Read Online Raw Material by Alan; Sillitoe - Free Book Online

irreversible dosage of work. Three remedies that kept him fulsomely active were Friar’s Balsam, Fuller’s Earth, and Epsom Salts. He smoked Robin cigarettes, though often sat at the parlour table making his own. He was a good customer of Shipstone’s Ales.
    Nobody knows where he has gone to, though some said that there was only one place for a man like him. He’s vanished, but not without trace, and since I can’t light candles, I write words, for in spite of all that was said about him he was my grandfather on my mother’s side.
    Not long ago, at the bottom of the dream-pit, I was inside a large barn-like building. Using great force, I twisted a piece of new wood from a banister rail, and it was satisfying to pick at its freshly splintered surface.
    I showed it to Burton: ‘You see how vigorous and alive the wood is?’
    â€˜Yes,’ he answered readily, with all-knowing irony, ‘but it’s rotten. Look at it.’
    And staring close I saw that, just beneath its surface, the wood was pullulating with tiny winged insects and maggots. ‘Well,’ I told him, as usual trying to make the best of something catastrophic, even in a dream, ‘David will be able to examine them under his microscope. I’ve just bought him a new one.’
    David is my son. One of his great-grandfathers, and a contemporary of Burton, was a cantor in a synagogue in Bukovina. Burton, happy at the sight of him coming towards us, gave a smile of uncomplicated pleasure that he’d never been able to put on with an adult. The main person in a dream is always oneself, no matter who it is. David was myself as a child in this dream, and also himself as he is now.
    One can’t have one’s grandparents all one’s life, for if this were so one wouldn’t then have them to look back on, and childhood would not have been what it was. But of all those now dead of my family, Burton is the one whom I would like to know that I had become a writer, and whom I would happily read novels and stories to.
    I ought to stop writing about him because I do not want to become in any shade similar, or feel encapsulated by his spirit. He was too real a person, and so I will pull gradually away. With a straightforward tale it would be possible and necessary to become him in order to write about him. I’d feel entirely easy in it, and sense no danger tunnelling my way through such a yarn, because I would be certain to come out empty on the other side.
    One’s grandparents are more important in every way than one’s parents.

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    The truth is difficult to get at, as if it’s locked in a near-impregnable first-class Vauban fort that one is only let into on humble sufferance—hauled up the sheer scarps in a wicker basket, as it were. But one doesn’t want to go in on such terms or make any fuss about it. Truth comes in flashes, forgotten pictures that it blesses us with. The fact that it comes at all makes it generous.
    As an old man of nearly eighty, Burton went to visit one of his married daughters in Kent. It couldn’t have been too long before he returned to Nottingham and died, though there was no sign of it until close to the end. He stood with another of his grandsons watching combine-harvesters circling the wheat, and when the field was small some bystanders began throwing missiles at rabbits running for safety. Burton saw one in the chaff close by and made a grab for it. At that moment a piece of slate smashed into the back of his hand, inadvertently hurled by someone who did not see him.
    Burton made no complaint. He kept his grip on the rabbit, which he hit sharply at the back of the neck and killed. He stood up and said nothing, then walked off with his grandson to the doctor’s house a few miles away to get his hand put right, blood trailing on the ground from his shattered veins, the dead rabbit swinging from his pocket.

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    So as not to share the same fate,