Autumn (Seasonal, #1)

by Ali Smith

the nuns told all the little girls there was about a little boy called Rastus. Rastus is in love with a little white girl. But the little white girl gets ill, and it looks like she’s going to die. Someone tells Rastus that she’ll be dead by the time the leaves have fallen off the tree at the front of her house. So Rastus collects up all the shoelaces he can find. Maybe he also unravels his jumper and cuts the unravelled wool into pieces. He’s going to need a lot of pieces. He climbs the tree outside the girl’s house. He ties the leaves on to the branches. But one night a really wild wind blows all the leaves off the tree. (Forty years before Christine Keeler was born, but presumably at a time when a lot of those nuns who apparently told stories like this one to the little girls in their care were growing up or were young adults, Rastus was a name popular in blackface minstrel shows. It became a character-name, a racist shorthand for someone