Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [49]
Out now, through Oswaldtwistle, past the dog-biscuit factory. There are some kids waiting by the side door for the broken bits of pink and green bone-shaped biscuits. Only one of them has a dog in tow.
I am in my Morris Minor van – successor to the Imp – loaded up with a bicycle and a trunk of books, a small suitcase of clothes and a pack of sardine sandwiches, and twenty gallons of petrol in tins because no one has told me that you can buy petrol on the motorway. As the dynamo on the Minor is faulty, I dare not switch off the engine, so I have to pull up on the hard shoulder of the motorway, run round and fill up with fuel, and set off again. I don’t care.
I am going to Oxford.
11
Art and Lies
ON OUR FIRST evening as undergraduates, our tutor turned to me and said, ‘You are the working-class experiment.’ Then he turned to the woman who was to become and remain my closest friend, and he said, ‘You are the black experiment.’
We soon realised that our tutor was malevolently gay and that the five women in our year would receive no tuition. We were going to have to educate ourselves.
In a way it didn’t matter. Books were everywhere and all we had to do was to read them – starting with Beowulf and ending with Beckett, and not worrying that there appeared to be only four women novelists – the Brontës, who came as a team, George Eliot, Jane Austen – and one woman poet, Christina Rossetti. She is not a great poet, unlike Emily Dickinson, but no one was going to tell us about great women. Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance. We formed our own reading group, and that soon included contemporary writers – women as well as men – and feminism. Suddenly I was reading Doris Lessing and Toni Morrison, Kate Millett and Adrienne Rich. They were like a new Bible.
But in spite of its sexism, snobbery, patriarchal attitudes and indifference to student welfare, the great thing about Oxford was its seriousness of purpose and the unquestioned belief that the life of the mind was at the heart of civilised life.
Although our tutor denigrated and undermined us, for no better reason than that we were women, we were tacitly upheld by the ethos of the university in our passion for reading, thinking, knowing, discussing.
That made a huge difference to me. It was like living in a library, and that was where I had always been happiest.
The more I read the more I fought against the assumption that literature is for the minority – of a particular education or class. Books were my birthright too. I will not forget my excitement at discovering that the earliest recorded poem in the English language was composed by a herdsman in Whitby around ad 680 (‘Caedmon’s Hymn’) when St Hilda was the abbess of Whitby Abbey.
Imagine it … a woman in charge and an illiterate cowhand making a poem of such great beauty that educated monks wrote it down and told it to visitors and pilgrims.
It is a lovely story – Caedmon would rather be with the cows than with people, and he doesn’t know any poetry or songs, and so at the end of the feasts in the abbey, when all are invited to sing or recite, Caedmon always rushes back to the cows where he can be on his own. But that night, an angel comes and tells him to sing – if he can sing to the cows, he can sing to the angel. Caedmon says sadly that he doesn’t know any songs, but the angel tells him to sing one anyway – about the creation of the world. And Caedmon opens his mouth and there is the song. (Have a look at an early account of this in Bede: History of the English Church and Peoples.)
The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn