Prose non-fiction

Prose non-fiction
Read carefully an extract from Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? (2011) by Jeanette Winterson, and then answer the question that follows it (Page twenty-three). Jeanette Winterson was adopted as a baby and brought up by a Mr and Mrs Winterson in Accrington in the north of England. At Home Mrs Winterson left behind things that she could not do. One of those things was to make a home. The Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade talks about home—ontological as well as geographical home—and in a lovely phrase, he calls home “the heart of the real”. Home, he tells us, is the intersection of two lines—the vertical and the horizontal. The vertical plane has heaven, or the upper world, at one end, and the world of the dead at the other end. The horizontal plane is the traffic of this world, moving to and fro—our own traffic and that of teeming others. Home was a place of order. A place where the order of things come together—the living and dead—the spirits of the ancestors and the present inhabitants, and the gathering up and stilling of all the to-and-fro. Leaving home can only happen because there is a home to leave. And the leaving is never just a geographical or spatial separation; it is an emotional separation—wanted or unwanted. Steady or ambivalent. For the refugee, for the homeless, the lack of this crucial coordinate in the placing of the self has severe consequences. At best it must be managed, made up for in some way. At worst, a displaced person, literally, does not know which way is up, because there is no true north. No compass point. Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity. A nomadic people learn to take their homes with them—and the familiar objects are spread out or re-erected from place to place. When we move house, we take with us the invisible concept of home—but it is a very powerful concept. Mental health and emotional continuity do not require us to stay in the same house or the same place, but they do require a sturdy structure on the inside—and that structure is built in part by what has happened on the outside. The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live. Home was problematic for me. It did not represent order and it did not stand for safety. I left home at sixteen, and after that I was always moving, until finally, almost by accident I found and kept two places, both modest, one in London and one in the country. I have never lived with anyone in either of those homes. I am not entirely happy about that, but when I did live with someone, and for thirteen years, I could only manage it by having a lot of separate space. I am not messy, I am organised, and I cook and clean very happily, but another presence is hard for me. I wish it were not so, because I would really like to live with someone I love. I just don’t think I know how to do that. So it is better to accept my not quite adjusted need for distance and privacy.
Mrs Winterson never respected my privacy. She ransacked my possessions, read my diaries, my note-books, my stories, my letters. I never felt safe in the house and when she made me leave it I felt betrayed. The horrible sick feeling that I had never 40 belonged and never would belong is assuaged now by the fact that my homes are mine and I can come and go as I please. I never had a key to the house in Water Street, and so entry depended on being let in—or not. I don’t know why I am still so fond of doorsteps—it seems perverse, given that I spent so much time sitting on one, but the two parts of home that mattered to me 45 in Accrington are the parts I could least do without now. They are the threshold and the hearth. My friends joke that I won’t shut the door unless it is officially bedtime or actually snowing into the kitchen. The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is to open the back door. The next thing I do, in winter, is to light the fire. 50 All those hours spent sitting on my bum on the doorstep have given me a feeling for liminal space. I love the way cats like to be half in half out, the wild and the tame, and I too am the wild and the tame. I am domestic, but only if the door is open. And I guess that is the key—no one is ever going to lock me in or lock me out again. My door is open and I am the one who opens it. 55 The threshold and the hearth are mythic spaces. Each has sacred and ceremonial aspects in the history of our myth. To cross the threshold is to enter another world— whether the one on the inside or the one on the outside—and we can never be really sure what is on the other side of the door until we open it. Everyone has dreams of familiar doors and unknown rooms. Narnia is through a door in a wardrobe. In the story of Bluebeard there is one door that must not be opened. A vampire cannot cross a threshold strewn with garlic. Open the door into the tiny Tardis, and inside is a vast and changing space. The tradition of carrying the bride into her new house is a rite of passage; one world has been left behind, another entered. When we leave the parental home, even now, we do much more than go out of the house with a suitcase. Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door. The crossing in and out, the different worlds, the significant spaces, are private coordinates that in my fiction I have tried to make paradigmatic. Personal stories work for other people when those stories become both paradigms and parables. The intensity of a story—say the story in Oranges3—releases into a bigger space than the one it occupied in time and place. The story crosses the threshold from my world into yours. We meet each other on the steps of the story. Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home—they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. There is warmth there too—a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm. I know that from the chilly nights on the doorstep.

Mrs Winterson lived in the same house on Water Street from 1947 until her death 80 in 1990. Was it a sanctuary? I don’t think so. Was it where she wanted to be? No …

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit was Jeanette Winterson’s first novel.
She hated the small and the mean, and yet that is all she had. I bought a few big houses myself along the way, simply because I was trying out something for her. In fact, my tastes are more modest—but you don’t know that until you have bought and 85 sold for the ghost of your mother. Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father . . . that’s how Oranges begins, and it ends with the young woman, let’s call her Jeanette, returning home to find things much the same—a new electronic organ to add a bit of bass and percussion to the Christmas carols, but otherwise, it’s life as it ever was—the giant figure of the mother stooped inside the cramped house, filling it with Royal Albert and electrical goods, totting up the church accounts in a double ledger, smoking into the night underneath a haze of fly spray, her fags hidden in a box marked RUBBER BANDS. Like most people, when I look back, the family house is held in time, or rather it is now outside of time, because it exists so clearly and it does not change, and it can only be entered through a door in the mind. I like it that pre-industrial societies, and religious cultures still, now, distinguish between two kinds of time—linear time, that is also cyclical because history repeats itself, even as it seems to progress, and real time, which is not subject to the clock or the calendar, and is where the soul used to live. This real time is reversible and redeemable. It is why, in religious rites of all kinds, something that happened once is re-enacted— Passover, Christmas, Easter, or, in the pagan record, Midsummer and the dying of the god. As we participate in the ritual, we step outside of linear time and enter real time. Time is only truly locked when we live in a mechanised world. Then we turn into clock-watchers and time-servers. Like the rest of life, time becomes uniform and standardised.

When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed—for a few 110 weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. 115 Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you. Why did I leave home when I was sixteen? It was one of those important choices that will change the rest of your life. When I look back it feels like I was at the borders of common sense, and the sensible thing to do would have been to keep quiet, keep going, learn to lie better and leave later. I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is 120 quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it. And here is the shock—when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge 125 energy. You are unhappy. Things get worse. It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded. And then all the cowards come out and say, “See, I told you so.” In fact, they told you nothing.

 
Question :Discuss the ways in which Jeanette Winterson explores the concept of home. In your answer you should take into account her use of •structure personal experience and anecdote language and imagery any other literary or rhetorical devices you consider to be important.
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