Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Read online

  The class giggled.

  Slowly I sat down, not sure what was going on, but sure that something was. When I got home I told my mother I didn’t want to go again.

  ‘You’ve got to,’ she said. ‘Here, have an orange.’

  Some weeks passed, in which I tried to make myself as ordinary as possible. It seemed like it was working, and then we started sewing class; on Wednesdays, after toad-in-the-hole and Manchester tart. We did our cross stitch and chain stitch and then we had to think of a project. I decided to make a sampler for Elsie Norris. The girl next to me wanted to do one for her mother, TO MOTHER WITH LOVE; the girl opposite a birthday motif. When it came to me I said I wanted a text.

  ‘What about SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN?’ suggested Mrs Virtue.

  I knew that wouldn’t do for Elsie. She liked the prophets.

  ‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘it’s for my friend, and she reads Jeremiah mostly. I was thinking of THE SUMMER IS ENDED AND WE ARE NOT YET SAVED.’

  Mrs Virtue was a diplomatic woman, but she had her blind spots. When it came to listing all the samplers, she wrote the others out in full, and next to mine put ‘Text’.

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘You might upset the others,’ she said. ‘Now what colour do you want, yellow, green, or red?’

  We looked at each other.

  ‘Black,’ I said.

  I did upset the children. Not intentionally, but effectively. Mrs Sparrow and Mrs Spencer came to school one day all fluffed up with rage; they came at playtime, I saw them with their handbags and hats, revolving up the concrete, lips pursed. Mrs Spencer had her gloves on.

  Some of the others knew what was happening. There was a little group of them by the fence, whispering. One of them pointed at me. I tried not to notice and carried on with my whip and top. The group got bigger, a girl with sherbet on her mouth yelled across at me, I didn’t catch what she said, but the others all screamed with laughter. Then a boy came and hit me on the neck, then another and another, all hitting and running off.

  ‘Tag, tag,’ they cried as the teacher came past.

  I was bewildered, then angry, in-the-stomach angry. I caught one with my little whip. He yelped.

  ‘Miss, Miss, she hit me.’

  ‘Miss, Miss, she hit him,’ chorused the rest.

  Miss took me by the back of my hair and hauled me off inside.

  Outside, the bell rang, there was noise and doors and scuffling, then quiet. That particular corridor quiet.

  I was in the staff room.

  Miss turned to me, she looked tired.

  ‘Hold out your hand.’

  I held out my hand.

  She reached for the ruler. I thought of the Lord. The staff room door opened, and in walked Mrs Vole, the head.

  ‘Ah, I see Jeanette is here already. Wait outside a moment, will you?’

  I withdrew my sacrificial palm, shoved it into my pocket and slid out between them.

  I was just in time to see the retreating shapes of Mrs Spencer and Mrs Sparrow, ripe plums of indignation falling from them.

  It was cold in the corridor; I could hear low voices behind the door, but nothing happened. I started to pick at the radiator with my compass, trying to make a bit of warped plastic look like Paris from the air.

  Last night at church had been the prayer meeting, and Mrs White had had a vision.

  ‘What was it like?’ we asked eagerly.

  ‘Oh, it was very holy,’ said Mrs White.

  The plans for the Christmas campaign were well under way. We had got permission from the Salvation Army to share their crib space outside the town hall, and rumour had it that Pastor Spratt might be back with some of the converted Heathen. ‘We can only hope and pray, said my mother, writing to him at once.

  I had won yet another Bible quiz competition, and to my great relief had been picked as narrator for the Sunday School Pageant. I had been Mary for the last three years, and there was nothing else I could bring to the part. Besides, it meant playing opposite Stanley Farmer.

  It was clear and warm and made me happy.

  At school there was only confusion.

  By this time I had squatted on the floor, so when the door finally opened all I could see were wool stockings and Hush Puppies.

  ‘We’d like to talk to you,’ said Mrs Vole.

  I scrambled up and went inside, feeling like Daniel.

