Welcome TINA – There Is No Alternative.
In 1988, Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, called the post-war consensus, the ‘postwar delusion’.
I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as a good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.
I did not know that Thatcherism would fund its economic miracle by selling off all our nationalised assets and industries.
I did not realise the consequences of privatising society.
I am driving under the viaduct and past the Factory Bottoms. As I drive past the Elim Pentecostal Church I see my dad coming out in his overalls. He's been painting. My foot lifts off the accelerator and I nearly stop. I want to say goodbye, but I don't because I can't. Did he see me? I don't know. I look in the mirror. He's going home. I am going away.
Out now, through Oswaldtwistle, past the dog-biscuit factory. There are some kids waiting by the side door for the broken bits of pink and green bone-shaped biscuits. Only one of them has a dog in tow.
I am in my Morris Minor van – successor to the Imp – loaded up with a bicycle and a trunk of books, a small suitcase of clothes and a pack of sardine sandwiches, and twenty gallons of petrol in tins because no one has told me that you can buy petrol on the motorway. As the dynamo on the Minor is faulty, I dare not switch off the engine, so I have to pull up on the hard shoulder of the motorway, run round and fill up with fuel, and set off again. I don’t care.
I am going to Oxford.
11
Art and Lies
O
N OUR FIRST EVENING AS undergraduates, our tutor turned to me and said, ‘You are the working-class experiment.’ Then he turned to the woman who was to become and remain my closest friend, and he said, ‘You are the black experiment.’
We soon realised that our tutor was malevolently gay and that the five women in our year would receive no tuition. We were going to have to educate ourselves.
In a way it didn’t matter. Books were everywhere and all we had to do was to read them – starting with Beowulf and ending with Beckett, and not worrying that there appeared to be only four women novelists – the Brontës, who came as a team, George Eliot, Jane Austen – and one woman poet, Christina Rossetti. She is not a great poet, unlike Emily Dickinson, but no one was going to tell us about great women. Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance. We formed our own reading group, and that soon included contemporary writers – women as well as men – and feminism. Suddenly I was reading Doris Lessing and Toni Morrison, Kate Millett and Adrienne Rich. They were like a new Bible.
But in spite of its sexism, snobbery, patriarchal attitudes and indifference to student welfare, the great thing about Oxford was its seriousness of purpose and the unquestioned belief that the life of the mind was at the heart of civilised life.
Although our tutor denigrated and undermined us, for no better reason than that we were women, we were tacitly upheld by the ethos of the university in our passion for reading, thinking, knowing, discussing.
That made a huge difference to me. It was like living in a library, and that was where I had always been happiest.
The more I read the more I fought against the assumption that literature is for the minority – of a particular education or class. Books were my birthright too. I will not forget my excitement at discovering that the earliest recorded poem in the English language was composed by a herdsman in Whitby around AD 680 (‘Caedmon’s Hymn’) when St Hilda was the abbess of Whitby Abbey.
Imagine it . . . a woman in charge and an illiterate cowhand making a poem of such great beauty that educated monks wrote it down and told it to visitors and pilgrims.
It is a lovely story – Caedmon would rather be with the cows than with people, and he doesn’t know any poetry or songs, and so at the end of the feasts in the abbey, when all are invited to sing or recite, Caedmon always rushes back to the cows where he can be on his own. But that night, an angel comes and tells him to sing – if he can sing to the cows, he can sing to the angel. Caedmon says sadly that he doesn’t know any songs, but the angel tells him to sing one anyway – about the creation of the world. And Caedmon opens his mouth and there is the song. (Have a look at an early account of this in Bede: History of the English Church and Peoples.)
The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.
Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture – exploit the new thing then move on.
There’s a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.
Reading is where the wild things are.
At the end of my first term at Oxford we were reading T S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.
I was thinking about the pattern; the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperone, standing between us and the newness of the present – the new chance.
I was wondering if the past could be redeemed – could be ‘reconciled’ – if the old wars, the old enemies, the boarhound and the boar, might be able to find peace of a kind.
I was wondering this because I was thinking of visiting Mrs Winterson.
That there might be a level we can reach above the ordinary conflict is a seductive one. Jung argued that a conflict can never be resolved on the level at which it arises – at that level there is only a winner and a loser, not a reconciliation. The conflict must be got above – like seeing a storm from higher ground.
And there’s a wonderful passage too, at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, where Troilus, defeated and dead, is taken up to the Seventh Sphere and he looks down on the sublunar world – ours – and laughs because he realises how absurd it all is – the things that mean so much, the feuds we carry, the irreconcilables.
