Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

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