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This programme contains some strong language. | 0:00:04 | 0:00:10 | |
Jeanette Winterson published her first novel, | 0:00:15 | 0:00:17 | |
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, in 1985 at the age of 26, | 0:00:17 | 0:00:22 | |
and has since then blazed a unique trail | 0:00:22 | 0:00:25 | |
through contemporary literature. | 0:00:25 | 0:00:28 | |
But no matter how high her imagination flies, | 0:00:33 | 0:00:37 | |
how brilliantly luminous the world she creates, | 0:00:37 | 0:00:40 | |
she's always tapped into something deep and dark | 0:00:40 | 0:00:43 | |
in her own life story. | 0:00:43 | 0:00:44 | |
When I'm standing up here, | 0:00:46 | 0:00:48 | |
I'm thinking about that bit in Oranges, | 0:00:48 | 0:00:50 | |
where the character Jeanette | 0:00:50 | 0:00:52 | |
goes up to the top of the hill above her hometown, and she's looking out. | 0:00:52 | 0:00:56 | |
It's a dismal sight. | 0:00:56 | 0:00:58 | |
And she says, "It's just like Jesus on the Pinnacle, | 0:00:58 | 0:01:01 | |
"but it's not very tempting." | 0:01:01 | 0:01:03 | |
And this IS very tempting. | 0:01:03 | 0:01:04 | |
This is that bit in the Bible story where Jesus has fasted | 0:01:07 | 0:01:10 | |
for 40 days and 40 nights, | 0:01:10 | 0:01:11 | |
and he goes up to the pinnacle of the temple | 0:01:11 | 0:01:13 | |
and Satan appears and says, | 0:01:13 | 0:01:16 | |
"Why don't you just throw yourself off?" | 0:01:16 | 0:01:20 | |
Very modern, because it's the temptation of celebrity, | 0:01:20 | 0:01:23 | |
to throw yourself off the roof of your own life. | 0:01:23 | 0:01:25 | |
You look over this vast, lit up space. | 0:01:28 | 0:01:32 | |
And that tiny moon behind the tower block. | 0:01:32 | 0:01:37 | |
And this is success. | 0:01:37 | 0:01:38 | |
It's beautiful, and it's frightening. | 0:01:40 | 0:01:43 | |
-Who was the oldest man in the Bible? -Methuselah. | 0:02:00 | 0:02:02 | |
-How old was he when he died? -969. | 0:02:02 | 0:02:04 | |
What sort of tea is this? | 0:02:04 | 0:02:06 | |
Stand up and be counted. | 0:02:06 | 0:02:08 | |
I mean, Empire Blend. | 0:02:09 | 0:02:11 | |
In Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, | 0:02:29 | 0:02:31 | |
a magnificent monster was born - Mrs Winterson. | 0:02:31 | 0:02:35 | |
A woman who kept a revolver in her duster drawer | 0:02:35 | 0:02:38 | |
had plans for her adopted daughter. | 0:02:38 | 0:02:41 | |
She was to be a missionary in the Pentecostal church. | 0:02:41 | 0:02:45 | |
It didn't quite work out. | 0:02:45 | 0:02:47 | |
In 2011, Jeanette returned to the story of her childhood | 0:02:48 | 0:02:52 | |
with a new book, Why Be Happy, When You Could Be Normal? | 0:02:52 | 0:02:56 | |
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING | 0:02:56 | 0:02:59 | |
Before we begin, I just want to ask a question. | 0:03:06 | 0:03:08 | |
Would you put your hand up | 0:03:08 | 0:03:10 | |
if you've never read anything by Jeanette Winterson? | 0:03:10 | 0:03:12 | |
This is marvellous! LAUGHTER | 0:03:16 | 0:03:19 | |
You've been led here tonight to this tent | 0:03:19 | 0:03:23 | |
because you know that something is missing in your life! | 0:03:23 | 0:03:26 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:03:26 | 0:03:29 | |
And so far, nothing has been able to fill that gap. | 0:03:31 | 0:03:33 | |
And some invisible force prompted you to go online | 0:03:35 | 0:03:39 | |
and get a ticket for tonight. | 0:03:39 | 0:03:42 | |
And by the end of it, I can't promise a pot plant, | 0:03:42 | 0:03:46 | |
which is what Mrs Winterson got when she found Jesus, but... | 0:03:46 | 0:03:50 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:03:50 | 0:03:54 | |
But I can promise you an experience. | 0:03:54 | 0:03:57 | |
And I hope that by the end of the evening, | 0:03:57 | 0:03:59 | |
when I ask you to raise your hand, | 0:03:59 | 0:04:01 | |
all of you will be able to say, "I've been saved." | 0:04:01 | 0:04:03 | |
She's a great advert for being a short arse! | 0:04:05 | 0:04:07 | |
She has such power in that little frame, | 0:04:09 | 0:04:13 | |
and she so dominates wherever she is, | 0:04:13 | 0:04:15 | |
and I just think that's fantastic, you know? | 0:04:15 | 0:04:17 | |
It's like, you don't have to be big and butch to rule the world, | 0:04:17 | 0:04:21 | |
cos she does rule her world. | 0:04:21 | 0:04:23 | |
The most recent version of her autobiography | 0:04:25 | 0:04:28 | |
is a tale of two mothers. | 0:04:28 | 0:04:29 | |
There's the overwhelming presence of one mother, Mrs Winterson, | 0:04:29 | 0:04:34 | |
and the overwhelming absence of another, her biological mother. | 0:04:34 | 0:04:38 | |
She's still my daughter! | 0:04:39 | 0:04:41 | |
She's not your daughter. She's mine. | 0:04:41 | 0:04:45 | |
You were unfit. | 0:04:45 | 0:04:46 | |
Unfit to have a child. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:48 | |
Just let me see her! | 0:04:48 | 0:04:50 | |
God gave her to me! | 0:04:50 | 0:04:52 | |
You've nothing to do with God! | 0:04:52 | 0:04:55 | |
You've a heart of stone! | 0:04:55 | 0:04:56 | |
You'll be in hell! | 0:04:58 | 0:05:00 | |
Who told you to come out here? | 0:05:02 | 0:05:04 | |
I said, who told you?! | 0:05:04 | 0:05:06 | |
Was that my real mother? | 0:05:06 | 0:05:08 | |
I'm your real mother. | 0:05:08 | 0:05:10 | |
She was just the carrying case that bore you! | 0:05:11 | 0:05:14 | |
'To be rejected by one mother is bad enough.' | 0:05:15 | 0:05:18 | |
To be rejected by two is horrific. | 0:05:18 | 0:05:20 | |
And I think that's the other thing about Jeanette, | 0:05:20 | 0:05:23 | |
it's a miracle that she has survived that. | 0:05:23 | 0:05:25 | |
And I think she absolutely did survive it | 0:05:25 | 0:05:27 | |
by telling the stories, by recreating herself. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:29 | |
And I sort of recognised it slightly too, | 0:05:29 | 0:05:31 | |
because I think it is what you do | 0:05:31 | 0:05:32 | |
when you can't cope with your environment. | 0:05:32 | 0:05:35 | |
You can fall into books or art, | 0:05:35 | 0:05:37 | |
and you can reinvent yourself through your own stories. | 0:05:37 | 0:05:39 | |
"Chapter One - The Wrong Crib. | 0:05:46 | 0:05:49 | |
"When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, | 0:05:51 | 0:05:55 | |
"'The devil led us to the wrong crib!' | 0:05:55 | 0:05:59 | |
"The image of Satan taking time off | 0:06:00 | 0:06:05 | |
"from the Cold War and McCarthyism | 0:06:05 | 0:06:08 | |
"to visit Manchester in 1960, | 0:06:08 | 0:06:14 | |
"purpose of visit, to deceive Mrs Winterson, | 0:06:14 | 0:06:18 | |
"has a flamboyant theatricality to it." | 0:06:18 | 0:06:22 | |
She dedicates Why Be Happy..? to her three mothers, doesn't she? | 0:06:28 | 0:06:32 | |
Of whom I am one, yes. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:34 | |
Of whom you are one. | 0:06:34 | 0:06:36 | |
And, erm, yes, | 0:06:36 | 0:06:38 | |
I was immensely pleased by that. | 0:06:38 | 0:06:42 | |
I like to think that she thinks of me like that. | 0:06:42 | 0:06:45 | |
I believe she does. | 0:06:45 | 0:06:47 | |
I think that Why Be Happy..? is a wonderful book, | 0:06:47 | 0:06:51 | |
and it... | 0:06:51 | 0:06:53 | |
..it's the quintessential autobiography, really. | 0:06:55 | 0:06:59 | |
But she knew it, and wrote accordingly. | 0:06:59 | 0:07:03 | |
She wasn't going to be dissuaded or swayed in anyway. | 0:07:03 | 0:07:07 | |
It's very positive, very straightforward, | 0:07:07 | 0:07:11 | |
and, oh, absolutely real. | 0:07:11 | 0:07:13 | |
You believe every word. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:16 | |
Folks, do your good deed, have a good read! | 0:07:16 | 0:07:19 | |
Do your good deed and you have a good read! | 0:07:19 | 0:07:22 | |
"I was born in Manchester in 1959. | 0:07:24 | 0:07:27 | |
"It was a good place to be born. | 0:07:27 | 0:07:29 | |
"Manchester was the world's first industrial city, | 0:07:32 | 0:07:34 | |
"its looms and mills transforming itself and the fortunes of Britain. | 0:07:34 | 0:07:39 | |
"Manchester spun riches beyond anybody's wildest dreams, | 0:07:42 | 0:07:45 | |
"and wove despair and degradation into the human fabric. | 0:07:45 | 0:07:50 | |
"Manchester is either bling or damage." | 0:07:52 | 0:07:57 | |
Ladies, you're looking fine, me lovelies! Not twist your arm?! | 0:07:57 | 0:07:59 | |
Jeanette's portrait of Manchester as radical and contrary | 0:08:04 | 0:08:08 | |
fits with her own combative energy, | 0:08:08 | 0:08:10 | |
her passionate feminism and her belief in the power of art. | 0:08:10 | 0:08:14 | |
Gallery eight. In Pursuit Of Beauty. | 0:08:17 | 0:08:21 | |
The Victorians really believed in beauty | 0:08:21 | 0:08:24 | |
and did everything they could to destroy it. | 0:08:24 | 0:08:26 | |
Ha! | 0:08:26 | 0:08:28 | |
Oh, no! | 0:08:29 | 0:08:31 | |
-Oh, yes! -SHE LAUGHS | 0:08:31 | 0:08:34 | |
I can't believe it! It's my first ancestor! It's Sappho! | 0:08:34 | 0:08:37 | |
There she is, looking rather pouting and magnificent. | 0:08:37 | 0:08:42 | |
Mrs Winterson would never have had that in the house. | 0:08:42 | 0:08:44 | |
It's astonishing, this idealisation of women. | 0:08:47 | 0:08:49 | |
Women who didn't look like that, and never would. | 0:08:52 | 0:08:54 | |
But also, the fact that women are so absent from public life | 0:08:54 | 0:08:56 | |
and so present in art. | 0:08:56 | 0:08:59 | |
That's ridiculous. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:01 | |
That's ridiculous and fantastic. I love it! | 0:09:02 | 0:09:05 | |
I love the way her feet match her tiger skin. | 0:09:05 | 0:09:09 | |
That could be a Vogue shoot, couldn't it? | 0:09:09 | 0:09:11 | |
SHE LAUGHS It could be! | 0:09:11 | 0:09:13 | |
I mean, some of this is so dreadful, | 0:09:13 | 0:09:15 | |
it just tips over into another kind of experience, doesn't it? | 0:09:15 | 0:09:19 | |
If I'd been around at the turn of the century, | 0:09:21 | 0:09:23 | |
I definitely would have been a militant suffragist, | 0:09:23 | 0:09:26 | |
and they were all here, of course, in Manchester. | 0:09:26 | 0:09:28 | |
The Pankhursts. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:29 | |
And in 1913, they came into the gallery | 0:09:29 | 0:09:32 | |
and slashed some of the pictures, | 0:09:32 | 0:09:33 | |
including this one, which is a bit bizarre. | 0:09:33 | 0:09:35 | |
Paolo and Francesca. | 0:09:35 | 0:09:36 | |
But I think they were probably just running riot by then. | 0:09:36 | 0:09:39 | |
And they continued and had a go at Rossetti, had a go at Leighton, | 0:09:39 | 0:09:44 | |
and I think part of what they were doing | 0:09:44 | 0:09:47 | |
was trying to desecrate and destroy this false image, | 0:09:47 | 0:09:52 | |
this artificial idea, of what a woman is. | 0:09:52 | 0:09:55 | |
That she will always be decorative, that she'll always be passive. | 0:09:55 | 0:09:58 | |
That she's ornamental. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:00 | |
That you can paint her | 0:10:00 | 0:10:02 | |
and she doesn't have high passion, feeling, a heart. | 0:10:02 | 0:10:05 | |
And by smashing everything up, | 0:10:05 | 0:10:07 | |
it had to change that image. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:09 | |
Would I do it, even though I love these pictures? | 0:10:10 | 0:10:12 | |
-Would you do it? -I think I would. | 0:10:14 | 0:10:16 | |
