Free Raw Material by Alan; Sillitoe

couldn’t finally tell whether this disfigurement was to my spiritual gain or not.
    In the darkness of childhood I did not go this far in my reasoning, but one step further and I feel certain I would have done. A child is a mystic, and what he lacks in intelligence and worldly knowledge he makes up for in earnestness and depth of feeling.
    Every child is a prince ruling over a kingdom of half-dark and half-light, which only the revolution of age can inextricably mix up, and condemn him to the lie that he can recognize daylight when he sees it.

23
    When I knew my grandmother she was sixty and had white hair, but in her younger days it had been reddish and golden. Being the youngest of a large family she was a girl of few opinions, but the many virtues she had lasted all her life. She was put into service at thirteen, and a few years later was working as a general help at the White Hart pub in Lenton.
    Burton, the son of the local blacksmith, got to know her there. He was young and tall, though his strength alone was handsome—his eyes firm, his nose straight, his hair short and fair, a moustache worn as if to balance his strong chin. Like any farrier, he had a permanent spark in his throat from smithing, and no amount of beer could ever put it out. While asking for a pint at the bar he fell in love with this shy, plump girl called Mary-Ann, and told her so. She was busy and said nothing, and if she believed her ears it didn’t seem possible that he was more than joking. But as the weeks went by he said it again and again, not with any sentimental fervour, but straight out, as if he were saying he loved beer or pork.
    Being a servant she wasn’t able to leave the pub more than once a month, and one day she took a fancy to a pair of black cotton gloves in a newspaper advertisement. Burton was surprised when, after saying he loved her and wanted her to marry him, she pushed a florin over the counter and asked if he’d go and get her a pair of black gloves from a shop down town. They’d cost one and elevenpence, she told him.
    She thought he might wait till the weekend to do it, but he downed his pint and went straight away. When he came back two hours later he pushed the gloves across the bar with the florin she’d given him still on top of the packet. The next time he asked her to marry him she said yes.
    After her marriage she hardly ever went to church, for fear of Burton’s scorn, though she believed in God, and was certainly superstitious. It is said that lightning never strikes a blacksmith’s house, and Burton averred so often enough in a bantering boastful tone when Mary-Ann showed herself full of dread at the onset of a bad storm. She felt that every lightning flash coming from the black sky was especially aimed at her, so maybe it was no bad thing that she married a man who stood in absolute fearlessness of it, though his mockery of the fear she felt did little to comfort her.
    But while he was in the house it was true that she wasn’t so frightened. When he was at work, however, she would open the front door wide, in spite of the rain driving in, so that if a thunderbolt came spinning with vicious and dreadful power down the chimney and madlarked into the hearth it would be drawn by the gap of light to continue its journey harmlessly into the yard—without exploding and blowing the house to pieces.
    Having taken that precaution she would retire to the dark place on the stairs with an oil lamp, even if her grown children were sitting in the kitchen. When the storm’s fearful rumbles ceased to penetrate into her hideaway and reach for her soul, she would open the stairfoot door and ask whether it was safe to come out.
    She led a blameless life, and no one ever knew what there was for her to be frightened of. If anyone should have been afraid of being struck dead it ought to have been Burton, but Mary-Ann thought that the supernatural power behind the lightning bolts would