Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

of can – you will find that with a bit of clunking, you can now depress the clutch).
    Janey's family had a camp-site book and we looked up cheap camping at a golf club outside Oxford.
    It took us about nine hours to get there but we had our bacon and beans and we were happy.
    The next day I had an appointment to see the senior tutor and one of the English fellows – the other, fortunately for me, was away.
    I had the usual problem of not being able to speak at all and then babbling like . . . Under stress I am a cross between Billy Budd and the Donkey in Shrek .
    I spread my hands in despair and saw that the palms were covered in oil. The Imp had a leak.
    So there was nothing for it but to explain at Shrek-speed about the Hillman Imp, and the tent, and the market stall where I worked, and a little bit about the Apocalypse and Mrs Winterson, and English Literature in Prose A – Z . . .
    They already had a letter from Mrs Ratlow open on the desk. I don't know what she said, but Mrs Oliphant was mentioned.
    ‘I want to be a better writer than her.’
    ‘That shouldn't be too hard – though she did write a very good ghost story called –’
    ‘ The Open Door . I've read that. It's scary’
    For some reason Mrs Oliphant was on my side.

    The senior tutor explained that St Catherine's was a progressive college, only founded in 1962, committed to bringing in pupils from state schools, and one of the few mixed colleges.
    ‘Benazir Bhutto is here. Margaret Thatcher studied Chemistry at Somerville, you know.’
    I didn't know and I didn't know who Benazir Bhutto was either.
    ‘Would you like there to be a woman prime minister?’
    Yes . . . In Accrington women couldn't be anything except wives or teachers or hairdressers or secretaries or do shop work. ‘Well, they can be librarians, and I thought of doing that, but I want to write my own books.’
    ‘What kind of books?’
    ‘I don't know. I write all the time.’
    ‘Most young people do.’
    ‘Not in Accrington they don't.’
    There was a pause. Then the English fellow asked me if I thought that women could be great writers. I was baffled by the question. It had never occurred to me.
    ‘It's true they mostly come at the beginning of the alphabet – Austen, Brontës, Eliot . . .’
    ‘We study those writers of course. Virginia Woolf is not on the syllabus though you will find her interesting – but compared to James Joyce . . .’
    It was a reasonable introduction to the prejudices and pleasures of an Oxford degree course.
    I left St Catherine's and walked down Holywell Street to Blackwell's bookshop. I had never seen a shop with five floors of books. I felt dizzy, like too much oxygen all at once. And I thought about women. All these books, and how long had it taken for women to be able to write their share, and why were there still so few women poets and novelists, and even fewer who were considered to be important?
    I was so excited, so hopeful, and I was troubled too, by what had been said to me. As a woman would I be an onlooker and not a contributor? Could I study what I could never hope to achieve? Achieve it or not, I had to try.
    And later, when I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you were good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics.
    Whatever happened that day worked out for me; I was given a place, deferred for a year.
    And that took me straight to Margaret Thatcher and the 1979 election. Thatcher had the vigour and the arguments and she knew the price of a loaf of bread. She was a woman – and that made me feel that I too could succeed. If a grocer's daughter could be prime minister, then a girl like me could write a book that would be on the shelves of English Literature in Prose A–Z.
    I voted for her.
    It is commonplace now to say that Thatcher changed two political parties: her own, and the left-wing Labour opposition. It is less often remembered that Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK broke forever the post-war consensus – and that consensus had lasted for over thirty years.
    Spin back to 1945, and whether you were on the Left or the Right in Britain or Western Europe, rebuilding societies after the war could not happen using the outdated and discredited neo-liberal economics of the free market – unregulated