Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

I do think that the relationship my mother enjoyed with God had a lot to do with positioning.

I still have it, and whenever I’m tempted to cut corners I think about that whalebone, and I know better.

sharpness of the whalebone vs. round pebble cut corners: sharp whalebone what does this mean for the pebble?

When my mother heard the call, she was presented with a copy of the Psalms and asked to make her choice between a Christmas Cactus (non-flowering) and a lily of the valley. She had opted for the lily of the valley. When my father went the next night, she told him to be sure and go for the cactus, but by the time he got to the front they had all gone.

sharpness of the cactus and roundness of lily of the valley

mother sang to the child, and stabbed the demons. She understood how jealous the Spirit is of flesh.

stabbing vs. flesh --> sharp vs. round

Such warm tender flesh. Her flesh now, sprung from her head. Her vision. Not the jolt beneath the hip bone, but water and the word. She had a way out now, for years and years to come.

intangibility (water and the word)

a fat brown envelope plopped through the letter box.

brown

My mother looked horrified and rooting in her handbag she gave me an orange.

disinfectant and mashed potatoes.

sharp smell of disinfectant; soft mashed potatoes

So she married my father and reformed him and he built the church and never got angry.

mother is sharp and father is soft

ripe plums of indignation falling from them.

‘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.’

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.

My father was at work at the time, so she left him the address and a note which said:‘I am busy with the Lord in Wigan.’

The woman was indeed perfect, there was no doubt about that, but she wasn’t flawless.

‘There are two principles,’ she said, ‘the Weight and the Counter-weight.’ ‘Oh yes,’ put in one of the advisors, ‘you mean the sphere of Destiny and the wheel of Fortune.’

‘What does exist lies in the sphere of your own hands.’

and saw a man selling oranges.

‘Sorry,’ said the seller, ‘I only does oranges.’

oranges are the only fruit

It was spring, the ground still had traces of snow, and I was about to be married.

predestined for heterosexual marriage

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.

She used a thin stained knife, and threw the gut into a tin bucket.

‘When I was born I looked like a melon.’

round

‘So just you take care, what you think is the heart might well be another organ.’

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time.

History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it’s still a ball of string full of knots.

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact.

And in some ghastly way Pol Pot was more honest than the rest of us have been.

wipe out the past is a really effective way of enforcing an ideology

Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches . . . .

No sooner had I said that than I felt a blow that wrapped round my head like a bandage.

the sharp and the soft

‘I’m your mother,’ she said very quietly. ‘She was a carrying case.’

We made love and I hated it and hated it, but would not stop.

I knew that demons entered wherever there was a weak point. If I had a demon my weak point was Melanie, but she was beautiful and good and had loved me.

Can love really belong to the demon?

The orange demon that beguiles?

‘Well, the demon you get depends on the colour of your aura, yours is orange which is why you’ve got me. Your mother’s is brown, which is why she’s so odd,

orange = beguiles brown = odd

That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

rough brown pebble.

stone; her mother's aura is brown round but rough

She was very soft.

growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree.

circular

he patted my arm, told me he knew, and forgave us both. There was only one thing I could do; mustering all my spit, I did it.

pointy ears.

Once, trying to reach a huge icicle, I fell down on to a quarry ledge and couldn’t climb back again; the earth kept crumbling away. She barked and spluttered and then ran off to help me. Now, here we were, on a different edge.

points and edges

Round Table

There was a stone that held a bright sword and no one could pull the sword because their minds were fixed on the stone.

circular-wise like a target. Near the centre is a sundial and at the centre a thorny crown.

But oh, Sir Perceval, come and turn cartwheels again.

round, circular, again evokes continuity

Hands in my pockets, I played with a rough brown pebble.

pebble returns in times of trauma

She ended by saying that having taken on a man’s world in other ways I had flouted God’s law and tried to do it sexually.

If there’s such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

I held on tight to the little brown pebble and hoped they’d go away.