Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (5 page)

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.

‘No one listens to eccentrics,’ she said. When I was sad she read me
Goblin Market
by a woman called Christina Rossetti, whose friend once gave her a pickled mouse in a jar, for a present.

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.

‘What looks like one thing,’ she told me, ‘may well be another.’ I was reminded of my orange peel igloo.

‘If you think about something for long enough,’ she explained, ‘more than likely, that thing will happen.’ She tapped her head. ‘It’s all in the mind.’

My mother believed that if you prayed for something long enough it happened. I asked Elsie if that was the same thing.

‘God’s in everything,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘so it’s always the same thing.’

I had a feeling my mother would disagree, but she wasn’t there, so it didn’t matter.

I played Ludo with Elsie, and Hang the Man, and she took to reading me a poem just before she left at the end of visiting time.

One of them had these lines it it:

‘All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.’

I understood this because I had been working on my orange peel igloo for weeks. Some days were a great disappointment, others, a near triumph. It was a feat of balance and vision. Elsie was always encouraging, and told me not to mind the nurses.

‘It would have been easier with plasticine,’ I complained one day.

‘But less interesting,’ she said.

When I finally left the hospital, my hearing had been restored, and my confidence recovered (thanks to her).

I had to go and stay with Elsie for a couple of days, until my mother got home from Wigan, where she was auditing the Society for the Lost.

‘I’ve found a new piece of sheet music,’ she said on the bus, ‘it’s got an interlude for seven elephants in it.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘The Battle of Abysinnia.’

Which is, of course, a very famous bit of Victorian Sentiment, like Prince Albert.

‘Anything else?’

‘Not really, the Lord and I don’t bother with each other just now. It comes and goes, so I’ve been doing a bit of decorating while I can. Nothing fancy, just a dab on the skirting boards, but when I’m with the Lord, I haven’t time for anything!’

When we got home, she came over all mysterious, and told me to wait in the parlour. I could hear her rustling and muttering, then I heard something squeaking. At last she pushed open the door, wheezing loudly.

‘God forgive me,’ she panted, ‘but it’s a bugger.’

And she plonked a large box on the table.

‘Open it then.’

‘What is it?’

‘Never mind that, open it.’

I pulled off the wrapper.

It was a domed wooden box with three white mice inside.

‘Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace.’ She stretched her gums at me into a smile. ‘Look, I painted them flames meself.’

The back of the box was a wash of angry orange paint shaped into tongues of flame.

‘It could even be Pentecost,’ I suggested.

‘Oh yes, it’s very versatile,’ she agreed.

The mice took no notice.

‘And see, I made these too.’ She shuffled in her bag and pulled out two plywood figures. They were both painted very bright, but it was obvious that one was celestial, from the wings. She looked at me, triumphant.

‘Nebuchadnezzar and the angel of the Lord.’

The angel had little slits in his base that helped him to fit on top of the dome without disturbing the mice.

‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she nodded, dropping a bit of cheese past the angel.

That evening we made some scones and sat by the fire. She had an old fireplace with pictures of famous men and
Florence Nightingale printed on to the tiles. Give of India was there, and Palmerston, and Sir Isaac Newton with a singed chin where the fire roared too high. Elsie showed me her holy dice, bought in Mecca forty years ago. She kept them in a box behind the chimney breast, in case of thieves.

‘Some folks say I’m a fool, but there’s more to this world than meets the eye.’ I waited quietly.

‘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.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I sighed, thinking what to ask next, to make it clearer, but she had fallen asleep with her mouth open, and besides, there were the mice to feed.

Perhaps I’ll find out when I get to school was my only consolation as the hours ticked past and Elsie didn’t wake up. Even when she did wake up, she seemed to have forgotten all about her explanation of the universe, and wanted to build a tunnel for the mice. I didn’t find many explanations at school though either; it only got more and more complex. After three terms I was beginning to despair. I’d learnt country dancing and the rudiments of needlework, but not a great deal more. Country dancing was thirty-three rickety kids in black plimsolls and green knickers trying to keep up with Miss who always danced with Sir anyway and never looked at anybody else. They got engaged soon after, but it didn’t do us any good because they started going in for ballroom competitions, which mean they spent all our lessons practising their footwork while we shuffled up and down to the recorded instructions on the gramophone. The threats were the worst; being forced to hold hands with somebody you hated. We flapped along twisting each others’ fingers off and promising untold horrors as soon as the lesson was over. Tired of being bullied, I became adept at inventing the most fundamental tortures under the guise of sweet sainthood. ‘What me Miss? No Miss. Oh
Miss
, I never did.’ But I did, I always did. The most frightening for the girls was the offer of total immersion in the cesspit round the back of Rathbone’s Wrought Iron. For the boys, anything that involved their willies. And so, three terms later, I squatted
down in the shoebags and got depressed. The shoebag room was dark and smelly, it was always smelly, even at the beginning of terms.

‘You can’t get rid of feet,’ I heard the caretaker say sourly.

The cleaning lady shook her head; she’d got rid of more smells than she’s eaten hot dinners. She had even worked in a zoo once, ‘and you know how them animals stink,’ but the feet had beaten her. ‘This stuff takes the seal off floors,’ she said, waving a red tin, ‘but it don’t shift feet.’

We didn’t really notice after a week or so, and besides it was a good place to hide. The teachers didn’t come near it, except to supervise a few yards away from the door. The last day of term . . . we’d been on a school trip to Chester Zoo earlier in the week. That meant everybody in their Sunday best, vying for who had the cleanest socks and the most impressive sandwiches. Canned drinks were our envy, since most of us had orange squash in Tupperware pots. The Tupperware always heated up, and burnt our mouths.

