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504
ALAN SILLITOE
His body was brought back to Nottingham, and buried
in
Lenton churchyard. He was that rare youth who is liked by all
his
sisters, and as a child I used to go with them - my aunts - to put ,
flowers on his grave. They did so every week, even twenty or thirty
years after he had died. He was also Burton's favorite son, and
Burton himself was eventually buried next to him. 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, was to visit Oliver's
grave and set flowers by it. Unlike his wife and daughters he would
j
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 family, at both times equally grief-stricken,
said that God had got back at him twice: once when He put out
hi!> eye, and again when He took his son.
When Burton was working as a young man, a piece of burning
I
steel flew into his eye, and, eye surgery being what it was at the end '
of the nineteenth century - at least for someone like Burton-it
stayed there for the rest of his life, and went to the grave with him.
He lived most of his days, the fifty years that remained, in appalling
pain, which almost certainly accounted for much of his harshness
and short temper.
Burton was certainly no hero.
If
he had been he'd maybe have
kept a stiff upper lip and been as light and jolly as the rest of his
family wanted him to be. Or at least he would have said nothing
sharp to them and let them live their own lives. But he believed in
spreading his suffering, and whether they liked it or not they had
t(l
share it with him, while at the same time never mentioning the
cause of it, or hearing it from his own lips either. There weren't
many heroes in those days.
He used to sit without a murmur in a darkened room when he
could bear his affliction no longer, a bottlc of whisky at his side.
This suffering was compounded when he had his dead son to think
about as well. Even when he was over seventy I remember being
told not to go into the parlor, because he wanted to be by himself.
His family also said that Burton was not capable of loving any–
body, that he had never loved anyone and never would. But to me
he seemed tender to his wife, and calm enough when I knew him
and they were elderly. When they went out together he made Mary -
