Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (7 page)

Elsie got very cross. She was an absolutist, and had no time for people who thought cows didn’t exist unless you
looked at them. Once a thing was created, it was valid for all time. Its value went not up nor down.

Perception, she said was a fraud; had not St Paul said we see in a glass darkly, had not Wordsworth said we see by glimpses? ‘This piece of fruit cake’ – she waved it between bites – ‘this cake doesn’t need me to eat it to make it edible. It exists without me.’

That was a bad example, but I knew what she meant. It meant that to create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.

‘Have some cake,’ she said cheerfully, but I didn’t because even if Elsie was philosophically amiss, her contention that the cake existed without either of us was certainly true. There was probably a whole township in there, with values of its own, and a style of gossip.

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. It runs right the way through life, though it starts with hyacinth growing, passes through milk monitor, and finishes somewhere at half-blue.

My hyacinths were pink. Two of them. I called the ensemble ‘The Annunciation’ (you have to have a theme). This was because the blooms were huddled up close, and reminded me of Mary and Elizabeth soon after the visit by the angel. I thought it was a very clever marriage of horticulture and theology. I put a little explanation at the bottom, and the appropriate verse so that people could look it up if they wanted to, but it didn’t win. What did win was a straggly white pair called ‘Snow Sisters’. So I took ‘The Annunciation’ home and fed it to our rabbit. I was a bit uneasy afterwards in case it was heresy, and the rabbit fell sick. Later, I tried to win the Easter egg painting competition. I had had so little success with my biblical themes that it seemed an idea to try something new. It couldn’t be anything pre-Raphaelite,
because Janey Morris was thin, and not suited to being played by an egg.

Coleridge and the Man from Porlock?

Coleridge was fat, but I felt the tableau would lack dramatic interest.

‘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.’

I didn’t despair; I did
Streetcar 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. She quite liked
Now Voyager
, because she had done her courting during that film, but she thought I should have made the Tower of Babel out of oregami, even though I told her it would be too difficult.

‘The Lord walked on the water,’ was all she said when I tried to explain. But she had her own problems. A lot of the missionaries had been eaten, which meant she had to explain to their families.

‘It’s not easy,’ she said, ‘even though it’s for the Lord.’

When the children of Israel left Egypt, they were guided by the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night. For them, this did not seem to be a problem. For me, it was an enormous problem. The pillar of cloud was a fog, perplexing and impossible. I didn’t understand the ground rules. The daily world was a world of Strange Notions, without form, and therefore void. I comforted myself as best I could by always rearranging their version of the facts.

One day, I learned that Tetrahedron is a mathematical shape that can be formed by stretching an elastic band over a series of nails.

But Tetrahedron is an emperor. . . .

The emperor Tetrahedron lived in a palace made absolutely from elastic bands. To the right, cunning fountains shot elastic jets, subtle as silk; to the left, ten minstrels played day and night on elastic lutes.

The emperor was beloved by all.

At night, when the thin dogs slept, and the music lulled all but the most watchful to sleep, the mighty palace lay closed and barred against the foul Isosceles, sworn enemy to the graceful Tetrahedron.

But in the day, the guards pulled back the great doors, flooding the plain with light, so that gifts could be brought to the emperor.

Many brought gifts; stretches of material so fine that a
change of the temperature would dissolve it; stretches of material so strong that whole cities could be built from it.

And stories of love and folly.

One day, a lovely woman brought the emperor a revolving circus operated by midgets.

The midgets acted all of the tragedies and many of the comedies. They acted them all at once, and it was fortunate that Tetrahedron had so many faces, otherwise he might have died of fatigue.

They acted them all at once, and the emperor, walking round his theatre, could see them all at once, if he wished.

Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing:

that no emotion is the final one.

L
EVITICUS

T
HE
H
EATHEN WERE
a daily household preoccupation. My mother found them everywhere, particularly Next Door. They tormented her as only the godless can, but she had her methods.

They hated hymns, and she liked to play the piano, an old upright with pitted candelabra and yellow keys. We each had a copy of the
Redemption Hymnal
(boards and cloth 3 shillings). My mother sang the tune, and I put in the harmonies. The first hymn I ever learned was a magnificent Victorian composition called
Ask the Saviour to Help You
.

One Sunday morning, just as we got in from Communion, we heard strange noises, like cries for help, coming from Next Door. I took no notice, but my mother froze behind the radiogram, and started to change colour. Mrs White, who had come home with us to listen to the World Service, immediately crushed her ear against the wall.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said in loud whisper, ‘but whatever it is, it’s not holy.’

Still my mother didn’t move.

‘Have you got a wine glass?’ urged Mrs White.

My mother looked horrified.

‘For medicinal purposes, I mean,’ added Mrs White hurriedly.

My mother went into a high cupboard, and reached down a box from the top shelf. This was her War Cupboard, and every week she bought a new tin to put in it, in case of the
Holocaust. Mostly it was full of black cherries in syrup and special offer sardines.

‘I never use these,’ she said meaningfully.

‘Neither do I,’ said Mrs White defensively, clamping herself back against the wall. While my mother was covering up the television, Mrs White slithered up and down the skirting board.

‘We’ve just had that wall decorated,’ my mother pointed out.

