In the crib next to me had been a little boy called Paul. He was my ghostly brother because his sainted self was always invoked when I was naughty. Paul would never have dropped his new doll into the pond (we didn't go near the surreal possibilities of Paul having been given a doll in the first place). Paul would not have filled his poodle pyjama case with tomatoes so that he could perform a stomach operation with blood—like squish. Paul would not have hidden Grandad's gas mask (for some reason Grandad still had his wartime gas mask and I loved it). Paul would not have turned up at a nice birthday party, to which he had not been invited, wearing Grandad's gas mask.
If they had taken Paul instead of me, it would have been different, better. I was supposed to be a pal . . . like she had been to her mother.
And then her mother died and she shut herself up in her grief. I shut myself up in the larder because I had learned how to use the little key that opened the tins of corned beef.
I have a memory — true or not true?
The memory is surrounded by roses, which is odd because it is a violent and upsetting memory, but my grandad was a keen gardener and he particularly loved roses. I liked finding him, shirtsleeves rolled up, wearing a knitted waistcoat and spraying the blooms with water from a polished copper can with a piston pressure valve. He liked me, in an odd sort of way, and he disliked my mother, and she hated him — not in an angry way, but with a toxic submissive resentment.
I am wearing my favourite outfit — a cowboy suit and a fringed hat. My small body is slung from side to side with cap—gun Colts.
A woman comes into the garden and Grandad tells me to go inside and find my mother who is making her usual pile of sandwiches.
I run in — Mrs Winterson takes off her apron and goes to answer the door.
I am peeping from down the hallway. There is an argument between the two women, a terrible argument that I can't understand, and something fierce and frightening, like animal fear. Mrs Winterson slams the door and leans on it for a second. I creep out of my peeping place. She turns around. There I am in my cowboy outfit.
‘Was that my mum?’
Mrs Winterson hits me and the blow knocks me back. Then she runs upstairs.
I go out into the garden. Grandad is spraying the roses. He ignores me. There is no one there.
2
My Advice To Anybody Is: Get Born
I
WAS BORN IN MANCHESTER in 1959. It was a good place to be born.
Manchester is in the south of the north of England.
Its spirit has a contrariness in it — a south and north bound up together — at once untamed and unmetro—politan; at the same time, connected and worldly.
Manchester was the world's first industrial city; its looms and mills transforming itself and the fortunes of Britain. Manchester had canals, easy access to the great port of Liverpool, and railways that carried thinkers and doers up and down to London. Its influence affected the whole world.
Manchester was all mix. It was radical — Marx and Engels were here. It was repressive — the Peterloo Massacres and the Corn Laws. Manchester spun riches beyond anybody's wildest dreams, and wove despair and degradation into the human fabric. It was Utilitarian, in that everything was put to the test of ‘Does this work?’ It was Utopian — its Quakerism, its feminism, its anti—slavery movement, its socialism, its communism.
The Manchester mix of alchemy and geography can't be separated. What it is, where it is ... long before the Romans had a fort here in AD 79, the Celts worshipped the river goddess of the Medlock. This was Mam—ceaster — and Mam is mother, is breast, life force . . . energy.
To the south of Manchester is the Cheshire plain. Human settlements in Cheshire are among the earliest to be found in the British Isles. There were villages here, and strange yet direct routes to what became Liverpool on the vast and deep River Mersey.
To the north and east of Manchester are the Pennines — the wild rough low mountain range that runs through the north of England, where early settlements were scattered and few, and where men and women lived solitary, often fugitive lives. The smooth Cheshire plain, civilised and settled, and the rough tussocky Lancashire Pennines, the brooding place, the escaping place.
Until the boundary changes, Manchester was partly in Lancashire and partly in Cheshire — making it a double city rooted in restless energy and contradictions.
The textile boom of the early nineteenth century sucked all the surrounding villages and satellite settlements into one vast moneymaking machine. Until the First World War, 65 per cent of the world's cotton was processed in Manchester. Its nickname was Cottonopolis.
