Raw Material by Alan; Sillitoe Read Free Book Online Page A

disasters.
    An artist who sees that the falsity of truth is nothing better than a trap must sooner or later decide what it is he wants. If truth is not everything to him, it must be nothing, but if truth is nothing, then what is fit to take its place?

15
    Burton was to regret the hard times he’d given Oliver, his eldest son.
    As a youth, Oliver was led the fiercest dance of all, ‘got kicked from pillar to post’ because he had the misfortune to be Burton’s firstborn and prime competitor. After one terrible bout he walked out and took a job as a blacksmith at Browns’ Sawmills near Wollaton, and none of the family knew where he slept, for he had no money to get lodgings. His mother managed to send some dinner every day by one of his sisters—each time with a message imploring him to come home and make it up with his father. Burton had already grudgingly agreed to it, because if there was one thing worse than having an argumentative son in the house, it was having him away from it so that he could no longer be got at.
    After a week Oliver relented, preferring to share a bed with his brothers than sleep on the newly seasoned planks in one of the lofts. But he kept his job at the sawmill. A year or so later he started courting, but when his girl-friend came to call for him one day, Burton, in his forty-seventh year, took a fancy to her. She appears to have fallen for him, being a loose and saucy Radford tart, and the iron peace of the family was shattered. Burton went off with her for a few days to some place in Derbyshire. Oliver, who had been in love with the girl and was now in despair at everyone’s perfidy, enlisted with the army as a blacksmith, for the Great War had begun.
    So at forty-eight years of age Burton received news of his eldest son, and accounts differ as to how it came. One says that a white-faced twelve-year-old daughter went to the forge with the black tidings. How did he take it? He was shoeing a horse and, stunned by her own emptiness after the words of the telegram, she was afraid to interrupt his work, imagining it was more important to them and the world than what she had been fetched out of school to tell.
    Her mother was at home, crying one minute, stunned and silent the next, clinging to the flickering light of disbelief whenever she had the strength—while blinds at the house had already been drawn.
    Burton had seen her, and wondered why she was out of school, for he had insisted that none of his children should miss a minute of it. She couldn’t tell whether he scowled especially at her, or whether he was niggled by the horse unable to hold still, an animal that could sense before any of them the awful news in the air.
    He hammered in the last four nails of the shoe, and even then she did not dare shout what she had come to tell, because three or four other people were standing around. She had thought on her way there to go up and whisper it, but was more afraid of that than doing it any other way. When the horse was pushed unwillingly backwards between the cart-shafts she called out: ‘Oliver’s dead, our dad.’
    â€˜What did you say?’
    He stopped in picking up his tools, but heard the first time, and his question was only a means of keeping himself steady, and the preparation for him to stand bolt-still for a few seconds in the silence created by the information among the men waiting around, and for him to say in a sharp voice that astonished them all, and made them realize how terrible the by now not unusual news would be: ‘I bloody well knew it!’
    Oliver had not been killed at the Battle of the Aisne, or in the senseless slaughter at Loos, but on a moor in Norfolk. Some of his boisterous soldier-mates had, by way of a joke, fed rum to a string of mules he was to lead across the moor at dusk. Enlivened too much, they kicked him to death, and he wasn’t found till the middle of the following day.
    Another account, and probably