You know, it's like that business | 0:10:16 | 0:10:17 | |
where some people know they couldn't commit murder, | 0:10:17 | 0:10:20 | |
but I'm not one of those people. | 0:10:20 | 0:10:22 | |
-THEY LAUGH -That's reassuring! | 0:10:23 | 0:10:26 | |
"Where you were born, what you were born into, | 0:10:35 | 0:10:38 | |
"the place, the history of the place, | 0:10:38 | 0:10:41 | |
"how that history mates with your own, | 0:10:41 | 0:10:43 | |
"stamps who you are, | 0:10:43 | 0:10:45 | |
"whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say. | 0:10:45 | 0:10:49 | |
"Sometime between six weeks and six months old, | 0:10:50 | 0:10:54 | |
"I got picked up from Manchester and taken to Accrington. | 0:10:54 | 0:10:58 | |
"It was all over for me and the woman whose baby I was. | 0:10:59 | 0:11:04 | |
"She was gone. | 0:11:04 | 0:11:06 | |
"I was gone. | 0:11:06 | 0:11:08 | |
"I was adopted. | 0:11:08 | 0:11:09 | |
"21st January 1960 is the date | 0:11:11 | 0:11:13 | |
"when John and Constance Winterson got the baby they thought they wanted | 0:11:13 | 0:11:19 | |
"and took it home to 200 Water Street, Accrington." | 0:11:19 | 0:11:23 | |
When did they first buy the house? | 0:11:27 | 0:11:29 | |
Well, my parents got married after the war, | 0:11:29 | 0:11:31 | |
and they came here in 1947, which was the coldest winter of the century. | 0:11:31 | 0:11:37 | |
And she said that the snow was so high | 0:11:37 | 0:11:39 | |
that it was at the top of the piano when they pushed it through the door. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:42 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:11:42 | 0:11:44 | |
And, of course, she lived here until she died. | 0:11:44 | 0:11:46 | |
She died in 1990. She was only 68. | 0:11:46 | 0:11:48 | |
This was their home, and it didn't change. | 0:11:48 | 0:11:52 | |
-And there it is. -There it is. | 0:11:52 | 0:11:55 | |
200 Water Street, Accrington, Lancashire, BB5 6QU. | 0:11:55 | 0:11:59 | |
-Mrs Winterson's house. -Yes. | 0:12:00 | 0:12:03 | |
One thing I'm missing here is, there used to be a doorstep. | 0:12:03 | 0:12:07 | |
-You were thrown out most nights. -That IS the doorstep. | 0:12:07 | 0:12:09 | |
-You see that York stone doorstep? That's it. -You poor thing! | 0:12:09 | 0:12:12 | |
-You weren't sitting on that, were you? -I was! | 0:12:12 | 0:12:14 | |
That's got the imprint of my bum on it somewhere! | 0:12:14 | 0:12:17 | |
-Ooh, let's have a closer look here! -That's the step. | 0:12:17 | 0:12:20 | |
That's where I was shut out many a night. | 0:12:20 | 0:12:23 | |
But it works perfectly well. | 0:12:23 | 0:12:25 | |
I mean, even now. You can sit here quite comfortably. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:29 | |
You don't get rained on. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:31 | |
And this is where I made up stories. | 0:12:31 | 0:12:33 | |
Mrs Winterson wasn't that keen on Accrington, | 0:12:33 | 0:12:35 | |
and she always said that it would be blown up in the apocalypse, | 0:12:35 | 0:12:39 | |
because she lived in end times. | 0:12:39 | 0:12:41 | |
She was longing for the apocalypse, where everything would be destroyed. | 0:12:41 | 0:12:44 | |
Revelations was her favourite book of the Bible. | 0:12:44 | 0:12:47 | |
This was the woman who read the Bible to us every evening. | 0:12:47 | 0:12:50 | |
'Mrs Winterson was absolutely Old Testament. | 0:12:52 | 0:12:55 | |
'There was nothing of insecurity or softness about her.' | 0:12:55 | 0:12:58 | |
She literally spoke in great statements all the time. | 0:12:58 | 0:13:02 | |
She was a huge, larger-than-life figure, | 0:13:02 | 0:13:05 | |
and Jeanette was this tiny, little creature. | 0:13:05 | 0:13:07 | |
This little elf. And I think that's the thing. | 0:13:07 | 0:13:10 | |
There's nothing New Testament about Jeanette either! | 0:13:10 | 0:13:13 | |
I'm always saying that to my daughters. | 0:13:13 | 0:13:15 | |
Jeanette does almost the same thing. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:16 | |
She talks in great, cathedral statements. | 0:13:16 | 0:13:19 | |
She lives her life in this great way. | 0:13:19 | 0:13:21 | |
There's no light and shade there. | 0:13:21 | 0:13:23 | |
It's there, and I think that is part of the dance | 0:13:23 | 0:13:25 | |
that her and Mrs Winterson played all the time. | 0:13:25 | 0:13:27 | |
She used to read the Bible standing up. | 0:13:27 | 0:13:30 | |
Start at Genesis, go right through the 66 books to Revelations, | 0:13:30 | 0:13:33 | |
and then give us a week off to think about things. | 0:13:33 | 0:13:36 | |
And then start again. | 0:13:36 | 0:13:37 | |
But if you hear that every day of your life, | 0:13:37 | 0:13:40 | |
and you hear a woman with a rather startling turn of phrase... | 0:13:40 | 0:13:44 | |
you know, she spoke like the Bible. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:46 | |
Lord help me to defeat this limb of Satan! | 0:13:46 | 0:13:50 | |
Hear the word of the Lord from the book of Deuteronomy. | 0:13:50 | 0:13:53 | |
"The Lord will smite you with the boils of Egypt | 0:13:53 | 0:13:56 | |
"and with the ulcers and the scurvy | 0:13:56 | 0:13:58 | |
"and the itch of which you cannot be cured!" | 0:13:58 | 0:14:01 | |
One of the things I love about Jeanette is her use of words. | 0:14:05 | 0:14:09 | |
And I love it in her books, but I also love that in my life. | 0:14:09 | 0:14:13 | |
I send her a text message, | 0:14:13 | 0:14:15 | |
and I get an A-star text back! | 0:14:15 | 0:14:18 | |
Nothing is unconsidered. | 0:14:20 | 0:14:23 | |
Nothing is not sort of fully formed, fully grown. | 0:14:23 | 0:14:27 | |
That sort of abundance in her writing | 0:14:27 | 0:14:30 | |
is actually in her personality. | 0:14:30 | 0:14:32 | |
Drink. They spend all their money on drink, | 0:14:39 | 0:14:41 | |
and they're as filthy as anything. | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
They've never seen soap or polish | 0:14:44 | 0:14:45 | |
and they buy all their clothes from Maximores. | 0:14:45 | 0:14:47 | |
Catalogue seconds. They can't afford new ones. | 0:14:47 | 0:14:49 | |
They cut corners and swallow every penny. | 0:14:49 | 0:14:52 | |
'She was telling her truth,' | 0:14:52 | 0:14:55 | |
and she was telling the truth of someone very small, yeah? | 0:14:55 | 0:14:58 | |
Who was brought up by someone very big and powerful, | 0:14:58 | 0:15:03 | |
and very, very determining. | 0:15:03 | 0:15:04 | |
And here's this little, determining creature | 0:15:04 | 0:15:07 | |
inventing herself against this huge creature, | 0:15:07 | 0:15:11 | |
which was Mrs Winterson. | 0:15:11 | 0:15:12 | |
And Oranges is actually the story of that clash, | 0:15:12 | 0:15:16 | |
and the growth of this little one | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
into someone who can stand on her own two feet. | 0:15:19 | 0:15:22 | |
I had to be able to set my story against Mrs Winterson. | 0:15:22 | 0:15:26 | |
She was such a powerful storyteller in her own way. | 0:15:26 | 0:15:30 | |
She had these dark narratives, you know, | 0:15:30 | 0:15:33 | |
the devil in the wrong crib, that kind of thing. | 0:15:33 | 0:15:35 | |
If somebody says to you,"The devil led us to the wrong crib," | 0:15:35 | 0:15:39 | |
immediately you're in a fairy story, aren't you? | 0:15:39 | 0:15:41 | |
You think of all the stories where the Queen gives birth, | 0:15:41 | 0:15:43 | |
and she looks in the cradle and it's a cat. | 0:15:43 | 0:15:46 | |
It has furry ears or furry feet, and that's what it was like. | 0:15:46 | 0:15:50 | |
When you finally left home, | 0:15:50 | 0:15:54 | |
and you lost touch with your mother, didn't you, really, almost, you... | 0:15:54 | 0:15:58 | |
Yes. I came back once to see her in the Christmas holidays, | 0:15:58 | 0:16:02 | |
I'd left home for two years and got myself to Oxford. | 0:16:02 | 0:16:05 | |
Then I wrote to her and asked if I could come back in the holidays, | 0:16:05 | 0:16:08 | |
and bring a friend. | 0:16:08 | 0:16:09 | |
She said yes, which was unusual, | 0:16:09 | 0:16:11 | |
because she was not a welcoming woman. | 0:16:11 | 0:16:14 | |
I should say that where that letterbox is positioned now | 0:16:14 | 0:16:16 | |
is exactly where the poker would come out | 0:16:16 | 0:16:19 | |
if somebody knocked at the door and she didn't want to answer. | 0:16:19 | 0:16:22 | |
She'd just run down the lobby and stick the poker through the letterbox. | 0:16:22 | 0:16:25 | |
Not welcoming. | 0:16:25 | 0:16:27 | |
But she said yes, I could bring a friend, | 0:16:27 | 0:16:29 | |
and I came back here in that Christmas holiday, | 0:16:29 | 0:16:32 | |
and actually it was like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. | 0:16:32 | 0:16:35 | |
-I hate cooking. -So do I. | 0:16:35 | 0:16:38 | |
If it wasn't for you and your dad, I'd be a missionary. | 0:16:38 | 0:16:40 | |
It's too hot to cook out there. You just eat pineapples all the time. | 0:16:40 | 0:16:44 | |
Explain how Mrs Winterson responded to you. | 0:16:44 | 0:16:47 | |
Let's hear it first hand. | 0:16:47 | 0:16:49 | |
I know, the story is legendary. | 0:16:49 | 0:16:51 | |
Literally, I walk in the door, | 0:16:51 | 0:16:53 | |
and she said she'd been to the missionaries | 0:16:53 | 0:16:55 | |
to find out what is it they eat. | 0:16:55 | 0:16:57 | |
So as I came in the door, she handed me a plate of pineapples from tins, | 0:16:57 | 0:17:00 | |
handed me a plate, and she brought the dinner wagon out. | 0:17:00 | 0:17:04 | |
She had the best dress on and best dinner service out, | 0:17:04 | 0:17:07 | |
and she brought it in, and she said "Vicky, would you like some gammon | 0:17:07 | 0:17:11 | |
"and pineapple, or perhaps pineapple and cream, Vicky?" | 0:17:11 | 0:17:15 | |
Everything! | 0:17:15 | 0:17:17 | |
And then I went to bed, and the bed was like, I kid you not, | 0:17:17 | 0:17:19 | |
seven duvets and about five hot water bottles, | 0:17:19 | 0:17:22 | |
"Because they feel the cold. They feel the cold." | 0:17:22 | 0:17:24 | |
It turned into like being in a Joe Orton play. | 0:17:24 | 0:17:27 | |
It started getting weirder and weirder. | 0:17:27 | 0:17:30 | |
So we went out one evening, thought we'd told her, came back. | 0:17:30 | 0:17:33 | |
Mrs Winterson was at the frying pan. | 0:17:33 | 0:17:35 | |
She'd been frying our dinner for five hours. | 0:17:35 | 0:17:38 | |
She was like this. Like that. | 0:17:38 | 0:17:40 | |
She said, "I've been cooking your tea for five hours." Literally. | 0:17:40 | 0:17:43 | |
I thought, "OK". Then in the morning, we were washing up. | 0:17:43 | 0:17:46 | |
Her mum comes storming down the stairs | 0:17:46 | 0:17:48 | |
with a Victorian postcard | 0:17:48 | 0:17:50 | |
of two little dogs going, "Nobody loves us." | 0:17:50 | 0:17:52 | |
"That's your dad and me." And she stalks off again. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:56 | |
From then, it just spiralled out of control. | 0:17:56 | 0:17:59 | |
And eventually she got the revolver out, and laid it on the table. | 0:17:59 | 0:18:04 | |
I said to my friend Vicky, "I think it's time to go." | 0:18:04 | 0:18:07 | |
And Vicky thought it was time to go because she'd gone up to bed, | 0:18:07 | 0:18:10 | |
and found her pillow had disappeared, | 0:18:10 | 0:18:12 | |
and the pillowcase had been entirely stuffed | 0:18:12 | 0:18:15 | |
with tracts about the apocalypse and the second coming. | 0:18:15 | 0:18:19 | |