‘It’s stopped anyway,’ panted Mrs White.

At that moment another burst of wailing began from Next Door.

Very clear this time.

‘They’re fornicating,’ cried my mother, rushing to put her hands over my ears.

‘Get off,’ I yelled.

The dog started barking, and my dad, who had been on nights the Saturday just gone, came down in his pyjama bottoms.

‘Put some clothes on,’ shrieked my mother, ‘Next Door’s at it again.’

I bit my mother’s hand. ‘Let go of my ears, I can hear it too.’

‘On a Sunday,’ exclaimed Mrs White.

Outside, suddenly, the ice-cream van.

‘Go and get two cornets, and a wafer for Mrs White,’ ordered my mother, stuffing 10 shillings into my hand.

I ran off. I didn’t know quite what fornicating was, but I had read about it in Deuteronomy, and I knew it was a sin. But why was it so noisy? Most sins you did quietly so as not to get caught. I bought the ice-creams and decided to take my time. When I got back my mother had opened the piano, and she and Mrs White were looking through the
Redemption Hymnal
.

I passed round the ice-creams.

It’s stopped,’ I said brightly.

‘For the moment,’ said my mother grimly.

As soon as we had finished, my mother wiped her hands on her apron.

‘Ask the Saviour to Help You
, we’ll sing that. Mrs White, you be the baritone.’

The first verse was very fine I thought:

‘
Yield not to Temptation, for yielding is sin,
Each Victory will help you some other to win.
Fight manfully onwards, Dark Passions subdue,
Look ever to Jesus, He will carry you through
.’

The hymn had a rousing chorus that moved my mother to such an extent that she departed entirely from the notation of the
Redemption Hymnal
, and instead wrought her own huge chords that sounded the length of the piano. No note was exempt. By the time we got to verse 3, Next Door had started to bang on the wall.

‘Listen to the Heathen,’ my mother shouted jubilantly, her foot furious on the hard pedal.

‘Sing it again.’

And we did, while the Heathen, driven mad by the Word, rushed away to find what blunt instruments they could to pound the wall from the other side.

Some of them ran into the back yard and yelled over the wall, ‘Stop that bloody racket.’

‘On a Sunday too,’ tutted Mrs White, aghast.

My mother leapt from the keys and rushed into our back yard to quote the scripture. She found herself staring at the eldest son who had a lot of spots.

‘The Lord help me,’ she prayed, and a piece of Deuteronomy flashed into her mind:

‘
The Lord will smite you with the boils of Egypt, and with the ulcers and the scurvey and the itch of which you cannot be cured
.’ (Revised Standard Version.)

Then she ran back inside and slammed the back door.

‘Now then,’ she smiled, ‘who’s for a bit of dinner?’

My mother called herself a missionary on the home front. She said that the Lord hadn’t called her to the hot places,
like Pastor Spratt and his Glory Crusade, but to the streets and by-ways of Lancashire.

‘I have always been guided by the Lord,’ she told me. ‘Look at my Wigan Work.’

A long time ago, very soon after her conversion, my mother had received a strange envelope, post marked Wigan. She had been suspicious, knowing how the Devil tempts the newly saved. The only person she knew in Wigan was an old flame, who had threatened to kill himself when she married another.

‘That’s up to you,’ she had said, refusing to correspond.

Eventually curiosity got the upper hand, and she tore open the envelope. It wasn’t from Pierre at all, but from one Eli Bone (Rev.) of the Society for the Lost.

The crest on the paper was a number of souls gathered round a mountain, with a little arch of a text underneath. ‘
Fastened to the Rock
’, it said.

My mother read on . . .

Pastor Spratt, leaving Wigan on his way to Africa, had recommended my mother to the Society. They were looking for a new treasurer. The last, Mrs Maude Butler (nee Richards), had just got married, and was moving to Morecambe. She would be opening a guest house for the bereaved, with special rates for all those who worked for the Society.

‘A very attractive offer in itself,’ reminded the Rev.

My mother was very flattered, and decided to accept the Rev.’s invitation to go and stay in Wigan for a few days, to find out more about the Society. My father was at work at the time, so she left him the address and a note which said: ‘I am busy with the Lord in Wigan.’

She didn’t come back for three weeks, and after that went regularly to the Rev. Bone’s to audit the accounts and campaign for new members. She was a good business woman, and under her direction the Society for the Lost almost doubled in membership.

Every subscription form carried with it a number of tempting offers: discount on hymnbooks, and other religious accoutrements; a newsletter with a free gift every time, and
a free record at Christmas; and, of course, the discounts available at the Morecambe guest house.

My mother regularly designed a gift of interest, available only to members of the Society. One year it was a fold-away, wipe-clean copy of Revelations, so that the blessed could be sure of the signs and portents surrounding the Second Coming. Another year, a Tribesman money box for missionary contributions. And my favourite of all, the sliding scale outdoor thermometer. On the one side of this sturdy Bakelite device was a simple temperature gauge, on the other, a sliding scale showing the number of possible conversions that could be made in a year, if every person, starting with you, brought two souls to the Lord. According to the sliding scale, the whole world could be godly within a mere ten years. This was a great encouragement to the timid and my mother received many letters of thanks.