I still sing it and I have taught it to all my friends and my godchildren, and it is completely ridiculous and, I think, rather wonderful. Here are all the words:
Cheer up ye saints of God,
There’s nothing to worry about;
Nothing to make you feel afraid,
Nothing to make you doubt;
Remember Jesus saves you;
So why not trust him and shout,
You’ll be sorry you worried at all, tomorrow morning.
So, there was my mum at the piano singing ‘God Has Blotted Them Out’, and there was me in the coal-hole singing ‘Cheer Up Ye Saints of God’.
The trouble with adoption is that you never know what you are going to get.
Our life at home was a bit odd.
I didn’t go to school until I was five, because we were living in Grandad’s house and looking after the dying grandmother. School was too difficult to add.
In the days of the dying Grandmother I used to climb on her big high bed in the sitting room that looked onto the rose garden. It was a lovely light room and I was always the first person awake.
In the way that small children and old people can be so well matched, I loved getting into the kitchen and standing on a stool and making really messy jam and cream sandwiches. These were all my grandmother could eat, because of her throat cancer. I liked them, but I liked anything that was food, and besides, at that hour there were none of the Dead hanging round the kitchen. Or maybe it was only my mother who could see them.
When the sandwiches were made I took them to the big high bed – I was about four, I suppose – and woke up Grandma and we ate them and got jam everywhere and read. She read to me and I read to her. I was good at reading – you have to be if you start with the Bible . . . but I loved words from the beginning.
She bought me all the Orlando the Marmalade Cat books by Kathleen Hale. He was so very orange and debonair.
Those days were good. One day my father’s mother came to visit and was introduced to me as ‘your grandmother’.
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.
When Grandma died I found her. I didn’t know she was dead. I just knew that she wasn’t reading the story or eating the jam and cream sandwiches.
And then we packed our bags and left Grandad’s house with the three gardens and the steep wood behind.
We moved back to Water Street. The two-up two-down.
My mother’s depression started then, I think.
During the sixteen years that I lived at home, my father was on shift work at the factory, or he was at church. That was his pattern.
My mother was awake all night and depressed all day. That was her pattern.
I was at school, at church, out in the hills, or reading in secret. That was my pattern.
I learned secrecy early. To hide my heart. To conceal my thoughts. Once it had been decided that I was the Wrong Crib, everything I did supported my mother in that belief. She watched me for signs of possession.
When I went deaf she didn’t take me to the doctor because she knew it was either Jesus stoppering up my ears to the things of the world in an attempt to reform my broken soul, or it was Satan whispering so loud that he had perforated my eardrums.
It was very bad for me that my deafness happened at around the same time as I discovered my clitoris.
Mrs W was nothing if not old-fashioned. She knew that masturbation made you blind, so it was not difficult to conclude that it made you deaf too.
I thought this was unfair as a lot of people we knew had hearing aids and glasses.
In the public library there was an entire large-print section. I noticed it was next to the individual study cubicles. Presumably one thing led to another.
In any event, I did have to have my adenoids out, so it was neither Jesus nor Satan who had blocked my ears, leaving only my own base nature as the culprit.
When my mother took me to the hospital and settled me in the high-sided bed on the children’s ward, I climbed straight out and ran after her.
She was up ahead in her Crimplene coat, tall, massy, solitary, and I can still feel the polished lino skidding under my bare feet.
Panic. I can feel it now. I must have thought she had taken me back to be adopted again.
I remember that afternoon in hospital and being given the anaesthetic and starting to make up a story about a rabbit that had no fur. His mother gave him a jewelled coat to wear but a weasel stole it and it was winter . . .
I suppose I should finish that story one day . . .
It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.
After the rabbit and adenoids episode I was sent to school a year late. This was a worry because my mother called it the Breeding Ground – and when I asked her what exactly a Breeding Ground was, she said it was like the sink would be if she didn’t put bleach down it.
She told me not to mix with the other children, who presumably had survived the bleach – anyway they were all very pale.
I could read and write and add up and that was all that happened at school. In spite of my competence I was given bad reports in the way that bad children are given bad reports. I had accepted the bad label. It was better to have some identity than none at all.
Most of the time I drew pictures of Hell which I took home for my mother to admire. There is a very nice technique for Hell: colour a piece of paper with lots of bright rainbow colours in blocks then get a black wax crayon and scrub out all the colours. Then get a pin and etch into the paper. Where the black is scraped away the colours come through. Dramatic and effective. Especially for lost souls.
