Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (6 page)

‘You’ll soon fit in,’ she soothed.

I wanted to please her, and trembling with anticipation I started my essay. . . . ‘ “This holiday I went to Colwyn Bay with our church camp.” ’

The teacher nodded and smiled.

‘ “It was very hot, and Auntie Betty, whose leg was loose anyway, got sunstroke and we thought she might die.” ’

The teacher began to look a bit worried, but the class perked up.

‘ “But she got better, thanks to my mother who stayed up all night struggling mightily.” ’

‘Is your mother a nurse?’ asked the teacher, with quiet sympathy.

‘No, she just heals the sick.’

Teacher frowned. ‘Well, carry on then.’

‘ “When Auntie Betty got better we all went in the bus to Llandudno to testify on the beach. I played the tambourine, and Elsie Norris brought her accordian, but a boy threw some sand, and since then she’s had no F sharp. We’re going to have a jumble sale in the autumn to try and pay for it.

‘ “When we came back from Colwyn Bay, Next Door had had another baby but there are so many of them Next Door we don’t know whose it is. My mother gave them some potatoes from the yard, but they said they weren’t a charity and threw them back over the wall.” ’

The class had gone very quiet. Teacher looked at me.

‘Is there any more?’

‘Yes, two more sides.’

‘What about?’

‘Not much, just how we hired the baths for our baptism service after the Healing of the Sick crusade.’

‘Very good, but I don’t think we’ll have time today. Put your work back in your tidy box, and do some colouring till playtime.’

The class giggled.

Slowly I sat down, not sure what was going on, but sure that something was. When I got home I told my mother I didn’t want to go again.

‘You’ve got to,’ she said. ‘Here, have an orange.’

Some weeks passed, in which I tried to make myself as ordinary as possible. It seemed like it was working, and then we started sewing class; on Wednesdays, after toad-in-the-hole and Manchester tart. We did our cross stitch and chain stitch and then we had to think of a project. I decided to make a sampler for Elsie Norris. The girl next to me wanted to do one for her mother, TO MOTHER WITH LOVE; the girl opposite a birthday motif. When it came to me I said I wanted a text.

‘What about SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN?’ suggested Mrs Virtue.

I knew that wouldn’t do for Elsie. She liked the prophets.

‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘it’s for my friend, and she reads Jeremiah mostly. I was thinking of THE SUMMER IS ENDED AND WE ARE NOT YET SAVED.’

Mrs Virtue was a diplomatic woman, but she had her blind spots. When it came to listing all the samplers, she wrote the others out in full, and next to mine put ‘Text’.

‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

‘You might upset the others,’ she said. ‘Now what colour do you want, yellow, green, or red?’

We looked at each other.

‘Black,’ I said.

I did upset the children. Not intentionally, but effectively. Mrs Sparrow and Mrs Spencer came to school one day all fluffed up with rage; they came at playtime, I saw them with their handbags and hats, revolving up the concrete, lips pursed. Mrs Spencer had her gloves on.

Some of the others knew what was happening. There was a little group of them by the fence, whispering. One of them pointed at me. I tried not to notice and carried on with my whip and top. The group got bigger, a girl with sherbet on her mouth yelled across at me, I didn’t catch what she said, but the others all screamed with laughter. Then a boy came and hit me on the neck, then another and another, all hitting and running off.

‘Tag, tag,’ they cried as the teacher came past.

I was bewildered, then angry, in-the-stomach angry. I caught one with my little whip. He yelped.

‘Miss, Miss, she hit me.’

‘Miss, Miss, she hit him,’ chorused the rest.

Miss took me by the back of my hair and hauled me off inside.

Outside, the bell rang, there was noise and doors and scuffling, then quiet. That particular corridor quiet.

I was in the staff room.

Miss turned to me, she looked tired.

‘Hold out your hand.’

I held out my hand.

She reached for the ruler. I thought of the Lord. The staff room door opened, and in walked Mrs Vole, the head.

‘Ah, I see Jeanette is here already. Wait outside a moment, will you?’

I withdrew my sacrificial palm, shoved it into my pocket and slid out between them.

I was just in time to see the retreating shapes of Mrs Spencer and Mrs Sparrow, ripe plums of indignation falling from them.

It was cold in the corridor; I could hear low voices behind the door, but nothing happened. I started to pick at the radiator with my compass, trying to make a bit of warped plastic look like Paris from the air.

Last night at church had been the prayer meeting, and Mrs White had had a vision.

‘What was it like?’ we asked eagerly.

‘Oh, it was very holy,’ said Mrs White.

The plans for the Christmas campaign were well under way. We had got permission from the Salvation Army to share their crib space outside the town hall, and rumour had it that Pastor Spratt might be back with some of the converted Heathen. ‘We can only hope and pray, said my mother, writing to him at once.

I had won yet another Bible quiz competition, and to my great relief had been picked as narrator for the Sunday School Pageant. I had been Mary for the last three years, and there was nothing else I could bring to the part. Besides, it meant playing opposite Stanley Farmer.

It was clear and warm and made me happy.

At school there was only confusion.

By this time I had squatted on the floor, so when the door finally opened all I could see were wool stockings and Hush Puppies.

‘We’d like to talk to you,’ said Mrs Vole.

I scrambled up and went inside, feeling like Daniel.

Mrs Vole picked up an ink well, and looked at me carefully.

‘Jeanette, we think you may be having problems at school. Do you want to tell us about them?’

‘I’m all right.’ I shuffled defensively.

‘You do seem rather pre-occupied, shall we say, with God.’

I continued to stare at the floor.

‘Your sampler, for instance, had a very disturbing motif.’

‘It was for my friend, she liked it,’ I burst out, thinking how Elsie’s face had lit up when I had given it to her.

‘And who is your friend?’

‘She’s called Elsie Norris and she gave me three mice in the fiery furnace.’

Mrs Vole and Miss looked at one another.

‘And why did you choose to write about hoopoos and rock badgers in your animal book, and in one case, I believe, shrimps?’

‘My mother taught me to read,’ I told them rather desperately.

‘Yes, your reading skills are quite unusual, but you haven’t answered my question.’

How could I?

My mother had taught me to read from the Book of Deuteronomy because it is full of animals (mostly unclean). Whenever we read ‘Thou shall not eat any beast that does not chew the cud or part the hoof she drew all the creature mentioned. Horsies, bunnies and little ducks were vague fabulous things, but I knew all about pelicans, rock badgers, sloths and bats. This tendency towards the exotic has brought me many problems, just as it did for William Blake. My mother drew winged insects, and the birds of the air, but my favourite ones were the seabed ones, the molluscs. I had a fine collection from the beach at Blackpool. She had a blue pen for the waves, and brown ink for the scaly-backed crab. Lobsters were red biro, she never drew shrimps, though, because she liked to eat them in a muffin. I think it had troubled her for a long time. Finally, after much prayer, and some consultation with a great man of the Lord in Shrewsbury, she agreed with St Paul that what God has cleansed we must not call common. After that we went to Molly’s seafoods every Saturday. Deuteronomy had its drawbacks; it’s full of Abominations and Unmentionables. Whenever we read about a bastard, or someone with crushed testicles, my mother turned over the page and said, ‘Leave that to the Lord,’ but when she’d gone, I’d sneak a look. I was glad I didn’t have testicles. They sounded like intestines only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.

‘Well,’ pressed Mrs Vole, ‘I’m waiting.’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

‘And why, and this is perhaps more serious, do you terrorize, yes, terrorize, the other children?’

‘I don’t,’ I protested.

‘Then can you tell me why I had Mrs Spencer and Mrs Sparrow here this morning telling me how their children have nightmares?’

‘I have nightmares too.’

‘That’s not the point. You have been talking about Hell to young minds.’

It was true. I couldn’t deny it. I had told all the others about the horrors of the demon and the fate of the damned. I had illustrated it by almost strangling Susan Hunt, but that was an accident, and I gave her all my cough sweets afterwards.

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘I thought it was interesting.’

Mrs Vole and Miss shook their heads.

