Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

homestead, wife, bees – and the books told you how to do it. It made for confidence . . .
    And in the midst of those things, like the burning bush, were complete sets of Dickens, the Brontës, Sir Walter Scott. They were cheap to buy and I bought them – sloping into the warren of storerooms after work, knowing he'd stay open playing his ancient opera records on one of those radiograms with Bakelite knobs and an arm that moved all on its own to touch down on the black spinning surface of the vinyl.

What is life to me without thee?
    What is left if thou art dead?
    What is life; life without thee?
    What is life without my love?
    Eurydice! Eurydice!

    It was Kathleen Ferrier singing – the contralto born in Blackburn, five miles from Accrington. The telephonist who had won a singing competition and become as famous as Maria Callas.
    Mrs Winterson had heard Kathleen Ferrier sing at Blackburn Town Hall, and she liked to play Kathleen Ferrier songs on the piano. She often sang in her own style that famous aria from Gluck's Orfeo – ’What is life to me without thee?’.
    We had no time for death. The war plus the Apocalypse plus eternal life made death ridiculous. Death/life. What did it matter as long as you had your soul?
    ‘How many men did you kill, Dad?’
    ‘I don't recall. Twenty. I killed six with my bayonet. They gave the bullets to the officers – not to us – they said, “We've no bullets, strap on your bayonets.”’
    The D-Day landings. My dad survived. None of his friends did.
    And in the war before, the First World War, Lord Kitchener had decided that men who were friends made better soldiers. Accrington managed to send 720 men – the Accrington Pals – to Serre in France. They trained on the hill at the top of my street and they set off to be heroes. On 1 July 1916 the Battle of the Somme pushed them forward in steady lines that did not waver as the German machine guns took them down. 586 of them were killed or wounded.
    In the rag-and-bone shop we sat by the radiogram. The man gave me a poem to read about a dead soldier. He said it was by Wilfred Owen, a young poet killed in 1918. I know the beginning now but I didn't then . . . but I couldn't forget the end . . .
    And in his eyes/The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak/In different skies.
    I was often out at night – walking home or in lockout on the doorstep – so I spent a lot of time looking at the stars and wondering if they looked the same somewhere that wasn't Accrington.
    My mother's eyes were like cold stars. She belonged in a different sky.
    Sometimes, when she hadn't been to sleep at all, she'd be there in the morning waiting for the corner shop to open and she'd make an egg custard. Egg-custard mornings made me nervous. When I came home from school nobody would be there – Dad would be at work and she had done a Disappearance. So I used to go round to the back alley and climb over the wall and see if she had left the back door open. Usually she did do that if it was a Disappearance, and the egg custard would be there under a cloth and a bit of money to go to the shop and get a pie.
    The only problem was that the doors were locked so it meant climbing over the wall again, returning with the pie and hoping you could get back over without squashing it. Onion and potato for me, meat and onion for Dad when he came home.
    At the corner shop they always knew she had Disappeared.
    ‘She'll be back tomorrow, will Connie. She always comes back.’
    That was true. She always came back. I never asked her where she went and I still don't know. I never eat egg custard either.
    There were so many corner shops in Accrington. People opened them in their front rooms and lived upstairs. There were bread shops and pie shops and vegetable shops and shops that sold sweets in jars.
    The best sweet shop was run by two ladies who may or may not have been lovers. One was quite young, but the older one wore a woollen balaclava all the time – not the full-face version, but a balaclava nonetheless. And she had a moustache. But a lot of women had moustaches in those days. I never met anybody who shaved anything, and it didn't occur to me to shave anything myself until I turned up at Oxford looking like a werewolf.
    But I suspect that my mother had seen The Killing of Sister George (1968), where Beryl Reid plays a bawling brassy butch dyke sadistically tormenting her younger blonde girlfriend called Childie. It is a magnificent and unsettling movie