Which was Mrs Winterson's way of trying to save her soul. | 0:18:19 | 0:18:23 | |
The other very odd thing she did was, one night Jeanette | 0:18:23 | 0:18:27 | |
went to see a friend, without me. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:29 | |
She sat beside me and went, "Vicky," like this. | 0:18:29 | 0:18:31 | |
She brought out this book, | 0:18:31 | 0:18:33 | |
and it was this extraordinary album of Jeanette's life. | 0:18:33 | 0:18:36 | |
Documented in extraordinary detail. | 0:18:36 | 0:18:38 | |
Tiny handwriting, every single moment. It was obsessive. | 0:18:38 | 0:18:41 | |
And she sat with me, and we had to go through the entire book. | 0:18:41 | 0:18:46 | |
The strangeness of it was the incredible love | 0:18:46 | 0:18:50 | |
and intensity she had for Jeanette, incredible fixation almost, | 0:18:50 | 0:18:54 | |
and Jeanette being the chosen one, the special one, | 0:18:54 | 0:18:57 | |
at the same time as not being able to deal with each other at all | 0:18:57 | 0:19:01 | |
when they were in the same room. | 0:19:01 | 0:19:02 | |
A line I love from the book particularly | 0:19:02 | 0:19:06 | |
is when somebody has described her to Jeanette as a monster, | 0:19:06 | 0:19:11 | |
I think expecting sympathy and understanding from Jeanette, | 0:19:11 | 0:19:15 | |
and Jeanette says "Yes, she was a monster, but she was MY monster." | 0:19:15 | 0:19:19 | |
-Were you like that? -Yes. Yes. | 0:19:19 | 0:19:23 | |
What were the reasons you got thrown out, by and large? | 0:19:23 | 0:19:27 | |
Usually because I'd broken some code, you know. | 0:19:29 | 0:19:32 | |
It was very difficult not to do things wrong with Mrs Winterson, | 0:19:32 | 0:19:36 | |
and the punishment always came a long time after the crime. | 0:19:36 | 0:19:40 | |
So she'd make my dad hit me if he came home from work, | 0:19:40 | 0:19:43 | |
or she'd just say "Get outside and sit on the step." | 0:19:43 | 0:19:46 | |
But kids were often shut outside. | 0:19:46 | 0:19:49 | |
It was a routinely brutal world, a different world. | 0:19:49 | 0:19:52 | |
They wouldn't have thought they were being cruel. | 0:19:52 | 0:19:55 | |
You know, nowadays you'd have social services round. | 0:19:55 | 0:19:58 | |
In those days, somebody would come by and say, | 0:19:58 | 0:20:00 | |
"Jeanette's sitting on the step again, give her a bag of chips, | 0:20:00 | 0:20:03 | |
"we know what her mother's like." | 0:20:03 | 0:20:05 | |
That's how I started to tell myself stories. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:08 | |
Because either you can sit there and think, "My life's over," | 0:20:08 | 0:20:12 | |
or you can go into your head and start inventing something. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:14 | |
It's very strange coming back here. | 0:20:17 | 0:20:19 | |
I have so many emotions about it. | 0:20:19 | 0:20:23 | |
Part of me is still proud of it, | 0:20:23 | 0:20:26 | |
still connected to it in a very deep way which will never change. | 0:20:26 | 0:20:31 | |
And another part of me actually can't bear it | 0:20:31 | 0:20:34 | |
and wants to run away the moment I return. | 0:20:34 | 0:20:38 | |
We all used to play around here when we were kids. | 0:20:43 | 0:20:47 | |
There are a lot of children. | 0:20:47 | 0:20:48 | |
That's something that has changed, hasn't it? | 0:20:48 | 0:20:50 | |
Tons of kids on the street, there was a streetlife. | 0:20:50 | 0:20:55 | |
CHILDREN SING AND CHANT | 0:20:55 | 0:20:57 | |
I used to love that. We used to sit up there. | 0:20:58 | 0:21:01 | |
In fact, that was one of my spots for telling stories | 0:21:01 | 0:21:03 | |
because I knew more stories than anybody else, | 0:21:03 | 0:21:05 | |
so you imagine a group of snotty-nosed, dirty kids. | 0:21:05 | 0:21:08 | |
We weren't clean, you know, that needs to be stressed, | 0:21:08 | 0:21:11 | |
nobody had a bathroom, so we'd be up there telling stories | 0:21:11 | 0:21:14 | |
to the dead of night and then some mother would come out down the road | 0:21:14 | 0:21:17 | |
and shout, "Susan, Jeanette, come in", and that'd be it. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:21 | |
What did Mrs Winterson make of it when she read the book? | 0:21:22 | 0:21:26 | |
It was dreadful. We hadn't seen each other for years | 0:21:26 | 0:21:30 | |
and she sent me a note | 0:21:30 | 0:21:31 | |
in her beautiful copperplate handwriting that she was very proud of, | 0:21:31 | 0:21:35 | |
saying that I had to give her a phone call, but she had no phone | 0:21:35 | 0:21:38 | |
and I had no phone, so I went to a phone box | 0:21:38 | 0:21:41 | |
and she went to a phone box. | 0:21:41 | 0:21:42 | |
The phone box is still there around the street. | 0:21:42 | 0:21:45 | |
And I telephoned her and that's the moment when you think, | 0:21:45 | 0:21:48 | |
"Who needs Skype?", | 0:21:48 | 0:21:49 | |
because I could see her in the phone box, larger than life, filling it | 0:21:49 | 0:21:53 | |
up, 20 stone, surgical stockings, | 0:21:53 | 0:21:55 | |
flat sandals, crimpolene dress, headscarf. And she said to me, | 0:21:55 | 0:22:00 | |
"It's the first time I've had to order a book in a false name." | 0:22:00 | 0:22:05 | |
That was the beginning of our conversation | 0:22:05 | 0:22:08 | |
and I tried to explain, but you know, what was going through my mind | 0:22:08 | 0:22:12 | |
all the time was, "Why aren't you proud of me?" | 0:22:12 | 0:22:16 | |
And she did say to me, she said, "But it's not true." | 0:22:16 | 0:22:21 | |
And I was rather taken aback by this, because this was a woman | 0:22:21 | 0:22:25 | |
who had explained the flash-dash of mice activity in the kitchen as ectoplasm. | 0:22:25 | 0:22:31 | |
ALAN LAUGHS | 0:22:31 | 0:22:33 | |
Their whole life was a story of them versus us. | 0:22:33 | 0:22:36 | |
It was "Me and this chosen child that I have | 0:22:36 | 0:22:39 | |
"and the rest of the world...don't go there, Jeanette, don't, it's us". | 0:22:39 | 0:22:42 | |
That's how she started the story. | 0:22:42 | 0:22:44 | |
That's why I think she was obviously so devastated when Jeanette | 0:22:44 | 0:22:48 | |
became her own person and more importantly, was a lesbian. | 0:22:48 | 0:22:52 | |
That was the thing. | 0:22:52 | 0:22:53 | |
Because up to then, she had created the narrative of who Jeanette was | 0:22:53 | 0:22:57 | |
and who Jeanette was in relation to her, | 0:22:57 | 0:22:59 | |
and it all completely broke down. | 0:22:59 | 0:23:01 | |
And it was at that point, one cannot imagine what Jeanette's darkness | 0:23:01 | 0:23:04 | |
must have been like, | 0:23:04 | 0:23:05 | |
because Mrs Winterson was her lifeline to the world, her mother, | 0:23:05 | 0:23:08 | |
and it completely smashed between the two of them. | 0:23:08 | 0:23:12 | |
There are two of our number have committed a great sin. | 0:23:12 | 0:23:15 | |
A terrible sin. The sin that dare not speak its name. | 0:23:15 | 0:23:21 | |
Jess, Melanie, come to the front, please. | 0:23:22 | 0:23:25 | |
WHISPERS: Keep calm, keep calm. | 0:23:28 | 0:23:30 | |
These children of God have fallen foul of their lusts. | 0:23:38 | 0:23:43 | |
Their bodies have proved stronger than the spirits, | 0:23:45 | 0:23:49 | |
their hearts are fixed on carnal things. | 0:23:49 | 0:23:53 | |
-These children are full of demons. -I'm not, neither is she. -Be quiet. | 0:23:53 | 0:23:58 | |
I've said it's not true. | 0:23:58 | 0:23:59 | |
Now we hear the voice of the demon arguing with the voice of the Lord. | 0:23:59 | 0:24:02 | |
Now we hear Satan's voice. | 0:24:02 | 0:24:05 | |
Do you deny that you love this young woman with a love | 0:24:05 | 0:24:08 | |
reserved for husband and wife? | 0:24:08 | 0:24:10 | |
Yes! No, it's not like that. | 0:24:10 | 0:24:12 | |
Even when she first published that book, I think, | 0:24:12 | 0:24:15 | |
people were so busy laughing at it | 0:24:15 | 0:24:16 | |
that they didn't actually look at it and think | 0:24:16 | 0:24:19 | |
"This is actually a portrait of psychological and religious abuse | 0:24:19 | 0:24:23 | |
"of the worst sort, from somebody who was your adoptive mother, | 0:24:23 | 0:24:26 | |
"so you were already given away." | 0:24:26 | 0:24:28 | |
Mrs Winterson believed that we're called to be a part | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
and in a small northern town, that's a full-time job. | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
But she liked an occupation, | 0:24:34 | 0:24:36 | |
so we lived in the closed world of the church. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:40 | |
We weren't really meant to interact with unbelievers and the heathen. | 0:24:40 | 0:24:44 | |
They were all going to be damned and we weren't. | 0:24:44 | 0:24:47 | |
So there was a cut-off point for us. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:48 | |
And I think that's why she tried so hard to keep secular influences out. | 0:24:48 | 0:24:53 | |
I think she had been well-read | 0:24:53 | 0:24:54 | |
and she didn't want books to fall into my hands. | 0:24:54 | 0:24:58 | |
She had a line which is a typical Mrs Winterson line. | 0:24:58 | 0:25:02 | |
She said, "The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it | 0:25:02 | 0:25:05 | |
"until it's too late." | 0:25:05 | 0:25:06 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:25:06 | 0:25:08 | |
I used to think "Too late for what?" | 0:25:10 | 0:25:12 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:25:12 | 0:25:13 | |
It's this other world, so naturally, | 0:25:13 | 0:25:15 | |
as these things were forbidden, I wanted them. | 0:25:15 | 0:25:18 | |
Mrs Winterson used to love reading mystery stories | 0:25:18 | 0:25:21 | |
and so I was packed off to the library to bring back | 0:25:21 | 0:25:23 | |
her sackful of mystery stories and when I challenged her about this | 0:25:23 | 0:25:26 | |
and said, "Why can you read mystery stories and I can't read books?", | 0:25:26 | 0:25:29 | |
she said, "If you know there's a body coming, it's not so much of a shock." | 0:25:29 | 0:25:33 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:25:33 | 0:25:35 | |
In Accrington public library, | 0:25:39 | 0:25:41 | |
Jeanette found the means to transform her world. | 0:25:41 | 0:25:44 | |
She found books. | 0:25:44 | 0:25:46 | |
They were sitting there on shelves, marked English Literature A-Z. | 0:25:48 | 0:25:52 | |
By the time she was 16, she had got to M. | 0:25:55 | 0:25:58 | |
I love this building. | 0:26:06 | 0:26:08 | |
This was my escape from Mrs Winterson and it was going to be the beginning | 0:26:08 | 0:26:12 | |
of my escape from Accrington, because the book would be a flying carpet. | 0:26:12 | 0:26:18 | |
That's how I was going to get away | 0:26:18 | 0:26:20 | |
and I always thought of myself as both of these figures, | 0:26:20 | 0:26:24 | |
reading the book, so intent and so serious, so caught up in it. | 0:26:24 | 0:26:29 | |
They're beautiful and they gave me hope. | 0:26:29 | 0:26:31 | |
There's the boy and girl and I was both because I was never | 0:26:31 | 0:26:34 | |
quite sure whether I was a girl who was a boy or a boy who was a girl, | 0:26:34 | 0:26:38 | |
or if I was all of those things together and it didn't matter. | 0:26:38 | 0:26:41 | |
What mattered was the book and I'd go around saying to myself, | 0:26:41 | 0:26:45 | |
"Oh, for a book and a shady nook", | 0:26:45 | 0:26:47 | |
either indoors or out, | 0:26:47 | 0:26:48 | |
