Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Sisterhood
    Tuesday night – Bible Study
    Wednesday night – Prayer Meeting
    Thursday night – Brotherhood/Black and Decker
    Friday night – Youth Group
    Saturday night – Revival Meeting (away)
    Sunday – All day

    The Brothers’ Black and Decker nights were practical meetings to fix up the church building or to help one of the brothers at home. The Saturday-night revival meetings were really the highlight of the week because that usually meant a trip to another church, or, in the summer, a tent crusade.
    Our church had a giant tent and every summer we went up and down with the Glory Crusade. My mother and father had remade their marriage in a Glory Crusade tent on a piece of spare land under the Accrington viaduct.
    My mother loved the Glory Crusades. I don’t think she believed half of what she was supposed to believe, and she made up quite a lot of theology. But I think that the night in the tent crusade when she and Dad found the Lord stopped her walking away from home with a small suitcase and never coming back.
    And so every year when Mrs Winterson saw the tent in the field, and heard the harmonium playing ‘Abide With Me’, she used to grab my hand and say, ‘I can smell Jesus.’
    The smell of the canvas (it always rains up north in the summer), and the smell of soup cooking for afterwards, and the smell of damp paper printed with the hymns – that’s what Jesus smells like.
    If you want to save souls – and who doesn’t – then a tent seems to be the best kind of temporary structure. It is a metaphor for this provisional life of ours – without foundations and likely to blow over. It is a romance with the elements. The wind blows, the tent billows, who here feels lost and alone? Answer – all of us. The harmonium plays ‘What A Friend We Have in Jesus’.
    In a tent you feel a sympathy with the others even when you don’t know them. The fact of being in a tent together is a kind of bond, and when you see smiling faces and when you smell the soup, and the person next to you asks your name, then quite likely you will want to be saved. The smell of Jesus is a good one.
    The tent was like the war had been for all the people of my parents’ age. Not real life, but a time where ordinary rules didn’t apply. You could forget the bills and the bother. You had a common purpose.

    I can see them; Dad in his knitted cardigan and knitted tie standing at the flap shaking hands with people as they came in; Mother, halfway up the tent aisle, helping people to find a seat.
    And there’s me, giving out hymn sheets or leading the choruses – evangelical churches sing a lot of choruses – short sharp merry verses with rousing tunes – easy to memorise. Like ‘Cheer Up Ye Saints of God’.
    It is hard to understand the contradictions unless you have lived them; the camaraderie, the simple happiness, the kindness, the sharing, the pleasure of something to do every night in a town where there was nothing to do – then set this against the cruelty of dogma, the miserable rigidity of no drink, no fags, no sex (or if you were married, as little sex as possible), no going to the pictures (an exception was made for Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments ), no reading anything except devotional literature, no fancy clothes (not that we could afford them), no dancing (unless it was in church, and it was a kind of Irish jig of godly ecstasy), no pop music, no card games, no pubs – even for orange juice. TV was OK but not on Sundays. On Sundays you covered the set with a cloth.
    But I loved it in the school holidays when the Glory Crusades were on and you could get on your bike and cycle thirty or forty miles to wherever the tent was and somebody would give you a sausage or a pie, and then it was time for the meeting, and hours later everybody who had travelled got in their sleeping bags and went to sleep on the floor. Then we biked home again.

    Mrs Winterson came by coach on her own so that she could smoke.
    One day she brought Auntie Nellie with her. They both smoked but they had a pact not to tell anybody. Auntie Nellie had been a Methodist but she had changed her mind. Everybody called her Auntie Nellie even though she had no biological family. I think she was born called Auntie Nellie.
    She lived in a slum tenement of one-up one-down stone-built factory dwellings. The outside loo was shared with two other houses. It was very clean – outside loos were supposed to be very clean – and this