Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

piano playing, and the sometime-revolver, and the relentless brooding mountain range of my mother, and the scary bedtimes – if Dad was on nights and she came to bed it meant all night with the light on reading about the End Time – and the Apocalypse itself never far away, well, home wasn’t really a place where you could relax.
    Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
    ‘Will it be tonight, Mum?’
    ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls.’
    Mrs Winterson did not have a soothing personality. Ask for reassurance and it would never come. I never asked her if she loved me. She loved me on those days when she was able to love. I really believe that is the best she could do.
    When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.

    I did not know that love could have continuity. I did not know that human love could be depended upon. Mrs Winterson’s god was the God of the Old Testament and it may be that modelling yourself on a deity who demands absolute love from his ‘children’ but thinks nothing of drowning them (Noah’s Ark), attempting to kill the ones who madden him (Moses), and letting Satan ruin the life of the most blameless of them all (Job), is bad for love.
    True, God reforms himself and improves thanks to his relationship with human beings, but Mrs Winterson was not an interactive type; she didn’t like human beings and she never did reform or improve. She was always striking me down, and then making a cake to put things right, and very often after a lockout we’d walk down to the fish and chip shop the next night and sit on the bench outside eating from the newspaper and watching people come and go.
    For most of my life I have behaved in much the same way because that is what I learned about love.
    Add to that my own wildness and intensity and love becomes pretty dangerous. I never did drugs, I did love – the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak than health. And I fought and hit out and tried to put it right the next day. And I went away without a word and didn’t care.
    Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.
    *

    Auntie Nellie made love into soup. She didn’t want thanks and she wasn’t ‘doing good’. She fed love on Tuesdays and Thursdays to all the children she could find, and even if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had knocked down the outside loo and ridden into the stone-floored kitchen, they would have been given soup.
    I went down to her tiny house sometimes but I never thought about what she was doing. Only later, much later, trying to relearn love, did I start to think about that simple continuity and what it meant. Maybe if I had had children I would have got there faster, but maybe I would have hurt my own kids the way I was hurt.
    It is never too late to learn to love.
    But it is frightening.
    At church we heard about love every day, and one day, after the prayer meeting, an older girl kissed me. It was my first moment of recognition and desire. I was fifteen.
    I fell in love – what else is there to do?
    We were like any pair of kids of the Romeo and Juliet age and kind – mooning about, meeting secretly, passing notes at school, talking about how we would run away and open a bookshop. We started sleeping together at her house, because her mother worked nights. Then one night she came to stay with me in Water Street, which was very unusual as Mrs Winterson hated visitors.
    But Helen came to stay and during the night we got into the same bed. We fell asleep. My mother came in with her flashlight. I remember waking up with the flashlight on our faces, the flashlight like a car headlamp passing across Helen’s face to my face. The flashlight playing down the narrow bed and out of the window like a signal.
    It was a signal. It was the signal at the end of the world.
    Mrs Winterson was an eschatologist. She believed in End Time, and she rehearsed it. Our emotional states at home were always close to the edge. Things were usually final. Things were