‘You’d better go,’ said Mrs Vole. ‘I shall be writing to your mother.’

I was very depressed. What was all the fuss about? Better to hear about Hell now than burn in it later. I walked past Class 3’s collage of an Easter bunny, and I thought of Elsie’s collage of Noah’s Ark, with the removable chimp.

It was obvious where I belonged. Ten more years and I could go to missionary school.

Mrs Vole kept her promise. She wrote to my mother, explaining my religious leanings, and asking my mother if she would moderate me. My mother hooted and took me to the cinema as a treat. They were showing
The Ten Commandments
. I asked if Elsie could come, but my mother said no.

After that day, everyone at school avoided me. If it had not been for the conviction that I was right, I might have been very sad. As it was I just forgot about it, did my lessons as best I could, which wasn’t that well, and thought about our church. I told my mother how things were once.

‘We are called to be apart,’ she said.

My mother didn’t have many friends either. People didn’t understand the way she thought; neither did I, but I loved her because she always knew exactly why things happened.

When it came round to Prizegiving, I took my sampler back from Elsie Norris and entered it for the needlework class. I
still think it was a masterpiece of its kind; it had the lettering all in black, and the border all in white, and in the bottom corner a sort of artist’s impression of the terrified damned. Elsie had framed it, so it looked quite professional.

Mrs Virtue stood at the top of the class, collecting. . . .

‘Irene, yes.’

‘Vera, yes.’

‘Shelley, yes.’ (Shelley was a Brownie.)

‘Here’s mine Mrs Virtue,’ I said, placing it on the desk.

‘Yes,’ she said, meaning No.

‘I will enter it, if that’s what you want, but to be frank I don’t think it’s the sort of thing the judges will be hoping for.’

‘What do you mean,’ I demanded, ‘it’s got everything, adventure, pathos, mystery. . . .’

She interrupted.

‘I mean, your use of colour is limited, you don’t exploit the potential of the thread; take Shelley’s Village Scene, for instance, notice the variety, the colours.’

‘She’s used four colours, I’ve used three.’

Mrs Virtue frowned.

‘And besides, no one else has used black.’

Mrs Virtue sat down.

‘And I’ve used mythical counter-relief,’ I insisted, pointing at the terrified damned.

Mrs Virtue laid her head on her hands.

‘What are you talking about? If you mean that messy blotch in the corner. . . .’

I was furious; luckily I had been reading about how Sir Joshua Reynolds insulted Turner.

‘Just because you can’t tell what it is, doesn’t mean it’s not what it is.’

I picked up Shelley’s Village Scene.

‘That doesn’t look like a sheep, it’s all white and fluffy.’

‘Go back to your desk, Jeanette.’

‘But. . . .’

‘GO BACK TO YOUR DESK!’

What could I do? My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognized things according to
expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, sea and fish; if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she’d either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes. But most likely, she’d do what most people do when confronted with something they don’t understand:

Panic.

What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in an usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt). I knew that my sampler was absolutely right in Elsie Norris’s front room, but absolutely wrong in Mrs Virtue’s sewing class. Mrs Virtue should either have had the imagination to commend me for my effort in context, or the farsightedness to realize that there is a debate going on as to whether something has an absolute as well as a relative value; given that, she should have given me the benefit of the doubt.

As it was she got upset and blamed me for her headache. This was very like Sir Joshua Reynolds, who complained that Turner always gave him a headache.

I didn’t win anything with my sampler though, and I was very disappointed. I took it back to Elsie on the last day of school and asked her if she still wanted it.

She snatched it from me, and put it firmly on the wall.

‘It’s upside down, Elsie,’ I pointed out.

She fumbled for her glasses, and stared at it.

‘So it is, but it’s all the same to the Lord. Still, I’ll put it right for them that doesn’t know.’

And she carefully adjusted the picture.

‘I thought you might not like it any more.’

‘Heathen child, the Lord himself was scorned, don’t expect the unwashed to appreciate.’

(Elsie always called the unconverted the unwashed.)

‘Well it would be nice sometimes,’ I ventured, displaying a tendency towards relativism.