Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn’t matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that. She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window. She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies.

She had a mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children; it wasn’t that she couldn’t do it, more that she didn’t want to do it. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first.

They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.

a mouse mustve made a MASSIVE nest out of my hair recently x

The Missionary Report was a great trial to me because our mid-day meal depended upon it. If it went well, no deaths and lots of converts, my mother cooked a joint. If the Godless had proved not only stubborn, but murderous, my mother spent the rest of the morning listening to the Jim Reeves Devotional Selection, and we had to have boiled eggs and toast soldiers. Her husband was an easy-going man, but I knew it depressed him. He would have cooked it himself but for my mother’s complete conviction that she was the only person in our house who would tell a saucepan from a piano. She was wrong, as far as we were concerned, but right as far as she was concerned, and really, that’s what mattered.

The Devil himself is a drunk’ (sometimes my mother invented theology).

it was hardly fair of her but she never was particularly fair;

my mother called them fornicators

Once, when I was collecting the black peas, about to go home, the old woman got hold of my hand. I thought she was going to bite me. She looked at my palm and laughed a bit. ‘You’ll never marry,’ she said, ‘not you, and you’ll never be still.’

She said they dealt in unnatural passions. I thought she meant they put chemicals in their sweets.

My mother said he looked like Errol Flynn, but holy. A lot of women found the Lord that week.

Luckily she can’t paint.

she was not so young these days and people were not kind. She liked to speak French and to play the piano, but what do these things mean?

The old woman thanked her, and died at once.

Poor Dad, he was never quite good enough.

That night at church, we had a visiting speaker, Pastor Finch from Stockport. He was an expert in demons, and delivered a terrifying sermon on how easy it is to become demon-possessed. We were all very uneasy afterwards. Mrs White said she thought her next-door neighbours were probably possessed, they had all the signs.

‘how blessed,’ then his brow clouded. ‘But how cursed.’ At this word his fist hit the table and catapulted a cheese sandwich into the collection bag; I saw it happen, but I was so distracted I forgot to tell anyone. They found it in there the week after, at the Sisterhood meeting. The whole table had fallen silent, except for Mrs Rothwell who was stone deaf and very hungry.

‘But that’s not right,’ he said, aghast.

me when something's not right

she always talked like that, I think it was because she taught the oboe. It does something to your mouth.

‘I think you’ve had enough excitement for one day.’ It’s odd, the things other people think are exciting.

I asked my mother to teach me French, but her face clouded over, and she said she couldn’t. ‘Why not?’ ‘It was nearly my downfall.’

ah yes the biblical evils of the french

One Sunday the pastor told everyone how full of the spirit I was. He talked about me for twenty minutes, and I didn’t hear a word; just sat there reading my Bible and thinking what a long book it was. Of course this seeming modesty made them all the more convinced.

My mother looked horrified and rooting in her handbag she gave me an orange. I peeled it to comfort myself,

Now I was finding that even the church was sometimes confused. This was a problem. But not one I chose to deal with for many years more.

I tried to build an igloo out of the orange peel but it kept falling down and even when it stood up I didn’t have an eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about ‘How Eskimo Got Eaten’, which made me even more miserable.

I thought of the sea walrus I had just invented. It was wicked, it had eaten the eskimo; but it was better than these. The nurse had thrown my igloo in the bin.

What if I died? So young and so promising! I thought of my funeral, of all the tears.

When she couldn’t come herself she sent my father, usually with a letter and a couple of oranges. ‘The only fruit,’ she always said.

Fruit salad, fruit pie, fruit for fools, fruited punch. Demon fruit, passion fruit, rotten fruit, fruit on Sunday. Oranges are the only fruit.

‘There’s this world,’ she banged the wall graphically, ‘and there’s this world,’ she thumped her chest. ‘If you want to make sense of either, you have to take notice of both.’

we’d been on a school trip to Chester Zoo earlier in the week.

big up chester zoo

saving up for a piano and hymn books; fending off the temptations of the Devil go to on holiday instead.

‘They were all wayward men,’ she sighed.

gonna start saying this about my exes

‘That? Oh just Eddy’s sister, I don’t know why I put it there,’ and she turned the page. Next time we looked, it had gone.

I know what u are 🫵😐 🏳️‍🌈

I was glad I didn’t have testicles.

If it had not been for the conviction that I was right, I might have been very sad.

‘this cake doesn’t need me to eat it to make it edible. It exists without me.’

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.’

‘They’re fornicating,’ cried my mother,

The only person she knew in Wigan was an old flame, who had threatened to kill himself when she married another. ‘That’s up to you,’ she had said, refusing to correspond.

lowkey real as fuck

‘How can I run this whole kingdom without a wife?’

Part three: the need to produce a world full of perfect beings. The possibility thereby of a heaven on earth. A perfect race. An exhortation to single-mindedness.

eugenics?!

My new husband turned to me, and here were a number of possibilities. Sometimes he was blind, sometimes a pig, sometimes my mother, sometimes the man from the post office, and once, just a suit of clothes with nothing inside.

No doubt that woman had discovered in life what I had discovered in my dreams. She had unwittingly married a pig.

Sweet I was not. But I was a little girl, ergo, I was sweet, and here were sweets to prove it.

I was confused. Everyone always said you found the right man.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

Slowly I closed the book. It was clear that I had stumbled on a terrible conspiracy. There are women in the world. There are men in the world. And there are beasts. What do you do if you marry a beast? Kissing them didn’t always help. And beasts are crafty. They disguise themselves like you and I.

Why had no one told me? Did that mean no one else knew? Did that mean that all over the globe, in all innocence, women were marrying beasts?

If only there was some way of telling, then we could operate a ration system. It wasn’t fair that a whole street should be full of beasts.

‘Course the children helped. I ignored him for fifteen years.’