and "a book is better to me than gold", which it was. | 0:26:48 | 0:26:52 | |
Money was meaningless, we didn't have any anyway, | 0:26:52 | 0:26:54 | |
but the fact that you could read and learn and change | 0:26:54 | 0:26:59 | |
and then invent yourself and reinvent yourself, disappear, | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
to me it was like performing the Indian rope trick, that you | 0:27:02 | 0:27:05 | |
climb to the top and then you vanish and never come back again. | 0:27:05 | 0:27:10 | |
# What is life to me without thee? | 0:27:11 | 0:27:17 | |
# What is left if thou art dead? | 0:27:17 | 0:27:24 | |
# What is life, life without thee? | 0:27:24 | 0:27:31 | |
# What is life without my love? # | 0:27:31 | 0:27:38 | |
So you had the library and more than anything, you had this place. | 0:27:38 | 0:27:43 | |
Yes, I had escape. | 0:27:43 | 0:27:44 | |
I mean, Mrs Winterson wasn't interested in child protection, | 0:27:44 | 0:27:47 | |
so she let me wander about as much as I liked, so I could come up | 0:27:47 | 0:27:51 | |
here day and night and not have to go home until it was dark or even then. | 0:27:51 | 0:27:55 | |
You look at this view and it does give you something, it makes | 0:27:55 | 0:27:59 | |
you feel that there are other places, places that you can go and escape. | 0:27:59 | 0:28:04 | |
It's quite liberating and exhilarating up here, isn't it? | 0:28:04 | 0:28:06 | |
It is. Well, I suppose that down there defines you, doesn't it, | 0:28:06 | 0:28:09 | |
whereas up here, you can define yourself. | 0:28:09 | 0:28:11 | |
-Yes, this is the runaway place. -Yeah. -Yeah. | 0:28:11 | 0:28:14 | |
Of course, I felt like Heathcliff or something out of the Brontes. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:18 | |
The one thing I have never been in my whole life is bored. | 0:28:18 | 0:28:21 | |
There has always been a place to go and that place has been | 0:28:21 | 0:28:24 | |
the world of imagination. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:25 | |
And what about this sort of sense of...did it give you time | 0:28:25 | 0:28:29 | |
to think about who you were, your own sexuality, | 0:28:29 | 0:28:31 | |
your own desires, your own aspirations in that sense? | 0:28:31 | 0:28:34 | |
-Did you... -I never thought about sex, I just did it. -Really? | 0:28:34 | 0:28:39 | |
Yes, I never wasted any time thinking about it. | 0:28:39 | 0:28:43 | |
I just made the most of the opportunity | 0:28:43 | 0:28:46 | |
and also it never worried me, it wasn't a concern. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:49 | |
It's strange, because it's never been really at the forefront of my mind. | 0:28:49 | 0:28:52 | |
I mean, it became something that was political later | 0:28:52 | 0:28:55 | |
that I knew that I had to fight for, a civil liberties issue, | 0:28:55 | 0:28:58 | |
for the dignity of difference, | 0:28:58 | 0:29:00 | |
but in myself, my body, my head, my imagination, | 0:29:00 | 0:29:03 | |
it was always something I was very comfortable with. | 0:29:03 | 0:29:07 | |
I was comfortable with being me. | 0:29:07 | 0:29:08 | |
And when you read Murder In The Cathedral, for instance, | 0:29:08 | 0:29:12 | |
and you say that you sobbed in the library, | 0:29:12 | 0:29:14 | |
where you're not supposed to make any noise. | 0:29:14 | 0:29:17 | |
No, the librarian was furious | 0:29:17 | 0:29:19 | |
because you weren't allowed to sneeze in the library in those days. | 0:29:19 | 0:29:22 | |
When we went in today and saw everybody scooting around, | 0:29:22 | 0:29:24 | |
it being user-friendly, part of me is horrified, | 0:29:24 | 0:29:27 | |
thinking you've got to be quiet and just read. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:29 | |
But it was a bad day because Mrs Winterson was throwing me out | 0:29:29 | 0:29:34 | |
because I loved another girl and I always felt that the failure | 0:29:34 | 0:29:37 | |
was my failure, that I couldn't be in a family and couldn't belong. | 0:29:37 | 0:29:41 | |
So I was really unhappy and I thought "Where will I go? | 0:29:41 | 0:29:43 | |
"I have nowhere to live. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:45 | |
"I don't know how I'm going to make enough money", | 0:29:45 | 0:29:47 | |
and I got one of her books and she'd put on the list | 0:29:47 | 0:29:50 | |
Murder In The Cathedral by TS Eliot | 0:29:50 | 0:29:53 | |
because she thought it was a story about monks. | 0:29:53 | 0:29:56 | |
And she loved anything that was bad for the Pope. | 0:29:56 | 0:29:59 | |
So I got it and I opened it and thought "It's a bit short" | 0:29:59 | 0:30:01 | |
and it's written in verse which, by and large, | 0:30:01 | 0:30:03 | |
mystery stories are not, and thought, "She's not going to like this". | 0:30:03 | 0:30:07 | |
And I opened it on the line - which I'll never forget - | 0:30:07 | 0:30:11 | |
where Thomas a Becket is saying, "This is one moment, | 0:30:11 | 0:30:16 | |
"but know that another will pierce you with a sudden, painful joy." | 0:30:16 | 0:30:22 | |
And that's when I burst into tears and I went outside | 0:30:22 | 0:30:25 | |
and sat on the library steps in the usual freezing northern gale | 0:30:25 | 0:30:29 | |
and I read it all the way through, and I thought, | 0:30:29 | 0:30:31 | |
"Yes, this is one moment, | 0:30:31 | 0:30:33 | |
"but there'll be another and there will be joy", | 0:30:33 | 0:30:37 | |
and I thought could go forward. | 0:30:37 | 0:30:39 | |
And that's why it's always seemed to me that the great writers were not remote, | 0:30:39 | 0:30:43 | |
they were my friends, and they were in Accrington. | 0:30:43 | 0:30:46 | |
When I was growing up, I used to hide books under my mattress, | 0:30:54 | 0:30:57 | |
and anybody who's got a single bed, standard size | 0:30:57 | 0:31:01 | |
and a collection of paperbacks, standard size, | 0:31:01 | 0:31:03 | |
will know that you can fit 72 under the mattress. | 0:31:03 | 0:31:07 | |
And it was when Mrs Winterson realised this | 0:31:07 | 0:31:10 | |
and she pulled one out and the whole lot came tumbling down, | 0:31:10 | 0:31:12 | |
and it was DH Lawrence, Women in Love - terrible choice - | 0:31:12 | 0:31:16 | |
and she knew that Lawrence was a Satanist and a pornographer, | 0:31:16 | 0:31:19 | |
and she took the whole lot and threw them into the back yard, | 0:31:19 | 0:31:22 | |
then poured paraffin on top of them from the little stove | 0:31:22 | 0:31:25 | |
that used to warm our freezing house, and set them on fire. | 0:31:25 | 0:31:28 | |
And watching them burn that night, I realised two things. | 0:31:31 | 0:31:34 | |
One, that everything outside of you can be taken away. | 0:31:34 | 0:31:37 | |
And also as I saw those volumes burning | 0:31:40 | 0:31:42 | |
and the scraps of paper flying around the yard up into the air - | 0:31:42 | 0:31:46 | |
a Saturnian, January night, never forget that night - | 0:31:46 | 0:31:51 | |
I thought, "Fuck it, I can write my own." | 0:31:51 | 0:31:53 | |
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE | 0:31:53 | 0:31:54 | |
"I was 16, and my mother was about to throw me out of the house for ever | 0:32:04 | 0:32:10 | |
"for breaking a very big rule - even bigger than the forbidden books. | 0:32:10 | 0:32:15 | |
"The rule was not just no sex, | 0:32:15 | 0:32:17 | |
"but definitely no sex with your own sex. | 0:32:17 | 0:32:21 | |
"In many ways, it was time for me to go. | 0:32:23 | 0:32:25 | |
"The books had got the better of me. | 0:32:27 | 0:32:29 | |
"And my mother had got the better of the books." | 0:32:29 | 0:32:32 | |
Immediately after leaving home, Jeanette had nowhere else to go. | 0:32:36 | 0:32:41 | |
She began sleeping in a borrowed Mini she was learning to drive. | 0:32:41 | 0:32:44 | |
A late '60s Mini. Perfect. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:46 | |
Extremely smart, though. Mine wasn't at all smart like this. | 0:32:46 | 0:32:50 | |
Mine was rather battered. | 0:32:50 | 0:32:52 | |
However, I will now demonstrate how you live in a Mini. | 0:32:52 | 0:32:56 | |
Yeah, tell me. In we go. | 0:32:56 | 0:32:59 | |
You get into the front, into the driving seat. | 0:32:59 | 0:33:02 | |
-Perfect amount of space. -Yeah. | 0:33:05 | 0:33:08 | |
These large, old-fashioned steering wheels | 0:33:08 | 0:33:11 | |
are ideal for reading a book or for writing letters. | 0:33:11 | 0:33:14 | |
So this is really very comfortable. | 0:33:14 | 0:33:16 | |
And you have your own little library and office in this space. | 0:33:16 | 0:33:18 | |
And then when you want to eat, you eat where you're sitting now. | 0:33:18 | 0:33:21 | |
But you mustn't just slide across, | 0:33:21 | 0:33:23 | |
because that will just feel | 0:33:23 | 0:33:25 | |
like you're some scruffy, homeless person eating in a car. | 0:33:25 | 0:33:28 | |
No, you have to get out of this side... | 0:33:28 | 0:33:32 | |
I shall close the door. Come round to the other side... | 0:33:32 | 0:33:35 | |
Because then immediately you've got two doors, which is gracious, | 0:33:35 | 0:33:39 | |
and two rooms. | 0:33:39 | 0:33:40 | |
Then you get into this side and there's plenty there for you to eat | 0:33:40 | 0:33:45 | |
and here you can put your food, your cups, whatever you want. | 0:33:45 | 0:33:48 | |
-Of course. -So that's all perfect. -Yeah. -You've got room. | 0:33:48 | 0:33:51 | |
And when night time comes, you must get your things out, | 0:33:51 | 0:33:55 | |
go round to the back of the Mini - | 0:33:55 | 0:33:57 | |
very important to have dignity and order - | 0:33:57 | 0:33:59 | |
put everything away in the back, neatly, close the boot | 0:33:59 | 0:34:03 | |
and then it's time for bed. | 0:34:03 | 0:34:05 | |
So in order to go to bed, | 0:34:06 | 0:34:08 | |
your sleeping bag's ready in the back, | 0:34:08 | 0:34:10 | |
in you get. | 0:34:10 | 0:34:12 | |
I would normally close the door by now. | 0:34:12 | 0:34:15 | |
Put your feet up, and it's good night from me. | 0:34:17 | 0:34:21 | |
And it's good night from me. | 0:34:21 | 0:34:23 | |
Perfect. | 0:34:25 | 0:34:27 | |
And how long did you actually spend in the car? Sleeping in the car? | 0:34:27 | 0:34:32 | |
Not long. About a couple of months. | 0:34:32 | 0:34:35 | |
-ONLY a couple of months...! -Yes. Yes. | 0:34:35 | 0:34:37 | |
And then I found better accommodation for the winter. | 0:34:37 | 0:34:41 | |
-Do you ever yearn to be back again in the Mini? -No. | 0:34:41 | 0:34:44 | |
I don't long to be in those difficult places, | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
but I know that if everything were to be taken away from me, | 0:34:47 | 0:34:51 | |
if I had nothing again, I'd still have the books inside me, | 0:34:51 | 0:34:54 | |
I'd still know the poetry, and I'd always know how to survive. | 0:34:54 | 0:34:58 | |
ENGINE STARTS | 0:35:00 | 0:35:02 | |
"I decided to apply to read English at the University of Oxford | 0:35:19 | 0:35:23 | |
"because it was the most impossible thing I could do." | 0:35:23 | 0:35:26 | |
"I had no idea that there could be such a beautiful city | 0:35:28 | 0:35:31 | |
"or places like the colleges with quadrangles and lawns | 0:35:31 | 0:35:34 | |
"and that sense of energetic quiet that I still find so seductive." | 0:35:34 | 0:35:39 | |
"I'd never seen a shop with five floors of books. | 0:35:47 | 0:35:50 | |
"I felt dizzy, like too much oxygen all at once. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:53 | |
