Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [4]
Every day Mrs Winterson prayed, ‘Lord, let me die.’ This was hard on me and my dad.
Her own mother had been a genteel woman who had married a seductive thug, given him her money, and watched him womanise it away. For a while, from when I was about three, until I was about five, we had to live with my grandad, so that Mrs Winterson could nurse her mother, who was dying of throat cancer.
Although Mrs W was deeply religious, she believed in spirits, and it made her very angry that Grandad’s girlfriend, as well as being an ageing barmaid with dyed blonde hair, was a medium who held seances in our very own front room.
After the seances my mother complained that the house was full of men in uniform from the war. When I went into the kitchen to get at the corned beef sandwiches I was told not to eat until the Dead had gone. This could take several hours, which is hard when you are four.
I took to wandering up and down the street asking for food. Mrs Winterson came after me and that was the first time I heard the dark story of the Devil and the crib …
In the crib next to me had been a little boy called Paul. He was my ghostly brother because his sainted self was always invoked when I was naughty. Paul would never have dropped his new doll into the pond (we didn’t go near the surreal possibilities of Paul having been given a doll in the first place). Paul would not have filled his poodle pyjama case with tomatoes so that he could perform a stomach operation with blood-like squish. Paul would not have hidden Grandad’s gas mask (for some reason Grandad still had his wartime gas mask and I loved it). Paul would not have turned up at a nice birthday party, to which he had not been invited, wearing Grandad’s gas mask.
If they had taken Paul instead of me, it would have been different, better. I was supposed to be a pal … like she had been to her mother.
And then her mother died and she shut herself up in her grief. I shut myself up in the larder because I had learned how to use the little key that opened the tins of corned beef.
I have a memory – true or not true?
The memory is surrounded by roses, which is odd because it is a violent and upsetting memory, but my grandad was a keen gardener and he particularly loved roses. I liked finding him, shirtsleeves rolled up, wearing a knitted waistcoat and spraying the blooms with water from a polished copper can with a piston pressure valve. He liked me, in an odd sort of way, and he disliked my mother, and she hated him – not in an angry way, but with a toxic submissive resentment.
I am wearing my favourite outfit – a cowboy suit and a fringed hat. My small body is slung from side to side with cap-gun Colts.
A woman comes into the garden and Grandad tells me to go inside and find my mother who is making her usual pile of sandwiches.
I run in – Mrs Winterson takes off her apron and goes to answer the door.
I am peeping from down the hallway. There is an argument between the two women, a terrible argument that I can’t understand, and something fierce and frightening, like animal fear. Mrs Winterson slams the door and leans on it for a second. I creep out of my peeping place. She turns around. There I am in my cowboy outfit.
‘Was that my mum?’
Mrs Winterson hits me and the blow knocks me back. Then she runs upstairs.
I go out into the garden. Grandad is spraying the roses. He ignores me. There is no one there.
2
My Advice To Anybody Is: Get Born
I WAS BORN in Manchester in 1959. It was a good place to be born.
Manchester is in the south of the north of England.
Its spirit has a contrariness in it – a south and north bound up together – at once untamed and unmetropolitan; at the same time, connected and worldly.
Manchester was the world’s first industrial city; its looms and mills transforming itself and the fortunes of Britain. Manchester had canals, easy access to the great port of Liverpool, and railways that carried