*
When I left the infant school in disgrace for burning down the play kitchen, the headmistress, who wore black tweed because she was in mourning for Scotland, told my mother that I was domineering and aggressive.
I was. I beat up the other kids, boys and girls alike, and when I couldn’t understand what was being said to me in a lesson I just left the classroom and bit the teachers if they tried to make me come back.
I realise my behaviour wasn’t ideal but my mother believed I was demon possessed and the headmistress was in mourning for Scotland. It was hard to be normal.
I got myself up for school every day. My mother left me a bowl of cornflakes and the milk in a flask. We had no fridge and most of the year we had no need of one – the house was cold, the North was cold, and when we bought food we ate it.
Mrs Winterson had terrible stories about fridges – they gave off gas and made you dizzy, mice got caught in the motor, rats would be attracted by the dead mice caught in the motor . . . children got trapped inside and couldn’t escape – she knew of a family whose youngest child had climbed into the fridge to play hide-and-seek, and frozen to death. They had to defrost the fridge to prise him out. After that the council took away the other children. I wondered why they didn’t just take away the fridge.
Every morning when I came downstairs I blew on the fire to get it going and read my note – there was always a note. The note began with a general reminder about washing – HANDS, FACE, NECK AND EARS – and an exhortation from the Bible, such as Seek Ye the Lord. Or Watch and Pray.
The exhortation was different every day. The body parts to be washed stayed the same.
When I was seven we got a dog, and my job before school was to walk the dog round the block and feed her. So then the list was arranged as WASH, WALK, FEED, READ.
At dinner time, as lunchtime was called in the North, I came home from school for the first few years,
because junior school was only round the corner. By then, my mother was up and about, and we ate pie and peas and had a Bible reading.
Later, when I was at the grammar school further away, I didn’t come home at dinner time, and so I didn’t have any dinner. My mother refused to be means-tested, and so I didn’t qualify for free school meals, but we had no money to buy the meals either. I usually took a couple of slices of white bread and a bit of cheese, just like that, in my bag.
Nobody thought it unusual – and it wasn’t. There were plenty of kids who didn’t get fed properly.
We did get fed properly in the evening because we had an allotment, and our vegetables were good. I liked growing vegetables – I still do, and there is a quiet pleasure in it for me. We had hens, so got eggs, but with meat affordable only twice a week, we didn’t get enough protein.
Thursday nights were always boiled onions or boiled potatoes from the allotment. Dad got paid Fridays and by Thursday there was no money left. In winter, the gas and electricity meters ran out on Thursdays too, and so the onions and potatoes weren’t quite boiled enough and we ate them in the dark of the paraffin lamp.
Everybody in the street was the same. Blackout Thursdays were common.
We had no car, no phone, and no central heating. In winter the windows froze on the inside.
We were usually cold but I don’t remember being upset by it. My dad had had no socks when he was a little boy, so our feet, if not the rest of us, had made progress.
We had a coal fire that I learned to lay and to light when I was five, as soon as we moved back from Grandad’s centrally heated house to our own draughty and damp terrace. My dad taught me how to make a fire and I was so proud of myself and my burnt fingers and singed hair.
It was my job to make twists of paper and soak them in paraffin and keep them stacked in a sealed biscuit tin. Dad collected kindling and axed it up. When the coalman came he gave my mother free bags of the stuff they called slack because he had wanted to marry her. She viewed this as an insult to her moral character but she kept the slack.
When my mother went to bed – around six in the morning – she spread the thin dusty tarry slack over the fire to keep it low and hot, and left coal for me to get the fire going again at 7.30 a.m. She sat up all night listening to secret broadcasts of the Gospel to Soviet Russia behind the Iron Curtain. She baked, she sewed, she knitted, she mended, and she read the Bible.
She was such a solitary woman. A solitary woman who longed for one person to know her. I think I do know her now, but it is too late.
Or is it?
Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.
Mrs Winterson left behind things that she could not do.
One of those things was to make a home.
The Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade talks about home – ontological as well as geographical home – and in a lovely phrase, 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. A place where the order of things come together – the living and dead – the spirits of the ancestors and the present inhabitants, and the gathering up and stilling of all the to-and-fro.
