*
Accrington is not famous for much. It has the world’s worst football team – Accrington Stanley – and a large collection of Tiffany glass donated by Joseph Briggs, an Accrington man who did manage to leave, and who made his name and fortune in New York, working for Tiffany.
If bits of New York came to Accrington, then much bigger bits of Accrington went to New York. Among its oddities, Accrington used to make the world’s hardest bricks – there is iron ore in the heavy clay, and that gives the bricks their recognisable bright red colour, as well as their remarkable strength.
The bricks are known as the Nori brick because somebody said they were as hard as iron and stamped it on the bricks backwards by mistake – so Nori they became.
Thousands of these bricks went to New York to build the foundations of the 1,454-foot-tall Empire State Building. Think King Kong and think Accrington. It was the Nori brick that kept the gorilla swinging Fay Wray. We used to have special showings of King Kong at the little cinema in the town and there was always a newsreel about the bricks. Nobody had ever been to New York City, but we all felt personally responsible for its success as the world’s most modern city with the world’s tallest building standing on Accrington brick.
The famous bricks had a more domestic life too. Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus architect, used Nori bricks for his only residential building in Britain – 66 Old Church Street, Chelsea, London.
Unlike the Empire State Building nobody thought much of Gropius’s work but everybody knew about it. We had things to be proud of in Accrington.
The money that came out of the mills and the cotton industry built the market hall and town hall, the Victoria Hospital, the Mechanics’ Institute and, later, in part, the public library.
It seems so easy now to destroy libraries – mainly by taking away all the books – and to say that books and libraries are not relevant to people’s lives. There’s a lot of talk about social breakdown and alienation, but how can it be otherwise when our ideas of progress remove the centres that did so much to keep people together?
In the North people met in the church, in the pub, in the marketplace, and in those philanthropic buildings where they could continue their education and their interests. Now, maybe, the pub is left – but mainly nothing is left.
The library was my door to elsewhere. But there other doors too – not decorated or municipal, but low and hidden.
There was a second-hand rummage and junk shop somewhere under the viaduct in Accrington which was the last relative of the nineteenth-century rag-and-bone shops. There was a rag-and-bone cart that came round the streets most weeks, and people threw on it what they didn’t want and bargained to take home what they did want. I never knew what the man was called, but he had a little Jack Russell terrier called Nip that stood on top of the rag-and-bone cart, barking and guarding the junk.
Under the viaduct was a slam-door of prison-grade steel. Get inside, and you walked down a mummified passage hung with half-dead horsehair mattresses. The Rag Man hung them on meathooks like carcasses, the hooks wedged through the steel springs.
Walk further and the passage broke into a small chamber that wheezed fumes in your face. The wheeze was from a flame heater – a shooting angry jet of gas and fire that the Rag Man used to keep himself warm.
His was the kind of place that sold pre-war prams with wheels the size of millstones and canvas hoods on steel frames. The canvas was mildewed and torn, and sometimes he'd prop a china-head doll under the hood, its glazed eyes malevolent and watchful. He had hundreds of chairs, most with a leg missing like survivors of a shoot-out. He had rusty canary cages and balding stuffed animals, knitted blankets and trolleys on castors. He had tin baths and washboards, clothes mangles and bedpans.
If you fought your way through the Victorian fringed standard lamps and orphaned patchwork quilts, if you crawled under walnut sideboards with their doors off and half-chopped church pews, if you could flatten yourself past the hot dry airless tombs of bedding still tubercular, and sheets hanging like ghosts – the lost linen of lines of the unemployed selling everything and sleeping in sacks – all of that sweated in misery, then, if you could press past and beyond the children's tricycles left with one wheel and the hobby horses without manes and the punctured leather footballs with their dirty criss-cross leather laces, then you came to the books.
ChatterBox Annual, 1923. The Gollywog News, 1915. Empire for Boys, 1911. Empire for Girls . . . The Astral Plane, 1913. How To Keep A Cow. How To Keep A Pig. How To Keep House.
I loved those – life was so simple – you decided what you wanted to keep – livestock, homestead, wife, bees – and the books told you how to do it. It made for confidence . . .
And in the midst of those things, like the burning bush, were complete sets of Dickens, the Brontës, Sir Walter Scott. They were cheap to buy and I bought them – sloping into the warren of storerooms after work, knowing he'd stay open playing his ancient opera records on one of those radiograms with Bakelite knobs and an arm that moved all on its own to touch down on the black spinning surface of the vinyl.
What is life to me without thee?
What is left if thou art dead?
What is life; life without thee?
What is life without my love?
Eurydice! Eurydice!
It was Kathleen Ferrier singing – the contralto born in Blackburn, five miles from Accrington. The telephonist who had won a singing competition and become as famous as Maria Callas.
Mrs Winterson had heard Kathleen Ferrier sing at Blackburn Town Hall, and she liked to play Kathleen Ferrier songs on the piano. She often sang in her own style that famous aria from Gluck's Orfeo – ’What is life to me without thee?’.
We had no time for death. The war plus the Apocalypse plus eternal life made death ridiculous. Death/life. What did it matter as long as you had your soul?
