Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

three, until I was about five, we had to live with my grandad, so that Mrs Winterson could nurse her mother, who was dying of throat cancer.
    Although Mrs W was deeply religious, she believed in spirits, and it made her very angry that Grandad's girlfriend, as well as being an ageing barmaid with dyed blonde hair, was a medium who held seances in our very own front room.
    After the seances my mother complained that the house was full of men in uniform from the war. When I went into the kitchen to get at the corned beef sandwiches I was told not to eat until the Dead had gone. This could take several hours, which is hard when you are four.
    I took to wandering up and down the street asking for food. Mrs Winterson came after me and that was the first time I heard the dark story of the Devil and the crib . . .
    In the crib next to me had been a little boy called Paul. He was my ghostly brother because his sainted self was always invoked when I was naughty. Paul would never have dropped his new doll into the pond (we didn't go near the surreal possibilities of Paul having been given a doll in the first place). Paul would not have filled his poodle pyjama case with tomatoes so that he could perform a stomach operation with blood—like squish. Paul would not have hidden Grandad's gas mask (for some reason Grandad still had his wartime gas mask and I loved it). Paul would not have turned up at a nice birthday party, to which he had not been invited, wearing Grandad's gas mask.
    If they had taken Paul instead of me, it would have been different, better. I was supposed to be a pal . . . like she had been to her mother.
    And then her mother died and she shut herself up in her grief. I shut myself up in the larder because I had learned how to use the little key that opened the tins of corned beef.
    I have a memory — true or not true?
    The memory is surrounded by roses, which is odd because it is a violent and upsetting memory, but my grandad was a keen gardener and he particularly loved roses. I liked finding him, shirtsleeves rolled up, wearing a knitted waistcoat and spraying the blooms with water from a polished copper can with a piston pressure valve. He liked me, in an odd sort of way, and he disliked my mother, and she hated him — not in an angry way, but with a toxic submissive resentment.
    I am wearing my favourite outfit — a cowboy suit and a fringed hat. My small body is slung from side to side with cap—gun Colts.
    A woman comes into the garden and Grandad tells me to go inside and find my mother who is making her usual pile of sandwiches.
    I run in — Mrs Winterson takes off her apron and goes to answer the door.
    I am peeping from down the hallway. There is an argument between the two women, a terrible argument that I can't understand, and something fierce and frightening, like animal fear. Mrs Winterson slams the door and leans on it for a second. I creep out of my peeping place. She turns around. There I am in my cowboy outfit.
    ‘Was that my mum?’
    Mrs Winterson hits me and the blow knocks me back. Then she runs upstairs.
    I go out into the garden. Grandad is spraying the roses. He ignores me. There is no one there.

2
    My Advice To Anybody Is: Get Born

    I
WAS BORN IN MANCHESTER in 1959. It was a good place to be born.
    Manchester is in the south of the north of England.
    Its spirit has a contrariness in it — a south and north bound up together — at once untamed and unmetro—politan; at the same time, connected and worldly.
    Manchester was the world's first industrial city; its looms and mills transforming itself and the fortunes of Britain. Manchester had canals, easy access to the great port of Liverpool, and railways that carried thinkers and doers up and down to London. Its influence affected the whole world.
    Manchester was all mix. It was radical — Marx and Engels were here. It was repressive — the Peterloo Massacres and the Corn Laws. Manchester spun riches beyond anybody's wildest dreams, and wove despair and degradation into the human fabric. It was Utilitarian, in that everything was put to the test of ‘Does this work?’ It was Utopian — its Quakerism, its feminism, its anti—slavery movement, its socialism, its communism.
    The Manchester mix of alchemy and geography can't be separated. What it is, where it is ... long before the Romans had a fort here in AD 79, the Celts worshipped the river goddess of the Medlock. This was Mam—ceaster — and Mam is mother, is breast,