  Mrs Vole picked up an ink well, and looked at me carefully.

  ‘Jeanette, we think you may be having problems at school. Do you want to tell us about them?’

  ‘I’m all right.’ I shuffled defensively.

  ‘You do seem rather pre-occupied, shall we say, with God.’

  I continued to stare at the floor.

  ‘Your sampler, for instance, had a very disturbing motif.’

  ‘It was for my friend, she liked it,’ I burst out, thinking how Elsie’s face had lit up when I had given it to her.

  ‘And who is your friend?’

  ‘She’s called Elsie Norris and she gave me three mice in the fiery furnace.’

  Mrs Vole and Miss looked at one another.

  ‘And why did you choose to write about hoopoos and rock badgers in your animal book, and in one case, I believe, shrimps?’

  ‘My mother taught me to read,’ I told them rather desperately.

  ‘Yes, your reading skills are quite unusual, but you haven’t answered my question.’

  How could I?

  My mother had taught me to read from the Book of Deuteronomy because it is full of animals (mostly unclean). Whenever we read ‘Thou shall not eat any beast that does not chew the cud or part the hoof she drew all the creature mentioned. Horsies, bunnies and little ducks were vague fabulous things, but I knew all about pelicans, rock badgers, sloths and bats. This tendency towards the exotic has brought me many problems, just as it did for William Blake. My mother drew winged insects, and the birds of the air, but my favourite ones were the seabed ones, the molluscs. I had a fine collection from the beach at Blackpool. She had a blue pen for the waves, and brown ink for the scaly-backed crab. Lobsters were red biro, she never drew shrimps, though, because she liked to eat them in a muffin. I think it had troubled her for a long time. Finally, after much prayer, and some consultation with a great man of the Lord in Shrewsbury, she agreed with St Paul that what God has cleansed we must not call common. After that we went to Molly’s seafoods every Saturday. Deuteronomy had its drawbacks; it’s full of Abominations and Unmentionables. Whenever we read about a bastard, or someone with crushed testicles, my mother turned over the page and said, ‘Leave that to the Lord,’ but when she’d gone, I’d sneak a look. I was glad I didn’t have testicles. They sounded like intestines only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.

  ‘Well,’ pressed Mrs Vole, ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

  ‘And why, and this is perhaps more serious, do you terrorize, yes, terrorize, the other children?’

  ‘I don’t,’ I protested.

  ‘Then can you tell me why I had Mrs Spencer and Mrs Sparrow here this morning telling me how their children have nightmares?’

  ‘I have nightmares too.’

  ‘That’s not the point. You have been talking about Hell to young minds.’

  It was true. I couldn’t deny it. I had told all the others about the horrors of the demon and the fate of the damned. I had illustrated it by almost strangling Susan Hunt, but that was an accident, and I gave her all my cough sweets afterwards.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘I thought it was interesting.’

  Mrs Vole and Miss shook their heads.

  ‘You’d better go,’ said Mrs Vole. ‘I shall be writing to your mother.’

  I was very depressed. What was all the fuss about? Better to hear about Hell now than burn in it later. I walked past Class 3’s collage of an Easter bunny, and I thought of Elsie’s col
lage of Noah’s Ark, with the removable chimp.

  It was obvious where I belonged. Ten more years and I could go to missionary school.

  Mrs Vole kept her promise. She wrote to my mother, explaining my religious leanings, and asking my mother if she would moderate me. My mother hooted and took me to the cinema as a treat. They were showing The Ten Commandments. I asked if Elsie could come, but my mother said no.

  After that day, everyone at school avoided me. If it had not been for the conviction that I was right, I might have been very sad. As it was I just forgot about it, did my lessons as best I could, which wasn’t that well, and thought about our church. I told my mother how things were once.

  ‘We are called to be apart,’ she said.

  My mother didn’t have many friends either. People didn’t understand the way she thought; neither did I, but I loved her because she always knew exactly why things happened.

