Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

but not one likely to win Mrs W over to the cause of gay rights.
    She loved going to the pictures, even though it was not allowed and even though she couldn't afford it. Whenever we passed by the Odeon Cinema she looked carefully at the posters, and sometimes, when she went on one of her Disappearances, I think she was at the Odeon.
    Whatever the truth of the story, there came a day when I was forbidden to go into the sweet shop. This was a blow because I always got extra jelly babies from them. When I pestered Mrs Winterson about it she said they dealt in unnatural passions. At the time I assumed this meant they put chemicals in their sweets.
    My other favourite shops, also forbidden, were the selling-out shops, now called off-licences, where women in headscarves took string bags to buy bottles of stout.
    Although they were forbidden, these were the places where Mrs W got her cigarettes, and quite often she sent me, saying, ‘Tell them they're for your dad.’
    All the booze bottles were returnable and carried a deposit in those days, and I soon worked out that the returns were kept in crates round the back and it was easy to pull a couple out and ‘return’ them again.
    The selling-out shops were full of men and women who swore and talked about sex and betting on greyhounds, so all that plus free money and being forbidden made it very exciting.

    When I think about it now I wonder why it was all right for me to go into the selling-out shops and buy cigarettes but all wrong for me to get extra sweets from a couple of women who were happy together, even if one of them wore a balaclava all the time.
    I think Mrs Winterson was afraid of happiness. Jesus was supposed to make you happy but he didn't, and if you were waiting for the Apocalypse that never came, you were bound to feel disappointed.
    She thought that happy meant bad/wrong/sinful. Or plain stupid. Unhappy seemed to have virtue attached to it.
    But there were exceptions. The Gospel Tent was an exception, and Royal Albert was an exception, and so was Christmas. She loved Christmas.
    In Accrington there was always a huge tree outside the market hall, and the Salvation Army played carols there for most of December.
    At Christmas time the bartering system was in full swing. We could offer Brussels spouts on stalks from our allotment, apples wrapped in newspaper to make sauce, and best of all the once-a-year cherry brandy made from the morello cherry tree in the yard, and steeped half a year in the back of a cupboard on the way to Narnia.
    We swapped our goods for smoked eel, crunchy like grated glass, and for a pudding made in cloth – a pudding made the proper way, and hard like a cannonball and speckled with fruit like a giant bird's egg. It stayed in slices when you cut it, and we poured the cherry brandy over the top and set it on fire, my dad turning the light out while my mother carried it into the parlour.

    The flames lit up her face. The coal fire lit up me and my dad. We were happy.
    On 21 December every year my mother went out in her hat and coat – she wouldn't say where – while my father and I strung paperchains, made by me, from the corners of the parlour cornice to the centre light. My mother returned, in what seemed to be a hailstorm, though maybe that was her personal weather. She carried a goose half in, half out of her bag, its slack head hung sideways like a dream nobody could remember. She gave it to me, goose and dream, and I plucked the feathers into a bucket. We kept the feathers to restuff whatever needed restuffing and we saved the thick goose fat we drained from the bird for roasting potatoes through the winter. Apart from Mrs W who had a thyroid problem everybody we knew was as thin as a ferret. We needed goose fat.
    Christmas was the one time of the year when my mother went out into the world looking as though the world was more than a Vale of Tears.
    She got dressed up and came to my school concerts – and that meant wearing her mother's fur coat and a half-hat made of black feathers. Hat and coat were circa 1940 and this was in the 1970s, but she cut a dash, and she always had good posture, and as the whole of the North was in the wrong decade until the 1980s, nobody noticed.
    The concerts were extremely ambitious; the first half was something daunting like the Fauré Requiem or the St Anthony Chorale , and it required the full power of the choir and orchestra and usually a soloist or two from the Halle Orchestra in