Raw Material by Alan Sillitoe
There was no doubt that Oswald loved Nellie all his life and pitied her more than he did himself for the tragedy she’d been forced to share. She was ill and partially paralysed for her last dozen years, and Oswald was a strong man who generously wore himself out nursing, lifting, doing everything for her. Over seventy years old, he fell dead from a heart attack one morning. He had meticulously prepared his garden for the spring planting of vegetables, and all the seeds for it were laid out by the back step of his prefab at Bilborough. Nellie lived two more years, and left a thousand pounds to the church.
It seems centuries since I saw them, almost as if what occurred never happened, events slung up from the great unconscious into a spreading and ramifying dream that for once I can remember. Burton lost another grandson called Phillip, the youngest child of Edith, who at the age of five fell into a canal and was drowned. He slipped in quietly one winter’s morning, and his friends of the same age ran away frightened, not telling about it till they were questioned in the evening.
It is bound to be little else but death and turmoil in a backward scoop to the jungle of where one came from. Death is rolling towards everyone underfoot. I am deceived at the solid feel of the earth—which is waiting to pull me like a trapped fox into its soil. Death is the final black clapper of life, and maybe it doesn’t bother me because I can’t bear to think about it. It might also be that those who see death as the end are the ones who fear it most.
As for calling that dreamlike far-back zone—in which the first-seen people of my life appeared—a jungle, it certainly was exactly the opposite of a desert, due to its green richness and many traps, and its instilling of lifelong love. Those whom I knew so well are part of my corporate identity. Such mixing creates the mystery that makes every soul unique, and safe beyond the deathly probing of sociological scholarship. They are the segments that fix the truth of anyone, and it can be done in no other way.
When that line of thick forest is stabilized at my back, the way will be clear before me. Seed from its trees will drift off and fertilize the plain in front, so that my heart will burst when I cross it. One does not exist unless the heart is full. One crumbles into dust, and that is the only real death.
26
I suppose I was born into the world wanting to love my parents. I knew my father wouldn’t like my mother to be seen talking with somebody else, and realized how silent I had to keep about her conversations with the lorry-driver by the rammel-tips. It was difficult to look my father in the eye, and when he hit her for what I knew to be true I had reason to hate him for the rest of his life, though a few days later I had forgotten all about it.
It taught me to keep a secret and initiated me into the feat of being able to prevent ice from melting in the middle of a fire. I developed cunning and deceit, though it might have come later, or started much earlier. Still, I couldn’t hold it against her for doing it on my father, if that is what happened, for whoever lived with him had to survive, and that was a fact.
When a little truth has been found there is no reason to condemn people. They existed and did what they did only so that one day I would be able to find the truth. How else can you look at it if you are continually fighting against falsehoods in yourself?
The liars who run society can condemn people. Let the judges and magistrates go rotten with injustice and iniquity. Those who seek after truth have no right to condemn, while those who think they have found it do little else. Perhaps those who search for the truth lack the courage or are too lazy to condemn. One small truth leads to another, and once it begins there is no stopping. It is difficult to say whether seeking after truth is a self-abuse of the spirit, or a holy flight of fancy that grows into a way of life—which is something to be prevented at all costs.
But nothing is too painful if it can be remembered. Memories have already been screened and released in the pit of the mind before they are splashed on to the brain with such force that they cry out to you, and make you cry out when you feel them. They are sent as the only signposts to truth, and to remind you that truth is still possible. If you ignore them they go away either gracefully or with flesh in their mouths, but they always return in another form, at another time, behind another picture, possibly more acceptable, yet maybe with even sharper teeth.
Memories are part of yourself and, peaceful or not, your eternal friends, for if they lead you to some sort of truth it is only with the object of completing your wholeness, the humanity that will protect you against the world while at the same time making you more vulnerable to yourself.
I used to believe that as far as getting at the truth was concerned my subconscious could be relied on, but now I know that such a way is not for me. Waiting year after year for the subconscious to spew out its truth is a negative attitude that has to be overcome by a deliberate and forceful attempt to get at the truth in other ways, for the subconscious can be just as big a liar as the most wordy politician.
At the same time the subconscious should be held in awe and respect. It has power, its own rights, an entire republic. Through it a man is capable of doing evil if he recognizes what his subconscious is prompting him to do yet tells those around him that he intends to act otherwise—and even persuades himself of it. Under the machinations of self-control he hides the progress of what destiny intends for him.
In other words he is able to let his subconscious do its subterranean work at the rate it will be most effective and deadly, in the way primal human matter works out its own evolutionary role. Having mastered patience and wisdom, he may decide to let it go into evil instead of good, becoming sly and full of such self-control that it is nothing more than perversity and malice.
Once the subconscious gets you in its power it is impossible to escape, or to disown it if it threatens you with harm, or to save those whom you ought to love. An intelligent man can thus be taken over by a wolf. He perceives everything but is controlled by the mechanism of an animal, and has no defence against it.