  When it came round to Prizegiving, I took my sampler back from Elsie Norris and entered it for the needlework class. I still think it was a masterpiece of its kind; it had the lettering all in black, and the border all in white, and in the bottom corner a sort of artist’s impression of the terrified damned. Elsie had framed it, so it looked quite professional.

  Mrs Virtue stood at the top of the class, collecting. . . .

  ‘Irene, yes.’

  ‘Vera, yes.’

  ‘Shelley, yes.’ (Shelley was a Brownie.)

  ‘Here’s mine Mrs Virtue,’ I said, placing it on the desk.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, meaning No.

  ‘I will enter it, if that’s what you want, but to be frank I don’t think it’s the sort of thing the judges will be hoping for.’

  ‘What do you mean,’ I demanded, ‘it’s got everything, adventure, pathos, mystery. . . .’

  She interrupted.

  ‘I mean, your use of colour is limited, you don’t exploit the potential of the thread; take Shelley’s Village Scene, for instance, notice the variety, the colours.’

  ‘She’s used four colours, I’ve used three.’

  Mrs Virtue frowned.

  ‘And besides, no one else has used black.’

  Mrs Virtue sat down.

  ‘And I’ve used mythical counter-relief,’ I insisted, pointing at the terrified damned.

  Mrs Virtue laid her head on her hands.

  ‘What are you talking about? If you mean that messy blotch in the corner. . . .’

  I was furious; luckily I had been reading about how Sir Joshua Reynolds insulted Turner.

  ‘Just because you can’t tell what it is, doesn’t mean it’s not what it is.’

  I picked up Shelley’s Village Scene.

  ‘That doesn’t look like a sheep, it’s all white and fluffy.’

  ‘Go back to your desk, Jeanette.’

  ‘But. . . .’

  ‘GO BACK TO YOUR DESK!’

  What could I do? My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognized things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, sea and fish; if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she’d either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes. But most likely, she’d do what most people do when confronted with something they don’t understand:

  Panic.

  What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in an usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt). I knew that my sampler was absolutely right in Elsie Norris’s front room, but absolutely wrong in Mrs Virtue’s sewing class. Mrs Virtue should either have had the imagination to commend me for my effort in context, or the farsightedness to realize that there is a debate going on as to whether something has an absolute as well as a relative value; given that, she should have given me the benefit of the doubt.

  As it was she got upset and blamed me for her headache. This was very like Sir Joshua Reynolds, who complained that Turner always gave him a headache.

  I didn’t win anything with my sampler though, and I was very disappointed. I took it back to Elsie on the last day of school and asked her if she still wanted it.

  She snatched it from me, and put it firmly on the wall.

  ‘It’s upside down, Elsie,’ I pointed out.

  She fumbled for her glasses, and stared at it.

  ‘So it is, but it’s all the same to the Lord. Still, I’ll put it right for them that doesn’t know.’

  And she carefully adjusted the picture.

  ‘I thought you might not like it any more.’

  ‘Heathen child, the Lord himself was scorned, don’t expect the unwashed to appreciate.’

  (Elsie always called the unconverted the unwashed.)

  ‘Well it would be nice sometimes,’ I ventured, displaying a tendency towards relativism.

  Elsie got very cross. She was an absolutist, and had no time for people who thought cows didn’t exist unless you looked at them. Once a thing was created, it was valid for all time. Its value went not up nor down.

  Perception, she said was a fraud; had not St Paul said we see in a glass darkly, had not Wordsworth said we see by glimpses? ‘This piece of fruit cake’ – she waved it between bites – ‘this cake doesn’t need me to eat it to make it edible. It exists without me.’

  That was a bad example, but I knew what she meant. It meant that to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.

  ‘Have some cake,’ she said cheerfully, but I didn’t because even if Elsie was philosophically amiss, her contention that the cake existed without either of us was certainly true. There was probably a whole township in there, with values of its own, and a style of gossip.