"And I thought about women. | 0:35:55 | 0:35:57 | |
"All those books, and how long had it taken for women | 0:35:57 | 0:35:59 | |
"to be able to write their share?" | 0:35:59 | 0:36:02 | |
Here we go. | 0:36:02 | 0:36:04 | |
ENGINE RUMBLES | 0:36:04 | 0:36:06 | |
That soothing sound... Is that familiar? Do you miss it? | 0:36:06 | 0:36:10 | |
I do miss it, yeah. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:11 | |
And it sounds like a real car. | 0:36:11 | 0:36:13 | |
I can't hear my car at all. | 0:36:13 | 0:36:15 | |
Isn't it interesting... | 0:36:18 | 0:36:21 | |
You arrive here in your 1960 Morris Minor | 0:36:21 | 0:36:23 | |
and there is the 1962 classic Modernist building by Jacobsen. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:30 | |
This glorious thing. | 0:36:30 | 0:36:32 | |
And there you are, this working-class girl from Accrington. | 0:36:32 | 0:36:35 | |
Yes, it's a good symbol of the two worlds, | 0:36:35 | 0:36:38 | |
and the huge space in between them. | 0:36:38 | 0:36:41 | |
The car and this college, | 0:36:41 | 0:36:43 | |
where I'd come from and where I was now, | 0:36:43 | 0:36:45 | |
and where I was going to be. | 0:36:45 | 0:36:47 | |
It was 1978, and it'd been only four years since St Catherine's | 0:36:54 | 0:36:59 | |
had changed the terms of its foundation charter | 0:36:59 | 0:37:03 | |
to become one of the few Oxford colleges to admit women. | 0:37:03 | 0:37:06 | |
It was here that Jeanette met one of her closest friends. | 0:37:08 | 0:37:13 | |
I take it you were both experiments, according to... | 0:37:13 | 0:37:16 | |
(LAUGHS) That's right. The famous story is true, | 0:37:16 | 0:37:18 | |
of our tutor, dear Michael Gearin-Tosh, on the first day, | 0:37:18 | 0:37:21 | |
saying, "Now, you're the working-class experiment, | 0:37:21 | 0:37:24 | |
"you're the black experiment - how exciting!" | 0:37:24 | 0:37:27 | |
And after that we thought, | 0:37:27 | 0:37:28 | |
"Well, we'd better be friends, then, really." | 0:37:28 | 0:37:31 | |
It was still very sexist, very patriarchal, | 0:37:31 | 0:37:33 | |
in a way which would be extraordinary to students studying now. | 0:37:33 | 0:37:36 | |
And there is a gender difference here. And it's huge. | 0:37:36 | 0:37:39 | |
It's changed, it's changing, which is wonderful for women now | 0:37:39 | 0:37:42 | |
who feel that they can do whatever they like. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:45 | |
But coming here, I thought, | 0:37:45 | 0:37:46 | |
"I'll have to use this space, use what the university offers me. | 0:37:46 | 0:37:50 | |
"But there are all sorts of things they can't offer me. | 0:37:50 | 0:37:53 | |
"They don't understand that being a woman is different to being a man. | 0:37:53 | 0:37:57 | |
"They don't understand - really - what it's like to be a working-class girl, | 0:37:57 | 0:38:01 | |
"who wants to get her own book on the shelves | 0:38:01 | 0:38:03 | |
"of English literature in prose." | 0:38:03 | 0:38:05 | |
There's also that sense that women aren't just child-bearers, | 0:38:05 | 0:38:09 | |
and the possibility that women who have the creative spark | 0:38:09 | 0:38:13 | |
can devote and dedicate themselves to creativity. | 0:38:13 | 0:38:16 | |
That's part of that story, isn't it? | 0:38:16 | 0:38:18 | |
Yes, because of course the four great women writers, supposedly - | 0:38:18 | 0:38:21 | |
the Brontes, Eliot and Jane Austen - didn't have children. | 0:38:21 | 0:38:26 | |
I wish I'd been able to do it. I couldn't. | 0:38:26 | 0:38:28 | |
But I think now, suppose it all started again, | 0:38:28 | 0:38:30 | |
how great it would be, to be in a situation where I could do both. | 0:38:30 | 0:38:35 | |
Whilst at Oxford, Jeanette also discovered | 0:38:36 | 0:38:39 | |
the novels of Virginia Woolf. | 0:38:39 | 0:38:41 | |
No-one understood so well, or wrote so tellingly, | 0:38:42 | 0:38:45 | |
about how women could storm the citadel of literature. | 0:38:45 | 0:38:48 | |
The first steps were an independent income, | 0:38:49 | 0:38:52 | |
and a room of one's own. | 0:38:52 | 0:38:54 | |
So here I am and this was a room of my own. | 0:38:57 | 0:39:01 | |
And bigger than anything that I'd ever had before in Accrington - | 0:39:01 | 0:39:05 | |
certainly a lot bigger than a Mini. | 0:39:05 | 0:39:07 | |
And it felt like freedom. It was freedom. | 0:39:07 | 0:39:11 | |
And I enjoyed this monastic austerity, | 0:39:11 | 0:39:15 | |
which seemed perfect for the life of the mind and serious study. | 0:39:15 | 0:39:22 | |
And then you get that fabulous view. | 0:39:22 | 0:39:24 | |
When I first came here, in the first couple of weeks, | 0:39:27 | 0:39:31 | |
and I was reading - every time there was a knock on the door, | 0:39:31 | 0:39:34 | |
I still used to hide the book under the pillow. | 0:39:34 | 0:39:37 | |
Because I couldn't remember for that split second | 0:39:37 | 0:39:39 | |
that it wouldn't be Mrs Winterson. | 0:39:39 | 0:39:41 | |
And that the whole thing wouldn't have to be a secret. | 0:39:41 | 0:39:44 | |
That you could be here BECAUSE you wanted to read books! | 0:39:44 | 0:39:48 | |
It was astonishing. | 0:39:48 | 0:39:50 | |
And delightful. | 0:39:50 | 0:39:51 | |
And, actually, I thought, slightly mad. | 0:39:51 | 0:39:55 | |
But, of course, it was the other world that was mad, | 0:39:55 | 0:39:57 | |
not this one. | 0:39:57 | 0:39:59 | |
At this point, there's an extraordinary and rather playful | 0:40:03 | 0:40:07 | |
leap in the chronology of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? | 0:40:07 | 0:40:10 | |
It takes a break. | 0:40:10 | 0:40:12 | |
Allows itself an intermission. | 0:40:13 | 0:40:15 | |
And skips 25 years. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:18 | |
So, taking a leaf out of her book, | 0:40:19 | 0:40:21 | |
let's flash forward to 2012, | 0:40:21 | 0:40:24 | |
and the now successful author is visiting Paris, | 0:40:24 | 0:40:27 | |
one of her favourite cities. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:29 | |
# Deshabillez-moi... # | 0:40:29 | 0:40:31 | |
And, of course, the city of love. | 0:40:31 | 0:40:33 | |
# Deshabillez-moi... # | 0:40:33 | 0:40:35 | |
In 2000, she chose it as one of the locations | 0:40:35 | 0:40:38 | |
for a very modern love story, The PowerBook, | 0:40:38 | 0:40:41 | |
whose narrator is a writer for hire on the world wide web, | 0:40:41 | 0:40:46 | |
giving Jeanette the opportunity to reinvent the city, and herself, | 0:40:46 | 0:40:50 | |
for the digital age. | 0:40:50 | 0:40:52 | |
"You pointed to the Cafe Marly, | 0:40:54 | 0:40:57 | |
"and we walked across to a glittering table. | 0:40:57 | 0:41:01 | |
"She said, "What brings you to Paris? | 0:41:01 | 0:41:04 | |
"A story I'm writing." | 0:41:04 | 0:41:07 | |
"Is it about Paris?" | 0:41:07 | 0:41:08 | |
"No, but Paris is in it." | 0:41:08 | 0:41:12 | |
"Well, what is it about?" | 0:41:12 | 0:41:14 | |
"Boundaries, desire." | 0:41:14 | 0:41:16 | |
"Can't you write about something else?" | 0:41:16 | 0:41:19 | |
"No." | 0:41:19 | 0:41:21 | |
"So, why come to Paris?" | 0:41:21 | 0:41:24 | |
"Another city, another disguise." | 0:41:24 | 0:41:26 | |
Salut! | 0:41:26 | 0:41:28 | |
Salut. | 0:41:28 | 0:41:30 | |
One of the things I love about this book | 0:41:31 | 0:41:35 | |
is the way you kind of rediscover words. | 0:41:35 | 0:41:38 | |
So, when I'm looking here, and I'm thinking about this virtual world, | 0:41:38 | 0:41:41 | |
a virtual world is a world you can invent in your own image, | 0:41:41 | 0:41:43 | |
that's what people do with these machines they have, anyway. | 0:41:43 | 0:41:46 | |
Then they can search, they can save. | 0:41:46 | 0:41:49 | |
They kind of reinvent the world, just like, in a way, Paris, | 0:41:49 | 0:41:52 | |
this is the place where you imagine you find those cliched love stories. | 0:41:52 | 0:41:57 | |
But you've turned it all upside down. | 0:41:57 | 0:41:59 | |
I think that's my job. | 0:41:59 | 0:42:01 | |
There's a line actually in Written On The Body, where she says, | 0:42:01 | 0:42:04 | |
"It's the cliches that cause the trouble." | 0:42:04 | 0:42:06 | |
Every time, we have to try and detonate the cliche, and begin again. | 0:42:06 | 0:42:10 | |
It's important for our imaginative life, | 0:42:10 | 0:42:12 | |
and, actually, for our spiritual life. | 0:42:12 | 0:42:14 | |
And what I try and do here in The PowerBook | 0:42:14 | 0:42:17 | |
is retell all kinds of love stories. | 0:42:17 | 0:42:19 | |
Not with happy endings, because I don't believe in those, | 0:42:19 | 0:42:21 | |
but with something in them that forces the person | 0:42:21 | 0:42:24 | |
to grapple with the size of their own feelings | 0:42:24 | 0:42:26 | |
so that things should not be lukewarm or insipid, | 0:42:26 | 0:42:29 | |
but they should be urgent. | 0:42:29 | 0:42:32 | |
Maybe I'm one of the last romantics, | 0:42:32 | 0:42:34 | |
but I do believe that you do it from the heart, or not at all. | 0:42:34 | 0:42:37 | |
And that, probably, the only way to live | 0:42:37 | 0:42:39 | |
is to love with your whole nature, and leave the rest to fate. | 0:42:39 | 0:42:43 | |
And, there's love and being loved. | 0:42:44 | 0:42:46 | |
-Yes, which are not the same thing. -No. | 0:42:46 | 0:42:48 | |
SHE LAUGHS No. | 0:42:48 | 0:42:50 | |
You've had a struggle with both, of course. | 0:42:50 | 0:42:53 | |
Yeah. | 0:42:53 | 0:42:54 | |
But usually in my life, I've chosen to go out there | 0:42:54 | 0:42:57 | |
as the suitor, or as the knight, searching, | 0:42:57 | 0:43:00 | |
because we're back to the Grail stories, | 0:43:00 | 0:43:02 | |
hoping that, by looking for love, | 0:43:02 | 0:43:04 | |
I could conceal from myself | 0:43:04 | 0:43:06 | |
the fact that I might not know how to love, | 0:43:06 | 0:43:09 | |
either the giving or the receiving. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:11 | |
Sometimes you have to watch your enthusiasms, | 0:43:11 | 0:43:13 | |
because they tell you where you're actually lacking. | 0:43:13 | 0:43:16 | |
The PowerBook is partly about that. | 0:43:16 | 0:43:18 | |
It's about a search for something which cannot be found, | 0:43:18 | 0:43:21 | |
that leads back, inevitably, to the self. | 0:43:21 | 0:43:24 | |
She says in there, "I can change the story. I AM the story." | 0:43:24 | 0:43:28 | |
Which is very freeing, but also very risky. | 0:43:28 | 0:43:31 | |
Did I hear you say you have had several affairs in Paris? | 0:43:31 | 0:43:34 | |
I have had several affairs in Paris, yes. | 0:43:34 | 0:43:36 | |
So I guess it is a question of art imitating life. | 0:43:36 | 0:43:40 | |
# Bien sur nous eumes des orages | 0:43:47 | 0:43:53 | |
# Vingt ans d'amour C'est l'amour folle | 0:43:53 | 0:43:59 | |
# Mille fois tu pris ton bagage... # | 0:43:59 | 0:44:04 | |
I suppose, for me, | 0:44:04 | 0:44:05 | |
bridges are always emblematic of relationships, | 0:44:05 | 0:44:10 | |
in that I feel the closeness of the connection, | 0:44:10 | 0:44:13 | |
and at the same time, the absolute separation. | 0:44:13 | 0:44:16 | |
I feel that we're here, we meet in the middle. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:19 | |
But at nightfall, we can't help it, we have to go our separate ways, | 0:44:19 | 0:44:22 | |
because I live on that side and you live on that side. | 0:44:22 | 0:44:25 | |
And there is nothing we can do about it, | 0:44:25 | 0:44:27 | |
