Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

of what to do. I would do whatever they wanted but only on the outside. On the inside I would build another self – one that they couldn’t see. Just like after the burning of the books.
    I got up. There was food. I ate it. My mother gave me aspirin.
    I said I was sorry. She said, ‘What’s bred in the bone comes out in the marrow.’
    ‘You mean my mother?’
    ‘She was going with men at sixteen.’
    ‘How do you know that?’
    She didn’t answer. She said, ‘You’re not leaving this house by day or night until you promise not to see that girl again.’
    I said, ‘I promise not to see that girl again.’
    That night I went round to Helen’s house. It was in darkness. I knocked on the door. No one answered. I waited and waited and after a while she came out from round the back. She was leaning on the whitewashed wall. She wouldn’t look at me.
    Did they hurt you? she said.
    Yes. Did they hurt you?
    No . . . I told them everything . . . What we did . . .
    That was ours not theirs.
    I had to tell them.
    Kiss me.
    I can’t.

    Kiss me.
    Don’t come again. Please don’t come again.
    I walked home the long way round so that I shouldn’t be seen by anyone, by chance, coming from Helen’s house. The chip shop was open and I had enough money. I bought a bag of chips and sat on a wall.
    So this is it – not Heathcliff, not Cathy, not Romeo and Juliet, not love laid end to end like a road across the world. I thought we could go anywhere. I thought we could be map and globe, route and compass. I thought we were each other’s world. I thought . . .
    We were not lovers, we were love.
    I said that to Mrs Winterson – not then, later. She understood. It was a terrible thing to say to her. That is why I said it.
    But that night there was only Accrington and the street lamps and the chips and the buses and the slow way home. The Accrington buses were painted red and blue and gold – the colours of the East Lancashire Regiment – the Accrington Pals, famous for being tiny and plucky and doomed – they were mowed down at the Battle of the Somme. The buses still had their mudguards painted black as a mark of respect.
    We have to remember. We mustn’t forget.
    Will you write to me?
    I don’t know you. I can’t know you. Please don’t come back.
    I don’t know what happened to Helen. She went away to study theology and married an ex-army man who was training to be a missionary. I met them once, later. She was smug and neurotic. He was sadistic and unattractive. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?
    After the exorcism I went into a kind of mute state of misery. I used to take my tent and sleep up by the allotment. I didn’t want to be near them. My father was unhappy. My mother was disordered. We were like refugees in our own life.

7
    Accrington

    I
LIVED ON A LONG stretchy street with a town at the bottom and a hill at the top.

The town lies at the foot of Hameldon Hill to the east and the Haslingden hills to the south, and from these hills three brooks descend westward, north-west and north to join near the old church, and as one stream flow west to the Hyndburn. The town grew up along the road from Clitheroe to Haslingden and the south, here called Whalley Road, Abbey Street and Manchester Road in succession.
    from A History of the County of Lancaster:
    Volume 6 , by William Farrer & J. Brownbill
    (eds), 1911

    The first mention of Accrington is in the Domesday Book, and it seems to be an oak-enclosed space. The soil is the heavy clay that oaks enjoy. The land was rough pasture – sheep not arable – but like the rest of Lancashire, Accrington made its money out of cotton.
    James Hargreaves, the Lancashire illiterate who invented the spinning jenny in 1764, was baptised and married in Accrington, though he came from Oswaldtwistle (pronounced Ozzle-twizzle). The spinning jenny was able to do the work of eight spinning wheels, and is really the start of the Lancashire looms and Lancashire’s grip on the world cotton trade.
    Oswaldtwistle was the next settlement along the road from Accrington and supposedly a place for imbeciles and morons. We called it Gobbin-Land. When I was growing up there was a dog-biscuit factory there, and the poor kids used to hang about outside waiting for sacks of oddments to eat. If you spit on a dog biscuit and dip it in icing sugar it tastes like a proper biscuit.
    At our girls’ grammar school we were constantly threatened with a future at the dog-biscuit factory in