Imagine it — the vast steamed—powered gaslit factories and the back—to back tenements thrown up in between. The filth, the smoke, the stink of dye and ammonia, sulphur and coal. The cash, the ceaseless activity day and night, the deafening noise of looms, of trains, of trams, of wagons on cobbles, of teeming relentless human life, a Niebelheim hell, and a triumphant work of labour and determination.
Everyone who visited Manchester both admired it and felt appalled. Charles Dickens used it as the basis for his novel Hard Times; the best of times and the worst of times were here — everything the machine could achieve, and the terrible human cost.
Men and women, ill—clad, exhausted, drunken and sickly, worked twelve—hour shifts six days a week, went deaf, clogged their lungs, saw no daylight, took their children to crawl under the terrifying clatter of the working looms, picking up fluff, sweeping, losing hands, arms, legs, small children, weak children, uneducated and often unwanted, the women working as hard as the men, and they also bore the burden of the house.
A horde of ragged women and children, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and puddles — neither drains nor pavements —standing pools in all directions — the dark smoke of a dozen factory chimneys ... a measureless filth and stench.
Engels, The Condition of the English
Working Class in England (1844)
The rawness of Manchester life, where nothing could be hidden out of sight, where the successes and the shames of this new uncontrollable reality were everywhere, pitched Manchester into a radicalism that became more important in the long run than its cotton trade.
Manchester was active. The Pankhurst family had had enough of all talk and no vote, and in 1903 went militant with the Women's Social and Political Union.
The first Trades Union Conference was held in Manchester in 1868. Its purpose was change, not talk about change.
Twenty years earlier, in 1848, Karl Marx had published The Communist Manifesto — much of it written out of his time in Manchester with his friend Friedrich Engels. The men were theorists made activists by their time in a city that had no time for thinking, that was all the frenzy of doing — and Marx wanted to turn that fiendish unstoppable energy of doing into something good . . .
Engels’ time in Manchester, working for his father's firm, opened up to him the brutal reality of working—class life. The Condition of the Working Class in England is still worth reading— a frightening, upsetting account of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on ordinary people — what happens when people ‘regard each other only as useful objects’.
Where you are born — what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own — stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say. My birth mother worked as a machinist in a factory. My adoptive father laboured as a road mender, then shovelled coal at the power station on shift work. He worked ten hours at a stretch, did overtime when he could, saved the bus fare by biking six miles each way, and never had enough money for meat more than twice a week or anything more exotic than one week a year at the seaside.
He was no better off and no worse off than anyone else we knew. We were the working class. We were the mass at the factory gates.
I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class. I wanted to work, but not like him. I
didn't want to disappear. I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape — but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community — to society?
As Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, in the spirit of her friend Ronald Reagan, celebrating the Me decade of the 1980s, ‘There is no such thing as society . . .’
But I didn't care about any of that when I was growing up — and I didn't understand it either.
I just wanted to get out.
My birth mother, they told me, was a little red thing from out of the Lancashire looms, who at seventeen gave birth to me, easy as a cat.
She came from the village of Blakely where QueenVictoria had her wedding dress made, though by the time my mother was born and I was born, Blakely was a village no longer. The country forced into the city — that is the story of industrialisation, and it has a despair in it, and an excitement in it, and a brutality in it, and poetry in it, and all of those things are in me.
When I was born the looms had gone but not the long low terraces of houses sometimes stone sometimes brick under shallow—pitched roofs of slate tiles. With slate roof tiles your pitch can be as shallow as 33 degrees — with stone tiles you must allow 45 degrees or even 54. The look of a place was all to do with the materials to hand. Steeper roofs of stone tiles coax the water to run slower as it bumps over the rises and indentations of the stone. Slate is fast and fiat, and if slate roofs are too steep, the water waterfalls straight over the gutters. The flow is slowed by the pitch.
That typical fiat grey unlovely look of the northern industrial roofscape is no—nonsense efficient, like the industry the houses were built to support. You get on with it, you work hard, you don't try for beauty or dreamin ou don't build for the vie hick flagstone floors, small mean rooms, dismal backyards.
