Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [11]
For the people I knew, books were few and stories were everywhere, and how you tell ’em was everything. Even an exchange on a bus had to have a narrative.
‘They’ve no money so they’re having their honeymoon in Morecambe.’
‘That’s a shame – there’s nowt to do in Morecambe once you’ve had a swim.’
‘I feel sorry for ’em.’
‘Aye, but it’s only a week’s honeymoon – I know a woman who spent all her married life in Morecambe.’
Ask not for whom the bell tolls …
*
My mother told stories – of their life in the war and how she’d played the accordion in the air-raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can’t stand the accordion …
About her life sewing parachutes – all the girls stole the silk for clothes.
About her life to come, when she’d have a mansion and no neighbours. All she ever wanted was for everyone to go away. And when I did she never forgave me.
She loved miracle stories, probably because her life was as far away from a miracle as Jupiter is from the Earth. She believed in miracles, even though she never got one – well, maybe she did get one, but that was me, and she didn’t know that miracles often come in disguise.
I was a miracle in that I could have taken her out of her life and into a life she would have liked a lot. It never happened, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything – the miracle – is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.
The miracle stories she loved were Bible ones, like the Five Loaves and Two Fishes, probably because we never had quite enough to eat, and ones from the front line of Jesus in the World.
I particularly liked the Hallelujah Giant – eight feet tall, shrunk to six feet three through the prayers of the faithful.
And there were the stories about bags of coal appearing from nowhere, and an extra pound in your purse when you needed it most.
She didn’t like stories about being raised from the dead. She always said that if she died we weren’t to pray to bring her back.
Her funeral money was sewn into the curtains – at least it was until I stole it. When I unpicked the hem, there was note in her handwriting – she was so proud of her handwriting – it said: ‘Don’t cry Jack and Jeanette. You know where I am.’
I did cry. Why is the measure of love loss?
4
The Trouble With A Book …
THERE WERE SIX books in our house.
One was the Bible and two were commentaries on the Bible. My mother was a pamphleteer by temperament and she knew that sedition and controversy are fired by printed matter. Ours was not a secular house, and my mother was determined that I should have no secular influences.
I asked my mother why we couldn’t have books and she said, ‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late.’
I thought to myself, ‘Too late for what?’
I began to read books in secret – there was no other way – and every time I opened the pages, I wondered if this time it would be too late; a final draught (draft) that would change me forever, like Alice’s bottle, like the tremendous potion in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, like the mysterious liquid that seals the fate of Tristan and Isolde.
In myths, in legends, in fairy stories, and in all the stories that borrow from these basics, both size and shape are approximate, and subject to change. This includes the size and shape of the heart, where the beloved can suddenly be despised, or where the loathed can become the loved. Look what happens in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Puck’s eyedrops turn Lysander from an opportunistic womaniser into a devoted husband. In Shakespeare’s use of the magic potion, it is not that the object of desire itself is altered – the women are who they are – rather that the man is forced to see them differently.