Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

told my mother that I was domineering and aggressive.
    I was. I beat up the other kids, boys and girls alike, and when I couldn’t understand what was being said to me in a lesson I just left the classroom and bit the teachers if they tried to make me come back.
    I realise my behaviour wasn’t ideal but my mother believed I was demon possessed and the headmistress was in mourning for Scotland. It was hard to be normal.
    I got myself up for school every day. My mother left me a bowl of cornflakes and the milk in a flask. We had no fridge and most of the year we had no need of one – the house was cold, the North was cold, and when we bought food we ate it.
    Mrs Winterson had terrible stories about fridges – they gave off gas and made you dizzy, mice got caught in the motor, rats would be attracted by the dead mice caught in the motor . . . children got trapped inside and couldn’t escape – she knew of a family whose youngest child had climbed into the fridge to play hide-and-seek, and frozen to death. They had to defrost the fridge to prise him out. After that the council took away the other children. I wondered why they didn’t just take away the fridge.
    Every morning when I came downstairs I blew on the fire to get it going and read my note – there was always a note. The note began with a general reminder about washing – HANDS, FACE, NECK AND EARS – and an exhortation from the Bible, such as Seek Ye the Lord . Or Watch and Pray .
    The exhortation was different every day. The body parts to be washed stayed the same.
    When I was seven we got a dog, and my job before school was to walk the dog round the block and feed her. So then the list was arranged as WASH, WALK, FEED, READ.
    At dinner time, as lunchtime was called in the North, I came home from school for the first few years, because junior school was only round the corner. By then, my mother was up and about, and we ate pie and peas and had a Bible reading.
    Later, when I was at the grammar school further away, I didn’t come home at dinner time, and so I didn’t have any dinner. My mother refused to be means-tested, and so I didn’t qualify for free school meals, but we had no money to buy the meals either. I usually took a couple of slices of white bread and a bit of cheese, just like that, in my bag.
    Nobody thought it unusual – and it wasn’t. There were plenty of kids who didn’t get fed properly.
    We did get fed properly in the evening because we had an allotment, and our vegetables were good. I liked growing vegetables – I still do, and there is a quiet pleasure in it for me. We had hens, so got eggs, but with meat affordable only twice a week, we didn’t get enough protein.
    Thursday nights were always boiled onions or boiled potatoes from the allotment. Dad got paid Fridays and by Thursday there was no money left. In winter, the gas and electricity meters ran out on Thursdays too, and so the onions and potatoes weren’t quite boiled enough and we ate them in the dark of the paraffin lamp.
    Everybody in the street was the same. Blackout Thursdays were common.
    We had no car, no phone, and no central heating. In winter the windows froze on the inside.
    We were usually cold but I don’t remember being upset by it. My dad had had no socks when he was a little boy, so our feet, if not the rest of us, had made progress.
    We had a coal fire that I learned to lay and to light when I was five, as soon as we moved back from Grandad’s centrally heated house to our own draughty and damp terrace. My dad taught me how to make a fire and I was so proud of myself and my burnt fingers and singed hair.
    It was my job to make twists of paper and soak them in paraffin and keep them stacked in a sealed biscuit tin. Dad collected kindling and axed it up. When the coalman came he gave my mother free bags of the stuff they called slack because he had wanted to marry her. She viewed this as an insult to her moral character but she kept the slack.
    When my mother went to bed – around six in the morning – she spread the thin dusty tarry slack over the fire to keep it low and hot, and left coal for me to get the fire going again at 7.30 a.m. She sat up all night listening to secret broadcasts of the Gospel to Soviet Russia behind the Iron Curtain. She baked, she sewed, she knitted, she mended, and she read the Bible.
    She was such a solitary woman. A solitary woman who longed for one person to know her. I think I do know her now, but it is too