If you do climb to the top of the house, all there is are the squat stacks of the shared chimneys, smoking coal into the haze that somewhere hides the sky.
But ...
The Lancashire Pennines are the dreaming place. Low, thick—chested, massy, hard, the ridge of hills is always visible, like a rough watcher who loves something he can't defend, but stays anyway, hunched over the ugliness human beings make. Stays scarred and battered but stays.
If you drive along the M62 from Manchester towards Accrington where I was brought up, you will see the Pennines, shocking in their suddenness and their silence. This is a landscape of few words, taciturn, reluctant. It is not an easy beauty.
But it is beautiful.
Sometime, between six weeks and six months old, I got picked up from Manchester and taken to Accrington. It was all over for me and the woman whose baby I was.
She was gone. I was gone.
I was adopted.
21 January 1960 is the date when John William Winterson, Labourer, and Constance Winterson, Clerk, got the baby they thought they wanted and took it home to 200 Water Street, Accrington, Lancashire.
They had bought the house for £200 in 1947.
1947, the coldest British winter of the twentieth century, snow so high it reached the top of the upright piano as they pushed it in through the door.
1947, and the war ended, and my dad out of the army, doing his best, trying to make a living, and his wife throwing her wedding ring in the gutter and refusing all sexual relations.
I don't know, and never will, whether she couldn't have children or whether she just wouldn't put herself through the necessaries.
I know they both drank a bit and they both smoked before they found Jesus. And I don't think my mother was depressed in those days. After the tent crusade, where they became Pentecostal evangelical Christians, they both gave up drink — except for cherry brandy at New Year — and my father traded his Woodbines for Polo mints. My mother carried on smoking because she said it kept her weight down. Her smoking had to be a secret though, and she kept an air freshener she claimed was fly spray in her handbag.
No one seemed to think it was unusual to keep fly spray in your handbag.
She was convinced that God would find her a child, and I suppose that if God is providing the baby, having sex can be crossed off the list. I don't know how Dad felt about this. Mrs Winterson always said, ‘He's not like other men . . .’
Every Friday he gave her his pay packet and she gave him back enough change for three packets of Polo mints.
She said, ‘They're his only pleasure . . .’
Poor Dad.
When he got married again at seventy—two, his new wife Lillian, who was ten years younger and a good—time girl, told me it was like sleeping with a red—hot poker.
Until I was two years old, I screamed. This was evidence in plain sight that I was possessed by the Devil. Child psychology hadn't reached Accrington, and in spite of important work by Winnicott, Bowlby and Balint on attachment, and the trauma of early separation from the love object that is the mother, a screaming baby wasn't a broken—hearted baby — she was a Devil baby.
That gave me a strange power as well as all the vulnerabilities. I think my new parents were frightened of me.
Babies are frightening — raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body. My new mother had a lot of problems with the body — her own, my dad's, their bodies together, and mine. She had muffled her own body in flesh and clothes, suppressed its appetites with a fearful mix of nicotine and Jesus, dosed it with purgatives that made her vomit, submitted it to doctors, who administered enemas and pelvic rings, subdued its desires for ordinary touch and comfort, and suddenly, not out of her own body, and with no preparation, she had a thing that was all body.
A burping, spraying, sprawling faecal thing blasting the house with rude life.
She was thirty—seven when I arrived, and my dad was forty. That is pretty normal these days, but it wasn't normal in the 1960s when people married early and started their families in their twenties. She and my father had already been married for fifteen years.
They had an old—fashioned marriage in that my father never cooked, and when I arrived, my mother never worked outside the home. This was very bad for her, and turned her inward—looking nature into walled—in depression. There were many fights, and about many things, but the battle between us was really the battle between happiness and unhappiness.
I was very often full of rage and despair. I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life. When I was upset I went roaming into the Pennines — all day on a jam sandwich and a bottle of milk. When I was locked outside, or the other favourite, locked in the coal—hole, I made up stories and forgot about the cold and the dark. I know these are ways of surviving, but maybe a refusal, any refusal, to be broken lets in enough light and air to keep believing in the world — the dream of escape.
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 Je
sus.
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 . . .