Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

psychic place than the physical place.

    I slept in the shelters on the bowling green between about 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. and woke freezing and stiff to the cloud-broken light of October. I went down to the market and bought fried eggs and strong tea, and then took my few things to college with me.
    The next few days were difficult. Janey's father had decided that he really didn't like me – I had that effect on my friends’ parents – and so I couldn't sleep in the caravan. Instead, I slept in the beaten-up old Mini that I was learning to drive.
    It was a very good Mini, and it belonged to a crazy boy at church whose parents were elderly, not religious, but doting. He let me use it because they wanted him to have his own car and he was terrified of driving. Between us we drove it over to Janey's house and parked it round the corner.
    The only way to sleep in a car is to have a plan. Mine was to sit in the front to read and eat and to lie down in the back to sleep. That way I felt like I was in control. I kept my stuff in the boot, and after a few days I decided to start driving the Mini around town, even though I didn't have a licence.
    I was working on the market packing up jumpers three evenings a week and on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. I worked on a fruit and veg stall, so I had money for food, petrol and the launderette.
    Every Saturday Janey and I went to the pictures, ate fish and chips, and made love in the back of the Mini. Then she went home and I went to sleep reading Nabokov by flashlight. I was not happy about reaching N.
    I couldn't understand why a man should find the mature female body so disgusting. The best thing about taking my showers at the public baths was being able to look at women. I found them beautiful, all of them. And that in itself was a rebuke to my mother who only understood bodies as sinful and ugly.
    Looking at women was not really sexual for me. I loved Janey and she was sexual, but looking at women was a way of looking at myself and, I suppose, a way of loving myself. I don't know how it would have been if I had wanted boys, but I didn't. I liked some of them but I didn't desire any of them. Not then. Not yet.
    One day, when I got to my sixth-form college, and we were reading Wilfred Owen and Middlemarch for the exam, I complained about Nabokov. I found Lolita upsetting. This was the first time that literature felt like a betrayal. I had asked the librarian – usually reliable – and she said that she disliked Nabokov too, and that many women felt that way but it was better not to say so in mixed company.
    Men will call you provincial, she said, and I asked what that meant, and she explained that it meant someone who came from the provinces. I asked her if Accrington was the provinces, but she said, no, it was beyond the provinces.
    So I decided to ask my teachers.
    I had two English teachers. The main one was a sexy wildman who eventually married one of our classmates when she managed to turn eighteen. He said that Nabokov was truly great and that one day I would understand that. ‘He hates women,’ I said, not realising that this was the beginning of my feminism.

    ‘He hates what women become,’ said the wildman. ‘That's different. He loves women until they become what they become.’
    And then we had an argument about Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch , and the revolting Rosamund, whom all the men prefer, presumably because she hasn't become what women become . . .
    The argument led nowhere and I went trampo-lining with a couple of girls who weren't worried about Dorothea Brook or Lolita. They just liked trampolining.
    We were making so much noise on our trampoline that we disturbed the head of English, Mrs Ratlow.
    Mrs Ratlow was a middle-aged lady, round-shaped like a fluffy cat. She had fluffy hair and purple eye make-up. She wore red polyester suits and green frilly blouses. She was vain and frightening and ridiculous all at once, and we were either laughing at her or hiding from her. But she loved literature. Whenever she said ‘Shakespeare’, she bowed her head, and she had actually taken the coach to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1970 to see Peter Brook's legendary white-box production of A Midsummer Night's Dream . She was a kind of Miss Jean Brodie I suppose, though I didn't suppose because I hadn't got as far as S, and when I did get there, there was no Muriel Spark. Too modern for English Literature in Prose A–Z.
    But there was Mrs Ratlow – widowed with two