Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

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.

NOT!

When Elsie wasn’t reading the Bible, or telling stories, she spent time with the poets. She told me all about Swinburne and his troubles, and about the oppression of William Blake.

But of all her loves, Elsie’s favourite was W. B. Yeats. Yeats, she said, knew the importance of numbers, and the great effect of the imagination on the world.

I comforted myself with the thought of the summer camp our church went on each year. This time we were going far away, to Devon.

My mother was very excited because Pastor Spratt had promised to call in on one of his rare visits to England. He was to take the first Sunday service in the gospel tent just outside Cullompton. At the moment Pastor Spratt was touring his exhibition in Europe. He was fast becoming one of the most famous and successful missionaries that our group of churches had ever sent out.

Tribesmen from places we couldn’t pronounce sent thank-you letters to our headquarters, rejoicing in the Lord and their new salvation.

😃

My mother was in charge of the camp stores, and had already started to buy in huge tins of beans and frankfurter sausages. ‘An army marches on its stomach,’ she told me.

😂

We were hoping to make enough converts to start a new church in Exeter.

Eventually they had got a grant from head office to finish the roof, and pay for a flag to fly from the top. It was a proud day when they hoisted the flag, with SEEK YE THE LORD embroidered in red letters.

During the first year my mother had gone into all the pubs and clubs urging the drunkards to join her at church. She used to sit at the piano and sing Have You Any Room For Jesus? It was very moving, she said. The men cried into their tankards and stopped playing snooker while she sang. She was plump and pretty and they called her the Jesus Belle. ‘Oh, I had my offers,’ she confided, ‘and they weren’t all Godly.’

When it came round to Prizegiving, I took my sampler back from Elsie Norris and entered it for the needlework class.

Nice passage. Ends on p. 46.

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.

The more insipid and conventional, the better.

Later, I tried to win the Easter egg painting competition.

‘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.’

Yeah, shoulda won. But, of course, even the adults probably didn't get the reference.

didn’t despair; I did Street Car 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.

It was spring, the ground still had traces of snow, and I was about to be married. My dress was pure white and I had a golden crown. As I walked up the aisle the crown got heavier and heavier and the dress more and more difficult to walk in. I thought everyone would point at me, but no one noticed. Somehow I made it to the altar. The priest was very fat and kept getting fatter, like bubble gum you blow. Finally we came to the moment, ‘You may kiss the bride.’ 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. I told my mother about it, and she said it was because I ate sardines for supper. The next night I ate sausages, but I still had the dream.

There was a woman in our street who told us all she had married a pig. I asked her why she did it, and she said ‘You never know until it’s too late.’ Exactly. No doubt that woman had discovered in life what I had discovered in my dreams. She had unwittingly married a pig.

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. Like the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. 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?

When it was washday I hid in the dustbin to hear what the women said.

‘Let’s have a smoke,’ offered Nellie, ‘and you tell me about Jane.’ Jane was Doreen’s daughter, just turned seventeen and very studious. ‘If she don’t get a boyfriend folks will talk. She spends all her time at that Susan’s doing her homework, or so she tells me.’

Oh-ho!

Nellie thought that Jane might be seeing a boy on the quiet, pretending to be at Susan’s. Doreen shook her head. ‘She’s there all right, I check with Susan’s mother. If they’re not careful folk will think they’re like them two at the paper shop.’ ‘I like them two,’ said Nellie firmly, ‘and who’s to say they do anything?’ ‘Mrs Fergeson across saw them getting a new bed, a double bed.’

‘Well what does that prove? Me and Bert had one bed but we did nothing in it.’ Doreen said that was all very well, but two women were different. Different from what? I wondered from inside the dustbin. ‘Well your Jane can go to university and move away, she’s clever.’ ‘Frank won’t put up with that, he wants grandchildren, and if I don’t get a move on there’ll be no di...

It was a good thing I was destined to become a missionary. For some time after this I put aside the problem of men and concentrated on reading the Bible.

😄

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

Time is a great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away. There was a time in England when everyone was much concerned with building wooden boats and sailing off against the Turk. When that stopped being interesting, what peasants there were left limped back to the land, and what nobles there were left plotted against each other.

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

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.

Nobody should mind. Some people make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, children, when bright, can come top. It’s an all-purpose rainy day pursui...

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what t...

Knowing what to believe had its advantages. It built an empire and kept people where they belonged, in the bright realm of the wallet. . . .

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should.

This resonates with me.

People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult.

And if we can’t dispose of it we can alter it.

So the past, because it is past, is only malleable where once it was flexible. Once it could change its mind, now it can only undergo change.

What matters is that order is seen to prevail . . . . and if we are eighteenth-century gentlemen, drawing down the blinds as our coach jumbles over the Alps, we have to know what we are doing, pretending an order that doesn’t exist, to make a security that cannot exist.

And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own.

Great metaphors.

‘I love you almost as much as I love the Lord,’ I laughed. She looked at me, and her eyes clouded for a moment.’I don’t know,’ she said.

By the time we got to church, the first hymn was under way.

We had slid in next to Miss Jewsbury who told me to keep calm. ‘What do you mean?’ I whispered. ‘Come and talk to me afterwards,’ she his...

I decided she had gone mad. The church was very full as usual, and every time I caught someone’s eye they smi...

Then Miss Jewsbury was urging me to my feet saying, ‘Keep calm, keep calm,’ and I was walking out to the front with Melanie. I shot a glance at her. She was pale. ‘These children of God,’ began the pastor, ‘have fallen under Satan’s spell.’ His hand was hot and heavy on my neck. Everyone in the congregation looked like a waxwork. ‘These children of God have fallen foul of their lusts.’ ‘Just a minute . . .,’ I began, but he took no notice. ‘These children are full of demons.’ A cry of horror ran through the church. ‘I’m not,’ I shouted, ‘and neither is she.’ ‘Listen to Satan’s voice,’ said the pastor to the church, pointing at me. ‘How are the best become the worst.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, desperate. ‘Do you deny you love this woman with a love reserved for man and wife?’ ‘No, yes, I mean of course I love her.’ ‘I will read you the words of St Paul,’ announced the pastor, and he did, and many more words besides about unnatural passions and the mark of the demon. ‘To the pure all things are pure,’ I yelled at him. ‘It’s you not us.’ He turned to Melanie. ‘Do you promise to give up this sin and beg the Lord to forgive you?’ ‘Yes.’ She was trembling uncontrollably. I hardly heard what she said. ‘Then go into the vestry with Mrs White and the elders will come and pray for you. It’s not too late for those who truly repent.’ He turned to me. ‘I love her.’ ‘Then you do not love the Lord.’ ‘Yes, I love both of them.’ ‘You cannot.’ ‘I do, I do, let me go.’ But he caught my arm and held me fast. ‘The church will not see you suffer, go home and wait for us to help you.’

I ran out on to the street, wild with distress. Miss Jewsbury...

When we reached Miss Jewsbury’s house, she banged the kettle on to the gas ring, and pushed me by the fire. My teeth were chattering and I couldn’t talk.

‘I’ve known you for years and you were always headstrong, why haven’t you been a bit more careful?’

Start.