Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [6]
Engels’ time in Manchester, working for his father’s firm, opened up to him the brutal reality of working-class life. The Condition of the Working Class in England is still worth reading – a frightening, upsetting account of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on ordinary people – what happens when people ‘regard each other only as useful objects’.
Where you are born – what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own – stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say. My birth mother worked as a machinist in a factory. My adoptive father laboured as a road mender, then shovelled coal at the power station on shift work. He worked ten hours at a stretch, did overtime when he could, saved the bus fare by biking six miles each way, and never had enough money for meat more than twice a week or anything more exotic than one week a year at the seaside.
He was no better off and no worse off than anyone else we knew. We were the working class. We were the mass at the factory gates.
I didn’t want to be in the teeming mass of the working class. I wanted to work, but not like him. I didn’t want to disappear. I didn’t want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape – but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community – to society?
As Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, in the spirit of her friend Ronald Reagan, celebrating the Me decade of the 1980s, ‘There is no such thing as society …’
But I didn’t care about any of that when I was growing up – and I didn’t understand it either.
I just wanted to get out.
My birth mother, they told me, was a little red thing from out of the Lancashire looms, who at seventeen gave birth to me, easy as a cat.
She came from the village of Blakely where Queen Victoria had her wedding dress made, though by the time my mother was born and I was born, Blakely was a village no longer. The country forced into the city – that is the story of industrialisation, and it has a despair in it, and an excitement in it, and a brutality in it, and poetry in it, and all of those things are in me.
When I was born the looms had gone but not the long low terraces of houses sometimes stone sometimes brick under shallow-pitched roofs of slate tiles. With slate roof tiles your pitch can be as shallow as 33 degrees – with stone tiles you must allow 45 degrees or even 54. The look of a place was all to do with the materials to hand. Steeper roofs of stone tiles coax the water to run slower as it bumps over the rises and indentations of the stone. Slate is fast and flat, and if slate roofs are too steep, the water waterfalls straight over the gutters. The flow is slowed by the pitch.
That typical flat grey unlovely look of the northern industrial roofscape is no-nonsense efficient, like the industry the houses were built to support. You get on with it, you work hard, you don’t try for beauty or dreaming. You don’t build for the view. Thick flagstone floors, small mean rooms, dismal backyards.
If you do climb to the top of the house, all there is are the squat stacks of the shared chimneys, smoking coal into the haze that somewhere hides the sky.
But …
The Lancashire Pennines are the dreaming place. Low, thick-chested, massy, hard, the ridge of hills is always visible, like a rough watcher who loves something he can’t defend, but stays anyway, hunched over the ugliness human beings make. Stays scarred and battered but stays.
If you drive along the M62 from Manchester towards Accrington where I was brought up, you will see the Pennines, shocking in their suddenness and their silence. This is a landscape of few words, taciturn, reluctant. It is not an easy beauty.
But it is beautiful.
Sometime, between six weeks and six months old, I got picked up from Manchester and taken to