Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Gobbin-Land. This did not stop the poorer girls bringing dog biscuits to school. The problem was the telltale bone shape, and for a while the school had a policy of No Dog Biscuits.
    My mother was a snob and she didn’t like me mixing with dog-biscuit girls from Oswaldtwistle. Truthfully, she didn’t like me mixing with anyone, and always said, ‘We are called to be apart.’ That seemed to mean apart from everyone and everything, unless it was the Church. In a small northern town where everybody knows everybody’s business, being apart is a full-time job. But my mother needed an occupation.
    We went past Woolworths – ‘A Den of Vice.’ Past Marks and Spencer’s – ‘The Jews killed Christ.’ Past the funeral parlour and the pie shop – ‘They share an oven.’ Past the biscuit stall and its moon-faced owners – ‘Incest.’ Past the pet parlour – ‘Bestiality.’ Past the bank – ‘Usury.’ Past the Citizens Advice Bureau – ‘Communists.’ Past the day nursery – ‘Unmarried mothers.’ Past the hairdresser’s – ‘Vanity.’ Past the pawnbroker’s where my mother had once tried to pawn her leftover solid gold tooth, and on at last to a caff called the Palatine for beans on toast.
    My mother loved eating beans on toast at the Palatine. It was her luxury and she saved up so that we could do it on market day.
    Accrington Market was a big brash market, indoors and outdoors, with stalls stacked with dirty potatoes and fat cabbages. There were stalls selling household cleaners out of vats – no packaging, you took your own bottles for bleach and your own tubs for caustic soda. There was a stall that sold nothing but whelks and crabs and eels, and a stall that sold chocolate biscuits in paper bags.
    You could get a tattoo or buy a goldfish and you could have your hair trimmed for half the price of a salon. Stallholders shouted their bargains – ‘I won’t give you one, I won’t give you two, I’ll give you three for the price of one. What’s that, Missus? Seven for the price of two? How many children have you got? Seven? Does your husband know? What’s that? It’s all his fault. Lucky man. Here you are then and pray for me when I die . . .’
    And they demonstrated their goods – ‘This will SWE-EEP! This will VAC-UUM. This will clean up the top of the curtains and round the back of the oven . . . it’s all in the nozzles. What, Missus? You don’t like the look of my nozzle?’
    When the first supermarket opened in Accrington nobody went because the prices might be low but they were set. On the markets nothing was set; you haggled for a bargain. That was part of the pleasure, and the pleasure was in the everyday theatre. The stalls were their own shows. Even if you were so poor that you had to wait to buy your food at the very end of the day you could still have a good time down the market. There were people you knew and there was something to watch.
    I am not a fan of supermarkets and I hate shopping there, even for things I can’t get elsewhere, like cat food and bin bags. A big part of my dislike of them is the loss of vivid life. The dull apathy of existence now isn’t just boring jobs and boring TV; it is the loss of vivid life on the streets; the gossip, the encounters, the heaving messy noisy day that made room for everyone, money or not. And if you couldn’t afford to heat your house you could go into the market hall. Sooner or later somebody would buy you a cup of tea. That’s how it was.
    Mrs Winterson didn’t like to be seen bargain-hunting – she left that to my dad and took herself to the Palatine caff. She sat opposite me in the fugged-up window, smoking her cigarettes and thinking about my future.
    ‘When you grow up you’ll be a missionary.’
    ‘Where will I go?’
    ‘Away from Accrington.’
    I don’t know why she hated Accrington as much as she did but she did, and yet she didn’t leave. When I left it was as though I had relieved her and betrayed her all at once. She longed for me to be free and did everything she could to make sure it never happened.
    *

    Accrington is not famous for much. It has the world’s worst football team – Accrington Stanley – and a large collection of Tiffany glass donated by Joseph Briggs, an Accrington man who did manage to leave, and who made his name and fortune in New York, working for Tiffany.
    If bits of New York came to Accrington, then much bigger bits of Accrington went to New York. Among its oddities,