PARTISAN REVIEW
505
Ann walk some paces behind him, and this caused much comment,
though he never altered in his habit.
In the prime of their married life he gave her as little money
as possible to keep a house of ten. When they lived at Bridge Yard,
a house on Wollaton Road by the canal, between a coal-loading
wharf and the school, she took in washing to try and make ends
meet. All her complaints made no difference to him. He seemed
impenetrable, and couldn't even understand that he was being un–
kind. She had to have money for the house, but he had to have
money for beer, without which he could neither live nor work.
The children said he took more care over feeding his pigs than
hE
did over them. When people came with buckets of slops and crusts
to the house for his pigs he would give them a penny or two, then
hand the buckets to his children so that they could carry them to
the sty. On the way there they would search for leftovers still fit to
eat, but he never knew about this, otherwise they would have got
a good hiding for robbing their own father. And nobody would ever
tell him to his face that his children were hungry.
He worked unbelievably hard. Blacksmithery was a trade that
demanded it, in which it was said that some smiths occasionally
went blind from the spirit-breaking labor of their work. Yet for all
that, Burton appeared to me to be a sensitive man. Perhaps as a
child, and a grandchild at that, I was able to get through to a part
of him that had never been opened to his own children. His one
good eye seemed to be extraordinarily alive, and to miss nothing.
His mouth was permanently ironic, turning down at each end but
as if it didn't really want to, a wicked mouth ready to play any
trick, or to see one done.
Every face has a permanent expression which is not only based
on the formation of the features themselves, but is also moulded by
the qualities of the inner soul.
It
was stamped there at some moment
of truth , which may have been at the point of conception, when the
two expressions on the parents' faces fu sed into that of the conceived
soul. This was modified at the child's shock on coming out of the
womb and into air; and further altered by the environmental
pounding of its first few years. :\ person can never let go of this ex–
ternal picture - by which the inner soul is recognizable to the per–
cipient observer - and Burton was too sure of himself ever to think
