Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

one had a picture of the young Queen Elizabeth II in military uniform. Someone had graffitied GOD BLESS HER on the wall.
    Auntie Nellie shared the loo but she had her own outside tap that gave her cold water and inside there was a coal-burning iron range with a great big tin kettle on it, and a heavy flat iron. We supposed she still used the flat iron to press her clothes, and at night she put the flat iron in her bed to warm it up.
    She was unmarried, bow-legged, frizzy-haired, thin like someone who never has quite enough to eat, and she was never seen without her coat on.
    When the women came to lay her out they had to cut the buttons on her coat to get it off and they said it was more like corrugated iron than tweed.
    Then we found out that she wore woollen underwear, including a liberty bodice, woollen stockings, and a kind of patchwork petticoat made of bits and pieces – I think she sewed bits on and cut bits off over the years. There was a thick gent’s silk scarf round her neck, invisible under her coat, and that was quite a luxury that scarf and led to speculation – had she had a fancy man?
    If she had it must have been in the war. Her friend said every woman had had a fancy man in the war – married or not, that’s how it was.
    However it was, or had been, now she was wearing the scarf and the underwear and the coat and nothing else. No dress, no skirt, no blouse.
    We wondered if she had been too ill lately to get dressed, even though she had still been walking up and down to church and to the market. Nobody knew her age.
    It was the first time any of us had been upstairs.
    The small room was bare – a tiny window with newspaper tacked over it for warmth. A peg-rug on the floorboards – you make those yourself out of scraps of cotton and they have a rough-coated feel and they lie there like downcast dogs.
    There was an iron bedstead heaped with lumpy eiderdowns – the kind that were only ever stuffed with one duck.
    There was a chair with a dusty hat on it. There was a slop bucket for the night. There was a photograph on the wall of Auntie Nellie as a young woman wearing a black-and-white polka-dot dress.
    There was a cupboard and in the cupboard were two clean sets of darned underclothes and two clean pairs of thick woollen stockings. Hanging up and wrapped in brown paper was the polka-dot dress. It had sweat pads sewn into the armpits the way they used to do before deodorant. You just washed out the pads along with your stockings at night.

    We looked and we looked but there wasn’t anywhere to look. Auntie Nellie had kept her coat on because she had no clothes.
    The women washed her and they put her in the polka-dot dress. They showed me how to make a body look nice. It wasn’t my first body – I had sat eating jam sandwiches with Dead Grandma, and in the North in the 1960s coffins were kept open at home for three days and nobody minded.
    But touching a dead body is odd – I still find it odd – the skin changes so quickly and everything shrinks. Yet I would not give up the body I love to a stranger to wash and dress. It is the last thing you can do for someone, and the last thing you can do together – both your bodies, as it used to be. No, it’s not for a stranger . . .
    Auntie Nellie cannot have had much money. Twice a week she had all the neighbourhood children she could squeeze into her one room and she made onion soup or potato soup and all the children brought their own cup and she ladled it out off the stove.
    She taught them songs and she told them Bible stories and thirty or forty skinny hungry kids queued outside and sometimes brought things from their mothers – buns or toffees – and everybody shared. They all had nits. They all loved her and she loved them. She called her dank dark little house with its one window and black walls ‘Sunshine Corner’.
    It was my first lesson in love.
    I needed lessons in love. I still do because nothing could be simpler, nothing could be harder, than love.

    Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way. I didn’t have that, and I was a very nervous watchful child. I was a little thug too because nobody was going to beat me up or see me cry. I couldn’t relax at home, couldn’t disappear into a humming space where I could be alone in the presence of the other. What with the Departed Dead wandering round the kitchen, and mice masquerading as ectoplasm, and the sudden fits of