Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [32]
If you fought your way through the Victorian fringed standard lamps and orphaned patchwork quilts, if you crawled under walnut sideboards with their doors off and half-chopped church pews, if you could flatten yourself past the hot dry airless tombs of bedding still tubercular, and sheets hanging like ghosts – the lost linen of lines of the unemployed selling everything and sleeping in sacks – all of that sweated in misery, then, if you could press past and beyond the children’s tricycles left with one wheel and the hobby horses without manes and the punctured leather footballs with their dirty criss-cross leather laces, then you came to the books.
ChatterBox Annual, 1923. The Gollywog News, 1915. Empire for Boys, 1911. Empire for Girls … The Astral Plane, 1913. How To Keep A Cow. How To Keep A Pig. How To Keep House.
I loved those – life was so simple – you decided what you wanted to keep – livestock, homestead, wife, bees – and the books told you how to do it. It made for confidence …
And in the midst of those things, like the burning bush, were complete sets of Dickens, the Brontës, Sir Walter Scott. They were cheap to buy and I bought them – sloping into the warren of storerooms after work, knowing he’d stay open playing his ancient opera records on one of those radiograms with Bakelite knobs and an arm that moved all on its own to touch down on the black spinning surface of the vinyl.
What is life to me without thee?
What is left if thou art dead?
What is life; life without thee?
What is life without my love?
Eurydice! Eurydice!
It was Kathleen Ferrier singing – the contralto born in Blackburn, five miles from Accrington. The telephonist who had won a singing competition and become as famous as Maria Callas.
Mrs Winterson had heard Kathleen Ferrier sing at Blackburn Town Hall, and she liked to play Kathleen Ferrier songs on the piano. She often sang in her own style that famous aria from Gluck’s Orfeo – ‘What is life to me without thee?’.
We had no time for death. The war plus the Apocalypse plus eternal life made death ridiculous. Death/life. What did it matter as long as you had your soul?
‘How many men did you kill, Dad?’
‘I don’t recall. Twenty. I killed six with my bayonet. They gave the bullets to the officers – not to us – they said, “We’ve no bullets, strap on your bayonets.”’
The D-Day landings. My dad survived. None of his friends did.
And in the war before, the First World War, Lord Kitchener had decided that men who were friends made better soldiers. Accrington managed to send 720 men – the Accrington Pals – to Serre in France. They trained on the hill at the top of my street and they set off to be heroes. On 1 July 1916 the Battle of the Somme pushed them forward in steady lines that did not waver as the German machine guns took them down. 586 of them were killed or wounded.
In the rag-and-bone shop we sat by the radiogram. The man gave me a poem to read about a dead soldier. He said it was by Wilfred Owen, a young poet killed in 1918. I know the beginning now but I didn’t then … but I couldn’t forget the end …
And in his eyes / The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak / In different skies.
I was often out at night – walking home or in lockout on the doorstep – so I spent a lot of time looking at the stars and wondering if they looked the same somewhere that wasn’t Accrington.
My mother’s eyes were like cold stars. She belonged in a different sky.
Sometimes, when she hadn’t been to sleep at all, she’d be there in the morning waiting for the corner shop to open and she’d make an egg custard. Egg-custard mornings made me nervous. When I came home from school nobody would be there – Dad would be at work and she had done a Disappearance. So I used to go round to the back alley and climb over the wall and see if she had left the back door open. Usually she did do that if it was a Disappearance, and