The Volunteers by Raymond Williams

Author:Raymond Williams [Raymond Williams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908069238
Publisher: Parthian Books
Published: 2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

I had nothing to do then but to go on to Ireland. I was relieved by the effort: returning the car, getting on to the plane. But what was there all the time, at the edge of my mind, was a feeling that I was going the wrong way: that every mile from Pontyrhiw was in the wrong direction, if I was looking for the truth. That was the question, I supposed: the problem from the very beginning. My assignment, certainly, was the shooting of Buxton, but take the whole sequence in order – put it back in order – and Buxton was an incident along the road from Pontyrhiw. To call it an incident diminished it; he had, after all, been shot. But he was now recovering, satisfactorily, in the hospital in Cardiff, while Gareth Powell was dead and his wife and child were without him in that tidy back garden at Pontyrhiw, with her brother coming round, looking after her, trying to see her through it. On any real estimate, that was the case, but nothing works like that. The public story, in any available dominant version, was still the shooting of Buxton.

A public version against my private feelings; was that now the problem? I don’t know about private feelings: all I could touch was the rawness, and of course the resentment, of being turned out, seen off, from that private garden. We all say, as reporters, that we are used to brush-offs, but this is differential, like everything else. We are used to brush-offs from all the important people, on those occasional occasions when they don’t need us. We are on the other hand used to some welcome, indeed often to respect, from nearly everyone else: the public, vox pop, men in the street, as they’re known in the trade. The unexpected exclusion, and even more the immediate rejection, had then cut in hard. It still felt very hard because from the moment I saw Pontyrhiw I was aware of some change: some change in myself. Even before May Powell – the raw face and loose hair – the very bareness of the place, its harsh physical explicitness, had undercut the names and the story and the assigned significance. My relation to it was altering, but then altering in my head: more than in the head, in the nerves and stomach. But that made no difference. I wasn’t allocated the privilege of private adjustment. The objective relations were immediately and sharply administered to me; by others, even while my feelings were changing or had changed. Perhaps that’s always how it is. People who make a good deal out of private feelings depend, whether they know it or not, on some privilege of distance, within which there is room for their private adjustments to happen. To most of us, close in the world, no time is given for that. The immediate relations are declared, the substantial changes happen, because there are other people there facing you. You may

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