Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

  It was my first lesson in love.

  I needed lessons in love. I still do because nothing could be simpler, nothing could be harder, than love.

  Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way. I didn’t have that, and I was a very nervous watchful child. I was a little thug too because nobody was going to beat me up or see me cry. I couldn’t relax at home, couldn’t disappear into a humming space where I could be alone in the presence of the other. What with the Departed Dead wandering round the kitchen, and mice masquerading as ectoplasm, and the sudden fits of piano playing, and the sometime-revolver, and the relentless brooding mountain range of my mother, and the scary bedtimes – if Dad was on nights and she came to bed it meant all night with the light on reading about the End Time – and the Apocalypse itself never far away, well, home wasn’t really a place where you could relax.

  Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  ‘Will it be tonight, Mum?’

  ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls.’

  Mrs Winterson did not have a soothing personality. Ask for reassurance and it would never come. I never asked her if she loved me. She loved me on those days when she was able to love. I really believe that is the best she could do.

  When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.

  I did not know that love could have continuity. I did not know that human love could be depended upon. Mrs Winterson’s god was the God of the Old Testament and it may be that modelling yourself on a deity who demands absolute love from his ‘children’ but thinks nothing of drowning them (Noah’s Ark), attempting to kill the ones who madden him (Moses), and letting Satan ruin the life of the most blameless of them all (Job), is bad for love.

  True, God reforms himself and improves thanks to his relationship with human beings, but Mrs Winterson was not an interactive type; she didn’t like human beings and she never did reform or improve. She was always striking me down, and then making a cake to put things right, and very often after a lockout we’d walk down to the fish and chip shop the next night and sit on the bench outside eating from the newspaper and watching people come and go.

  For most of my life I have behaved in much the same way because that is what I learned about love.

  Add to that my own wildness and intensity and love becomes pretty dangerous. I never did drugs, I did love – the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak than health. And I fought and hit out and tried to put it right the next day. And I went away without a word and didn’t care.

  Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.

  *

  Auntie Nellie made love into soup. She didn’t want thanks and she wasn’t ‘doing good’. She fed love on Tuesdays and Thursdays to all the children she could find, and even if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had knocked down the outside loo and ridden into the stone-floored kitchen, they would have been given soup.

  I went down to her tiny house sometimes but I never thought about what she was doing. Only later, much later, trying to relearn love, did I start to think about that simple continuity and what it meant. Maybe if I had had children I would have got there faster, but maybe I would have hurt my own kids the way I was hurt.

  It is never too late to learn to love.

  But it is frightening.

  At church we heard about love every day, and one day, after the prayer meeting, an older girl kissed me. It was my first moment of recognition and desire. I was fifteen.

  I fell in love – what else is there to do?

  We were like any pair of kids of the Romeo and Juliet age and kind – mooning about, meeting secretly, passing notes at school, talking about how we would run away and open a bookshop. We started sleeping together at her house, because her mother worked nights. Then one night she came to stay with me in Water Street, which was very unusual as Mrs Winterson hated visitors.

  But Helen came to stay and during the night we got into the same bed. We fell asleep. My mother came in with her flashlight. I remember waking up with the flashlight on our faces, the flashlight like a car headlamp passing across Helen’s face to my face. The flashlight playing down the narrow bed and out of the window like a signal.

  It was a signal. It was the signal at the end of the world.

  Mrs Winterson was an eschatologist. She believed in End Time, and she rehearsed it. Our emotional states at home were always close to the edge. Things were usually final. Things were often over. When she caught me stealing money she said, ‘I will never trust you again.’ She didn’t. When she knew I was keeping a diary she said, ‘I never had secrets from my mother . . . but I am not your mother, am I?’ And after that she never was. When I wanted to learn to play her piano she said, ‘When you come back from school I will have sold it.’ She had.

  But lying in bed, pretending not to see the flashlight, pretending to be asleep, and then burying myself back down into Helen’s smell, I could believe that nothing had happened – because in truth it hadn’t. Not then.

  I didn’t know that she had let Helen stay because she was looking for proof. She had intercepted a letter. She had seen us holding hands. She had seen the way we looked at each other. Her mind was corrupt and there was no room in there for the clean free place we had made.

  She said nothing the next morning, nor for some time to come. She hardly spoke to me, but she often disappeared into herself. Things were calm, like before an air raid.

  And then the air raid happened.

  *

  It was an ordinary Sunday-morning service. I was a bit late. I noticed everyone was looking at me. We sang, we prayed, and then the pastor said that two of the flock were guilty of abominable sin. He read the passage in Romans 1:26: The women did change their natural use into that which is against nature . . .

  As soon as he began I knew what was going to happen. Helen burst into tears and ran out of the church. I was told to go with the pastor. He was patient. He was young. I don’t think he wanted trouble. But Mrs Winterson wanted trouble and she had enough of the old guard behind her. There was going to be an exorcism.