except hope that the bridge stays up. | 0:44:27 | 0:44:30 | |
I'm never more lonely than when I'm in a relationship. | 0:44:30 | 0:44:34 | |
# Je t'aime. # | 0:44:34 | 0:44:41 | |
How did vermin find their way into your love story? | 0:44:52 | 0:44:55 | |
-I mean, they're in The PowerBook. -SHE LAUGHS | 0:44:55 | 0:44:57 | |
There are two kinds of love, two ways of being in love. | 0:44:57 | 0:45:00 | |
There's what Dante calls "The love that moves the sun and all the stars" | 0:45:00 | 0:45:05 | |
which is an ecstatic, all-consuming, joyful love. | 0:45:05 | 0:45:09 | |
And then there's what Freud calls "the overestimation of the object", | 0:45:09 | 0:45:15 | |
which is what happens when you're really just projecting | 0:45:15 | 0:45:18 | |
all your own ideas and desires onto the other person. | 0:45:18 | 0:45:21 | |
Of course, soon that falls away. | 0:45:21 | 0:45:23 | |
And then, you just want to get rid of them. | 0:45:23 | 0:45:26 | |
And they become "animaux nuisibles", like these, | 0:45:26 | 0:45:29 | |
and you just want to stick them in a trap, and get rid of it. | 0:45:29 | 0:45:32 | |
And that's why I was writing about love as the snare. | 0:45:32 | 0:45:35 | |
Love is the thing which is the opposite of ecstasy, | 0:45:35 | 0:45:38 | |
which is the thing that traps you | 0:45:38 | 0:45:40 | |
and also the thing that you desperately want to get rid of | 0:45:40 | 0:45:43 | |
at all costs. These are all the rejected lovers, aren't they? | 0:45:43 | 0:45:46 | |
These are all the overestimations of the object! | 0:45:46 | 0:45:48 | |
SHE LAUGHS | 0:45:48 | 0:45:50 | |
It is fabulous. I love the macabreness of it. | 0:45:50 | 0:45:53 | |
It's very active, this shop. | 0:45:53 | 0:45:54 | |
Have you noticed how many people are in and out? | 0:45:54 | 0:45:56 | |
-I know, it makes you wonder about Paris, doesn't it? -It does. | 0:45:56 | 0:45:59 | |
Exactly. | 0:45:59 | 0:46:01 | |
-I think we should just go on. -Shall we just go? | 0:46:01 | 0:46:04 | |
In 2007, long after the death of Mrs Winterson, | 0:46:07 | 0:46:11 | |
Jeanette came across a formal adoption notice among her father's papers. | 0:46:11 | 0:46:16 | |
The name was scribbled out. | 0:46:16 | 0:46:19 | |
Suddenly, she felt trapped by her past, as she never had before. | 0:46:19 | 0:46:24 | |
It coincided with the break-up of a long-standing love affair. | 0:46:27 | 0:46:30 | |
"My six-year relationship was rocky and unhappy for us both. | 0:46:33 | 0:46:38 | |
"I have written love narratives, and loss narratives. | 0:46:39 | 0:46:42 | |
"Stories of longing and belonging. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:46 | |
"It all seems so obvious now. | 0:46:46 | 0:46:49 | |
"The Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss, longing. | 0:46:49 | 0:46:52 | |
"It is my mother. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:55 | |
"My mother. | 0:46:55 | 0:46:56 | |
"It is my mother. | 0:46:56 | 0:46:58 | |
"Soon after that time, I began to go mad. | 0:47:00 | 0:47:04 | |
"There is no other way to put it." | 0:47:04 | 0:47:07 | |
She was very close to the edge at that moment in her life, wasn't she? | 0:47:07 | 0:47:12 | |
I think she was close to the edge, yes. | 0:47:12 | 0:47:15 | |
Perhaps more than she had ever been, | 0:47:15 | 0:47:18 | |
um, perhaps because she was older. | 0:47:18 | 0:47:21 | |
When she was young, when she was very young, | 0:47:21 | 0:47:26 | |
she was so full of hope and ambition. | 0:47:26 | 0:47:30 | |
And she, she... She carried it out. | 0:47:30 | 0:47:35 | |
She did these things that she intended to do. | 0:47:35 | 0:47:37 | |
But I suppose with Deborah, it was a terrible blow. | 0:47:37 | 0:47:41 | |
And she didn't expect it. | 0:47:41 | 0:47:44 | |
And, it was... | 0:47:44 | 0:47:46 | |
It hadn't happened to her very often, if at all before. | 0:47:46 | 0:47:50 | |
I come from a Catholic background. | 0:47:50 | 0:47:51 | |
I believe very much in the dark night of the soul, I respect it. | 0:47:51 | 0:47:54 | |
And so I wouldn't ever presume to know or understand | 0:47:54 | 0:47:56 | |
how she was going to come out of that. | 0:47:56 | 0:47:58 | |
I didn't know what to expect, | 0:47:58 | 0:48:00 | |
because I knew that it was so true and so deep, | 0:48:00 | 0:48:04 | |
I had no sense of how she was going to survive it, | 0:48:04 | 0:48:06 | |
where she was going to be at the end of it. | 0:48:06 | 0:48:08 | |
There's a very strange moment when all that was going on | 0:48:08 | 0:48:10 | |
when I realised she hadn't been in touch. | 0:48:10 | 0:48:12 | |
And I couldn't get hold of her. | 0:48:12 | 0:48:15 | |
And I started sending messages, you know, saying, | 0:48:15 | 0:48:20 | |
"I know you're in hiding, | 0:48:20 | 0:48:22 | |
"but I just want you to know I am thinking about you. | 0:48:22 | 0:48:25 | |
"I know you don't want to talk, | 0:48:25 | 0:48:27 | |
"but I just want you to know that I'd love to talk." | 0:48:27 | 0:48:29 | |
And so on and so on. | 0:48:29 | 0:48:31 | |
And then, in fact, that did mean that we had some conversations, | 0:48:31 | 0:48:35 | |
and we had some walks, we often go on walks and have conversations. | 0:48:35 | 0:48:39 | |
And so I was aware that things were pretty bad. | 0:48:39 | 0:48:43 | |
"There's a field in front of my house, high up, | 0:48:47 | 0:48:50 | |
"sheltered by a dry stone wall, | 0:48:50 | 0:48:52 | |
"and opened by a long view of hills. | 0:48:52 | 0:48:55 | |
"When I could not cope, I went and sat in that field, | 0:48:55 | 0:48:59 | |
"and fixed on that field. | 0:48:59 | 0:49:02 | |
"The countryside, the natural world, my cats, | 0:49:02 | 0:49:06 | |
"and English Literature A-Z were what I could lean on and hold on to. | 0:49:06 | 0:49:12 | |
"My friends never failed me. | 0:49:12 | 0:49:14 | |
"And when I could talk, I did talk to them. | 0:49:14 | 0:49:18 | |
"But often, I could not talk. | 0:49:22 | 0:49:24 | |
"Language left me. | 0:49:24 | 0:49:26 | |
"I was in the place before I had any language. | 0:49:26 | 0:49:29 | |
"The abandoned place. | 0:49:29 | 0:49:31 | |
"Where are you?" | 0:49:33 | 0:49:34 | |
The best reprieve for her at the time | 0:49:41 | 0:49:44 | |
was that truly remarkable bookshop in Paris, Shakespeare And Company. | 0:49:44 | 0:49:48 | |
It's run by Sylvia Whitman, | 0:49:55 | 0:49:57 | |
whose father, George, opened the store in 1951, | 0:49:57 | 0:50:00 | |
reviving the name made famous in the '20s | 0:50:00 | 0:50:03 | |
as the haunt of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and others. | 0:50:03 | 0:50:08 | |
For Jeanette, it was a place of sanctuary, | 0:50:12 | 0:50:15 | |
with an unfailingly warm welcome from Colette, the dog. | 0:50:15 | 0:50:18 | |
George's motto for the bookshop was, | 0:50:30 | 0:50:33 | |
"Be not inhospitable to strangers, for they may be angels in disguise." | 0:50:33 | 0:50:38 | |
It's certainly a book lover's heaven. | 0:50:42 | 0:50:45 | |
Since George opened the shop, | 0:50:48 | 0:50:51 | |
more than 40,000 impoverished, aspiring writers | 0:50:51 | 0:50:55 | |
have been welcomed and given a bed for the night, | 0:50:55 | 0:50:58 | |
some staying for days, some for months, some for years. | 0:50:58 | 0:51:04 | |
It's true that it really is a little island of literature. | 0:51:05 | 0:51:10 | |
A place to get lost amongst the books. | 0:51:10 | 0:51:12 | |
Sometimes, you can be completely oblivious about the city around. | 0:51:12 | 0:51:16 | |
And George's rule was that everybody who worked here | 0:51:16 | 0:51:19 | |
-had to read a book a day. -Read a book a day. | 0:51:19 | 0:51:21 | |
-As he did himself, didn't he, all of his life. -Absolutely. | 0:51:21 | 0:51:24 | |
Anyone can walk in that door and be welcomed, almost anyone. | 0:51:24 | 0:51:29 | |
He'd look up and he'd say, "What's she doing here?" | 0:51:29 | 0:51:31 | |
And then you'd say, "Dad, it's Jeanette Winterson." | 0:51:31 | 0:51:33 | |
He'd say, "Oh, yeah, she's a really good writer, | 0:51:33 | 0:51:36 | |
"she can stay as long as she likes!" | 0:51:36 | 0:51:37 | |
THEY LAUGH And throw the keys at me. | 0:51:37 | 0:51:40 | |
So, yeah, it very much evolved around his personality. | 0:51:40 | 0:51:44 | |
And there are a lot of people that felt like Jeanette does, | 0:51:44 | 0:51:49 | |
it's a home away from home. | 0:51:49 | 0:51:50 | |
I think that filling a place with books makes people feel at home. | 0:51:50 | 0:51:57 | |
I want to talk to Jeanette about how down she was when she came here. | 0:51:57 | 0:52:01 | |
-Which we didn't know. -You didn't know. -That's interesting in itself. | 0:52:01 | 0:52:05 | |
When I read the book, I couldn't believe it. | 0:52:05 | 0:52:07 | |
And how much, and how much care you took of her when she came here. | 0:52:07 | 0:52:13 | |
How fragile she was. | 0:52:13 | 0:52:15 | |
Well, you know about, you know about making me stay, and the pyjama episode. | 0:52:15 | 0:52:19 | |
-Oh, yes! -SHE LAUGHS | 0:52:19 | 0:52:22 | |
-You did, you forcibly made me stay. -Yeah. Changed the ticket. -Yeah. | 0:52:22 | 0:52:28 | |
Usually, it's easy for me to be cheerful and optimistic. | 0:52:31 | 0:52:34 | |
I usually need a reason not to be optimistic. | 0:52:34 | 0:52:38 | |
I think that was one of my strengths | 0:52:38 | 0:52:40 | |
and survival strategies, I suppose, when I was growing up. | 0:52:40 | 0:52:44 | |
So what happened to me in 2007 was both unprecedented and unexpected, | 0:52:44 | 0:52:50 | |
and that's why I talk about it as living in a haunted house. | 0:52:50 | 0:52:54 | |
Because some days you would get up, and you felt entirely normal. | 0:52:54 | 0:52:59 | |
And I thought, "Oh, everything is fine again". | 0:52:59 | 0:53:02 | |
And then, it would be an invisible blow, | 0:53:02 | 0:53:04 | |
it had the physicality of a blow, | 0:53:04 | 0:53:07 | |
to the chest or to the stomach, or behind the knees. | 0:53:07 | 0:53:11 | |
And I would feel it again, | 0:53:11 | 0:53:14 | |
this pain of despair, this agony of mine. | 0:53:14 | 0:53:17 | |
I'd collapse, I would just go on to the floor | 0:53:17 | 0:53:20 | |
and hold on to a piece of furniture, | 0:53:20 | 0:53:22 | |
and think, "Don't let it start again." | 0:53:22 | 0:53:25 | |
At that point, I had no language to describe my situation | 0:53:25 | 0:53:29 | |
in those waves of despair. | 0:53:29 | 0:53:31 | |
No way of talking about it at all to myself or to anybody else. | 0:53:31 | 0:53:35 | |
And I would simply curl up, or be in a place where I felt safe, | 0:53:35 | 0:53:38 | |
until the worst of that moment passed. | 0:53:38 | 0:53:41 | |
So I couldn't trust my mind any more. | 0:53:41 | 0:53:44 | |
And, for me, that was the most frightening thing that could happen. | 0:53:44 | 0:53:47 | |
I was concealing this from everybody because I was also deeply ashamed. | 0:53:52 | 0:53:57 | |
I didn't feel that I had a right to this misery, | 0:53:57 | 0:53:59 | |
you know, I looked at my life | 0:53:59 | 0:54:01 | |
and I thought, "You're a successful writer, you've got money in the bank, | 0:54:01 | 0:54:05 | |
"you've got your own home, you've got really good friends. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:08 | |
"What is the matter with you?" And there was that shame | 0:54:08 | 0:54:12 | |
as well as the despair and the self-destruction, | 0:54:12 | 0:54:15 | |
so I didn't want to talk about it | 0:54:15 | 0:54:17 | |
but through all of that, I was able to come here. | 0:54:17 | 0:54:22 | |
