Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [45]
Her eyes were bright reading Shakespeare, and every time she finished ironing one of the huge hulking shirts, she stopped, turned the page, hung the shirt, and got another from the pile.
She was wearing fluffy slippers, pink on the black-and-white lino.
She was giving me a chance. Winter was coming and it was cold sleeping in the Mini, and the condensation from a night’s breathing meant that I woke up with drops of water all over me, like a leaf in the morning.
I had no idea whether any of what I was doing was the right thing to do. I talked to myself all the time, out loud, debating with myself my situation. I was lucky in one way because our church had always emphasised how important it is to concentrate on good things – blessings – not just bad things. And that is what I did at night when I curled up to sleep in my sleeping bag. There were very good things; there was Janey and there were my books. Leaving home meant that I could keep both without fear.
I got out my key, then I rang the bell out of politeness. One of the huge hulks opened the door. Mrs Ratlow came out. ‘Help her with her things, you two, do I have to do it all?’
I had a tiny room that looked over the back fields. I put my books in piles and folded my clothes; three pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes, four jumpers, four shirts and a week’s supply of socks and knickers. And a duffel coat.
‘Is that it?
‘There’s a tin-opener and some crockery and a camping stove, and a towel and a sleeping bag but they can stay in the car.’
‘You’ll need a hot-water bottle.’
‘I’ve got one, and a flashlight and shampoo.’
‘All right then. Get some jam and bread and go to bed.’
She watched me as I got out Gertrude Stein.
‘S,’ she said.
Gertrude and Alice are living in Paris. They are helping the Red Cross during the war. They are driving along in a two-seater Ford shipped from the States. Gertrude likes driving but she refuses to reverse. She will only go forward because she says that the whole point of the twentieth century is progress.
The other thing that Gertrude won’t do is read the map. Alice Toklas reads the map and Gertrude sometimes takes notice and sometimes not.
It is going dark. There are bombs exploding. Alice is losing patience. She throws down the map and shouts at Gertrude: ‘THIS IS THE WRONG ROAD.’
Gertrude drives on. She says, ‘Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it.’
10
This Is The Road
I DECIDED TO apply to read English at the University of Oxford because it was the most impossible thing I could do. I knew no one who had been to university and although clever girls were encouraged to go to teacher training college, or to take their accountancy exams, Oxford and Cambridge were not on the list of things to do before you die.
The Equal Pay Act had become law in Britain in 1970, but no woman I knew got anything like equal pay – or believed that she should.
In the industrial north of England traditional kinds of blue-collar employment were strong – factory work, manufacture, mining, and men held the economic power.
The women held together the family and the community, but the invisibility of women’s contribution, not measured or paid for, or socially rewarded, meant that my world was full of strong able women who were ‘housewives’ and had to defer to their men. My mother did it to my father. She held him in contempt (and that wasn’t fair), but she called him the head of the household (and that wasn’t true). That marital/domestic pattern was repeated everywhere I looked.
Few women I knew had professional or managerial jobs and those who did were unmarried. Most of my female teachers at school were unmarried. Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays because she said – and I will never forget it: ‘When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.’
It is quite a quote, and should have made her a feminist, but she had no