Driving back alone in the dark from London I lost all idea of where I was going and where I was coming from. It was not a new feeling. I’ve had it often before, of not belonging anywhere, or to anyone except myself. It is a precious and salutary sensation, like driving an aeroplane towards the Himalayas. The soft roar of the Peugeot lulled me on the motorway. I passed the tail-lights of another car as if they were sparks.
It was like lifting into the sky. In a motor-car one flies along, encapsulated in a comfortable seat, breathing stale air, all heaters burning, maps locked in the glove-box, headlights shining on a road that does not alter and so gets you nowhere. I am in a womb, sheltered, warm, and only half safe, waiting for the death-crash of being born, or the birth-crash of being dead, hoping whatever happens that I have loved my parents.
27
A man called Bill Gosse drove up from Cambridgeshire in a Rolls-Royce to visit the Burtons at Engine Town. Gosse’s wife was a niece of my grandmother, and his family enjoyed their trips to Nottingham in the thirties.
He parked his car on the unpaved lane, by a fence that stood at a crazy angle but never fell down. I felt sick when he took me for a ride so we had to turn back before getting very far. It wasn’t that my squeamish soul disliked his smooth machine, because I’d go pale in trolley-buses as well. It was simply that my inherited Tokinses stomach played up to its role.
As a young man Bill Gosse opened a small shop in a village near Peterborough. A craftsman saddler, he later stocked push-bikes and did repairs. He then took up cars via motor-cycles, and went on to install the first petrol pump in his village. After a while he moved into larger premises, and began to deal in second-hand vehicles.
Perhaps the Rolls-Royce was one of these, but its presence in the lane by Burton’s house made them seem fabulously rich, though Gosse and Burton were equal enough when they strolled down the lane together. But people who sold bicycles and cars looked to me like the gaffers of the world. They had no worries because they could buy a packet of fags without th
You could see it in their faces as they climbed from the car with royal nonchalance when they arrived before Sunday dinnertime, wearing caps and trenchcoats, scarves and shawls. Nobody held it against them, and there was a friendly atmosphere at Engine Town for this exotic branch of the family, good sports and fine mixers who made a more than fair living in the motor trade.
Charles and Mary Tokins shipped over from County Mayo during the potato famine of the 1840s and settled in St Neots with their six sons. For luggage they had a trunk, a hat-box, and a score of bundles. Three of the sons went on the land as agricultural workers, while the father and the rest became railway labourers in the days when tracks were being laid all over England and tens of thousands of navvies were needed for the rapid shifting of earth, clay, and stone. It was if the government of the day did nothing to curb the excesses of the Irish famine simply to drive enough men of muscle and intelligence to England at a time when the native energies of the Industrial Revolution were on the wane.
A grandson of Charles Tokins met and married Anne Gilbert of St Neots, and one of their children, born about 1870, was Mary-Ann whose fate led her to Nottingham and into the arms of Ernest Burton.
The Tokinses were always a family for railways, and maybe it is their blood that stirs in me when I hear train hooters in the night, noises which bring unquiet longings and fix me so much into the network of the world that I am never happily settled in the place where I happen to be.
Of Mary-Ann’s two brothers who worked on the railway, Bill was a porter in Leeds, and Ted had a similar job seventy miles down the line at Grantham. The same hat-box that had come over from County Mayo was filled with fresh Yorkshire bread baked by Grandma Tokins at Leeds in the morning, and sent in the guard’s van to Grantham.
Ted had a boy cycle home with the hat-box, whereupon his wife returned it to the station laden with new-culled Lincolnshire vegetables. These were put into the luggage van of the next train making the right connections with Leeds, and sent back up in the afternoon. This specimen of inter-family co-operation went on for over twenty years, and Bill, at the Leeds end, was the man whose funeral Burton was seen at with Mary-Ann in the twenties.
There are many such tales bursting from the genealogical rigmarole of the Tokinses line, telling of the ‘queer streaks’ certain limbs of it had. Maybe Burton felt out of it among that numerous lot, though he had two brothers, one a farrier with a forge at Ruddington Grange, the other with a smithy at Carlton.
Another grandson of the first itinerant Tokinses from Ireland became a prosperous builder. At sixty-eight he threw up normal domestic life, left his wife and three daughters, and went into the nearest workhouse much as another sort of man might enter a monastery.
A photograph taken during his sojourn there shows a large, broad-faced, flat-nosed man, a Tolstoyan figure with a bushy white beard, wearing a workman’s cap. Hands clasped, half-sitting on a full dustbin, he stares at the camera with an air of philosophical contentment. Behind is a flight of steps, and propped against a wall nearby is a long-poled sweeping brush I’m sure he never used. The sun shines as if on no one else in that place, and the photo is a good quality memento mounted on a piece of board. Between the name of the Leeds firm and a royal crest it says: PHOTOGRAPHERS TO THE LATE QUEEN.
He had ordered the cameraman in for himself alone, and paid out of his own pocket, for he was rich by any standards. When he died at the age of eighty he left £60,000 to the workhouse, and not a penny to his wife and daughters.
28
Ever since I can remember I have wanted to leave home, to pack up and go. This desire to tread places other than the one I lived in was so deeply implanted that it gave more power to the womb than was good for me, making it hard to avoid reckoning with. The only real journey away from it is death, which merely takes one back to it.
