Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

If you can’t write it down how will you pass it on? You remember. You recite.

Got to prctice this, honey.

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged and a very important part of me had been destroyed – that was my reality, the facts of my life; but on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel, and as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn’t lost. There was pain. There was joy. There was the painful joy Eliot had written about. My first sense of that painful joy was walking up to the hill above our house, the long stretchy streets with a town at the bottom and a hill at the top. The cobbled streets. The streets that went straight to the Factory Bottoms. I looked out and it didn’t look like a mirror or a world. It was the place I was, not the place where I would be. The books had gone, but they were objects; what they held could not be so easily destroyed. What they held was already inside me, and together we would get away. And standing over the smouldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that there was something else I could do. ‘Fuck it,’ I thought, ‘I can write my own.’

There are people who could never commit murder. I am not one of those people. It is better to know it. Better to know who you are, and what lies in you, what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

Dad was born in 1919, he was a celebratory end-of-First-World-War baby, and then they forgot to celebrate him. They forgot to look after him at all. He was the generation reared in time for the next war.

He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn’t look after him, upset that there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can’t grow up. They can get older, but they can’t grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won’t hit love in the face.

I said, ‘I’ve got one grandmother, I don’t want another one.’ It really hurt her and my dad, and was more proof positive of my evil nature. But no one thought to see that in my small arithmetic two mothers had meant the first one gone forever. Why would two grandmothers not mean the same? I was so frightened of loss.

he calls home ‘the heart of the real’. Home, he tells us, is the intersection of two lines – the vertical and the horizontal. The vertical plane has heaven, or the upper world, at one end, and the world of the dead at the other end. The horizontal plane is the traffic of this world, moving to and fro – our own traffic and that of teeming others. Home was a place of order.

When we move house, we take with us the invisible concept of home – but it is a very powerful concept.

I just don’t think I know how to do that.

This makes me happy. I am not the only one.

I am domestic, but only if the door is open.

And I guess that is the key – no one is ever going to lock me in or lock me out again. My door is open and I am the one who opens it.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.

I want to note down a memoy that just crossed my mind. I used to be very scared for my books. I very worried that Amma might do something to them when wasn't around. Burn them, throw water or milk on them, hide them. I was worried that my books wouldn't be there on my table if I go to sleep. But Amma never touched them. She will be heartbroken if I tell her this now, so you listen.

There is warmth there too – a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm. I know that from the chilly nights on the doorstep.

In fact, my tastes are more modest – but you don’t know that until you have bought and sold for the ghost of your mother.

You poor thing.

I like it that pre-industrial societies, and religious cultures still, now, distinguish between two kinds of time – linear time, that is also cyclical because history repeats itself, even as it seems to progress, and real time, which is not subject to the clock or the calendar, and is where the soul used to live. This real time is reversible and redeemable.

I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.

And here is the shock – when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy. You are unhappy. Things get worse. It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded. And then all the cowards come out and say, ‘See, I told you so.’ In fact, they told you nothing.

She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass.

But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was alive. She did not need to be trapped in mass.

She called her dank dark little house with its one window and black walls ‘Sunshine Corner’. It was my first lesson in love. I needed lessons in love. I still do because nothing could be simpler, nothing could be harder, than love. Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way. I didn’t have that, and I was a very nervous watchful child.

home wasn’t really a place where you could relax.

Ask for reassurance and it would never come. I never asked her if she loved me. She loved me on those days when she was able to love. I really believe that is the best she could do.

When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.

I did not know that love could have continuity. I did not know that human love...

I never did drugs, I did love – the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak than health. And I fought and hit out and tried to put it right the next day. And I went away without a word and didn’t care.

Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.

It is never too late to learn to love. But it is frightening.

At church we heard about love every day, and one day, after the prayer meeting, an older girl kissed me. It was my first moment of recognition and desire. I was fifteen. I fell in love – what else is there to do?

When she knew I was keeping a diary she said, ‘I never had secrets from my mother … but I am not your mother, am I?’ And after that she never was.