  Nobody could believe that anyone as faithful as I was could have had sex – and with another woman – unless there was a demon involved.

  I said there was no demon. I said I loved Helen.

  My defiance made things worse. I didn’t even know I had a demon whereas Helen spotted hers at once and said yes yes yes. I hated her for that. Was love worth so little that it could be given up so easily?

  The answer was yes. The mistake they made at church was to forget that I began my small life ready to be given up. Love didn’t hold when I was born, and it was tearing now. I did not want to believe that love was such flimsy stuff. I held on tighter because Helen let go.

  Dad wouldn’t have anything to do with the exorcism but he didn’t try and stop it. He took overtime at the factory and it was my mother who let in the elders for the service of prayer and renunciation. They were doing the praying – I was doing the renouncing. They did their bit. I didn’t do mine.

  The demon is supposed to pop out and maybe set the curtains on fire or fly into the dog who will foam at the mouth and have to be strangled. On occasions we have known demons inhabit pieces of furniture. There was a radiogram that had a demon in it – every time the poor woman tuned in to Songs of Praise, all she could hear were manic cackles. The valves were sent away to be blessed and when they were refitted the demon had gone. It might have been something to do with the soldering but nobody mentioned that
.

  Demons rot foodstuffs, lurk in mirrors, live in groups where there are any Dens of Vice – public houses and betting shops – and they like butchers’ shops. It’s the blood . . .

  When I was locked in the parlour with the curtains closed and no food or heat for three days I was pretty sure I had no demon. After three days of being prayed over in shifts and not allowed to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, I was beginning to believe that I had all Hell in my heart.

  At the end of this ordeal, because I was still stubborn, I was beaten repeatedly by one of the elders. Didn’t I understand that I was perverting God’s plan for normal sexual relationships?

  I said, my mother won’t sleep in the same bed as my father – is that a normal sexual relationship?

  He shoved me onto my knees to repent those words and I felt the bulge in his suit trousers. He tried to kiss me. He said it would be better than with a girl. A lot better. He put his tongue in my mouth. I bit it. Blood. A lot of blood. Blackout.

  I woke up in my own bed in the little room my mother had made for me when she got a grant to put in a bathroom. I loved my little bedroom but it was not a safe place. My mind felt clean and clear. That was probably the sharpness of hunger but I was sure of what to do. I would do whatever they wanted but only on the outside. On the inside I would build another self – one that they couldn’t see. Just like after the burning of the books.

  I got up. There was food. I ate it. My mother gave me aspirin.

  I said I was sorry. She said, ‘What’s bred in the bone comes out in the marrow.’

  ‘You mean my mother?’

  ‘She was going with men at sixteen.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  She didn’t answer. She said, ‘You’re not leaving this house by day or night until you promise not to see that girl again.’

  I said, ‘I promise not to see that girl again.’

  That night I went round to Helen’s house. It was in darkness. I knocked on the door. No one answered. I waited and waited and after a while she came out from round the back. She was leaning on the whitewashed wall. She wouldn’t look at me.

  Did they hurt you? she said.

  Yes. Did they hurt you?

  No . . . I told them everything . . . What we did . . .

  That was ours not theirs.

  I had to tell them.

  Kiss me.

  I can’t.

  Kiss me.

  Don’t come again. Please don’t come again.

  I walked home the long way round so that I shouldn’t be seen by anyone, by chance, coming from Helen’s house. The chip shop was open and I had enough money. I bought a bag of chips and sat on a wall.

  So this is it – not Heathcliff, not Cathy, not Romeo and Juliet, not love laid end to end like a road across the world. I thought we could go anywhere. I thought we could be map and globe, route and compass. I thought we were each other’s world. I thought . . .

  We were not lovers, we were love.

  I said that to Mrs Winterson – not then, later. She understood. It was a terrible thing to say to her. That is why I said it.

  But that night there was only Accrington and the street lamps and the chips and the buses and the slow way home. The Accrington buses were painted red and blue and gold – the colours of the East Lancashire Regiment – the Accrington Pals, famous for being tiny and plucky and doomed – they were mowed down at the Battle of the Somme. The buses still had their mudguards painted black as a mark of respect.

  We have to remember. We mustn’t forget.

  Will you write to me?

  I don’t know you. I can’t know you. Please don’t come back.

  I don’t know what happened to Helen. She went away to study theology and married an ex-army man who was training to be a missionary. I met them once, later. She was smug and neurotic. He was sadistic and unattractive. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

  After the exorcism I went into a kind of mute state of misery. I used to take my tent and sleep up by the allotment. I didn’t want to be near them. My father was unhappy. My mother was disordered. We were like refugees in our own life.

  7

  Accrington

  I

  LIVED ON A LONG stretchy street with a town at the bottom and a hill at the top.

