What doesn’t kill you…
‘I didn’t think about sex – I just did it.’ Jeanette Winterson was talking to Alan Yentob
on Imagine BBC 1 Tuesday 10.35pm – My Monster and Me.
She was born in Manchester
in 1959 to a woman who worked in a clothing factory. As she was illegitimate her birth mother gave
her up for adoption and her monster – Mrs Winterson - took her to live in the
back streets of Accrington, a soot-smutted Lancashire
town just over the moors from my own home town.
Jeanette wrote an award winning book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit when she was 26 which tells of her
extraordinary childhood. The monster was
her adoptive mother – an evangelical Christian and Jeanette was meant to be a
missionary. She was ruled with a rod of
iron – Mrs Winterson kept a revolver in the kitchen - and was frequently told
the devil had led Mrs Winterson to the wrong crib.
Rejected by two mothers (she regards the writer Ruth Rendell
as her third mother) Jeanette found relief in books. She demonstrated to Yentob how when she was
pushed out of the front door she would curl up on the step. She said it was
quite comfortable, sheltered from the rain and she could escape into her
imagination.
Books transformed her life; she would hide them under the
mattress – they were her ‘flying carpet ‘to get away from her dreary
surroundings. She worked her way through
the alphabet at the local library.
Mrs Winterson threw her out aged 16 when her attempts to
exorcise Jeanette’s homosexuality failed.
She lived in a borrowed Mini for two months and illustrated to Yentob
how she kept things respectable by using the driver’s seat as an office – the large
steering wheel as a book rest, the passenger seat as a dining room (never slide
across – always go out of the drivers door and in via the passenger door) and the
bedroom was the back seat with the boot as a wardrobe.
Somehow she got to Oxford University
and loved the ‘five floors of books’, the beautiful town, the acquisition of
knowledge and like minded friends.
Whilst at Oxford
she asked Mrs Winterson if she could take a friend home and surprisingly was
allowed. The friend was of mixed race
and Mrs Winterson provided lots of tins of pineapple and copious duvets on the
bed because ‘they feel the cold’.
When the revolver appeared on the kitchen table Jeanette
knew it was time to leave and was estranged from her adoptive mother until her
death.
Jeanette had many affairs both in England
and Paris. She said she always felt most lonely when she
was in a relationship. When a six year
relationship broke up she felt she was going mad. Her friends knew she was in a dark place but
didn’t know how to help her. She tried
to kill herself in her car in the garage - unaware that her cat was with her
and when she fell to the floor the cat scratched at her face until she got up
and opened the doors. She said she would
never be in that place again. This was a
new beginning. Oddly as she was relating
this to Yentob there was a movement on the darkened screen and one could just
make out a cat moving to sit by her.
Now it was to be a fresh start and she determined to find
her birth mother with the help of Susie Orbach.
Eventually she did find her.
The programme visited Paris
where Jeanette had found succour in the shop Shakespeare and Co, renowned for
harbouring writers sometimes for years.
There she found loving friendship, was fed and looked after
although they had no idea of what she was going through at the time
When Mrs Winterson died Jeanette didn’t attend the funeral
but sent flowers in the shape of a dog.
The film ends with her visiting Mrs Winterson’s grave along with
Yentob. As she said her mother was a
monster – but she was her
monster. Finally – left alone with her
thoughts she suddenly steals a bunch of white flowers from the next grave and
put’s them on Mrs Winterson’s grave.
As soon as the
programme was over there was a footnote to say the flowers were immediately
restored to their rightful place.
Jeanette’s memoir is Why
be Happy When you could be Normal?
My next read I think, to fill in the gaps.