‘How many men did you kill, Dad?’
‘I don't recall. Twenty. I killed six with my bayonet. They gave the bullets to the officers – not to us – they said, “We've no bullets, strap on your bayonets.”’
The D-Day landings. My dad survived. None of his friends did.
And in the war before, the First World War, Lord Kitchener had decided that men who were friends made better soldiers. Accrington managed to send 720 men – the Accrington Pals – to Serre in France. They trained on the hill at the top of my street and they set off to be heroes. On 1 July 1916 the Battle of the Somme pushed them forward in steady lines that did not waver as the German machine guns took them down. 586 of them were killed or wounded.
In the rag-and-bone shop we sat by the radiogram. The man gave me a poem to read about a dead soldier. He said it was by Wilfred Owen, a young poet killed in 1918. I know the beginning now but I didn't then . . . but I couldn't forget the end . . .
And in his eyes/The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak/In different skies.
I was often out at night – walking home or in lockout on the doorstep – so I spent a lot of time looking at the stars and wondering if they looked the same somewhere that wasn't Accrington.
My mother's eyes were like cold stars. She belonged in a different sky.
Sometimes, when she hadn't been to sleep at all, she'd be there in the morning waiting for the corner shop to open and she'd make an egg custard. Egg-custard mornings made me nervous. When I came home from school nobody would be there – Dad would be at work and she had done a Disappearance. So I used to go round to the back alley and climb over the wall and see if she had left the back door open. Usually she did do that if it was a Disappearance, and the egg custard would be there under a cloth and a bit of money to go to the shop and get a pie.
The only problem was that the doors were locked so it meant climbing over the wall again, returning with the pie and hoping you could get back over without squashing it. Onion and potato for me, meat and onion for Dad when he came home.
At the corner shop they always knew she had Disappea
red.
‘She'll be back tomorrow, will Connie. She always comes back.’
That was true. She always came back. I never asked her where she went and I still don't know. I never eat egg custard either.
There were so many corner shops in Accrington. People opened them in their front rooms and lived upstairs. There were bread shops and pie shops and vegetable shops and shops that sold sweets in jars.
The best sweet shop was run by two ladies who may or may not have been lovers. One was quite young, but the older one wore a woollen balaclava all the time – not the full-face version, but a balaclava nonetheless. And she had a moustache. But a lot of women had moustaches in those days. I never met anybody who shaved anything, and it didn't occur to me to shave anything myself until I turned up at Oxford looking like a werewolf.
But I suspect that my mother had seen The Killing of Sister George (1968), where Beryl Reid plays a bawling brassy butch dyke sadistically tormenting her younger blonde girlfriend called Childie. It is a magnificent and unsettling movie but not one likely to win Mrs W over to the cause of gay rights.
She loved going to the pictures, even though it was not allowed and even though she couldn't afford it. Whenever we passed by the Odeon Cinema she looked carefully at the posters, and sometimes, when she went on one of her Disappearances, I think she was at the Odeon.
Whatever the truth of the story, there came a day when I was forbidden to go into the sweet shop. This was a blow because I always got extra jelly babies from them. When I pestered Mrs Winterson about it she said they dealt in unnatural passions. At the time I assumed this meant they put chemicals in their sweets.
My other favourite shops, also forbidden, were the selling-out shops, now called off-licences, where women in headscarves took string bags to buy bottles of stout.
Although they were forbidden, these were the places where Mrs W got her cigarettes, and quite often she sent me, saying, ‘Tell them they're for your dad.’
All the booze bottles were returnable and carried a deposit in those days, and I soon worked out that the returns were kept in crates round the back and it was easy to pull a couple out and ‘return’ them again.
The selling-out shops were full of men and women who swore and talked about sex and betting on greyhounds, so all that plus free money and being forbidden made it very exciting.
When I think about it now I wonder why it was all right for me to go into the selling-out shops and buy cigarettes but all wrong for me to get extra sweets from a couple of women who were happy together, even if one of them wore a balaclava all the time.
I think Mrs Winterson was afraid of happiness. Jesus was supposed to make you happy but he didn't, and if you were waiting for the Apocalypse that never came, you were bound to feel disappointed.
She thought that happy meant bad/wrong/sinful. Or plain stupid. Unhappy seemed to have virtue attached to it.
But there were exceptions. The Gospel Tent was an exception, and Royal Albert was an exception, and so was Christmas. She loved Christmas.
In Accrington there was always a huge tree outside the market hall, and the Salvation Army played carols there for most of December.
At Christmas time the bartering system was in full swing. We could offer Brussels spouts on stalks from our allotment, apples wrapped in newspaper to make sauce, and best of all the once-a-year cherry brandy made from the morello cherry tree in the yard, and steeped half a year in the back of a cupboard on the way to Narnia.
We swapped our goods for smoked eel, crunchy like grated glass, and for a pudding made in cloth – a pudding made the proper way, and hard like a cannonball and speckled with fruit like a giant bird's egg. It stayed in slices when you cut it, and we poured the cherry brandy over the top and set it on fire, my dad turning the light out while my mother carried it into the parlour.
