Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

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 there 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’.
    I still sing it and I have taught it to all my friends and my godchildren, and it is completely ridiculous and, I think, rather wonderful. Here are all the words:

Cheer up ye saints of God,
    There’s nothing to worry about;
    Nothing to make you feel afraid,
    Nothing to make you doubt;
    Remember Jesus saves you;
    So why not trust him and shout,

    You’ll be sorry you worried at all, tomorrow morning.

    So, there was my mum at the piano singing ‘God Has Blotted Them Out’, and there was me in the coal-hole singing ‘Cheer Up Ye Saints of God’.
    The trouble with adoption is that you never know what you are going to get.
    Our life at home was a bit odd.
    I didn’t go to school until I was five, because we were living in Grandad’s house and looking after the dying grandmother. School was too difficult to add.
    In the days of the dying Grandmother I used to climb on her big high bed in the sitting room that looked onto the rose garden. It was a lovely light room and I was always the first person awake.
    In the way that small children and old people can be so well matched, I loved getting into the kitchen and standing on a stool and making really messy jam and cream sandwiches. These were all my grandmother could eat, because of her throat cancer. I liked them, but I liked anything that was food, and besides, at that hour there were none of the Dead hanging round the kitchen. Or maybe it was only my mother who could see them.
    When the sandwiches were made I took them to the big high bed – I was about four, I suppose – and woke up Grandma and we ate them and got jam everywhere and read. She read to me and I read to her. I was good at reading – you have to be if you