Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

  The library held all the Eng lit classics, and quite a few surprises like Gertrude Stein. I had no idea of what to read or in what order, so I just started alphabetically. Thank God her last name was Austen . . .

  At home one of the six books was unexpected; a copy of Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Mallory. It was a beautiful edition with pictures, and it had belonged to a bohe—mian, educated uncle — her mother's brother. So she kept it and I read it.

  The stories of Arthur, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Merlin, of Camelot and the Grail, docked into me like the missing molecule of a chemical compound.

  I have gone on working with the Grail stories all my life. They are stories of loss, of loyalty, of failure, of recognition, of second chances. I used to have to put the book down and run past the part where Perceval, searching for the Grail, is given a vision of it one day, and then, because he is unable to ask the crucial question, the Grail disappears. Perceval spends twenty years wandering in the woods, looking for the thing that he found, that was given to him, that seemed so easy, that was not.

  Later, when things were difficult for me with my work, and I felt that I had lost or turned away from something I couldn't even identify, it was the Perceval story that gave me hope. There might be a second chance . . .

  In fact, there are more than two chances — many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/ losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

  And of course I loved the Lancelot story because it is all about longing and unrequited love.

  Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

  I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule — even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.

  I was scared and unhappy.

  I remember going down to the library to collect the murder mysteries. One of the books my mother had ordered was called Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot. She assumed it was a gory story about nasty monks — and she liked anything that was bad for the Pope.

  The book looked a bit short to me — mysteries are usually quite long — so I had a look and saw that it was written in verse. Definitely not right ... I had never heard of T. S. Eliot. I thought he might be related to George Eliot. The librarian told me he was an American poet who had lived in England for most of his life. He had died in 1964, and he had won the Nobel Prize.

  I wasn't reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through ENGLISH LITERATURE IN PROSE A—Z.

  But this was different . . .

  I read: This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.

  I started to cry.

  Readers looked up reproachfully, and the librarian reprimanded me, because in those days you weren't even allowed to sneeze in a library, let alone weep. So I took the book outside and read it all the way through, sitting on the steps in the usual northern gale.

  The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day, and the things it made bearable were another failed family — the first one was not my fault but all adopted children blame themselves. The second failure was definitely my fault.

  I was confused about sex and sexuality, and upset about the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat, and how to do my A levels.

  I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me.

  So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language — and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers — a language powerful enough to say how it is.

  It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

  In many ways it was time for me to go. The books had got the better of me, and my mother had got the better of the books.

  I used to work on the market on Saturdays, and after school on Thursdays and Fridays, packing up. I used the money to buy books. I smuggled them inside and hid them under the mattress.

  Anybody with a single bed, standard size, and a collection of paperbacks, standard size, will know that seventy—two per layer can be accommodated under the mattress. By degrees my bed began to rise visibly, like the Princess and the Pea, so that soon I was sleeping closer to the ceiling than to the floor.

  My mother was suspicious—minded, but even if she had not been, it was clear that her daughter was going up in the world.

  One night she came in and saw the corner of a paperback sticking out from under the mattress. She pulled it out and examined it with her flashlight. It was an unlucky choice; D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love.

  Mrs Winterson knew that Lawrence was a satanist and a pornographer, and hurling it out of the window, she rummaged and rifled and I came tumbling off the bed while she threw book after book out of the window and into the backyard. I was grabbing books and trying to hide them, the dog was running off with them, my dad was standing helpless in his pyjamas.

  When she had done, she picked up the little paraffin stove we used to heat the bathroom, went into the yard, poured paraffin over the books and set them on fire.

  I watched them blaze and blaze and remember thinking how warm it was, how light, on the freezing Saturnian January night. And books have always been light and warmth to me.

  I had bound them all in plastic because they were precious. Now they were gone.

  In the morning there were stray bits of texts all over the yard and in the alley. Burnt jigsaws of books. I collected some of the scraps.

  It is probably why I write as I do – collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative. What does Eliot say? These fragments have I shored against my ruin . . .

  I was very quiet for a while, but I had realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

  I began to memorise text. We had always memorised long chunks of the Bible, and it seems that people in oral traditions have better memories than those who rely on stored text.

  There was a time when record-keeping wasn’t an act of administration; it was an art form. The earliest poems were there to commemorate, to remember, across generations, whether a victory in battle, or the life of the tribe. The Odyssey, Beowulf are poems, yes, but with a practical function. If you can’t write it down how will you pass it on? You remember. You recite.

  The rhythm and image of poetry make it easier to recall than prose, easier to chant. But I needed prose too, and so I made my own concise versions of nineteenth-century novels – going for the talismanic, not worrying much about the plot.

