Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

baby, having sex can be crossed off the list. I don't know how Dad felt about this. Mrs Winterson always said, ‘He's not like other men . . .’
    Every Friday he gave her his pay packet and she gave him back enough change for three packets of Polo mints.
    She said, ‘They're his only pleasure . . .’
    Poor Dad.
    When he got married again at seventy—two, his new wife Lillian, who was ten years younger and a good—time girl, told me it was like sleeping with a red—hot poker.
    Until I was two years old, I screamed. This was evidence in plain sight that I was possessed by the Devil. Child psychology hadn't reached Accrington, and in spite of important work by Winnicott, Bowlby and Balint on attachment, and the trauma of early separation from the love object that is the mother, a screaming baby wasn't a broken—hearted baby — she was a Devil baby.
    That gave me a strange power as well as all the vulnerabilities. I think my new parents were frightened of me.
    Babies are frightening — raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body. My new mother had a lot of problems with the body — her own, my dad's, their bodies together, and mine. She had muffled her own body in flesh and clothes, suppressed its appetites with a fearful mix of nicotine and Jesus, dosed it with purgatives that made her vomit, submitted it to doctors, who administered enemas and pelvic rings, subdued its desires for ordinary touch and comfort, and suddenly, not out of her own body, and with no preparation, she had a thing that was all body.
    A burping, spraying, sprawling faecal thing blasting the house with rude life.
    She was thirty—seven when I arrived, and my dad was forty. That is pretty normal these days, but it wasn't normal in the 1960s when people married early and started their families in their twenties. She and my father had already been married for fifteen years.
    They had an old—fashioned marriage in that my father never cooked, and when I arrived, my mother never worked outside the home. This was very bad for her, and turned her inward—looking nature into walled—in depression. There were many fights, and about many things, but the battle between us was really the battle between happiness and unhappiness.
    I was very often full of rage and despair. I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life. When I was upset I went roaming into the Pennines — all day on a jam sandwich and a bottle of milk. When I was locked outside, or the other favourite, locked in the coal—hole, I made up stories and forgot about the cold and the dark. I know these are ways of surviving, but maybe a refusal, any refusal, to be broken lets in enough light and air to keep believing in the world — the dream of escape.
    I found some papers of mine recently, with the usual teenage poetic dross, but also a line I unconsciously used later in Oranges — ’What I want does exist if I dare to find it . . .’
    Yes, it's a young person's melodrama, but that attitude seems to have had a protective function.

    I liked best the stories about buried treasure and lost children and locked—up princesses. That the treasure is found, the children returned and the princesses freed, seemed hopeful to me.
    And the Bible told me that even if nobody loved me on earth, there was God in heaven who loved me like I was the only one who had ever mattered.
    I believed that. It helped me.
    My mother, Mrs Winterson, didn't love life. She didn't believe that anything would make life better. She once told me that the universe is a cosmic dustbin — and after I had thought about this for a bit, I asked her if the lid was on or off.
    ‘On,’ she said. ‘Nobody escapes.’
    The only escape was Armageddon — the last battle when heaven and earth will be rolled up like a scroll, and the saved get to live in eternity with Jesus.
    She still had her War Cupboard. Every week she put another tin in there — some of the tins had been in there since 1947 — and I think that when the last battle started we were meant to live under the stairs with the shoe polish and eat our way through the tins. My earlier successes with the corned beef gave me no cause for further alarm. We would eat our rations and wait for Jesus.
    I wondered if we would be personally liberated by Jesus himself, but Mrs Winterson thought not. ‘He'll send an angel.’
    So that would be it — an angel under the stairs.
    I wondered where the wings would fit, but Mrs Winterson said