Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [10]
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 pressed on. ‘That’s good, Connie – are you glad?’
She said, ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls …’
So we didn’t.
She had other favourite lines. Our gas oven blew up. The repairman came out and said he didn’t like the look of it, which was unsurprising as the oven and the wall were black. Mrs Winterson replied, ‘It’s a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.’ That is a heavy load for a gas oven to bear.
She liked that phrase and it was more than once used towards me; when some well-wisher asked how I was, Mrs W looked down and sighed, ‘She’s a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.’
This was even worse for me than it had been for the gas oven. I was particularly worried about the ‘dead’ part, and wondered which buried and unfortunate relative I had so offended.
Later, I found the lines in Hamlet.
A general phrase, for her and others, when making an unfavourable comparison, was to say, ‘As a crab’s like an apple.’
That is the Fool in King Lear. Yet it has a northern ring to it, partly I think because a working-class tradition is an oral tradition, not a bookish one, but its richness of language comes from absorbing some of the classics in school – they all learned by rote – and by creatively using language to tell a good story. I think back and I realise that our stock of words was not small – and we loved images.
Until the eighties, visual culture, TV culture, mass culture, had not made much of an impact up north – there was still a strong local culture and a powerful dialect. I left in 1979, and it was not that much different from 1959.