So books were here, | 0:54:23 | 0:54:25 | |
which have always been the way that I have coped, | 0:54:25 | 0:54:28 | |
and an unspoken, unquestioning, unjudgmental friendship. | 0:54:28 | 0:54:33 | |
I didn't have to explain. I was simply allowed to be in this place. | 0:54:33 | 0:54:38 | |
When we met Jeanette, we had no idea | 0:54:43 | 0:54:46 | |
that she was going through that kind of experience | 0:54:46 | 0:54:49 | |
and it's amazing that she says that she couldn't count on her mind | 0:54:49 | 0:54:54 | |
because her mind was exactly what we were all drawn towards, | 0:54:54 | 0:54:57 | |
so it's extraordinary to hear that interiorly, | 0:54:57 | 0:55:01 | |
she was going through something quite different to what we saw. | 0:55:01 | 0:55:05 | |
I didn't want to live without that space that I knew was me. | 0:55:05 | 0:55:11 | |
I would rather be dead | 0:55:11 | 0:55:13 | |
and I thought, "If I cannot get back to who I believe I am, | 0:55:13 | 0:55:17 | |
"then I don't want to be here at all, | 0:55:17 | 0:55:19 | |
"I don't want to live this lukewarm half-life, | 0:55:19 | 0:55:22 | |
"I want to be in the intensity of creativity," | 0:55:22 | 0:55:26 | |
and this luminous, this lit-up world that I've always found, | 0:55:26 | 0:55:30 | |
even when I was at home or shut in the coalhole or out on the step, | 0:55:30 | 0:55:34 | |
the world has always been luminous to me. | 0:55:34 | 0:55:37 | |
I've lived in the present very well | 0:55:37 | 0:55:39 | |
and seen it and got great joy from it, | 0:55:39 | 0:55:42 | |
and if that was going, then I thought I should go too. | 0:55:42 | 0:55:46 | |
And the other thing is that of course, | 0:55:46 | 0:55:48 | |
-Jeanette talks to herself and... -THEY LAUGH | 0:55:48 | 0:55:52 | |
So when she wasn't talking to you, Sylvia, she was obviously | 0:55:52 | 0:55:54 | |
-having this argument with this other Jeanette... -To the dog. -It's great! | 0:55:54 | 0:55:58 | |
A dog is a very good excuse | 0:55:58 | 0:56:00 | |
because you can talk to yourself and nobody thinks you're crazy. | 0:56:00 | 0:56:03 | |
It's funny, because now, looking back | 0:56:03 | 0:56:06 | |
and realising what Jeanette was going through, I realise | 0:56:06 | 0:56:10 | |
that we were able to provide her with something that was very simple | 0:56:10 | 0:56:14 | |
and that was books and food, | 0:56:14 | 0:56:16 | |
-and that's really what I feel that we... -And love. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:19 | |
Yes, and love, of course, but often, you know, | 0:56:19 | 0:56:22 | |
we would just hand her a pile of books. "This has just come in," | 0:56:22 | 0:56:26 | |
or "There's this unusual edition of Gertrude Stein, I'm sure you'd be interested in that. | 0:56:26 | 0:56:30 | |
-"And here's some really good food." -And then food would appear. | 0:56:30 | 0:56:33 | |
-Yeah, and you felt she was nourished by both of those things. -I was. | 0:56:33 | 0:56:38 | |
People say to me, "How amazing that you survived that childhood | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
"and you didn't have a breakdown." | 0:56:41 | 0:56:43 | |
Then they say, "Amazing that you survived Oxford | 0:56:43 | 0:56:46 | |
"as a working-class girl arriving with no parents, no support" - | 0:56:46 | 0:56:50 | |
Oxbridge is notoriously a ruthless environment | 0:56:50 | 0:56:53 | |
and a lot of kids either do break down or drop out or commit suicide - | 0:56:53 | 0:56:58 | |
get through that, | 0:56:58 | 0:57:00 | |
become a writer and a success early, get through that, | 0:57:00 | 0:57:03 | |
and then have the bit about, "We hate her, we hate her work," | 0:57:03 | 0:57:06 | |
you know, the British press, "Let's kill her now." | 0:57:06 | 0:57:09 | |
Get through that, and it was almost as though I kept escaping the fire | 0:57:09 | 0:57:13 | |
and the fire was coming after me, and there was going to be a moment | 0:57:13 | 0:57:16 | |
where I was not going to be able to escape it, | 0:57:16 | 0:57:18 | |
that I had to turn and confront it. | 0:57:18 | 0:57:21 | |
I was at bay and I did confront it, and there was no way out but through. | 0:57:21 | 0:57:25 | |
MUSIC: "Art Thou Troubled" from "Rodelinda" by Handel | 0:57:25 | 0:57:29 | |
# Art thou troubled? | 0:57:29 | 0:57:32 | |
# Music will calm thee | 0:57:32 | 0:57:36 | |
# Art thou weary? | 0:57:38 | 0:57:42 | |
# Rest shall be thine | 0:57:43 | 0:57:48 | |
# Rest shall be thine... # | 0:57:48 | 0:57:55 | |
"Sylvia arranged for me to stay | 0:57:58 | 0:58:00 | |
"in the unmodernised, old-fashioned Hotel Esmeralda, | 0:58:00 | 0:58:03 | |
"next door to the shop. | 0:58:03 | 0:58:05 | |
"On the top floor, with no phone, no TV, | 0:58:05 | 0:58:07 | |
"just a bed and a desk and a view of the church, | 0:58:07 | 0:58:11 | |
"I found I could sleep and even work. | 0:58:11 | 0:58:14 | |
"Those times were temporary, but they were precious. | 0:58:15 | 0:58:19 | |
"I wasn't getting better. | 0:58:19 | 0:58:21 | |
"I was getting worse. | 0:58:21 | 0:58:23 | |
"I didn't go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. | 0:58:25 | 0:58:29 | |
"If this was going to kill me, then let me be killed by it. | 0:58:29 | 0:58:33 | |
"If this was the rest of my life, I could not live. | 0:58:33 | 0:58:36 | |
"I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life | 0:58:40 | 0:58:43 | |
"or put it back together in any way. | 0:58:43 | 0:58:45 | |
"I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. | 0:58:46 | 0:58:51 | |
"I only knew that the before world was gone for ever." | 0:58:51 | 0:58:55 | |
In February 2008, Jeanette tried to end her life. | 0:58:57 | 0:59:02 | |
She shut herself in her garage and turned on the car engine. | 0:59:02 | 0:59:06 | |
-And what about the cats? -Oh, you can't live without a cat. | 0:59:09 | 0:59:13 | |
In a way, a cat saved your life. | 0:59:13 | 0:59:15 | |
When I tried to end my life, | 0:59:16 | 0:59:18 | |
although I thought about it many times prior to that, | 0:59:18 | 0:59:21 | |
I didn't think about it at all in the moment, the hour, whatever, | 0:59:21 | 0:59:27 | |
I have no sense of the timing, actually, of when it was happening. | 0:59:27 | 0:59:31 | |
I simply could not go on any more | 0:59:31 | 0:59:33 | |
and I thought that the simplest way to do it | 0:59:33 | 0:59:37 | |
and the most dignified and least messy, | 0:59:37 | 0:59:40 | |
I mean, I could never jump under a train or anything like that, | 0:59:40 | 0:59:44 | |
would be to just go into the garage | 0:59:44 | 0:59:47 | |
and turn on the car engine and get on with it, | 0:59:47 | 0:59:51 | |
which I did, | 0:59:51 | 0:59:53 | |
and carbon monoxide is a heavy gas, | 0:59:53 | 0:59:56 | |
so it's on the floor before it's higher up, | 0:59:56 | 1:00:00 | |
and what I didn't know was, when I locked myself in the garage | 1:00:00 | 1:00:04 | |
and fastened everything up properly, it's a good, well-fitted garage, | 1:00:04 | 1:00:08 | |
that one of my cats was in there with me | 1:00:08 | 1:00:11 | |
and it was the cat scratching my face as I was falling unconscious | 1:00:11 | 1:00:17 | |
which brought me, literally, to my senses, | 1:00:17 | 1:00:21 | |
like having a bucket of cold water thrown over you | 1:00:21 | 1:00:25 | |
and I'm not quite sure how I moved from there to outside on the gravel | 1:00:25 | 1:00:30 | |
but at some point, I remember opening my eyes | 1:00:30 | 1:00:33 | |
and seeing the sky studded with stars | 1:00:33 | 1:00:36 | |
because this was in the country, so they were bright and deep and myriad, | 1:00:36 | 1:00:41 | |
these miraculous stars, | 1:00:41 | 1:00:42 | |
and what I was saying out loud, | 1:00:42 | 1:00:46 | |
I think, unsurprisingly, was something from the Scriptures, | 1:00:46 | 1:00:50 | |
which is that "you must be born again". | 1:00:50 | 1:00:53 | |
And I'm lying there, repeating this over and over, and thinking... | 1:00:53 | 1:00:57 | |
that this is a second life, this is a choice for life, | 1:00:57 | 1:01:01 | |
it's not a movement towards death, | 1:01:01 | 1:01:03 | |
so for me it was a moment... | 1:01:03 | 1:01:08 | |
Was it a moment of surrender? I think it was. | 1:01:09 | 1:01:12 | |
I did feel that I'd stopped battling with something at that moment. Yes. | 1:01:12 | 1:01:17 | |
But I am certain that I'll never have to go through that again | 1:01:18 | 1:01:22 | |
with or without my cat. | 1:01:22 | 1:01:24 | |
But yes, I think if I was ever to have a crest, | 1:01:24 | 1:01:29 | |
a cat would be on it! | 1:01:29 | 1:01:32 | |
THEY LAUGH | 1:01:32 | 1:01:33 | |
I remember, obviously, after her very, very dark, almost breakdown, | 1:01:35 | 1:01:39 | |
I remember her just saying to me, | 1:01:39 | 1:01:41 | |
"I think I'm going to look for my mother, my birth mother." | 1:01:41 | 1:01:44 | |
I think we'd mentioned it a few times, | 1:01:44 | 1:01:46 | |
over our entire length of friendship, | 1:01:46 | 1:01:48 | |
and I'd always backed down and never said anything, I kept my own counsel | 1:01:48 | 1:01:52 | |
as to whether she should search for her mother, | 1:01:52 | 1:01:54 | |
so this was a huge thing, | 1:01:54 | 1:01:55 | |
she just slipped it into the conversation like so. | 1:01:55 | 1:01:58 | |
In many ways, I don't know if it's a journey she could have done alone | 1:01:58 | 1:02:01 | |
and I'm eternally grateful for Susie | 1:02:01 | 1:02:03 | |
for being with her and being a strong presence for her, | 1:02:03 | 1:02:06 | |
because I don't think Jeanette could have done it on her own | 1:02:06 | 1:02:09 | |
or with her existing friends. | 1:02:09 | 1:02:11 | |
I mean, we all played a part, but I think she couldn't have done it | 1:02:11 | 1:02:14 | |
without an extremely strong figure standing with her. | 1:02:14 | 1:02:16 | |
Well, it's not an unusual thing to be interested | 1:02:16 | 1:02:20 | |
at a particular moment in your life, | 1:02:20 | 1:02:22 | |
about discovering your origins, | 1:02:22 | 1:02:24 | |
particularly if they've been clouded | 1:02:24 | 1:02:27 | |
with a lot of stories that don't quite fit together, | 1:02:27 | 1:02:32 | |
so I understood that it might be very important for her. | 1:02:32 | 1:02:36 | |
If you've been told that you should have been sent back home | 1:02:37 | 1:02:41 | |
or sent back to where you came from, | 1:02:41 | 1:02:43 | |
then there's a particular bite | 1:02:43 | 1:02:46 | |
in the need to find why you hadn't been held on to. | 1:02:46 | 1:02:51 | |
Jeanette's investigation into the true story of her adoption | 1:02:59 | 1:03:03 | |
became another quest into a past | 1:03:03 | 1:03:06 | |
where adoption had been both shameful and hidden. | 1:03:06 | 1:03:09 | |
It was a bureaucratic nightmare, which left her angry and frustrated. | 1:03:11 | 1:03:15 | |
Eventually, the trail of paperwork led back to Manchester. | 1:03:18 | 1:03:23 | |
The city was now more than ever a part of her story. | 1:03:23 | 1:03:27 | |
It was here, after much soul-searching, | 1:03:29 | 1:03:32 | |
that she finally met her birth mother Ann, | 1:03:32 | 1:03:34 | |
a woman who Mrs Winterson had told her was dead. | 1:03:34 | 1:03:38 | |
In fact, she was a seamstress, who had worked | 1:03:43 | 1:03:47 | |
in one of the city's great clothing factories, Raffles Mill. | 1:03:47 | 1:03:51 | |
So this could have been your destiny. | 1:03:52 | 1:03:55 | |
Yes. I could have been sewing tablecloths here, | 1:03:55 | 1:03:59 | |
