Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

IN 1658 THE English clergyman Edward Topsell published a handsome volume of woodcuts called A History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents.

Some of the creatures were familiar to townspeople and countryfolk alike – the dormouse, the cat, the beaver. Some were fantastical: the sphinx, the lamia, the winged dragon, the mantichora – a lion with a human face. And the unicorn, of course.

Other beasts illustrated by woodcut were ones that are familiar to us now – hippos, rhinos, the Egyptian crocodile, the giraffe – but in the 17^th century, these creatures had been seen by few – sailors, explorers, convicts, con-men, who described them for gain and pleasure, talked them up in taverns and at fairs, whispered about them in bed late at night, by candlelight, boasted about them for wagers of money and proof of daring. And we all wanted to believe it, because the world was still new, and life was short, and a pair of dragon’s wings might come in useful.

So, out of nature and imagination combined, beasts appeared not seen before or since. But they were pictured in a book – and so they came to exist.

That’s a line from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, my first novel, published in 1985 when I was twenty-five.

Oranges is many things: a coming-of-age story, a coming-out story, a little book of fairy tales, a character called Jeanette who is not me and who is me. A story of religious excess, of working-class life in the north of England, of books and of reading.

And love.

Oranges is a quest story. It’s the start of a long search for a mythical creature called Love.

I am adopted and that fact has shaped my whole life. At six weeks old I lost the other half of my first love affair – my mother.

So life began with the disappearance of the love object.

My new parents – the Wintersons – found love difficult. They didn’t do hugs. My mother was an Old Testament type who believed in fire and brimstone. At the same time the motto of our faith and church was God is Love.

This worked for me because I already had experience of my primary love object being invisible and unreachable.

Solitary by nature and nurture – an only child – I was intense and romantic. School was useless to me, but the library contained all the classics of English literature, and I read them. My roving reading was anchored by Shakespeare at one end and stretched as far as EM Forster at the other end. A few Americans were in there – Henry James, Edith Wharton, Poe, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein. I don’t think I read any Europeans back then, other than Gide and Hesse.

Essentially it was 350 years or so of the English imagination, its poetry and prose, that was crucial and formative for me.

And that includes – overshadowing it all, I guess – the King James Bible of 1611, read to me or read by me every single day of my life from babyhood to leaving home at sixteen. That’s a lot of Bible.

Literature has only lately been a secular enterprise. Most writers until the 20^th century were believers of some kind, or brought up in religious households – the Brontës in their blowy parsonage, John Donne, who gave up sex and writing about it, and became Dean of St Paul’s; Laurence Sterne – the amiable author of Tristram Shandy – was a vicar. The Romantic poets returned God to Nature. William Blake, like Walt Whitman, saw God in everything.

In the 19^th century in England and America, doubt was as potent a force as faith. Not to believe was defiant, and like all defiance contained explosive useful creative energy.

So I felt kinship with the underlying beliefs – or struggles with unbelief, tacit or explicit – of the writers I was reading. Growing up today would be a very different experience. Unbelief is the new normal – there’s no energy there. And, outside of secularism, the energy of belief we’re used to now manifests as fundamentalism, carrying all the hatred and violence of its competing dogmas, but none of the creative release.

The Bible begins with a grand abandonment. Exit from the Garden of Eden. Paradise lost.

Yahweh is an unstable, angry, rejecting parent with a strange idea of love. Later, in the Christian part of the Jewish story, God will allow his son Jesus to be murdered as a human sacrifice to save mankind, doomed by Yahweh in the first place. God is love? Oy veh.

Or is God so in love with his own story that he can’t rewrite it?

To me that felt like a failure of imagination. And the failure of love.

I wanted to do better.

You could call it arrogance or you could call it optimism.

So when I wrote Oranges I chaptered the sections according to the first eight books of the Bible. Not because I thought I was God, or any kind of authority – in fact, the opposite; the thing didn’t have to be written on tablets of stone. There was no rigid rulebook. No last word.

I had understood something – I could change the story.

Could I?

Writing is an attempt to make a world. I was telling myself the story of myself. In Oranges I became a fictional character trying to understand love – and coming to understand that, without love, nothing can be understood.

It was first love, awakening love, love as separation, love as sleepless nights and broken hearts. Love as trial by fire. The fearfulness of love. And it was love between women. There wasn’t much written about that back then.

Love between women became, for some readers, a way of trying to categorise the book – to lock it into a smaller space than it occupied. I have always been clear – I am a writer whose emotional interest is forwarded towards women, and whose sexual interest usually is. That is important, but it isn’t the reason I write, nor does it preoccupy me.

Heterosexual choice is allowed to be the background of a writer’s life; its wallpaper. So is maleness. And whiteness. Step out of that and you will be called a feminist writer, a lesbian writer, a gay writer, a woman writer. A black writer. You will never be called a heterosexual writer or a male writer or a white writer. Those signifiers are absorbed into the single word ‘writer’.

It is changing. I have been part of the change. And glad to be. It matters to stand up politically for what you believe in. It matters to carry into the mainstream what the mainstream has tried to marginalise.

