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

the right one, says that he and his pals were taking a drink outside a pub near Hungerford in Berkshire. One soldier dared a maid to feed whisky to one of their horses and, being gentle and persuasive, she managed to do it.
    The animal ran wild, galloping around the yard with such energy that it seemed they would never get it back to barracks. Oliver tried some tackling, and was killed by a blow at the head from one of its hooves. The horse had to be shot, and the girl who had given it whisky got into great trouble for her mindless action.
    All nine of the Burtons were sitting at Sunday dinner, a large joint of meat about to be carved. A knock sounded at the door, and Mary-Ann came back with a telegram saying that Oliver had been killed.
    His body, clothed as the soldier he had been, was brought to them in a coffin which lay open for a day in the living-room. The children stood around, though some of the girls dared not at first come down from the bedroom to look. Burton made them, and gave orders that none of them was to cry. ‘Anybody starts blubbering,’ he said, the bones standing out from his unnaturally white face, ‘and I’ll kick ’em from arse-hole to breakfast time. There’ll be no bleddy blawting in this family.’
    He made such impossible demands, sometimes only to hear the sound of his own voice, and when they objected he was then committed to getting obedience, even though it might not matter to him whether he was obeyed or not. If only they had let him speak, and not cringed before every word, he might have had something to thank them for.
    And they tried not to cry as they surrounded Oliver’s coffin and looked at his twenty-two-year-old face. He was that rare youth who was liked by all his sisters, as well as loved by them. In spite of everything, he was also Burton’s favourite son, and Burton knew he’d never been liked by him, though Burton had thought that one day Oliver would make as good a blacksmith as himself.
    There was a strange, chemical smell in the room. Two neighbours had come quietly in, and now the door burst open, and Florrie Voce from next door pushed through them and looked into the coffin. Her round flat Radford face suddenly bunched like a withered apple. ‘What the bloody hell does she want?’ Burton thought, and from her came a loud screaming of agonized distress which filled the whole house as if to split all the walls.
    The effect was to tear into the children’s hearts so directly that they too began to weep and wail, as if Oliver was finally getting his rightful dues. Mary-Ann resumed the quiet sobbing that had stricken her ever since hearing the news, and finally Burton himself—as they all witnessed—‘cried like a baby’, his soul torn out of him at last.
    The coffin was taken to Lenton cemetery on a gun-carriage, where Oliver was buried with full military honours to the tune of the Last Post.
    When he could bear to talk about it Burton said to Mary-Ann that if he’d been with Oliver on that day, the bloody horse wouldn’t have kicked him to death. He had a few tricks by which to tame it or keep it off. He slept with the vision of saving his son from all harm at its vicious antics, only to wake up in the morning and face the further reality of his death. He was eventually buried next to him in the same churchyard.
    As a child I used to go with my aunts to put flowers on Oliver’s grave. They did so every week, even twenty or thirty years after he had died. The last time Burton went out of the house as an old man of nearly eighty, before his first and last illness which brought on death too suddenly for him to beat it or have much say in the matter, was to visit Oliver’s grave and set flowers by it. Unlike his wife and daughters he would never put them in a vase of water, but merely lay them on the grave itself, stay a moment or two, grunt, and walk away.
    Burton did not believe in God, but his