Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [74]
‘She didn’t want me to get pregnant.’ Oh dear. Not the right thing to say, but then Mrs Winterson was dead set against illegitimacy as it used to be called, and had nothing but contempt for the woman who gave me my chance at life and Mrs Winterson her chance at me.
‘I have had four husbands,’ said Ann.
‘Four?’
She smiles. She doesn’t judge herself and she doesn’t judge others. Life is as it is.
My father the miniature miner from Manchester was not one of the four.
‘You’ve got his shape, narrow hips, we’ve all got wide hips, and you’ve got his hair. He was really dark. Very good-looking. He was a Teddy boy.’
I have to think about this. My mother has had four husbands. My other mother might have been a latent lesbian. My father was a Teddy boy. It is a lot to take in.
‘I like men myself, but I don’t rely on them. I can do my own electrics, my own plastering and I can put up a shelf. I don’t rely on anybody, me.’
Yes, we are alike. The optimism, the self-reliance. The ease we both have in our bodies. I used to wonder why I have always felt at ease in my body and liked my body. I look at her and it seems to be an inheritance.
Gary is well built but compact. He loves walking. He thinks nothing of walking fourteen miles on a Saturday afternoon. He boxes too. They have kept their working-class pride in who they are and what they can do. They like each other. I watch that. They talk. I listen to that. Is this what it would have been like?
But Ann had to work all the time because Pierre left her when the boys were little. And I suppose I would have had to look after my brothers. And I would have resented that.
I remember what she wrote on the adoption form. Better for Janet to have a mother and a father.
But her sons didn’t have a father at home for long. And neither did she. Her own father died in the 1950s.
‘There were ten of us,’ said Ann. ‘How did we fit into two bedrooms? And we were always doing a flit when we couldn’t pay the rent. My dad had a handcart and he’d come back and shout, “Pack up, we’re off,” and what we had went in the handcart and we started again. There were a lot of cheap places to rent in those days.’
My maternal grandmother bore ten children, two died in infancy, four are left. She worked all her life, and when she wasn’t working she was a ballroom-dancing champion.
‘And she lived to be ninety-seven,’ said Ann.
I go to the bathroom. All my life I have been an orphan and an only child. Now I come from a big noisy family who go ballroom dancing and live forever.
Ann’s youngest sister Linda arrives. She is technically my aunt, but she is the same age as my girlfriend, and it is ludicrous to be collecting aunts at this stage in life.
‘Everybody wants to meet you,’ says Linda. ‘I saw Oranges on the TV but I didn’t know it was you. My daughter has ordered all your books.’
That shows willing. We have all got adjustments to make.
I like Linda, who lives in Spain, where she runs women’s groups and teaches dancing, among other things. ‘I’m the quiet one,’ she says. ‘You can’t get a word in edgeways when that lot are all together.’
‘We should have a party,’ says Ann. Then she says, with an almost Mrs W-style segue, ‘Every morning I wake up and I ask myself, “Why am I here?”’
She doesn’t mean ‘Oh no, I am still here’ – it isn’t quite Mrs W. She really wants the question answered.
‘There must be a meaning but we don’t know it,’ says Gary. ‘I’m always reading about the cosmos.’
Linda has been reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which she recommends to Gary.
This is the old Manchester working-class way; you think, you read, you ponder. We could be back in the Mechanics’ Institute, back in the Workers’ Extension Lectures, back in the Public Library Reading Room. I feel proud – of them, of me, of our past, our heritage. And I feel very sad. I shouldn’t be the only one to have been educated. Everyone in this room is intelligent. Everyone in this room is thinking about the bigger questions. Try telling that to the Utility educators.
I don’t know why