The flames lit up her face. The coal fire lit up me and my dad. We were happy.
On 21 December every year my mother went out in her hat and coat – she wouldn't say where – while my father and I strung paperchains, made by me, from the corners of the parlour cornice to the centre light. My mother returned, in what seemed to be a hailstorm, though maybe that was her personal weather. She carried a goose half in, half out of her bag, its slack head hung sideways like a dream nobody could remember. She gave it to me, goose and dream, and I plucked the feathers into a bucket. We kept the feathers to restuff whatever needed restuffing and we saved the thick goose fat we drained from the bird for roasting potatoes through the winter. Apart from Mrs W who had a thyroid problem everybody we knew was as thin as a ferret. We needed goose fat.
Christmas was the one time of the year when my mother went out into the world looking as though the world was more than a Vale of Tears.
She got dressed up and came to my school concerts – and that meant wearing her mother's fur coat and a half-hat made of black feathers. Hat and coat were circa 1940 and this was in the 1970s, but she cut a dash, and she always had good posture, and as the whole of the North was in the wrong decade until the 1980s, nobody noticed.
The concerts were extremely ambitious; the first half was something daunting like the Fauré Requiem or the St Anthony Chorale, and it required the full power of the choir and orchestra and usually a soloist or two from the Halle Orchestra in Manchester.
We had a music teacher who played the cello with the Halle, and she was one of those electrical trapped women of a particular generation who are half mad because they are trapped, and half genius because they are trapped. She wanted her girls to know about music – to sing it, to play it, and to make no compromises.
We were terrified of her. If she was playing the piano at school assembly, she would play Rachmaninov, her hair dark over the Steinway, her fingernails always red.
The school song at Accrington High School for Girls was ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, a terrible choice for an all-girls’ school, but one that helped turn me into a feminist. Where were the famous women – indeed any women – and why weren't we praising them? I vowed to myself that I would be famous and that I would come back and be praised.
That seemed very unlikely as I was a terrible pupil, inattentive and troublesome, and my reports were year-in year-out awful. I couldn't concentrate and I didn't understand much of what was being said to me.
I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.
But it was Christmas and the school was lit up and Mrs Winterson was in her fur coat and bird hat and my dad was washed and shaved and I was walking in between them and it felt normal.
‘Is that your mum?’ said somebody.
‘Mostly,’ I said.
*
Years later, when I came back to Accrington after my first term at Oxford, it was snowing and I was walking up the long stretchy street from the train station, counting the lamp posts. I got near 200 Water Street and heard her before I saw her, her back to the window onto the street, very upright, very big, playing her new electronic organ – ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, with a jazz riff and cymbals.
I looked at her through the window. It had always been through the window – there was a barrier between us, transparent but real – but it says in the Bible, doesn't it, that we see through a glass darkly?
She was my mother. She wasn't my mother.
I rang the bell. She half turned. ‘Come in, come in, the door's open.’
8
The Apocalypse
M
RS WINTERSON WAS NOT A welcoming woman. If anyone knocked at the door she ran down the lobby and shoved the poker through the letter box.
I reminded her that angels often come in disguise and she said that was true but they didn't come disguised in Crimplene.
Part of the problem was that we had no bathroom and she was ashamed of this. Not many people did have bathrooms but I was not allowed to have friends from school in case they wanted to
use the toilet – and then they would have to go outside – and then they would discover that we had no bathroom.
In fact, that was the least of it. A bigger challenge for unbelievers than a draughty encounter with an outside loo was what was waiting for them when they got there.
We were not allowed books but we lived in a world of print. Mrs Winterson wrote out exhortations and stuck them all over the house.
Under my coat peg a sign said THINK OF GOD NOT THE DOG.
Over the gas oven, on a loaf wrapper, it said MAN SHALL NOT LIVE BY BREAD ALONE.
But in the outside loo, directly in front of you as you went through the door, was a placard. Those who stood up read LINGER NOT AT THE LORD'S BUSINESS.
Those who sat down read HE SHALL MELT THY BOWELS LIKE WAX.
This was wishful thinking; my mother was having trouble with her bowels. It was something to do with the loaf of white sliced we couldn't live by.
When I went to school my mother put quotes from the Scriptures in my hockey boots. At mealtimes there was a little scroll from the Promise Box by each of our plates. A Promise Box is a box with Bible texts rolled up in it, like the jokes you get in Christmas crackers, but serious. The little rolls stand on end and you close your eyes and pick one out. It can be comforting: LET NOT YOUR HEARTS BE TROUBLED NEITHER LET THEM BE AFRAID. Or it can be frightening: THE SINS OF THE FATHERS SHALL BE VISITED ON THE CHILDREN.
But cheery or depressing, it was all reading and reading was what I wanted to do. Fed words and shod with them, words became clues. Piece by piece I knew they would lead me somewhere else.
The only time that Mrs Winterson liked to answer the door was when she knew that the Mormons were coming round. Then she waited in the lobby, and before they had dropped the knocker she had flung open the door waving her Bible and warning them of eternal damnation. This was confusing for the Mormons because they thought they were in charge of eternal damnation. But Mrs Winterson was a better candidate for the job.