Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [34]
The flames lit up her face. The coal fire lit up me and my dad. We were happy.
On 21 December every year my mother went out in her hat and coat – she wouldn’t say where – while my father and I strung paperchains, made by me, from the corners of the parlour cornice to the centre light. My mother returned, in what seemed to be a hailstorm, though maybe that was her personal weather. She carried a goose half in, half out of her bag, its slack head hung sideways like a dream nobody could remember. She gave it to me, goose and dream, and I plucked the feathers into a bucket. We kept the feathers to restuff whatever needed restuffing and we saved the thick goose fat we drained from the bird for roasting potatoes through the winter. Apart from Mrs W who had a thyroid problem everybody we knew was as thin as a ferret. We needed goose fat.
Christmas was the one time of the year when my mother went out into the world looking as though the world was more than a Vale of Tears.
She got dressed up and came to my school concerts – and that meant wearing her mother’s fur coat and a half-hat made of black feathers. Hat and coat were circa 1940 and this was in the 1970s, but she cut a dash, and she always had good posture, and as the whole of the North was in the wrong decade until the 1980s, nobody noticed.
The concerts were extremely ambitious; the first half was something daunting like the Fauré Requiem or the St Anthony Chorale, and it required the full power of the choir and orchestra and usually a soloist or two from the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester.
We had a music teacher who played the cello with the Halle, and she was one of those electrical trapped women of a particular generation who are half mad because they are trapped, and half genius because they are trapped. She wanted her girls to know about music – to sing it, to play it, and to make no compromises.
We were terrified of her. If she was playing the piano at school assembly, she would play Rachmaninov, her hair dark over the Steinway, her fingernails always red.
The school song at Accrington High School for Girls was ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, a terrible choice for an all-girls’ school, but one that helped turn me into a feminist. Where were the famous women – indeed any women – and why weren’t we praising them? I vowed to myself that I would be famous and that I would come back and be praised.
That seemed very unlikely as I was a terrible pupil, inattentive and troublesome, and my reports were year-in year-out awful. I couldn’t concentrate and I didn’t understand much of what was being said to me.
I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.
But it was Christmas and the school was lit up and Mrs Winterson was in her fur coat and bird hat and my dad was washed and shaved and I was walking in between them and it felt normal.
‘Is that your mum?’ said somebody.
‘Mostly,’ I said.
*
Years later, when I came back to Accrington after my first term at Oxford, it was snowing and I was walking up the long stretchy street from the train station, counting the lamp posts. I got near 200 Water Street and heard her before I saw her, her back to the window onto the street, very upright, very big, playing her new electronic organ – ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, with a jazz riff and cymbals.
I looked at her through the window. It had always been through the window – there was a barrier between us, transparent but real – but it says in the Bible, doesn’t it, that we see through a glass darkly?
She was my mother. She wasn’t my mother.
I rang the bell. She half turned. ‘Come in, come in, the door’s open.’
8
The Apocalypse
MRS WINTERSON WAS NOT a welcoming woman. If anyone