PARTISAN REVIEW
499
them, telling me we were going to hear some thunder and lightning.
We stayed half an hour at the concert, and then left - my first
experience of listening to Bach.
Burton was not much interested in politics, though he did vote
from time to time at General Elections. In the 1890's he supported
the successful Liberal candidate for the West Nottingham constitu–
ency, a Mr.
J.
Yoxall, who stood on a platform of House of Lords
reform, rural education, and industrial insurance. Later in his life
Burton voted Labour. He did not believe however that politics
could have much effect on his life.
It
was as if he had been born
before the age of politics, knowing that they could alter nothing,
yet wanting to believe that they could. While there were horses in
the world he was his own master, and no system could change that.
At least it did not for most of his life.
Burton was never patriotic. He saw me once with a Union Jack
flag that had been given out at school, and told me to throw the
bloody thing away. He was too proud and too sure of himself, too
skilled in his job. You were soft in the head and the backbone if
you were for queen and country, or for king and country. To
believe in that sort of thing was a form of bum-sucking. You'd got
no guts, you were frightened of the dark. He couldn't understand
such people, and so left them alone. As a man you had your work,
and your family. The country you lived in, in the form of its govern–
ment, was always threatening these with destruction, so how could
you be patriotic about it?
He was a man of few friends - though everybody in the
district knew him. It wasn't as if they were afraid of him, or dis–
trusted him exactly, but they recognized him as the smith, the man
apart, a person with secrets that they could never share.
It
was as
if he had come to the country from some strange place hundreds
of years ago, and that he had forgotten he had done so, or even
where it was that he had come from, but that look in his eyes as
he gazed at the woods in the distance, was as empty and farseeing
as if some part of him did after all remember that he had undergone
some tremendous and difficult migration. He worked much, and
talked little, so perhaps that accounted foJ' him having more ac–
quaintances than friends.
