Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

testicles, my mother turned over the page and said, ‘Leave that to the Lord,’ but when she'd gone, I'd sneak a look. I was glad I didn't have testicles. They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.
    from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

    M
Y MOTHER WAS IN CHARGE of language. My father had never really learned to read — he could manage slowly, with his finger on the line, but he had left school at twelve and gone to work at the Liverpool docks. Before he was twelve, no one had bothered to read to him. His own father had been a drunk who often took his small son to the pub with him, left him outside, staggered out hours later and walked home, and forgot my dad, asleep in a doorway.
    Dad loved Mrs Winterson reading out loud — and I did too. She always stood up while we two sat down, and it was intimate and impressive all at the same time.
    She read the Bible every night for half an hour, starting at the beginning, and making her way through all sixty—six books of the Old and New Testaments. When she got to her favourite bit, the Book of Revelation, and the Apocalypse, and everyone being exploded and the Devil in the bottomless pit, she gave us all a week off to think about things. Then she started again, Genesis Chapter One. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth . . .
    It seemed to me to be a lot of work to make a whole planet, a whole universe, and blow it up, but that is one of the problems with the literal—minded versions of Christianity; why look after the planet when you know it is all going to end in pieces?
    My mother was a good reader, confident and dramatic. She read the Bible as though it had just been written — and perhaps it was like that for her. I got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time—bound. The words go on doing their work.
    Working—class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home, and as there was still a ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ or ‘tha’ in daily speech for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked ‘the quick and the dead’ — you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.
    In the 1960s many men — and they were men not women — attended evening classes at the Working Men's Institutes or the Mechanics’ Institute — another progressive initiative coming out of Manchester. The idea of ‘bettering’ yourself was not seen as elitist then, neither was it assumed that all values are relative, nor that all culture is more or less identical — whether Hammer Horror or Shakespeare.
    Those evening classes were big on Shakespeare —and none of the men ever complained that the language was difficult. Why not? It wasn't difficult — it was the language of the 1611 Bible; the King James Version appeared in the same year as the first advertised performance of The Tempest . Shakespeare wrote The Winter's Tale that year.
    It was a useful continuity, destroyed by the well—meaning, well—educated types who didn't think of the consequences for the wider culture to have modern Bibles with the language stripped out. The consequence was that uneducated men and women, men like my father, and kids like me in ordinary schools, had no more easy everyday connection to four hundred years of the English language.
    A lot of older people I knew, my parents’ generation, quoted Shakespeare and the Bible and sometimes the metaphysical poets like John Donne, without knowing the source, or misquoting and mixing.
    My mother, being apocalyptic by nature, liked to greet any news of either calamity or good fortune with the line ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls . . .’ This was delivered in a suitably sepulchral tone. As evangelical churches don't have any bells, I never understood, even, that it was about death, and certainly not till I got to Oxford did I find it was a misquote from a prose passage of John Donne, the one that begins ‘No man is an island entire of itself...’ and that ends ‘never send to know for whom the bell tolls . . .’
    Once, my dad won the works raffle. He came home very pleased with himself. My mother asked him what was the prize?
    ‘Fifty pounds and two boxes of Wagon Wheels.’ (These were large and horrible chocolate—style biscuits with a wagon and a cowboy on the wrapper.)
    My mother did not reply, so my dad