My defiance made things worse. I didn’t even know I had a demon whereas Helen spotted hers at once and said yes yes yes. I hated her for that. Was love worth so little that it could be given up so easily? The answer was yes.

The mistake they made at church was to forget that I began my small life ready to be given up. Love didn’t hold when I was born, and it was tearing now. I did not want to believe that love was such flimsy stuff. I held on tighter because Helen let go.

After three days of being prayed over in shifts and not allowed to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, I was beginning to believe that I had all Hell in my heart.

I said, my mother won’t sleep in the same bed as my father – is that a normal sexual relationship? He shoved me onto my knees to repent those words and I felt the bulge in his suit trousers. He tried to kiss me. He said it would be better than with a girl. A lot better. He put his tongue in my mouth. I bit it. Blood. A lot of blood. Blackout.

I loved my little bedroom but it was not a safe place. My mind felt clean and clear. That was probably the sharpness of hunger but I was sure of what to do. I would do whatever they wanted but only on the outside. On the inside I would build another self – one that they couldn’t see. Just like after the burning of the books.

No … I told them everything … What we did … That was ours not theirs.

I met them once, later. She was smug and neurotic. He was sadistic and unattractive. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

like refugees in our own life.

If you spit on a dog biscuit and dip it in icing sugar it tastes like a proper biscuit.

Breaks my heart that you know this

We went past Woolworths – ‘A Den of Vice.’ Past Marks and Spencer’s – ‘The Jews killed Christ.’ Past the funeral parlour and the pie shop – ‘They share an oven.’ Past the biscuit stall and its moon-faced owners – ‘Incest.’ Past the pet parlour – ‘Bestiality.’ Past the bank – ‘Usury.’ Past the Citizens Advice Bureau – ‘Communists.’ Past the day nursery – ‘Unmarried mothers.’ Past the hairdresser’s – ‘Vanity.’

A big part of my dislike of them is the loss of vivid life. The dull apathy of existence now isn’t just boring jobs and boring TV; it is the loss of vivid life on the streets; the gossip, the encounters, the heaving messy noisy day that made room for everyone, money or not. And if you couldn’t afford to heat your house you could go into the market hall. Sooner or later somebody would buy you a cup of tea. That’s how it was.

And in his eyes / The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak / In different skies.

My mother’s eyes were like cold stars. She belonged in a different sky.

She thought that happy meant bad/wrong/sinful. Or plain stupid. Unhappy seemed to have virtue attached to it.

some

:)

Mrs Winterson read out loud, turning the pages. There is the terrible fire at Thornfield Hall and Mr Rochester goes blind, but in the version Mrs Winterson read, Jane doesn’t bother about her now sightless paramour; she marries St John Rivers and they go off together to work in the mission field. It was only when I finally read Jane Eyre for myself that I found out what my mother had done.

I was glad to get out of the school and make a fresh start. Nobody thought I would come to much. The burning place inside me seemed like anger and trouble to them. They didn’t know how many books I had read or what I was writing up in the hills on long days alone. On the top of the hill looking out over the town I wanted to see further than anybody had seen. That wasn’t arrogance; it was desire. I was all desire, desire for life. And I was lonely.

‘I’ll give you five minutes and I’ll be back in here and you’ll wish you’d never been born.’ But I have never wished that and I wasn’t going to start wishing it for him.

I felt cold inside. I felt nothing inside. I could have killed him. I would have killed him. I would have killed him and felt nothing.

And her clearness was like water, cool and deep and see-through right to the bottom. No guilt. No fear.

‘Jeanette, will you tell me why?’ ‘What why?’ ‘You know what why …’ But I don’t know what why … what I am … why I don’t please her. What she wants. Why I am not what she wants. What I want or why. But there is something I know: ‘When I am with her I am happy. Just happy.’ She nodded. She seemed to understand and I thought, really, for that second, that she would change her mind, that we would talk, that we would be on the same side of the glass wall. I waited. She said, ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’

Oh damn! Only a soul that is deeply hurt can say this. Mrs Winterson :(