  The town lies at the foot of Hameldon Hill to the east and the Haslingden hills to the south, and from these hills three brooks descend westward, north-west and north to join near the old church, and as one stream flow west to the Hyndburn. The town grew up along the road from Clitheroe to Haslingden and the south, here called Whalley Road, Abbey Street and Manchester Road in succession.

  from A History of the County of Lancaster:

  Volume 6, by William Farrer & J. Brownbill

  (eds), 1911

  The first mention of Accrington is in the Domesday Book, and it seems to be an oak-enclosed space. The soil is the heavy clay that oaks enjoy. The land was rough pasture – sheep not arable – but like the rest of Lancashire, Accrington made its money out of cotton.

  James Hargreaves, the Lancashire illiterate who invented the spinning jenny in 1764, was baptised and married in Accrington, though he came from Oswaldtwistle (pronounced Ozzle-twizzle). The spinning jenny was able to do the work of eight spinning wheels, and is really the start of the Lancashire looms and Lancashire’s grip on the world cotton trade.

  Oswaldtwistle was the next settlement along the road from Accrington and supposedly a place for imbeciles and morons. We called it Gobbin-Land. When I was growing up there was a dog-biscuit factory there, and the poor kids used to hang about outside waiting for sacks of oddments to eat. If you spit on a dog biscuit and dip it in icing sugar it tastes like a proper biscuit.

  At our girls’ grammar school we were constantly threatened with a future at the dog-biscuit factory in Gobbin-Land. This did not stop the poorer girls bringing dog biscuits to school. The problem was the telltale bone shape, and for a while the school had a policy of No Dog Biscuits.

  My mother was a snob and she didn’t like me mixing with dog-biscuit girls from Oswaldtwistle. Truthfully, she didn’t like me mixing with anyone, and always said, ‘We are called to be apart.’ That seemed to mean apart from everyone and everything, unless it was the Church. In a small northern town where everybody knows everybody’s business, being apart is a full-time job. But my mother needed an occupation.

  We went past Woolworths – ‘A Den of Vice.’ Past Marks and Spencer’s – ‘The Jews killed Christ.’ Past the funeral parlour and the pie shop – ‘They share an oven.’ Past the biscuit stall and its moon-faced owners – ‘Incest.’ Past the pet parlour – ‘Bestiality.’ Past the bank – ‘Usury.’ Past the Citizens Advice Bureau – ‘Communists.’ Past the day nursery – ‘Unmarried mothers.’ Past the hairdresser’s – ‘Vanity.’ Past the pawnbroker’s where my mother had once tried to pawn her leftover solid gold tooth, and on at last to a caff called the Palatine for beans on toast.

  My mother loved eating beans on toast at the Palatine. It was her luxury and she saved up so that we could do it on market day.

  Accrington Market was a big brash market, indoors and outdoors, with stalls stacked with dirty potatoes and fat cabbages. There were stalls selling household cleaners out of vats – no packaging, you took your own bottles for bleach and your own tubs for caustic soda. There was a stall that sold nothing but whelks and crabs and eels, and a stall that sold chocolate biscuits in paper bags.

  You could get a tattoo or buy a goldfish and you could have your hair trimmed for half the price of a salon. Stallholders shouted their bargains – ‘I won’t give you one, I won’t give you two, I’ll give you three for the price of one. What’s that, Missus? Seven for the price of two? How many children have you got? Seven? Does your husband know? What’s that? It’s all his fault. Lucky man. Here you are then and pray for me when I die . . .’

  And they demonstrated their goods – ‘This will SWE-EEP! This will VAC-UUM. This will cl
ean up the top of the curtains and round the back of the oven . . . it’s all in the nozzles. What, Missus? You don’t like the look of my nozzle?’

  When the first supermarket opened in Accrington nobody went because the prices might be low but they were set. On the markets nothing was set; you haggled for a bargain. That was part of the pleasure, and the pleasure was in the everyday theatre. The stalls were their own shows. Even if you were so poor that you had to wait to buy your food at the very end of the day you could still have a good time down the market. There were people you knew and there was something to watch.

  I am not a fan of supermarkets and I hate shopping there, even for things I can’t get elsewhere, like cat food and bin bags. A big part of my dislike of them is the loss of vivid life. The dull apathy of existence now isn’t just boring jobs and boring TV; it is the loss of vivid life on the streets; the gossip, the encounters, the heaving messy noisy day that made room for everyone, money or not. And if you couldn’t afford to heat your house you could go into the market hall. Sooner or later somebody would buy you a cup of tea. That’s how it was.

  Mrs Winterson didn’t like to be seen bargain-hunting – she left that to my dad and took herself to the Palatine caff. She sat opposite me in the fugged-up window, smoking her cigarettes and thinking about my future.

  ‘When you grow up you’ll be a missionary.’

  ‘Where will I go?’

  ‘Away from Accrington.’

  I don’t know why she hated Accrington as much as she did but she did, and yet she didn’t leave. When I left it was as though I had relieved her and betrayed her all at once. She longed for me to be free and did everything she could to make sure it never happened.