Free The Flame of Life by Alan Sillitoe Page A

of the people. Whatever troubled you in youth never vanished. It recurred, as he now found. Mystery was a threat, whether political or religious and would not let you live, nor ever allow you to consider what riches of the world were at your disposal. He knew that Dawley had to be taken seriously. Mysteries had to be thrust behind him like Satan. They took you out of yourself and so could not be ignored, otherwise their power multiplied.
    Cuthbert felt some affinity with Dawley, but believed he could match him for power. He had spent years training to be a priest, while Dawley got his supposed authority from his time in the desert, which was said to have given him experience and wisdom. But this was yet to be proved, and Dawley had no pull over him, except that which forced him into the irritating position of having to think about him at all.
    Dawley’s hand fell, and Cuthbert’s smile drifted. They felt friendly enough at that moment, as two people often do who are together in similar areas of thought, and imagine themselves to be alone in it.
    Richard had detected their animosity, and hoped it was nothing serious. At these meetings he would find out whether any half-concealed trouble was likely to threaten the existence of the commune. Even in Lincolnshire, when the family had reigned, he had done the same, and the community didn’t feel as staid and safe as the family had in those days. The change of den meant that his father was no longer in proper control. He didn’t own the house or pay rent for it, and so felt insecure in his position – though he put in a generous amount towards running the community.
    The family, as it were, had almost doubled in number, and was called a community. Its lack of organisation was attractive, yet any believer in guerrilla warfare and revolution must know – as his brother Adam said yesterday – that organisation and intelligence lie at the bedrock of any society. The easygoing almost chaotic everyday flowing along of the community denied the clear and founding principles on which they worked. They were left alone to indulge themselves in a sort of controlled disorder for as long as they liked each day, and this was its great advantage. Yet Richard was uneasy, for even in the days of Uncle John there had been enough rigidity of life to make them feel that their work and the way they lived were fundamentally connected.
    But Adam also told him (they shared a room, and talked late into the night), that they must learn to look on the community as a test of adaptability – as befitted theoreticians of guerrilla warfare and addicts of the Handley way of life. They must recognise the needs of their father, who was an artist. If frequent changes of place and creed were called for by his internal motor, then they must put up with it. The artist always came before family, or community, or state – even the best of states.
    Handley suffered enough: Adam and Richard acknowledged it. They had only to observe some of the pictures he occasionally let them see. Hadn’t their mother accepted this policy when she said that she liked the community because it gave Handley something to do when he wasn’t painting? They wouldn’t be so plain about this patriarchal attitude, but saw that to be more subtle might be unjust to Handley as a breadwinning artist.
    Uncle John had said that they who believed in altering the social and productive forces of the earth must also honour their father and their mother. Adam tried to explain this heart-exploding paradox by seeing that John had made it because he never wanted them to go to extremes in their behaviour if ever it came to guerrilla warfare. In England, the foco of guerrilla warfare was to be the family.
    Apart from military history, small-arms manuals, and strategical texts, Adam’s favourite reading was the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Because he had never been able to explain this, nor indeed wanted to, it seemed