Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

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