Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

pressed on. ‘That's good, Connie — are you glad?’
    She said, ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls . . .’
    So we didn't.
    She had other favourite lines. Our gas oven blew up. The repairman came out and said he didn't like the look of it, which was unsurprising as the oven and the wall were black. Mrs Winterson replied, ‘It's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.’ That is a heavy load for a gas oven to bear.
    She liked that phrase and it was more than once used towards me; when some well—wisher asked how I was, Mrs W looked down and sighed, ‘She's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.’
    This was even worse for me than it had been for the gas oven. I was particularly worried about the ‘dead’ part, and wondered which buried and unfortunate relative I had so offended.

    Later, I found the lines in Hamlet .
    A general phrase, for her and others, when making an unfavourable comparison, was to say, ‘As a crab's like an apple.’
    That is the Fool in King Lea et it has a northern ring to it, partly I think because a working—class tradition is an oral tradition, not a bookish one, but its richness of language comes from absorbing some of the classics in school — they all learned by rote — and by creatively using language to tell a good story. I think back and I realise that our stock of words was not small — and we loved images.
    Until the eighties, visual culture, TV culture, mass culture, had not made much of an impact up north — there was still a strong local culture and a powerful dialect. I left in 1979, and it was not that much different from 1959. By 1990, when we went back to film Oranges for the BBC, it was totally different.
    For the people I knew, books were few and stories were everywhere, and how you tell ‘em was everything. Even an exchange on a bus had to have a narrative.
    ‘They've no money so they're having their honeymoon in Morecambe.’
    ‘That's a shame — there's nowt to do in Morecambe once you've had a swim.’
    ‘I feel sorry for ‘em.’
    ‘Aye, but it's only a week's honeymoon — I know a woman who spent all her married life in Morecambe.’
    Ask not for whom the bell tolls . . .
    *

    My mother told stories — of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air—raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion . . .
    About her life sewing parachutes — all the girls stole the silk for clothes.
    About her life to come, when she'd have a mansion and no neighbours. All she ever wanted was for everyone to go away. And when I did she never forgave me.
    She loved miracle stories, probably because her life was as far away from a miracle as Jupiter is from the Earth. She believed in miracles, even though she never got one — well, maybe she did get one, but that was me, and she didn't know that miracles often come in disguise.
    I was a miracle in that I could have taken her out of her life and into a life she would have liked a lot. It never happened, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything — the miracle — is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.
    The miracle stories she loved were Bible ones, like the Five Loaves and Two Fishes, probably because we never had quite enough to eat, and ones from the front line of Jesus in the World.
    I particularly liked the Hallelujah Giant — eight feet tall, shrunk to six feet three through the prayers of the faithful.
    And there were the stories about bags of coal appearing from nowhere, and an extra pound in your purse when you needed it most.
    She didn't like stories about being raised from the dead. She always said that if she died we weren't to pray to bring her back.
    Her funeral money was sewn into the curtains — at least it was a until I stole it. When I unpicked the hem, there was note in her handwriting — she was so proud of her handwriting— it said:'Don't cry Jack and Jeanette. You know where I am.‘
    I did cry. Why is the measure of love loss?

4
    The Trouble With A Book . . .

    T
HERE WERE SIX BOOKS IN our house.
    One was the Bible and two were commentaries on the Bible. My mother was a pamphleteer by temperament and she knew