I also wanted to tell people things that they would believe in, a fatal (though honest) admission from someone who is searching for the truth. The wish to convince them makes it impossible for me to get at the truth. One can only state the truth as it appears to oneself, and if others get comfort out of recognizing it, then my difficulties are honoured. But I cannot claim that my own truth is good for anyone else—otherwise I run the risk of them turning on the gas taps like the friend of mine already mentioned.
A desire to tell the wrong kind of truth manifested itself at an early age, when I was fascinated by the news being read on the radio. What was said seemed of high interest and importance, dealing as it did with frightening items of oncoming war. I thought that the man allotted to make such announcements must be a great person indeed. But it was a phase of listening to his master’s voice which I soon threw off, though when my mother in an odd moment asked what I wanted to do when I grew up I confessed I’d like to be a news reader.
At eight years of age I used to go to a ‘dinner centre’ during the midday break from school to have a free hot meal. I went in at the first sitting, and then came out with the rest so that the second hungry group could take our places. For some reason I was possessed to put my head to the window and, thought it was shut, shout through the glass, so that I could be heard clearly, all the rich swearwords I had so far learned.
The clatter within went silent at my bizarre and extensive vocabulary, and I took it to mean they were actually listening to what I had to say, so continued bawling obscene nonsense to my first captive audience. When one of the serving women could stand it no longer she came and punched me away from the window until I went off, bewildered and only slightly ashamed.
That was my first taste of wanting to become a writer, and an incipient edging towards the desire for truth. Though it was the false kind, yet it is the first sort one encounters on the long road towards real truth. In any case I had with unknowing perception equated as early as could possibly be expected the news coming over the radio with common irrelevant obscenities.
If and when one attains truth it can never be spectacular or in any way comforting. Everyone is born dead, and truth is no more than a search to restore life. As soon as a person feels the desire for truth beginning to stir within him, in no matter what subconscious or underhand way, he is starting to become alive. One is only alive when the search for truth begins.
To question every single point of existence demands a fundamental stability of the heart. One must know not only why one is alive and inhabiting the earth but also why one will perform the next simple action coming into one’s mind. It is an attempt to perceive clearly the connection between the two, and find a common formula uniting them. Until one can do this one is only half alive, but until one begins to embark on this search one is not alive at all.
We are born alive as infants but quickly become dead—after the first smack and cry for air—even though the flesh still moves. But if one was born alive and then becomes dead, one does not live again until the search for truth begins. The only truth from a dead man who has not set out on a search for the truth is that which he shouts in an incantatory fashion when dancing on the grave of his alive self that he killed because he despises the truth. This state also is part of me. This rhythmic inspirational speech is the kind of truth that can never be relied upon to protect the creative spirit. One is afraid because it is God’s truth but not Man’s, and what use is God’s truth to a man? It moves the poet and the shaman but will not affect the person who feels the acid of self-knowledge eating through his stomach.
It is often necessary and satisfying to spew forth the golden words that shift other people, but one needs an opening to the words that move oneself. Is this wanting too much? Is it a betrayal of one’s own spirit to hope for this further truth which seems to be a desire to unite the two?
There are more questions than answers in any quest for the truth. If not, mistrust that truth. But a beginning has been made, though to hope for progress is to de
Whatever is done to the heart, and whatever the heart does back, it must be trusted and obeyed absolutely. The only protector is your own heart. It will lead you into the wilderness, but carry you through peril and despair. And if it finally betrays you, you will only have lived in the way you were meant to live.
One sometimes starves in order to prevent the spirit withering away, but one continually searches for food.
29
Mary-Ann never turned a beggar away from the door, and solemnly told me never to do so, either.
If there wasn’t a penny to give she’d make a cup of tea, or fetch some bread and fat bacon from the pantry. I didn’t know how uncommon a trait it was, though it certainly rubbed itself off on her daughters, because when a man walked along our backyard in the hard-up thirties calling out if anybody could spare a cup of tea for a bloke on the tramp, my mother would shout from the back door, or through the window if it was summer: ‘Come on, then, duck, and let’s see what we’ve got’—though only if my father wasn’t there, which went to show in my eyes how good the women were but not the men.
Being a child of parents with widely differing souls, I sometimes follow the precepts of one, and occasionally the uncharitable response of the other, never knowing what I am going to do till I do it. Burton would certainly have bawled a beggar away from his door, telling him to go and find work if he wanted anything to eat.
Mary-Ann suggested I do my best to get into a grammar school instead of slogging off to work at fourteen. I think that since her grandson Howard had already died—and the same track had been broached for him—I was the next one suitable. So on a wet autumn morning I sat in a room of Nottingham High School to do the tests. The atmosphere seemed quite outside me, though I was there with a couple of friends and didn’t feel particularly uneasy. The problems were like pages of Chinese ideographs, and I could make nothing of them at first because I had gone through no preparation beforehand. I can’t say that I expected to pass, though after puzzling out some of the answers I hoped that by a miracle I would so so.