Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

start with the Bible . . . but I loved words from the beginning.

    She bought me all the Orlando the Marmalade Cat books by Kathleen Hale. He was so very orange and debonair.
    Those days were good. One day my father’s mother came to visit and was introduced to me as ‘your grandmother’.
    I said, ‘I’ve got one grandmother, I don’t want another one.’
    It really hurt her and my dad, and was more proof positive of my evil nature. But no one thought to see that in my small arithmetic two mothers had meant the first one gone forever. Why would two grandmothers not mean the same?
    I was so frightened of loss.
    When Grandma died I found her. I didn’t know she was dead. I just knew that she wasn’t reading the story or eating the jam and cream sandwiches.
    And then we packed our bags and left Grandad’s house with the three gardens and the steep wood behind.
    We moved back to Water Street. The two-up two-down.
    My mother’s depression started then, I think.
    During the sixteen years that I lived at home, my father was on shift work at the factory, or he was at church. That was his pattern.
    My mother was awake all night and depressed all day. That was her pattern.
    I was at school, at church, out in the hills, or reading in secret. That was my pattern.
    I learned secrecy early. To hide my heart. To conceal my thoughts. Once it had been decided that I was the Wrong Crib, everything I did supported my mother in that belief. She watched me for signs of possession.
    When I went deaf she didn’t take me to the doctor because she knew it was either Jesus stoppering up my ears to the things of the world in an attempt to reform my broken soul, or it was Satan whispering so loud that he had perforated my eardrums.
    It was very bad for me that my deafness happened at around the same time as I discovered my clitoris.
    Mrs W was nothing if not old-fashioned. She knew that masturbation made you blind, so it was not difficult to conclude that it made you deaf too.
    I thought this was unfair as a lot of people we knew had hearing aids and glasses.
    In the public library there was an entire large-print section. I noticed it was next to the individual study cubicles. Presumably one thing led to another.
    In any event, I did have to have my adenoids out, so it was neither Jesus nor Satan who had blocked my ears, leaving only my own base nature as the culprit.
    When my mother took me to the hospital and settled me in the high-sided bed on the children’s ward, I climbed straight out and ran after her.
    She was up ahead in her Crimplene coat, tall, massy, solitary, and I can still feel the polished lino skidding under my bare feet.
    Panic. I can feel it now. I must have thought she had taken me back to be adopted again.
    I remember that afternoon in hospital and being given the anaesthetic and starting to make up a story about a rabbit that had no fur. His mother gave him a jewelled coat to wear but a weasel stole it and it was winter . . .
    I suppose I should finish that story one day . . .
    It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.
    After the rabbit and adenoids episode I was sent to school a year late. This was a worry because my mother called it the Breeding Ground – and when I asked her what exactly a Breeding Ground was, she said it was like the sink would be if she didn’t put bleach down it.
    She told me not to mix with the other children, who presumably had survived the bleach – anyway they were all very pale.
    I could read and write and add up and that was all that happened at school. In spite of my competence I was given bad reports in the way that bad children are given bad reports. I had accepted the bad label. It was better to have some identity than none at all.
    Most of the time I drew pictures of Hell which I took home for my mother to admire. There is a very nice technique for Hell: colour a piece of paper with lots of bright rainbow colours in blocks then get a black wax crayon and scrub out all the colours. Then get a pin and etch into the paper. Where the black is scraped away the colours come through. Dramatic and effective. Especially for lost souls.
    *

    When I left the infant school in disgrace for burning down the play kitchen, the headmistress, who wore black tweed because she was in mourning for Scotland,