  Over the years I did my best to win a prize; some wish to better the world and still scorn it. But I never succeeded; there’s a formula, a secret, I don’t know what, that people who have been to public school or Brownies seem to understand. It runs right the way through life, though it starts with hyacinth growing, passes through milk monitor, and finishes somewhere at half-blue.

  My hyacinths were pink. Two of them. I called the ensemble ‘The Annunciation’ (you have to have a theme). This was because the blooms were huddled up close, and reminded me of Mary and Elizabeth soon after the visit by the angel. I thought it was a very clever marriage of horticulture and theology. I put a little explanation at the bottom, and the appropriate verse so that people could look it up if they wanted to, but it didn’t win. What did win was a straggly white pair called ‘Snow Sisters’. So I took ‘The Annunciation’ home and fed it to our rabbit. I was a bit uneasy afterwards in case it was heresy, and the rabbit fell sick. Later, I tried to win the Easter egg painting competition. I had had so little success with my biblical themes that it seemed an idea to try something new. It couldn’t be anything pre-Raphaelite, because Janey Morris was thin, and not suited to being played by an egg.

  Coleridge and the Man from Porlock?

  Coleridge was fat, but I felt the tableau would lack dramatic interest.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ said Elsie. ‘Wagner.’

  So we cut a cardboard box to set the scene, Elsie doing the back-drop, me doing the rocks out of half-egg shells. We stayed up all night on the dramatis personae, because of the detail. We had chosen the most exciting bit, ‘Brunhilda Confronts Her Father’. I did Brunhilda, and Elsie did Wodin. Brunhilda had a helmet made out of a thimble with little feather wings from Elsie’s pillow.

  ‘She needs a spear,’ said Elsie, ‘I’ll give you a cocktail stick only don’t tell anyone what I use it for.’

  As a final touch I cut off some of my own hair and made it into Brunhilda’s hair.

  Wodin was a masterpiece, a double-yoker brown egg, with a Ritz cracker shield and a drawn
-on eye-patch. We made him a match-box chariot that was just too small.

  ‘Dramatic emphasis,’ said Elsie.

  The next day I took it to school and placed it beside the others; there was no comparison. Imagine my horror when it didn’t win. I was not a selfish child and, understanding the nature of genius, would have happily bowed to another’s talent, but not to three eggs covered in cotton wool, entitled ‘Easter Bunnies’.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ I told Elsie, later that same evening at the Sisterhood meeting.

  ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘And anyway,’ butted in Mrs White, who had heard the story, ‘they’re not holy.’

  I didn’t despair; I did Streetcar Named Desire out of pipe-cleaners, an embroidered cushion cover of Bette Davis in Now Voyager, an oregami William Tell with real apple, and best of all, a potato sculpture of Henry Ford outside the Chrysler building in New York. An impressive list by any standards, but I was as hopeful and as foolish as King Canute forcing back the waves. Whatever I did made no impression at all, except to enrage my mother because I had abandoned biblical themes. She quite liked Now Voyager, because she had done her courting during that film, but she thought I should have made the Tower of Babel out of oregami, even though I told her it would be too difficult.

  ‘The Lord walked on the water,’ was all she said when I tried to explain. But she had her own problems. A lot of the missionaries had been eaten, which meant she had to explain to their families.

  ‘It’s not easy,’ she said, ‘even though it’s for the Lord.’

  When the children of Israel left Egypt, they were guided by the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night. For them, this did not seem to be a problem. For me, it was an enormous problem. The pillar of cloud was a fog, perplexing and impossible. I didn’t understand the ground rules. The daily world was a world of Strange Notions, without form, and therefore void. I comforted myself as best I could by always rearranging their version of the facts.

  One day, I learned that Tetrahedron is a mathematical shape that can be formed by stretching an elastic band over a series of nails.

  But Tetrahedron is an emperor. . . .

  The emperor Tetrahedron lived in a palace made absolutely from elastic bands. To the right, cunning fountains shot elastic jets, subtle as silk; to the left, ten minstrels played day and night on elastic lutes.