  I had lines inside me – a string of guiding lights. I had language.

  Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

  I had been damaged and a very important part of me had been destroyed – that was my reality, the facts of my life; but on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel, and as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn’t lost.

  There was pain. There was joy. There was the painful joy Eliot had written about. My first sense of that painful joy was walking up to the hill above our house, the long stretchy streets with a town at the bottom and a hill at the top. The cobbled streets. The streets that went straight to the Factory Bottoms.

  I looked out and it didn’t look like a mirror or a world. It was the place I was, not the place where I would be. The books had gone, but they were objects; what they held could not be so easily
destroyed. What they held was already inside me, and together we would get away.

  And standing over the smouldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that there was something else I could do.

  ‘Fuck it,’ I thought, ‘I can write my own.’

  5

  At Home

  O

  UR HOUSE WAS A NARROW house in a long narrow terrace of houses. The road outside was cobbled. The pavement was laid with solid slabs of York stone. Our house, number 200, was almost at the top.

  Inside the house was a tight dark lobby with a line of coat hooks and a coin-slot gas meter. Off the lobby to the right was the best parlour, distinguished by a standard lamp, a radiogram, a vinyl three-piece suite and a display cabinet.

  Pass by this door and there were steep stairs leading upwards. Go straight ahead and that was our living room, our kitchen, our yard, our coal-hole, and our outside loo, known as the Betty.

  Upstairs were two bedrooms, one to the right and one to the left. When I was fourteen, the damp, leaking room on the left was divided into a small bedroom for me, and a bathroom for all of us. Until then, we had a slop bucket upstairs. Until then we all slept in the same room. In that room was the double bed where my father slept, and where my mother slept if my father wasn’t in it, and a single bed against the wall where I slept. I have always been good at sleeping.

  Between the beds was a small table holding a light-up globe lamp on my side, and a light-up ballerina electric twirling alarm clock lamp and bedside light on her side.

  Mrs Winterson loved multi-purpose electrical goods of hideous design. She was one of the first women to have a heated corset. Unfortunately, when it overheated it beeped to warn the user. As the corset was by definition underneath her petticoat, dress, apron and coat, there was little she could do to cool down except take off her coat and stand in the yard. If it rained she had to stand in the Betty.

  It was a good loo; whitewashed and compact with a flashlight hanging behind the door. I smuggled books in here and read them in secret, claiming constipation. That was risky because Mrs W was keen on suppositories and enemas. But there is always a price to pay for your art . . .

  The coal-hole was not a good place; leaky, dirty, cold. I hated being locked in there much more than I hated being locked out on the doorstep. I used to shout and bang on the door but this had no effect. I once managed to break the door down, but that was followed by a beating. My mother never beat me. She waited until my father came home and told him how many strokes and what with . . . the plastic cane, the belt, or just his hand.

  Sometimes a whole day went by before the punishment was meted out, and so crime and punishment seemed disconnected to me, and the punishment arbitrary and pointless. I didn’t respect them for it. I didn’t fear it after a while. It did not modify my behaviour. It did make me hate them – not all the time – but with the hatred of the helpless; a flaring, subsiding hatred that gradually became the bed of the relationship. A hatred made of coal, and burning low like coal, and fanned up every time there was another crime, another punishment.

  The working-class north of England was a routinely brutal world. Men hit women – or as D. H. Lawrence called it, gave them ‘a dab’ – to keep them in their place. Less often, but not unknown, women hit men, and if it was in the general morality of ‘I deserved that’ – drunkenness, womanising, gambling the housekeeping money – then the men accepted the thump.

  Kids were slapped most days but beatings were less common. Kids fought all the time – boys and girls alike – and I grew up not caring much about physical pain. I used to hit my girlfriends until I realised it was not acceptable. Even now, when I am furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground.

  That solves nothing, I know, and I’ve spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder. I am not one of those people.

  It is better to know it. Better to know who you are, and what lies in you, what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

  My father started hitting his second wife a few years after they were married. Lillian called me at home in the Cotswolds and said, ‘Your dad’s started throwing things. I threw some back.’

  They were living in a sheltered accommodation bungalow by then, an unlikely scene of domestic violence, and my dad was seventy-seven. I didn’t take it seriously. What were they throwing? False teeth?

  I know that he used to hit my mother before they found Jesus, and I know that both she and her own mother were knocked about by my grandad, but when I was growing up, Dad only hit me when he was under instruction from my mother.

