Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [21]
I just don’t think I know how to do that.
So it is better to accept my not quite adjusted need for distance and privacy.
Mrs Winterson never respected my privacy. She ransacked my possessions, read my diaries, my notebooks, my stories, my letters. I never felt safe in the house and when she made me leave it I felt betrayed. The horrible sick feeling that I had never belonged and never would belong is assuaged now by the fact that my homes are mine and I can come and go as I please.
I never had a key to the house in Water Street, and so entry depended on being let in – or not. I don’t know why I am still so fond of doorsteps – it seems perverse, given that I spent so much time sitting on one, but the two parts of home that mattered to me in Accrington are the parts I could least do without now.
They are the threshold and the hearth.
My friends joke that I won’t shut the door unless it is officially bedtime or actually snowing into the kitchen. The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is to open the back door. The next thing I do, in winter, is to light the fire.
All those hours spent sitting on my bum on the doorstep have given me a feeling for liminal space. I love the way cats like to be half in half out, the wild and the tame, and I too am the wild and the tame. I am domestic, but only if the door is open.
And I guess that is the key – no one is ever going to lock me in or lock me out again. My door is open and I am the one who opens it.
The threshold and the hearth are mythic spaces. Each has sacred and ceremonial aspects in the history of our myth. To cross the threshold is to enter another world – whether the one on the inside or the one on the outside – and we can never be really sure what is on the other side of the door until we open it.
Everyone has dreams of familiar doors and unknown rooms. Narnia is through a door in a wardrobe. In the story of Bluebeard there is one door that must not be opened. A vampire cannot cross a threshold strewn with garlic. Open the door into the tiny Tardis, and inside is a vast and changing space.
The tradition of carrying the bride into her new house is a rite of passage; one world has been left behind, another entered. When we leave the parental home, even now, we do much more than go out of the house with a suitcase.
Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.
The crossing in and out, the different worlds, the significant spaces, are private coordinates that in my fiction I have tried to make paradigmatic.
Personal stories work for other people when those stories become both paradigms and parables. The intensity of a story – say the story in Oranges – releases into a bigger space than the one it occupied in time and place. The story crosses the threshold from my world into yours. We meet each other on the steps of the story.
Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.
There is warmth there too – a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm. I know that from the chilly nights on the doorstep.
Mrs Winterson lived in the same house on Water Street from 1947 until her death in 1990. Was it a sanctuary? I don’t think so. Was it where she wanted to be? No …
She hated the small and the mean, and yet that is all she had. I bought a few big houses myself along the way, simply because I was trying out something for her. In fact, my tastes are more modest – but you don’t know that until you have bought and sold for the ghost of your mother.
Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father … that’s how Oranges begins, and it ends with the young woman, let’s call her Jeanette, returning home to find things much the same – a new electronic organ to add