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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 deny the absolute value of what one is striving for. Such a journey breaks the heart, but a broken heart means that chains are snapping. It is a painful liberation of the spirit. If a person suffers through love or from treachery so that the heart is broken (as it is called) people pity him. They should celebrate and envy him, for his spirit is one move nearer to freedom.

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.

The rain was stultifying during the hour it took. My feet were saturated because I wore plimsolls, though I soon ignored the discomfort and got stuck in. Nothing could have put me into that school, for even if I'd had a vague chance of getting through this troubling initiation, my spirit wasn't ripe for it. I didn't want it, and it didn't want me, and I believe we were made to sense this by the fools walking about in caps and gowns—which seemed a senseless piece of ritual and intimidation to me and my friends, like something thrown up from the magistrates' court or the Spanish Inquisition. Certainly we had not seen the like of it before. So there was no hard feeling on my side, because when told that I wouldn't be going to such a school I had no regrets.

But I took the test again a year later, and failed that too, proving to me for the last time that I wasn't the right material for higher education. My grandmother may have been disappointed, though I never saw any sign of it. The experience certainly put me against any form of examination for children.

30

The only time Mary-Ann slipped off her track of high principles was when she spent the remaining week's budget-money on one-armed bandits at some beer-off in Radford, where she had called on her way home with the Co-op groceries. One of her daughters talked her into coming out, saying that otherwise Burton might get to know. But she didn't leave until every last penny had gone.

When someone told him, he took it as an act over which he had no control, and therefore one temptation against which Mary-Ann could not have been expected to show much sense either. In other words, he thought it a bit of a joke, saying: ‘Well, I'll be boggered!'—though keeping a tighter grip on her from then on in case she got into debt from it and had them run out of house and home by the bum-bailiffs.

Mary-Ann knew who'd shopped her, because while she was busy at the handle she'd seen Florrie Voce's face reflected in the glass. When tackled about it later Florrie denied it all, but called Mary-Ann an old cow for accusing her of such a thing. Normally good-natured and pacific, Mary-Ann went into the house, and came out with a cup, which she threw with full force and deadly aim at Florrie who has hanging washing up in the yard.

The group of houses abutted the school, and the silence of the classrooms was shattered by a squealing such as could only come from a pig in the process of being slaughtered, or a person whose throat was being unjustly cut. A young lady teacher, rattled by the sound, sent one of Mary-Ann's daughters out to see what was the matter.

Such noise from Bridge Yard was not unusual, but this time it was prolonged for what seemed beyond reason—it being that the cup hurled by Mary-Ann had caught Florrie full in the eye, and cut her both above and below it. A policeman was fetched, and Mary-Ann had to appear at the Guildhall on a charge of breaching the peace and common assault, for which she was fined the sum of £2.

Not that this caused any final rupture between the two women, because a few years later Florrie Voce came to Oliver's funeral and was the loudest wailer at it. They knew that you couldn't make enemies in your own backyard, though you had your ructions now and again. And a £2 fine would never convince Mary-Ann that she'd paid for the cardinal sin of committing violence on a neighbour, a pass she'd got herself into which was right out of character, and which she never did again.

She was a kind, hardworking woman, and thought more about other people than herself. Because of this she was seen as a simple person—a deceptively simple judgement which isn't worth much comment.

She used to collect the coloured cards from Burton's cigarettes and store them in the spice cupboard. They lay there for weeks and months until she had enough to make it worth while presenting them to me in an empty Robin packet. They were impregnated with the smell of curry and pepper, aloes and cloves, sage and thyme. A few years before she died she gave the same cupboard to me and I kept my first collection of books in it.

With a touching and solemn expression she also gave me a stick of oak about six inches long, no more than a piece of kindling, assuring me that it had been part of the ship in which the Good Lord Nelson had died. She had paid the exorbitant sum of sixpence for it to some cunning old robber who had once come to her door. I don't remember what happened to it. No doubt I treasured it for a while, then lost it on the long road my itching feet have since travelled.