  The next day I made the four-hour trip to Accrington, and Dad was sent out to buy fish and chips. Lillian made me a cup of tea and gave it to me in a plastic cup. There was broken crockery all over the place.

  ‘My tea set,’ said Lillian, ‘what’s left of it . . . and bought and paid for with my own money, not his.’

  She was indignant, especially as Mrs Winterson had collected Royal Albert china all her life – a very nasty set of sentimental tableware kept in the display cabinet. Lillian had persuaded Dad to sell it and start again.

  Lillian had bruises. Dad was looking sheepish.

  I took him out in the car to the Trough of Bowland. He loved the hills and valleys of Lancashire – we both did. When he was a vigorous man he used to carry me on the parcel rack of his push bike about ten miles till we reached Pendle Hill, then we’d walk and walk all day. Those were my happiest times.

  He had never talked much, him being clumsy and unsure with language, and my mum and me fast-draw and furious in our arguments and exchanges. But I suspect it was Mrs Winterson’s own Jehovah-like conversational style – really a lifelong soliloquy – that had silenced him further than his own nature allowed.

  I asked him what had been happening with the crockery, and he didn’t say anything for about half an hour, then he cried. We had some tea out of the flask, and he started talking about the war.

  He had been in the D-Day landings. He was in the first wave of the assault. They had no ammunition, only their bayonets. He killed six men with his bayonet.

  He told me about coming home on leave to Liverpool. He had been so tired that he had just walked into an empty abandoned house, pulled down the curtains and covered himself up on the settee. He had been woken at dawn by a policeman shaking his shoulder – did he not know what had happened?

  Dad looked all round, still half asleep. He was on the settee under the curtains, but the house had gone. It had been bombed in the night.

  He told me about his father walking him round and round the Liverpool docks looking for work in the Depression. Dad was born in 1919, he was a celebratory end-of-First-World-War baby, and then they forgot to celebrate him. They forgot to look after him at all. He was the generation reared in time for the next war.

  He was twenty when he was called up. He knew about neglect and poverty, and he knew that you had to hit life before it hit you.

  Somehow, all of those parts of Dad that had sunk to the bottom for so many years had come to the top again. And with them had come bad dreams about Mrs Winterson and their early married life.

  ‘I did love her . . .’ he kept saying.

  ‘You did, and now you love Lillian, and you mustn’t throw the teapot at her.’

  ‘Connie won’t forgive me for marrying again.’

  ‘It’s all right, Dad. She’ll be glad you’re happy.’

  ‘No, she won’t.’

  And I’m thinking, unless heaven is more than a place, unless it’s a full personality transplant, no, she won’t . . . but I don’t say that. Instead we eat chocolate and go quiet. Then he says, ‘I’ve been frightened.’

  ‘Don’t be frightened, Dad.’

  ‘No, no,’ he nods, comforted, a little boy. He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn’t look after him, upset that the
re are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can’t grow up. They can get older, but they can’t grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won’t hit love in the face.

  He said he wouldn’t do it again. I took Lillian to buy some new crockery.

  ‘I like these beaker . . .’ she said. And I like it that she calls mugs ‘beakers’. It’s a good slang – something to dip your beak in.

  ‘I blame Connie,’ she said. ‘They should have locked her up for what she did to you and your dad. You know she was mad don’t you? All that Jesus and staying up all night and throwing you out of the house and the gun and the corsets and bits of the bloody Bible stuck up everywhere. I made him scrape them off the walls y’know. He always loved you but she wouldn’t let him. He never wanted you to go.’

  ‘He didn’t fight for me, Lillian.’

  ‘I know, I know, I’ve told him . . . and that horrible house . . . and that horrible Royal Albert.’

  My mother had married down. Marrying down meant no money and no prospects. Marrying down meant showing everyone else in the street that even though you weren’t better off, you were better. Being better meant a display cabinet.

  Every spare penny went into a biscuit tin marked ROYAL ALBERT, and every bit of Royal Albert went into the display cabinet.

  Royal Albert is covered in roses and edged with gold. Needless to say we only used it at Christmas and on my mother’s birthday, which was in January. The rest of the time it was displayed.

  We all caught Royal Albert fever. I saved up. Dad did overtime, and we did it because every presentation of a plate or a gravy boat made her as close to happy as she could ever be. Happiness was still on the other side of a glass door, but at least she could see it through the glass, like a prisoner being visited by a longed-for loved one.

  She wanted to be happy, and I think that is a lot of why I enraged her as much as I did. I just couldn’t live in the cosmic dustbin with the lid on. While her favourite chorus was ‘God Has Blotted Them Out’, mine was ‘Cheer Up Ye Saints of God’.