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was that they were a ‘rum pair’—though he never said as much to their faces. His wife Mary-Ann remarked that they had to have chocolate to drink instead of tea, which seemed extremely strange to her.
    Burton had no belief in God. And after death it was the end, nothing, a disaster you went to sleep under before it hit you, if you were lucky. Nevertheless, his children were packed off to Sunday School for nearly ten years of their lives, the result of which was a glass-fronted case of books in the parlour recess, sober volumes they had brought home as prizes, and the first such collection I’d seen in a private house. From time to time Mary-Ann would give me one to take home and keep.
    Burton only bundled the kids off to bible class so as to get the house clear and make free with his wife without too many inquisitive ears wondering what they were up to and what those noises were. If the Sunday Schools of England in all their Godly work did not produce a nation of Christians they at least helped, when living-space was intolerably cramped, to keep a bit of private love-life on the go. One wonders if those sanctimonious men and women really knew what they were up to, or whether they didn’t just look upon Sunday School teaching as a sure way of keeping themselves out of mischief.
    Even in their sixties Burton and Mary-Ann, when I used to stay here, went upstairs on Sunday afternoon ‘for a bit of a sleep’ as they put it Burton tried to get me off to Sunday School with the Ollington children who lived in a cottage on the edge of Robins Wood, across the Cherry Orchard, but I came out with the statement that I did not believe in God, a straight answer which amused him so much that he winked at Mary-Ann, laughed loudly, and didn’t mention it again.
    He either recognized me in him, or gave in to the unknown part of me stemming from my father, whom he implacably disliked—though he never said so. Rather than face the truth he preferred to keep silent, and thereby enrich himself in the only way possible.

12
    To define the hidden truth is to change life for the better. One becomes more aware and more alive when it is no longer concealed, and a truth that reveals other hidden truths expands the limits of consciousness in such a way that it would seem one was hardly born before that first truth became apparent.
    The greatest truth of all would be to control the visionary light that flares in the mind for a split second at the point of dying, but which is put out for ever by death—and so is denied to us. I ask too much. Burton, who was strong in other things, was unfortunate enough not to realize that such questions existed. In one sense he was too strong to think they were necessary. Where illiterates ignore many things, literates question them so as to bask in the comfort of ignorance when they get no answer.
    To want truth is the beginning of defeat. To distrust truth is the first step to paradise. Life ends where truth begins. The search for truth is a momentary aberration that will not last, though a person should not refuse any experience that clamours to mind, for it may be a lock on the canal of life, carrying him to a higher level of consciousness, or at least suggesting it to him.
    Paradise, desired by everyone, is a place where neither truth nor lies exist, and where all is provided. But paradise can never be real, though the desire for it is. The truth this leads to is unimportant in that sense. But I am different from Burton, able to believe that an answer of yes or no to such a question may produce the first truth that will open the door to this search, or make me so despair of it that I will give up and go on in the darkness as before. People who cannot make decisions are in the hands of destiny. Those who do not ask questions are in their own hands.
    Life, like art, is the only way of approaching the truth. An artist can never say that art is not enough, though he may often be