Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [7]
She was gone. I was gone.
I was adopted.
21 January 1960 is the date when John William Winterson, Labourer, and Constance Winterson, Clerk, got the baby they thought they wanted and took it home to 200 Water Street, Accrington, Lancashire.
They had bought the house for £200 in 1947.
1947, the coldest British winter of the twentieth century, snow so high it reached the top of the upright piano as they pushed it in through the door.
1947, and the war ended, and my dad out of the army, doing his best, trying to make a living, and his wife throwing her wedding ring in the gutter and refusing all sexual relations.
I don’t know, and never will, whether she couldn’t have children or whether she just wouldn’t put herself through the necessaries.
I know they both drank a bit and they both smoked before they found Jesus. And I don’t think my mother was depressed in those days. After the tent crusade, where they became Pentecostal evangelical Christians, they both gave up drink – except for cherry brandy at New Year – and my father traded his Woodbines for Polo mints. My mother carried on smoking because she said it kept her weight down. Her smoking had to be a secret though, and she kept an air freshener she claimed was fly spray in her handbag.
No one seemed to think it was unusual to keep fly spray in your handbag.
She was convinced that God would find her a child, and I suppose that if God is providing the baby, having sex can be crossed off the list. I don’t know how Dad felt about this. Mrs Winterson always said, ‘He’s not like other men …’
Every Friday he gave her his pay packet and she gave him back enough change for three packets of Polo mints.
She said, ‘They’re his only pleasure …’
Poor Dad.
When he got married again at seventy-two, his new wife Lillian, who was ten years younger and a good-time girl, told me it was like sleeping with a red-hot poker.
Until I was two years old, I screamed. This was evidence in plain sight that I was possessed by the Devil. Child psychology hadn’t reached Accrington, and in spite of important work by Winnicott, Bowlby and Balint on attachment, and the trauma of early separation from the love object that is the mother, a screaming baby wasn’t a broken-hearted baby – she was a Devil baby.
That gave me a strange power as well as all the vulnerabilities. I think my new parents were frightened of me.
Babies are frightening – raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body. My new mother had a lot of problems with the body – her own, my dad’s, their bodies together, and mine. She had muffled her own body in flesh and clothes, suppressed its appetites with a fearful mix of nicotine and Jesus, dosed it with purgatives that made her vomit, submitted it to doctors, who administered enemas and pelvic rings, subdued its desires for ordinary touch and comfort, and suddenly, not out of her own body, and with no preparation, she had a thing that was all body.
A burping, spraying, sprawling faecal thing blasting the house with rude life.
She was thirty-seven when I arrived, and my dad was forty. That is pretty normal these days, but it wasn’t normal in the 1960s when people married early and started their families in their twenties. She and my father had already been married for fifteen years.
They had an old-fashioned marriage in that my father never cooked, and when I arrived, my mother never worked outside the home. This was very bad for her, and turned her inward-looking nature into walled-in depression. There were many fights, and about many things, but the battle between us was really the battle between happiness and unhappiness.
I was very often full of rage and despair. I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life. When I was upset I went roaming into the Pennines – all day on a jam sandwich and a bottle of milk. When I was locked outside, or the other favourite, locked in the coal-hole, I made up stories and forgot about the cold and the dark. I know these are ways of surviving,