The medieval mind loved the idea of mutability and everything happening chaotic and misunderstood under the sphere of the moon. When we look up at the sky and the stars we imagine we are looking out at the universe. The medieval mind imagined itself as looking in – that Earth was a seedy outpost, Mrs Winterson’s cosmic dustbin – and that the centre was – well, at the centre – the nucleus of God’s order proceeding from love.
I like it that order should proceed from love.
I understood, in a very dimly lit way, that I would need to find the place where my own life could be reconciled with itself. And I knew that had something to do with love.
I wrote to Mrs Winterson asking if she would like me to come back for the Christmas holidays – and could I bring a friend? Yes, she said, which was unusual.
She didn’t ask what I had been doing since we had last seen each other – no mention of happy/normal, or leaving home, or going to Oxford. I didn’t try to explain. Neither of us thought that was odd because in Winterson-world it wasn’t odd.
There she was with her new electronic organ and her home-built CB radio and headphones the size of alien-life detection devices.
There I was with my friend Vicky Licorish. I had already warned Mrs W that she was black.
; This was a great success to begin with because Mrs Winterson loved missionary work, and seemed to think that my having a best friend who was black was a kind of missionary endeavour all of its own. She went round to veterans of Africa and asked, ‘What do they eat?’
The answer was pineapples. I don’t know why. Are there any pineapples in Africa? In any case Vicky’s family was from St Lucia.
Mrs Winterson was not a racist. Hers was a missionary kind of tolerance, and as such it was patronising, but she would not hear a slur against anyone on the grounds of colour or ethnicity.
That was unusual at a time when Pakistanis had begun to arrive in noticeable numbers in white working-class towns where employment was already in short supply. Then, as now, nobody talked about the legacy of Empire. Britain had colonised, owned, occupied or interfered with half the world. We had carved up some countries and created others. When some of the world we had made by force wanted something in return, we were outraged.
But the Elim Church welcomed everyone and we were taught to make an effort for ‘our friends from other shores’.
When Vicky and I arrived in Accrington, Mrs Winterson gave her a blanket she had knitted so that Vicky would not be cold. ‘They feel the cold,’ she told me.
Mrs Winterson was an obsessive and she had been knitting for Jesus for about a year. The Christmas tree had knitted decorations on it, and the dog was fastened inside a Christmas coat of red wool with white snowflakes. There was a knitted nativity and all the shepherds were wearing scarves because this was Bethlehem on the bus route to Accrington.
My dad opened the door wearing a new knitted waistcoat and matching knitted tie. The whole house had been reknitted.
Never mind. There was no sign of the revolver. Mrs W was wearing her best teeth.
‘Vicky,’ she said, ‘sit down. I’ve made you cheese on toast with pineapples’.
Vicky assumed this was some Lancashire delicacy.
The next day there was gammon and pineapple followed by tinned pineapple chunks. Then there were pineapple fritters and pineapple upside-down cake and pineapples and cream and Chinese chicken and pineapple ands pineapple and cubes of Cheddar on cocktail sticks stuck into half a cabbage wrapped in tinfoil.
Eventually Vicky said, ‘I don’t like pineapple.’
This was a terrible mistake. Mrs Winterson’s mood changed at once. She announced that the next meal would be beefburgers. We said fine, but we were going out that night to eat scampi and chips in the pub.
About ten o’clock we returned to find Mrs Winterson standing grimly at the gas oven. There was a dreadful smell of burntness and oil and fat and meat.
In the little lean-to kitchen Mrs Winterson was mechanically flipping over some black things about the size of buttons.
‘I’ve been cooking these beefburgers since six o’clock,’ she said.
‘But you knew we were going out.’
‘You knew I was cooking beefburgers.’
We didn’t know what to do so we went to bed – Vicky upstairs and me in the front room on a blow-up lilo. The next morning at breakfast the table was set. In the middle was a pyramid of unopened tins of pineapple and a Victorian postcard of two cats on their hind legs, dressed up as Mr and Mrs. The caption was: ‘Nobody loves us.’
As we were wondering whether to run straight out to work or risk making toast, Mrs Winterson burst in, snatched up the postcard, and threw it back down on the table. ‘That’s your dad and me,’ she said.
Vicky and I were working at the mental hospital over Christmas; the vast Victorian pile where I had lived and worked during my year off. It was laid out in extensive grounds, with its own fire engine and social club. It was home to the deranged, the dangerous, the damaged and the damned. Some of the older residents had been locked up for having a baby, or trying to kill a baby, and some had been locked up with their babies. It was a strange world, both solitary and social.
