Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [33]
The only problem was that the doors were locked so it meant climbing over the wall again, returning with the pie and hoping you could get back over without squashing it. Onion and potato for me, meat and onion for Dad when he came home.
At the corner shop they always knew she had Disappeared.
‘She’ll be back tomorrow, will Connie. She always comes back.’
That was true. She always came back. I never asked her where she went and I still don’t know. I never eat egg custard either.
There were so many corner shops in Accrington. People opened them in their front rooms and lived upstairs. There were bread shops and pie shops and vegetable shops and shops that sold sweets in jars.
The best sweet shop was run by two ladies who may or may not have been lovers. One was quite young, but the older one wore a woollen balaclava all the time – not the full-face version, but a balaclava nonetheless. And she had a moustache. But a lot of women had moustaches in those days. I never met anybody who shaved anything, and it didn’t occur to me to shave anything myself until I turned up at Oxford looking like a werewolf.
But I suspect that my mother had seen The Killing of Sister George (1968), where Beryl Reid plays a bawling brassy butch dyke sadistically tormenting her younger blonde girlfriend called Childie. It is a magnificent and unsettling movie but not one likely to win Mrs W over to the cause of gay rights.
She loved going to the pictures, even though it was not allowed and even though she couldn’t afford it. Whenever we passed by the Odeon Cinema she looked carefully at the posters, and sometimes, when she went on one of her Disappearances, I think she was at the Odeon.
Whatever the truth of the story, there came a day when I was forbidden to go into the sweet shop. This was a blow because I always got extra jelly babies from them. When I pestered Mrs Winterson about it she said they dealt in unnatural passions. At the time I assumed this meant they put chemicals in their sweets.
My other favourite shops, also forbidden, were the selling-out shops, now called off-licences, where women in headscarves took string bags to buy bottles of stout.
Although they were forbidden, these were the places where Mrs W got her cigarettes, and quite often she sent me, saying, ‘Tell them they’re for your dad.’
All the booze bottles were returnable and carried a deposit in those days, and I soon worked out that the returns were kept in crates round the back and it was easy to pull a couple out and ‘return’ them again.
The selling-out shops were full of men and women who swore and talked about sex and betting on greyhounds, so all that plus free money and being forbidden made it very exciting.
When I think about it now I wonder why it was all right for me to go into the selling-out shops and buy cigarettes but all wrong for me to get extra sweets from a couple of women who were happy together, even if one of them wore a balaclava all the time.
I think Mrs Winterson was afraid of happiness. Jesus was supposed to make you happy but he didn’t, and if you were waiting for the Apocalypse that never came, you were bound to feel disappointed.
She thought that happy meant bad/wrong/sinful. Or plain stupid. Unhappy seemed to have virtue attached to it.
But there were exceptions. The Gospel Tent was an exception, and Royal Albert was an exception, and so was Christmas. She loved Christmas.
In Accrington there was always a huge tree outside the market hall, and the Salvation Army played carols there for most of December.
At Christmas time the bartering system was in full swing. We could offer Brussels spouts on stalks from our allotment, apples wrapped in newspaper to make sauce, and best of all the once-a-year cherry brandy made from the morello cherry tree in the yard, and steeped half a year in the back of a cupboard on the way to Narnia.
We swapped our goods for smoked eel, crunchy like grated glass, and for a pudding made in cloth – a pudding