It is good for the self-confidence of a child to be spoiled when young. The awful word ‘spoil' only means love and care, and freedom from unreasonable restrictions so that any good qualities can develop. To do good is the only way to teach others to do good, and to spoil is not to ruin, for it gives a child a sense of his own significance that will strengthen him to face the world and survive.

The reason people don't know what they want, and therefore do not know what to do at certain vital moments of their lives, is because they were told too often as children exactly what they could have and do, and not left enough to their own usually innocent choices. Parents may spoil a child yet not ruin it, though many are too frightened to try. It is usually left to the grandparents, who need to love a child in order to go on living themselves, and who often spoil grandchildren to make up for having been too harsh with their own. They can also spoil a grandchild so as to make life hard for its parents when that child grows up and begins to assert itself, but that is another matter, and nothing to do with the relatively uncomplicated Burton morality.

On a summer's afternoon I can smell newly-baked bread coming out of a heated oven. In a state of grace I get that warm and floury whiff as my grandmother laid the tins on the table. I shall always be able to smell it, as if no one else can, and as if I am the last person in the world to recall it.

31

Burton was always looking for something bigger than he was to break himself against, though he would have perished rather than admit to such a thing. He never did find that bigger force. He looked for it, and at the same time kept it at bay with fundamental Burton guile. The closest he got was when he met and married Mary-Ann Tokins, and she would never admit to it either, though she may have thought about it from time to time.

When Burton died, he died in bed, and all his guts came up, red and black, through his mouth. Like any blacksmith, he kept his silence, knowing that Old Nick had got him at last. And Old Nick was riding a horse that had been shod by somebody else, a fact which accounted for the look of shock on Burton's face.

Just after he died Mary-Ann said to one of her daughters that she wanted to go herself, that there was nothing to live for now that he had gone and she had lasted long enough to see him at rest in his grave. She died in her sleep a year later. There was no place on earth for her without him, just as there had been no peace on earth for her with him. What greater love is there than that?

32

A circle is a straight line to me. A straight line is a circle. My desire forms a straight line, my thoughts run in a circle. The circle imprisons me, the straight line takes me out of it. But I always return to the circle, if only to embark once more on a straight line. The circle is my bloodstream, pumped through the heart. The straight line is the invisible path I follow. The sun is a circle; a tree is a straight line. The world is a circle at the equator; the horizon is straight when I look at it from a hilltop. My sphincter is a circle; my penis is straight. A circle is not a straight line to me; a straight line is not a circle. The straight line of my desire breaks out of the circle. In searching for truth, whether it takes me on a straight line, or endlessly round in a circle, I am no longer a prisoner. My emblem is that of a straight line through a circle. Will the straight line ever leave the circle behind? The circle is my fundamental self. The straight line is my searching spirit. The circle pushes the straight line forward. The straight line drags the circle with it. They are eternally locked together.

PART TWO

33

My father's parents died soon after I was born, so what their first names were I don't know—and I saw no photographs of them. His family stories were unreliable or totally false, though it is certain that
his
father was an upholsterer from Wolverhampton in Staffordshire who, when he came to Nottingham, fitted out a workshop and ‘showroom' on Trafalgar Street in Radford.

He was small in stature and had a short, pointed grey beard, and was said to be a hard and excellent worker except when he took to the whisky, though he rarely did so to the extent of getting blind drunk. Like all the Sillitoes he was tight-lipped, certainly not of the tribe that drinks beer or breathes with their mouths open.

He married a Nottingham girl called Christine Blackwell, whose first name only slips into mind as I write. By all accounts he did not treat her well. She came from a family of cigarette and cigar manufacturers and retailers, and had six sons and two daughters—eight being the figure of plenty in those days.

After he died his offspring were pleasantly surprised to learn that he had been the owner of several slum houses in Wolverhampton, and when these were sold by common filial agreement each flush heir received the sum of £40. To anguished cries that they had been robbed by thieving solicitors (and it really seemed that they had) they spent it in a few weeks to drown their grievance. My father, however, put his portion in an envelope and folded it for safety into his waistcoat pocket, snug notes ready to be used for a rainy day.