I liked working there, cleaning the wards of vomit and shit and serving meals from giant tin trays. I worked twelve-hour shifts. Maybe the huge madness calmed my own disturbances. I felt compassion. And I felt lucky. It is easy to go mad.
The only thing I hated was the drugs trolley. Inmates were sedated and tranquillised – syringes and tablets look kinder than padded cells and straitjackets but I am not so sure. The wards smelled of Valium and Largactil – that’s the one that rots your teeth.
Vicky and I went to and from our work there, trying not to notice that back home in Water Street the atmosphere was crazier than anything at work. The house was darkening and cracking – like something out of Poe. The Christmas decorations were up and the coloured lights were on but that just made it more frightening.
For about a week Mrs Winterson had not spoken to us. Then one night we got home, and it was snowing, and there were carol singers in the street. I realised it was the church meeting at our house.
Mrs Winterson was in gay mood. She had on a nice dress and when Vicky and I arrived she greeted us warmly. ‘I’ll bring round the dinner wagon – would you like a party pie?’
‘What’s a dinner wagon?’ said Vicky, thinking of stagecoaches and shoot-outs.
‘It’s a hostess trolley for northerners,’ I said, as Mrs Winterson careered into the parlour loaded with party pies on her heated element.
At that moment a rival group of carol singers arrived at the front door – probably the Salvation Army, but Mrs W was having none of it. She opened the front door and shouted, ‘Jesus is here. Go away.’
‘That was a bit harsh, Mum.’
‘I have had a lot to put up with,’ she said, looking meaningfully at me. ‘I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day.’
Vicky was struggling. Just before Christmas she went up to bed and found that her pillowcase had no pillow in it; it was stuffed with religious tracts about the Apocalypse. She was beginning to discover what it was like to live in End Time.
‘It’s hard for you where you come from,’ said Mrs Winterson.
‘I was born in Luton,’ said Vicky.
But it was hard for her. It was hard for anyone. The paperchains hanging from the ceiling began to look like a madman’s manacles.
My dad was spending most of his time in the shed in the backyard making an installation for the church. I suppose it was a kind of evangelical altarpiece. The pastor wanted something for the Sunday school that could decorate the church without looking like a Catholic graven image as forbidden in Exodus.
Dad enjoyed making clay-cast figures and painting them. He was on figure number six.
‘What is it?’ asked Vicky.
It was the Seven Saved Dwarves: Snow White wasn’t there, presumably because she was too near the Catholic heresy of the Virgin Mary. The dwarves had little nameplates: Hopeful, Faithful, Cheerful, Godly, Worthy, Ready and Willing.
Dad was painting quietly. ‘Your mother is upset,’ he said.
We both knew what that meant.
In the kitchen Mrs Winterson was making custard. She was stirring the pan obsessively like someone mixing the dark waters of the deep. As we came past her from the backyard, she said, without looking up from the pan, ‘Sin. That’s what spoils everything.’
Vicky was unused to a conversational style that included bouts of silence lasting for days, and sudden doomful announcements from a train of thought we were all supposed to share but never could. I could tell that Vicky was finding things a strain, and I felt that Dad was trying to warn me. I checked the duster drawer. The revolver was not there.
‘I think it’s time for us to leave,’ I said to Vicky.
The next morning I told Mum we were leaving. She said, ‘You do it on purpose.’
The house. The two-up two-down. The long dark lobby and the poky rooms. The yard with the outside loo and the coal-hole, the dustbins and the dog kennel.
‘Goodbye, Mum.’
She didn’t answer. Not then. Not later. I never went back. I never saw her ag
ain.
Intermission
I
N MY WORK I HAVE pushed against the weight of clock time, of calendar time, of linear unravellings. Time may be what stops everything happening at once, but time’s domain is the outer world. In our inner world, we can experience events that happened to us in time as happening simultaneously. Our nonlinear self is uninterested in ‘when’, much more interested in ‘wherefore’.
I am more than halfway through my biological life and about halfway through my creative life. I measure time as we all do, and partly by the fading body, but in order to challenge linear time, I try and live in total time. I recognise that life has an inside as well as an outside and that events separated by years lie side by side imaginatively and emotionally.
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.
I like the line in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – ‘that which is only living/Can only die’. That’s time’s arrow, the flight from womb to tomb. But life is more than an arrow.
The womb to tomb of an interesting life – but I can’t write my own; never could. Not Oranges. Not now. I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact.
The fact is that I am going to miss out twenty-five years. Maybe later . . .
12
The Night Sea Voyage
W
HEN I WAS LITTLE – THE size that hides under tables and climbs into drawers – I climbed into a drawer believing that the drawer was a ship and the rug a sea.