Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Read Online Free PDF Page A

came off too.
    ‘I’ve had enough,’ she said. ‘Go away.’
    And she closed the kitchen door again and switched off the radio. I could hear her humming
Glorious Things of Thee are spoken
.
    ‘Well, that’s that then,’ I thought.
    And it was.
    The next morning was a hive of activity. My mother dragged me out of bed, shouting that it was half-past seven, that she had had no sleep at all, that my dad had gone to work without his dinner. She poured a scalding kettle of water into the sink.
    ‘Why didn’t you go to bed?’ I asked her.
    ‘No point if I had to get up with you three hours later.’
    She shot a jet of cold water into the hot.
    ‘Well you could have had an early night,’ I suggested, struggling with my pyjama top. An old woman had made it for me, and made the neck hole the same size as the arm holes, so I always had sore ears. Once I went deaf for three months with my adenoids: no one noticed that either.
    I was lying in bed one night, thinking about the glory of the Lord, when it struck me that life had gone very quiet. I had been to church as usual, sung as loudly as ever, but ithad seemed for some time that I was the only one making a noise.
    I had assumed myself to be in a state of rapture, not uncommon in our church, and later I discovered my mother had assumed the same. When May had asked why I wasn’t answering anybody, my mother had said, ‘It’s the Lord.’
    ‘What’s the Lord?’ May was confused.
    ‘Working in mysterious ways,’ declared my mother, and walked ahead.
    So, unknown to me, word spread about our church that I was in a state of rapture, and no one should speak to me.
    ‘Why do you think it’s happened?’ Mrs White wanted to know.
    ‘Oh, it’s not surprising, she’s seven you know,’ May paused for effect, ‘It’s a holy number, strange things happen in sevens, look at Elsie Norris.’
    Elsie Norris, ‘Testifying Elsie’ as she was called, was a great encouragement to our church. Whenever the pastor asked for a testimony on God’s goodness, Elsie leapt to her feet and cried, ‘Listen to what the Lord has done for me this week.’
    She needed eggs, the Lord had sent them.
    She had a bout of colic, the Lord took it away.
    She always prayed for two hours a day;
    once in the morning at seven a.m.
    and once in the evening at seven p.m.
    Her hobby was numerology, and she never read the Word without first casting the dice to guide her.
    ‘One dice for the chapter, and one dice for the verse’ was her motto.
    Someone once asked her what she did for books of the Bible that had more than six chapters.
    ‘I have my ways,’ she said stiffly, ‘and the Lord has his.’
    I liked her a lot because she had interesting things in her house. She had an organ that you had to pedal if you wanted it to make a noise. Whenever I went there she played
Lead Kindly Light
. Her doing the keys, and me doing the pedalsbecause she had asthma. She collected foreign coins and kept them in a glass case that smelled of linseed oil. She said it reminded her of her late husband who had used to play cricket for Lancashire.
    ‘Hard Hand Stan they called him,’ she said every time I went to see her. She could never remember what she told people. She could never remember how long she kept her fruit cake. There was a time when I got offered the same piece of cake for five weeks. I was lucky, she never remembered what you said to her either, so every week I made the same excuse.
    ‘Colic,’ I said.
    ‘I’ll pray for you,’ she said.
    Best of all, she had a collage of Noah’s Ark. It showed the two parent Noah’s leaning out looking at the flood, while the other Noah’s tried to catch one of the rabbits. But for me, the delight was a detachable chimpanzee, made out of a Brillo pad; at the end of my visit she let me play with it for five minutes. I had all kinds of variations, but usually I drowned it.
    One Sunday the pastor told everyone how full of the spirit I was. He talked about me for