Leaving home can only happen because there is a home to leave. And the leaving is never just a geographical or spatial separation; it is an emotional separation – wanted or unwanted. Steady or ambivalent.
For the refugee, for the homeless, the lack of this crucial coordinate in the placing of the self has severe consequences. At best it must be managed, made up for in some way. At worst, a displaced person, literally, does not know which way is up, because there is no true north. No compass point. Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity.
A nomadic people learn to take their homes with them – and the familiar objects are spread out or re-erected from place to place. When we move house, we take with us the invisible concept of home – but it is a very powerful concept. Mental health and emotional continuity do not require us to stay in the same house or the same place, but they do require a sturdy structure on the inside – and that structure is built in part by what has happened on the outside. The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.
Home was problematic for me. It did not represent order and it did not stand for safety. I left home at sixteen, and after that I was always moving, until finally, almost by accident, I found and kept two places, both modest, one in London and one in the country. I have never lived with anyone in either of those homes.
I am not entirely happy about that, but when I did live with someone, and for thirteen years, I could only manage it by having a lot of separate space. I am not messy, I am organised, and I cook and clean very happily, but another presence is hard for me. I wish it were not so, because I would really like to live with someone I love.
I just don’t think I know how to do that.
So it is better to accept my not quite adjusted need for distance and privacy.
Mrs Winterson never respected my privacy. She ransacked my possessions, read my diaries, my notebooks, my stories, my letters. I never felt safe in the house and when she made me leave it I felt betrayed. The horrible sick feeling that I had never belonged and never would belong is assuaged now by the fact that my homes are mine and I can come and go as I please.
I never had a key to the house in Water Street, and so entry depended on being let in – or not. I don’t know why I am still so fond of doorsteps – it seems perverse, given that I spent so much time sitting on one, but the two parts of home that mattered to me in Accrington are the parts I could least do without now.
They are the threshold and the hearth.
My friends joke that I won’t shut the door unless it is officially bedtime or actually snowing into the kitchen. The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is to open the back door. The next thing I do, in winter, is to light the fire.
All those hours spent sitting on my bum on the doorstep have given me a feeling for liminal space. I love the way cats like to be half in half out, the wild and the tame, and I too am the wild and the tame. 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.
The threshold and the hearth are mythic spaces. Each has sacred and ceremonial aspects in the history of our myth. To cross the threshold is to enter another world – whether the one on the inside or the one on the outside – and we can never be really sure what is on the other side of the door until we open it.
Everyone has dreams of familiar doors and unknown rooms. Narnia is through a door in a wardrobe. In the story of Bluebeard there is one door that must not be opened. A vampire cannot cross a threshold strewn with garlic. Open the door into the tiny Tardis, and inside is a vast and changing space.
The tradition of carrying the bride into her new house is a rite of passage; one world has been left behind, another entered. When we leave the parental home, even now, we do much more than go out of the house with a suitcase.
Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.
The crossing in and out, the different worlds, the significant spaces, are private coordinates that in my fiction I have tried to make paradigmatic.
Personal stories work for other people when those stories become both paradigms and parables. The intensity of a story – say the story in Oranges – releases into a bigger space than the one it occupied in time and place. The story crosses the threshold f
rom my world into yours. We meet each other on the steps of the story.
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.
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.
Mrs Winterson lived in the same house on Water Street from 1947 until her death in 1990. Was it a sanctuary? I don’t think so. Was it where she wanted to be? No . . .
She hated the small and the mean, and yet that is all she had. I bought a few big houses myself along the way, simply because I was trying out something for her. 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.
Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father . . . that’s how Oranges begins, and it ends with the young woman, let’s call her Jeanette, returning home to find things much the same – a new electronic organ to add a bit of bass and percussion to the Christmas carols, but otherwise, it’s life as it ever was – the giant figure of the mother stooped inside the cramped house, filling it with Royal Albert and electrical goods, totting up the church accounts in a double ledger, smoking into the night underneath a haze of fly spray, her fags hidden in a box marked RUBBER BANDS.
Like most people, when I look back, the family house is held in time, or rather it is now outside of time, because it exists so clearly and it does not change, and it can only be entered through a door in the mind.
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. It is why, in religious rites of all kinds, something that happened once is re-enacted – Passover, Christmas, Easter, or, in the pagan record, Midsummer and the dying of the god. As we participate in the ritual, we step outside of linear time and enter real time.