going home from Radford or Wollaton Pits.
Burton never thought of himself as an urban man, even when his house was on the actual city limits and he could find himself in Nottingham — so to speak — simply by walking to the end of the yard. There were still many fields to cross before coming to the packed houses of Old Radford and the first lively outlying pubs of the city. He watched them from behind the fence, as if daring them to come up and get him. He couldn’t be doing nothing for long, however, and before going back to what work there was he ceased his gazing and suddenly, to spite the lane a few yards away as well as shock it, he gobbed into the middle, and then turned his back on it. This gesture was characteristic, a spit at the bars of the fire to hear it sizzle, or down into the lane to pay it back for never moving. The fire was unbeatable as far as his saliva was concerned, but the lane couldn’t answer back. There was no contempt in his spitting. It was just an eternal testing of the forces of nature to make sure they were always as he expected them to be. Satisfied that they were, he could then go back to his work.
On Saturday night he donned his best suit. In fact he had two, which seemed an unparalleled luxury compared to the state of my own father at the time. There was a black one and a brown one — with boots to match each, of the sort that laced high and covered the ankles. Their good-quality leather glistened from the shine I had just given them as, in the chosen pair, he made his way down the dry or muddy lane, according to season, and on under the long tunnel-like railway bridge whose darkness at six o’clock on gloomy winter mornings had so much frightened my mother on her way to the lace factory in Nottingham where she worked from the age of fourteen.
Burton would stop at the beer-off in Radford Woodhouse for his first pint, then go on by the disused lime kilns up to Wollaton Road. His son Oswald lived in a cottage near the junction, and he would call in to see if everything was all right, then continue the two-mile walk into Nottingham. In his own world he was without fear, and he despised anyone who was not the same, though he would occasionally condescend to talk to them for reasons of work or business. Those who were similar in stature might be lucky to get a passing nod from time to time, for he was exceedingly conscious of his height, and held himself accordingly.
As a child I once caught a glimpse of him at a saloon bar when someone going in opened the pub door. Burton was standing up, talking to other men, the upper half of his tankard arm held well into his side, the beer pot straight at his mouth when he drank, though the stance and picture was by no means a stiff one. Then I dodged out of sight in case he should see me.
At Sunday dinner a quart bottle would be set on the table, which only he was allowed to drink. If his grown-up sons wanted to take beer at the same meal they had to go and buy a pint of their own, though they could only bring a glass to the table, never the actual bottle. If they did there would be ructions which would end in them getting knocked down if they didn’t take it away.
He’d send me out on Sunday morning to the Woodhouse for his ale, and I remember the smell of it as the handsome but hurried young woman at the beer-off poured it into the white enamel funnel she held over the bottle. He once rewarded me with a glass when I got back, though I should have known there was some trick in it, for he was delighted when I staggered away from the meal half drunk. On another occasion he tempted me to a pinch of snuff, which set me sneezing around the house and yard for hours. I was one of the few who appreciated his sense of humour, for he was universally known among his family as a ‘rotten old swine’, mostly because all his actions added up to the fact that he liked making people dance to his tune.