But writing is more than content. More than the stories we tell. Literature is an engagement with our deepest selves, a shaping of a language to talk about who we are – away from clichés and approximations, away from generalisations and half-truths. And oddly, literature is a way, at last, of not having to talk about anything. The moment that you put the book down. The moment you stare into space. A knowing that is beyond ordinary knowing. Resolution? Or peace? Or illumination? To pass through language back into silence. We start with silence, and we return to silence, but without language to guide us we cannot return there because

Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

Oranges is about transgressive love – love between young women – and young women who wanted their love to include sex. Why would you not want love to include sex?

Oranges is about absences as well as inclusions; the absence of family love. What do you do if your parents don’t know how to love you, and if you don’t know how to love your parents?

And overarching the story is God’s love – whatever that is. Invisible love – problematic and potent.

And I suppose those demonstrations of love were what I was trying to follow.

Love. Loss. Struggle. Loneliness. Abandonment. Separation. Faithfulness. Rejection. The natural world as an ally. Home as a place to leave behind. The search for meaning.

And could meaning be found through love?

Meaning.

Love.

What do those words mean, comets that they are, their tails stretched with stars? Their tales stretched with stars?

I was trying to trace light that had long left its source.

The story of my life starts there. Or is it here?

LIKE MOST PEOPLE I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling. My mother liked to wrestle; it didn’t matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.

She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town, my mother put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window.

My mother had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies.

And me, at first. I had been brought in to join her in a tag match against the Rest of the World. She had a mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children; it wasn’t that she couldn’t do it, more that she didn’t want to do it. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first. So she did the next best thing and arranged for a foundling. That was me.

This is both me and not me. Oranges isn’t autobiography or confessional. Part fiction, part fact is what life is. The stories we tell are all cover versions.

MY MOTHER AND I walked on towards the hill that stood at the top of our street. We lived in a town stolen from the valleys, a huddled place full of chimneys and little shops and back-to-back houses with no gardens. The hills surrounded us, and our own pushed out into the Pennines, broken here and there with a farm or a relic from the war. There used to be a lot of old tanks but the council took them away. The town was a fat blot, and the streets spread back from it into the green, steadily upwards. Our house was almost at the top of a long stretchy street. A flag-stone street with a cobbled road. Climb to the top of the hill and look down and you can see everything, just like Jesus on the pinnacle, except it’s not very tempting. Over to the right, there’s the viaduct, and behind the viaduct, Ellison’s Tenement, where we have the fair once a year. I was allowed to go there on condition that I brought back a tub of black peas for my mother. Black peas look like rabbit droppings and they come in a thin gravy made of stock and gypsy mush … Once when I was collecting the black peas, about to go home, the old woman took hold of my hand. I thought she was going to bite me. She looked at my palm and laughed a bit. ‘You’ll never marry,’ she said, ‘not you, and you’ll never be still.’

She didn’t take any money for the peas, and she told me to run home fast. I ran and ran, trying to understand what she meant. I hadn’t thought about getting married anyway. There were two women I knew who didn’t have husbands at all; they were old though, as old as my mother. They ran a newspaper shop, and sometimes, on a Wednesday, they gave me a banana bar with my comic. I liked them a lot and I talked about them a lot to my mother. One day, they asked me if I’d like to go to the seaside with them. I ran home, gabbled it out, and was busy emptying my money box to buy a new bucket and spade, when my mother said firmly, and forever, no. I couldn’t understand why not, and she wouldn’t explain. She didn’t even let me go back to say I couldn’t go. Then she cancelled my comic and told me to collect it from another shop, further away. I was sorry about that. I never got a banana bar from Grimsby’s.

A couple of weeks later I heard her telling Mrs White about it. She said they dealt in unnatural passions. I thought she meant they put chemicals in their sweets.

Does sex begin with a sense of transgression?

Does love survive the loss of physical intimacy?

IT WAS SPRING, the ground still had traces of snow, and I was about to be married. My dress was pure white and I had a golden crown. As I walked up the aisle the crown got heavier and heavier and the dress more and more difficult to walk in. I thought everyone would point at me, but no one noticed.

Somehow I made it to the altar. The priest was very fat and kept getting fatter, like bubblegum you blow. Finally we came to the moment, ‘You may kiss the bride.’ My new husband turned to me, and here were a number of possibilities. Sometimes he was blind, sometimes a pig, sometimes my mother, sometimes the man from the post office, and once, just a suit of clothes with nothing inside. I told my mother about it, and she said it was because I ate sardines for supper. The next night I ate sausages, but I still had the dream.

There was a woman in our street who told us all she had married a pig. I asked her why she did it, and she said, ‘You never know until it’s too late.’

Exactly.

No doubt that woman had discovered in life what I had discovered in my dreams. She had unwittingly married a pig.

I kept watch on him after that. It was hard to tell he was a pig. He was clever, but his eyes were close together, and his skin bright pink. I tried to imagine him without his clothes on. Horrid.

Other men I knew weren’t much better.

The man who ran the post office was bald and shiny with hands too fat for the sweet jars. He called me poppet, which my mother said was nice. He gave me sweets too, which was an improvement.

One day he had a new sort.

‘Sweet hearts for a sweet heart,’ he said and laughed. That day I had almost strangled my dog with rage, and been dragged from the house by a desperate mother. Sweet I was not. But I was a little girl, ergo, I was sweet, and here were sweets to prove it. I looked in the bag. Yellow and pink and sky-blue and orange, and all of them heart-shaped and all of them said things like,

Maureen 4 Ken,