‘You’ve got brown bread’ (scuffling over the seats come three heads). ‘What that for? It’s got bits in it, you vegetarian?’

I try not to take any notice as my sandwiches are prodded. The general sandwich inspection continues from seat to seat, alternating between murmurs of envy and shrieks of laughter. Susan Green had cold fish fingers in hers, because her family were very poor and had to eat leftovers even if they were horrible. Last time she’d only had brown sauce, because there weren’t even any leftovers. The inspectorate decided that Shelley had the best. Bright white rolls stuffed with curried egg and a dash of parsley. And she had a can of lemonade. The zoo itself was not exciting and we had to walk in twos. Our crocodile weaved in and out, ruining new shoes with sand and sawdust, sweating and sticking to each other. Stanley Farmer slipped into the flamingo pond, and nobody had any money to buy model animals. So an hour early, we trooped back on to our coach, and joggled home. Three plastic bags full of sick and hundreds of sweet wrappers were our memento to the driver. It was all we could part with.

‘Never again,’ heaved Mrs Virtue, herding us out on to the street. ‘Never again will I risk disgrace.’

Right now Mrs Virtue was helping Shelley finish her summer party dress. ‘They deserve each other,’ I thought.

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. To celebrate his ten thousandth convert, the pastor had been funded to take a long holiday and tour his collection of weapons, amulets, idols and primitive methods of contraception. The exhibition was called ‘Saved by Grace Alone’. I had only seen the leaflet, but my mother had all the details. Apart from Pastor Spratt, we had planned a careful campaign for the farming folk of Devon. In the past we had always used the same techniques, whether in a tent or in a town hall, and regardless of the location. Then, our campaigns secretary had received an action kit from Headquarters, explaining that the Second Coming might be at any time, and it was up to us to put all our efforts into saving souls. The action kit, which had been specially designed by the Charismatic Movement Marketing Council, explained that people are different and need a different approach. You had to make salvation relevant to them, to their minds. So, if you visited a sea people, you used sea metaphors to pass on the message. And most important, when talking to individuals, you determined as soon as you could what they most wanted in life, and of what they were most afraid. This made the message immediately relevant. The Council set us training weekends for all those engaged in the Good Fight, and gave out graphs so that we could monitor any improvements, and be encouraged. Pastor Spratt had written a personal recommendation on the back
of the kits. There was a photo of him too, much younger, baptising a chief. So, our aim was to prove the Lord relevant to the farming folk of Devon. 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.

‘I remember when we built the gospel hall here,’ said my mother wistfully. ‘All of us pulling together, and we only used born-again workmen.’ It had been a bright, difficult time; saving up for a piano and hymn books; fending off the temptations of the Devil go to on holiday instead.

‘Of course, your father was a card player in those days.’

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. All the churches had flags, made by disabled missionaries. It was a way of helping out their pension and giving them spiritual satisfaction. 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.’ Whatever they were, the church grew, and many a man will stop in the street when my mother goes past and raise his hat to the Jesus Belle.

Sometimes I think she married in haste. After her awful time with Pierre she wanted no more upsets. When I sat by her looking through the photograph album at ancestors with stern faces, she always stopped at the two pages called ‘Old Flames’ in the index. Pierre was there, and others including my father. ‘Why didn’t you marry that one, or that one?’ I asked, curious.

‘They were all wayward men,’ she sighed. ‘I had a bad time enough finding one that was only a gambler.’

‘Why isn’t he a gambler now?’ I wanted to know, trying to imagine my meek father looking like the men I’d seen on films.

‘He married me and he found the Lord.’ Then she sighed and told me the story of each one of the Old Flames; Mad Percy, who drove an open-topped car and asked her to live with him in Brighton; Eddy with the tortoiseshell glasses who kept bees . . . right at the bottom of the page was a yellowy picture of a pretty woman holding a cat.

‘Who’s that?’ I pointed.

‘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.

So she married my father and reformed him and he built the church and never got angry. I thought he was nice, though he didn’t say much. Of course, her own father was furious. He told her she’d married down, that she should have stayed in Paris, and promptly ended all communication. So she never had enough money and after a while she managed to forget that she’d ever had any at all. ‘The church is my family,’ she always said whenever I asked about the people in the photograph album. And the church was my family too.

At school I couldn’t seem to learn anything or win anything, not even the draw to get out of being dinner monitor. Dinner monitor meant that you had to make sure everybody had a plate and that the water jug didn’t have bits in it. Dinner monitors got served last and had the smallest portions. I’d been drawn to do it three times running and I got shouted at in class for always smelling of gravy. My clothes were gravy-spotted and my mother made me wear the same gymslip all week because she said there was no point trying to make me look clean as long as I had that duty. Now I was sitting in the shoebags, with liver and onions all down my front. Sometimes I tried to clean it off, but today I was too unhappy. After six weeks’ holiday with our church, I’d be even less able to cope with any of it. My mother was right. It was a Breeding Ground. And it wasn’t as though I
hadn’t tried. At first I’d done my very best to fit in and be good. We had been set a project just before we started last autumn, we had to write an essay called ‘What I Did in my Summer Holidays’. I was anxious to do it well because I knew they thought I couldn’t read or anything, not having been to school early enough. I did it slowly in my best handwriting, proud that some of the others could only print. We read them out one by one, then gave them to the teacher. It was all the same, fishing, swimming, picnics, Walt Disney. Thirty-two essays about gardens and frog spawn. I was at the end of the alphabet, and I could hardly wait. The teacher was the kind of woman who wanted her class to be happy. She called us lambs, and told me in particular not to worry if I found anything difficult.