Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [8]
I found some papers of mine recently, with the usual teenage poetic dross, but also a line I unconsciously used later in Oranges – ‘What I want does exist if I dare to find it …’
Yes, it’s a young person’s melodrama, but that attitude seems to have had a protective function.
I liked best the stories about buried treasure and lost children and locked-up princesses. That the treasure is found, the children returned and the princesses freed, seemed hopeful to me.
And the Bible told me that even if nobody loved me on earth, there was God in heaven who loved me like I was the only one who had ever mattered.
I believed that. It helped me.
My mother, Mrs Winterson, didn’t love life. She didn’t believe that anything would make life better. She once told me that the universe is a cosmic dustbin – and after I had thought about this for a bit, I asked her if the lid was on or off.
‘On,’ she said. ‘Nobody escapes.’
The only escape was Armageddon – the last battle when heaven and earth will be rolled up like a scroll, and the saved get to live in eternity with Jesus.
She still had her War Cupboard. Every week she put another tin in there – some of the tins had been in there since 1947 – and I think that when the last battle started we were meant to live under the stairs with the shoe polish and eat our way through the tins. My earlier successes with the corned beef gave me no cause for further alarm. We would eat our rations and wait for Jesus.
I wondered if we would be personally liberated by Jesus himself, but Mrs Winterson thought not. ‘He’ll send an angel.’
So that would be it – an angel under the stairs.
I wondered where the wings would fit, but Mrs Winterson said the angel would not actually join us under the stairs – only open the door and tell us it was time to come out. Our mansion in the sky was ready.
Those elaborate interpretations of a post-Apocalypse future occupied her mind. Sometimes she seemed happy, and played the piano, but unhappiness was always close by, and some other thought would cloud her mind so that she stopped playing, abruptly, and closed the lid, and walked up and down, up and down the back alley under the lines of strung washing, walking, walking as though she had lost something.
She had lost something. It was a big something. She had lost/was losing life.
We were matched in our lost and losing. I had lost the warm safe place, however chaotic, of the first person I loved. I had lost my name and my identity. Adopted children are dislodged. My mother felt that the whole of life was a grand dislodgement. We both wanted to go Home.
Still, I was excited about the Apocalypse, because Mrs Winterson made it exciting, but I secretly hoped that life would go on until I could be grown up and find out more about it.
The one good thing about being shut in a coal-hole is that it prompts reflection.
Read on its own that is an absurd sentence. But as I try and understand how life works – and why some people cope better than others with adversity – I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream …
Which brings me back to happiness, and a quick look at the word.
Our primary meaning now is the feeling of pleasure and contentment; a buzz, a zestiness, the tummy upwards feel of good and right and relaxed and alive … you know …
But earlier meanings build in the hap – in Middle English, that is ‘happ’, in Old English, ‘gehapp’ – the chance or fortune, good or bad, that falls to you. Hap is your lot in life, the hand you are given to play.
How you meet your ‘hap’ will determine whether or not you can be ‘happy’.
What the Americans, in their constitution, call ‘the right to the pursuit of happiness’ (please note, not