Raw Material by Alan; Sillitoe Page B

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.
    Employed as an exterior decorator, he was set to work high up a factory wall. It was dry weather, and a smell of suds and swarf came out of the window where he was painting on his piece of plank, himself and colour pots inadequately suspended by pulleys and a rather unstable set of ropes.
    Shifting cautiously to one end of it, the contraption began to sink. His view of traffic passing below was a comfort to his precariousness, but that sickening look at it when he should have tried to grasp one of the ropes was a big mistake.
    He spun thirty feet, landing stunned and crippled on the ground, covered in a spectrum of paint. By the time he reached hospital his clothes had dried hard as boards. They were cut open and prised off, and when he came back to consciousness the envelope with the money still in it was by his bedside. A few weeks later he hobbled out to spend it, before worse could happen.
    One of his brothers was a lace-designer, two were upholsterers, and two became managers of butchers’ shops. They had nothing to do with the Burtons, imagining themselves a few steps above that sort of uncouth beer-drinking person. Yet neither did the Burtons get much value into their clan when my father married a daughter from it, because he was a man with neither craft nor calling, a labourer who was often unable to find any work at all.
    He had been stricken with that disease of malnutrition and neglect known as rickets. It was a mystery why this should have been so in a family which was never badly off, though explanatory whispers put it down to the fact that my father was the youngest child. His brothers and sisters being grown up, he was unwanted and uncared for. The fable goes that he was stuck in a high chair as a baby and more or less forgotten for several years. When he was taken down he could not walk, and had to get about with irons on his legs until he was thirteen. At that age he was sent to school, with the help of two sticks, but a few months later his father ended this noble attempt to begin his education, so that he could stay at home and help in the shop. The hard work of shifting and carrying upholstered furniture made him immensely strong in the arms and shoulders, and by this he was qualified to labour satisfactorily until the end of his life.
    He never talked of his parents. I think he felt deeply that one should ‘honour thy father and thy mother’, but knew with truth that he could not do so. The fact bred great bitterness in him, for he certainly needed the luxury of such sentiments.
    But he did not complain and that, under the circumstances, was quality enough. He contented himself with cursing the Burtons at every opportunity, both to get back at my mother, as if in some way blaming her for his own birth, and also trying to make them pay for his parents’ deficiencies. He was so full of shame at such a thing having been done to him that he couldn’t even talk about it.
    Maybe he sensed that one should not destroy one’s parents, no matter what they had done. You destroy them only to become them, and I don’t think he wanted to do that. But his lack of intelligence was directly linked to the amount of care he had not received as a baby and a child. Screaming his guts out for food, he had been ignored by his demented or indifferent mother until he was too exhausted to care.
    None of his first questions were answered, nor those that came later, so he did not grow up with that minor civilized grace of curiosity. He was able to seek intelligent directions regarding the work he had to do, otherwise it was a case of ‘see all, hear all, say nowt’—with no compensation of self-expression.
    He did not have the ability to tell much that was interesting, and merely enjoyed the syntactical equipment to swear