making overcoats. | 1:03:59 | 1:04:01 | |
I suppose that IS what would have happened to me. | 1:04:02 | 1:04:05 | |
I'd have gone into the rag trade. What else would I have done? | 1:04:05 | 1:04:09 | |
It was a detective story all of the way through. | 1:04:09 | 1:04:11 | |
I thought she was probably involved in the rag trade. | 1:04:11 | 1:04:15 | |
I mean, why wouldn't she have been? And she was born in Blackley, | 1:04:15 | 1:04:18 | |
where Queen Victoria had her wedding dress made. | 1:04:18 | 1:04:21 | |
You know, everything around here was about seamstresses and sewing. | 1:04:21 | 1:04:24 | |
She's a very good sewer, and when I met her, she said to me, | 1:04:24 | 1:04:27 | |
"Oh, I can make anything. There's nothing I can't do. | 1:04:27 | 1:04:29 | |
"You can show it to me and I'll cut it out and I'll sew it for you. | 1:04:29 | 1:04:32 | |
Raffles used to make all the overcoats and gabardines | 1:04:32 | 1:04:37 | |
for Marks and Spencer's, and they looked after their employees | 1:04:37 | 1:04:41 | |
and it was Old Man Raffles, as she called him, | 1:04:41 | 1:04:44 | |
who found my mother the mother and baby home | 1:04:44 | 1:04:46 | |
when she told him she was pregnant. | 1:04:46 | 1:04:48 | |
He didn't put her out of a job. He found her somewhere to go | 1:04:48 | 1:04:51 | |
and he said, "And when you come back, there'll be a job for you." | 1:04:51 | 1:04:55 | |
-Right. -Come on, then. | 1:04:59 | 1:05:01 | |
-Shall we go in? -Definitely. | 1:05:01 | 1:05:03 | |
"There are three kinds of big endings..." | 1:05:13 | 1:05:15 | |
Wow. | 1:05:15 | 1:05:17 | |
"Revenge, tragedy, | 1:05:17 | 1:05:20 | |
"forgiveness. | 1:05:20 | 1:05:22 | |
"Revenge and tragedy often happen together. | 1:05:22 | 1:05:25 | |
"Forgiveness redeems the past. | 1:05:25 | 1:05:29 | |
"Forgiveness unblocks the future." | 1:05:29 | 1:05:32 | |
Incredible. | 1:05:32 | 1:05:33 | |
"My mother tried to throw me clear of her own wreckage, | 1:05:35 | 1:05:39 | |
"and I landed in a place | 1:05:39 | 1:05:41 | |
"as unlikely as any she could have imagined for me. | 1:05:41 | 1:05:44 | |
"There I am, leaving her body, | 1:05:44 | 1:05:47 | |
"leaving the only thing I know | 1:05:47 | 1:05:50 | |
"and repeating the leaving again and again, | 1:05:50 | 1:05:52 | |
"until it is my own body I'm trying to leave, | 1:05:52 | 1:05:56 | |
"the last escape I can make. | 1:05:56 | 1:05:58 | |
"But there was forgiveness." | 1:06:00 | 1:06:02 | |
I walked through this cemetery many times | 1:06:17 | 1:06:19 | |
when I was growing up in Accrington | 1:06:19 | 1:06:21 | |
because I used to steal flowers from the newly-laid graves | 1:06:21 | 1:06:24 | |
to take to my girlfriend, who lived over in Huncoat | 1:06:24 | 1:06:26 | |
and I couldn't afford to buy them, so I'd run up from Water Street, | 1:06:26 | 1:06:30 | |
run through here, grab the flowers and make off over the back wall. | 1:06:30 | 1:06:33 | |
But this is your first visit since your mother died? | 1:06:33 | 1:06:37 | |
I haven't been here since my father died | 1:06:37 | 1:06:39 | |
but I didn't go to Mrs Winterson's funeral. | 1:06:39 | 1:06:44 | |
We were estranged. I hadn't seen her | 1:06:44 | 1:06:46 | |
since the time I was in Accrington over the Christmas holidays | 1:06:46 | 1:06:49 | |
and she got the revolver out | 1:06:49 | 1:06:51 | |
and I'd fled with my best friend, thinking that we might be murdered, | 1:06:51 | 1:06:56 | |
and she died, just really, around the screening of Oranges for the BBC, | 1:06:56 | 1:07:02 | |
which was extraordinary. | 1:07:02 | 1:07:04 | |
So I rang up my father | 1:07:04 | 1:07:05 | |
and I got through to him eventually, | 1:07:05 | 1:07:09 | |
and he said, "She died of a broken heart. You broke it." | 1:07:09 | 1:07:14 | |
-Did he? -He did. She was 68. | 1:07:14 | 1:07:17 | |
And I controlled myself and I said, "Look, Dad, | 1:07:17 | 1:07:21 | |
"she did have an enlarged heart and a prolapse and a thyroid condition | 1:07:21 | 1:07:26 | |
"and whatever she died of, it wasn't a broken heart." | 1:07:26 | 1:07:30 | |
And he said, "Well, you're no daughter of mine." | 1:07:30 | 1:07:35 | |
It was very upsetting. And that was a really bad point between us, | 1:07:35 | 1:07:39 | |
so I didn't go to the funeral, | 1:07:39 | 1:07:41 | |
but I did send some flowers, | 1:07:41 | 1:07:43 | |
and what I sent was a dog, | 1:07:43 | 1:07:47 | |
a dog made out of flowers, because Mrs Winterson liked dogs | 1:07:47 | 1:07:51 | |
and there's one in Oranges, actually, | 1:07:51 | 1:07:53 | |
where the lady who runs the funeral home makes it out of wire | 1:07:53 | 1:07:57 | |
and then puts flowers all over it, and that's what I sent up, | 1:07:57 | 1:08:01 | |
so for a little while, there was a flower dog to look after her | 1:08:01 | 1:08:05 | |
but I've never been to her grave | 1:08:05 | 1:08:07 | |
and I don't know where it is. | 1:08:07 | 1:08:08 | |
Well, we're going to find it now, I think. | 1:08:10 | 1:08:12 | |
It's down here somewhere. Come with me. | 1:08:12 | 1:08:16 | |
-So it's been 22 years since she died. -Yes. Yes. | 1:08:16 | 1:08:22 | |
-So you've had time to reflect, haven't you? -Oh, yes, | 1:08:22 | 1:08:25 | |
and that's one of the reasons why I wrote Why Be Happy, to my surprise, | 1:08:25 | 1:08:31 | |
because I began to understand her for the first time ever | 1:08:31 | 1:08:34 | |
and also to forgive her | 1:08:34 | 1:08:36 | |
and there's that wonderful line in William Blake, isn't there, | 1:08:36 | 1:08:39 | |
where he says, "Throughout all eternity, | 1:08:39 | 1:08:41 | |
"I forgive you, you forgive me." | 1:08:41 | 1:08:43 | |
Well, here she is. Look. | 1:08:44 | 1:08:46 | |
It says, "A beloved wife and mother." | 1:08:58 | 1:09:02 | |
It does. | 1:09:02 | 1:09:04 | |
I suppose my dad must have done that, mustn't he? | 1:09:04 | 1:09:06 | |
-He must have. -Yeah. | 1:09:06 | 1:09:08 | |
And he will have chosen the headstone | 1:09:09 | 1:09:11 | |
and look, there's the Bible in the corner. | 1:09:11 | 1:09:14 | |
I think that's right. | 1:09:14 | 1:09:17 | |
So what do you feel now, then, really? | 1:09:17 | 1:09:20 | |
Despite having discovered your birth mother, | 1:09:20 | 1:09:23 | |
you might have been a very different person | 1:09:23 | 1:09:26 | |
if you hadn't had Mrs Winterson. | 1:09:26 | 1:09:28 | |
Completely different, and though she is Constance, she always used to, | 1:09:28 | 1:09:32 | |
she talked to herself all the time, which I still do as well, | 1:09:32 | 1:09:35 | |
she'd wander around the house, going, "You're a fool to yourself, Connie." | 1:09:35 | 1:09:39 | |
We never knew quite what she meant. | 1:09:39 | 1:09:41 | |
I mean, we assumed it was something to do with me and my dad, | 1:09:41 | 1:09:45 | |
and she always felt rather put-upon and burdened, | 1:09:45 | 1:09:48 | |
you know, this is a woman who'd say, | 1:09:48 | 1:09:50 | |
"The Bible tells us to turn the other cheek, | 1:09:50 | 1:09:52 | |
"but there's only so many cheeks in a day." | 1:09:52 | 1:09:55 | |
-I'm a bit confused, though, by this headstone. -Because? | 1:09:58 | 1:10:03 | |
Well, | 1:10:04 | 1:10:06 | |
there's Mum, Constance Winterson, | 1:10:06 | 1:10:08 | |
and then it says, "Also a dear father, John William Winterson, | 1:10:08 | 1:10:12 | |
-"1877 to 1951." -It does. | 1:10:12 | 1:10:15 | |
Which is really baffling, because my father's John William Winterson | 1:10:16 | 1:10:21 | |
and he's buried over there cos I buried him in 2008. | 1:10:21 | 1:10:26 | |
He certainly isn't here, and I wonder if they were saving money | 1:10:26 | 1:10:30 | |
and deciding to get the headstone done all at the same time. | 1:10:30 | 1:10:33 | |
Well, maybe this is her mystery story. | 1:10:33 | 1:10:35 | |
-I think it is. -Maybe she's responsible for this. | 1:10:35 | 1:10:38 | |
I think it is. I think this is the cover of her own book. | 1:10:38 | 1:10:41 | |
Yes! She's taken a bit of a leaf out of your book, hasn't she? | 1:10:41 | 1:10:45 | |
Sort of confusing fiction and fact | 1:10:45 | 1:10:48 | |
and sort of turning it into a sort of... | 1:10:48 | 1:10:51 | |
-She'd like that, wouldn't she? -She would. -Yeah. | 1:10:51 | 1:10:54 | |
I think we should give her that, then. | 1:10:54 | 1:10:57 | |
-All right, well, I'll leave you to look round it. -Thank you. | 1:10:57 | 1:11:01 | |
In fact... | 1:11:04 | 1:11:06 | |
They'll not know, will they? | 1:11:22 | 1:11:24 | |
I keep thinking of her singing God Has Blotted Them Out | 1:11:47 | 1:11:50 | |
and then me singing Cheer Up Ye Saints Of God, | 1:11:50 | 1:11:54 | |
which pretty much sums up the difference between us, I guess. | 1:11:54 | 1:11:57 | |
And she wanted me to be a missionary | 1:12:06 | 1:12:08 | |
and of course, she did get what she wanted | 1:12:08 | 1:12:11 | |
because I am, but just not for Jesus. | 1:12:11 | 1:12:14 | |
It was for the power of the word, | 1:12:14 | 1:12:17 | |
and I suppose even that is something of what she wanted, | 1:12:17 | 1:12:21 | |
because it does begin, doesn't it, "In the beginning was the Word, | 1:12:21 | 1:12:25 | |
"and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." | 1:12:25 | 1:12:28 | |
And I suppose the word is God, to me. | 1:12:29 | 1:12:32 | |
And she hated her life. It was too small, too mean, too narrow. | 1:12:34 | 1:12:38 | |
She just wanted to escape | 1:12:38 | 1:12:40 | |
and the sad thing is that I was her means of escape. | 1:12:40 | 1:12:45 | |
I was the golden ticket, | 1:12:45 | 1:12:47 | |
I was the one who could have got out of here for ever. | 1:12:47 | 1:12:50 | |
She could have had everything that she wanted, | 1:12:50 | 1:12:53 | |
she could have had the house she wanted, the life she wanted. | 1:12:53 | 1:12:57 | |
She was always praying for a miracle | 1:12:57 | 1:12:59 | |
but it had already happened, and it was me. | 1:12:59 | 1:13:03 | |
And sometimes, the thing you really want is standing right next to you | 1:13:03 | 1:13:07 | |
and you don't know it because it comes in the wrong package | 1:13:07 | 1:13:10 | |
and I was just the wrong package, you know, too wild, too risky. | 1:13:10 | 1:13:14 | |
But I think she got the right daughter | 1:13:16 | 1:13:19 | |
and I think I got the right mother. | 1:13:19 | 1:13:22 | |
I'll leave her now. | 1:13:25 | 1:13:26 | |
MUSIC: "After the Gold Rush" by k.d. lang | 1:13:28 | 1:13:31 | |
# I dreamed I saw a silver spaceship | 1:13:31 | 1:13:36 | |
# Flying in the yellow haze of the sun | 1:13:36 | 1:13:40 | |
# There were children crying and colours flying | 1:13:42 | 1:13:47 | |
# All around the chosen ones | 1:13:47 | 1:13:52 | |
# All in a dream, all in a dream... # | 1:13:52 | 1:13:57 | |
I think you should give her your jacket, Alan. | 1:13:57 | 1:13:59 | |
I think she's... All these years there, it's a long time | 1:13:59 | 1:14:02 | |
-to stand without any clothes on. -Can we give her my jacket? | 1:14:02 | 1:14:06 | |
-OK, she shouldn't be... -Cover her up. | 1:14:06 | 1:14:08 | |
Yeah, she shouldn't be like that. | 1:14:08 | 1:14:10 | |
That's better. You see, we'll make a suffragist of you yet! | 1:14:10 | 1:14:14 | |
THEY LAUGH | 1:14:14 | 1:14:16 | |
Actually, that's sexier. | 1:14:17 | 1:14:19 | |
It is sexier! | 1:14:19 | 1:14:21 | |
# Flying Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home. # | 1:14:21 | 1:14:27 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 1:14:27 | 1:14:30 |