O Caledonia

by Elspeth Barker

Janet dreamed about going to heaven, up a ladder from the beach, into the blue sky; God greeted her at the top, clad in a butcher’s striped apron.

This was our first insight into Janet’s views and on religion, and I found it noteworthy she pictured him as a butcher over the earth.

Grandpa’s God, like Nanny’s, was all-seeing, all-powerful, but, unlike Nanny’s, He was protective and compassionate, not vengeful.

Even at a young age, she understood the concept that God meant something different to each person who believed in him.

She recognised in herself a distaste for people, which was both physical and intellectual; and yet she nurtured a shameful, secret desire for popularity, or at least for acceptance, neither of which came her way.

This line to me incapsulates Janet perfectly. If I were to describe her in a single sentence, I couldn’t do it better.

The crime of self-centredness had been added to the miseries of her condition.

Constantly being misunderstood, Janet was often well-intentioned with a disastrous result, catapulting her into unpopularity with everyone she encountered.

He was panting; he brandished and twirled a dreadful dark pink baton out of the front of his shorts.

“Dreadful dark pink baton” is such an absolute zinger

When Janet used words which had delighted or amused her they fell silent and stared and moved away muttering to each other. First they thought she was showing off; then they thought she was mad.

Janet wanted so badly not just to make friends, but to be adored by her female peers and to find something in common with them, both of which she never accomplished.

She stood for a moment on the drive, straining after the intense silence of the hills, the damp pine-scented air. She thought, “I am alive again.”

Janet has such a complicated relationship with her home of Auchnasaugh that she couldn’t even wait to depart from it for her first trip to boarding school, but once she had left home, she longed only to return.

It was clear that there was as little point in trying to help people as there was in telling them the truth. You would be misunderstood or disbelieved and it would all be worse than ever.

We see as Janet grows older she begins to accept the lack of acceptance she receives from others, and begins to give up trying to make them understand her.

Life here is about give and take, caring and contributing. That’s why games are so important; you learn the rules, you obey them, and you move in harmony with your team. If you make your own rules you let the whole side down. Contrary to what you clearly believe, you are not superior to the rest of us. In fact you are a rather silly, very conceited little girl and if you don’t make a huge effort now you will never fit in, here or anywhere else.

This is Janet’s inner turmoil. Having never made a lasting human connection, she has developed a sincere distaste for most all people and thus a superiority complex that only enhances this divide. She wants to be admired but is unwilling to cut herself down into palatable pieces.

Janet began to hate the sea. There was so much of it, flowing, counter-flowing, entering other seas, slyly furthering its interests beyond the mind’s reckoning; no wonder it could pass itself off as sky; it was infinite, a voracious marine confederacy. She saw how it diminished people as they walked along the shore; they lost their identity, were no more than pebbles, part of the sea’s scheme.

This was just another part of the prose that was so rich it read more like poetry, and I had to read it 3 or 4 times to really understand its meaning.

She would persist in wearing them and eventually, with any luck, Vera would ask in exasperation why she always had to wear black and she would reply like Nina in The Seagull, “I am in mourning for my life.”

Part of Janet’s lifelong romanticization of her entire existence was the use of literary quotes which she stored in the hopes that something cinematic would happen to her that provided an opportunity to use it, and how fitting that this was the last quote that crossed her mind before her death.

She felt strong and bright and beautiful. Perhaps it was worth being female after all.

How beautiful that she fiinally sees and appreciates the power of womanhood, having spent her life being shown that if she were only born male, she would have been found worthy of the attention she craved.