Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

at the factory gates.

    I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class. I wanted to work, but not like him. I didn't want to disappear. I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape — but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community — to society?
    As Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, in the spirit of her friend Ronald Reagan, celebrating the Me decade of the 1980s, ‘There is no such thing as society . . .’
    But I didn't care about any of that when I was growing up — and I didn't understand it either.
    I just wanted to get out.
    My birth mother, they told me, was a little red thing from out of the Lancashire looms, who at seventeen gave birth to me, easy as a cat.
    She came from the village of Blakely where QueenVictoria had her wedding dress made, though by the time my mother was born and I was born, Blakely was a village no longer. The country forced into the city — that is the story of industrialisation, and it has a despair in it, and an excitement in it, and a brutality in it, and poetry in it, and all of those things are in me.
    When I was born the looms had gone but not the long low terraces of houses sometimes stone sometimes brick under shallow—pitched roofs of slate tiles. With slate roof tiles your pitch can be as shallow as 33 degrees — with stone tiles you must allow 45 degrees or even 54. The look of a place was all to do with the materials to hand. Steeper roofs of stone tiles coax the water to run slower as it bumps over the rises and indentations of the stone. Slate is fast and fiat, and if slate roofs are too steep, the water waterfalls straight over the gutters. The flow is slowed by the pitch.
    That typical fiat grey unlovely look of the northern industrial roofscape is no—nonsense efficient, like the industry the houses were built to support. You get on with it, you work hard, you don't try for beauty or dreamin ou don't build for the vie hick flagstone floors, small mean rooms, dismal backyards.
    If you do climb to the top of the house, all there is are the squat stacks of the shared chimneys, smoking coal into the haze that somewhere hides the sky.
    But ...
    The Lancashire Pennines are the dreaming place. Low, thick—chested, massy, hard, the ridge of hills is always visible, like a rough watcher who loves something he can't defend, but stays anyway, hunched over the ugliness human beings make. Stays scarred and battered but stays.
    If you drive along the M62 from Manchester towards Accrington where I was brought up, you will see the Pennines, shocking in their suddenness and their silence. This is a landscape of few words, taciturn, reluctant. It is not an easy beauty.
    But it is beautiful.
    Sometime, between six weeks and six months old, I got picked up from Manchester and taken to Accrington. It was all over for me and the woman whose baby I was.
    She was gone. I was gone.
    I was adopted.
    21 January 1960 is the date when John William Winterson, Labourer, and Constance Winterson, Clerk, got the baby they thought they wanted and took it home to 200 Water Street, Accrington, Lancashire.
    They had bought the house for £200 in 1947.
    1947, the coldest British winter of the twentieth century, snow so high it reached the top of the upright piano as they pushed it in through the door.
    1947, and the war ended, and my dad out of the army, doing his best, trying to make a living, and his wife throwing her wedding ring in the gutter and refusing all sexual relations.
    I don't know, and never will, whether she couldn't have children or whether she just wouldn't put herself through the necessaries.
    I know they both drank a bit and they both smoked before they found Jesus. And I don't think my mother was depressed in those days. After the tent crusade, where they became Pentecostal evangelical Christians, they both gave up drink — except for cherry brandy at New Year — and my father traded his Woodbines for Polo mints. My mother carried on smoking because she said it kept her weight down. Her smoking had to be a secret though, and she kept an air freshener she claimed was fly spray in her handbag.
    No one seemed to think it was unusual to keep fly spray in your handbag.
    She was convinced that God would find her a child, and I suppose that if God is providing the