Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into
an evangelical household in the dour, industrial North of England
and finds herself embroidering grim religious mottoes and shaking
her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary
comes of age, and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality, the
peculiar balance of her God-fearing household dissolves. Jeanette''s
insistence on listening to the truths of her own heart and mind -
and on reporting them with wit and passion - makes for an
unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving passage into
adulthood
關於作者：
Jeanette Winterson OBE is the author of ten novels, including
Oranges are not the Only Fruit, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry;
a book of short stories, The World and Other Places; a collection
of essays, Art Objects as well as many other works, including
children''s books, screenplays and journalism. Her writing has won
the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys
Memorial Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the Prix d''argent at
Cannes Film Festival. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback
edition.
內容試閱：
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 mater 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 she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in
the window. She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were
friends and there were enemies. Enemies were: The Devil in his
many forms Next Door Sex in its many forms Slugs Friends were:
God Our dog Auntie Madge The Novels of Charlotte Bront? Slug
pellets 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. I cannot
recall a time when I did not know that I was special. We had no
Wise Men because she didn''t believe there were any wise men, but we
had sheep. One of my earliest memories is me sitting on a sheep at
Easter while she told me the story of the Sacrificial Lamb. We had
it on Sundays with potato. Sunday was the Lord''s day, the most
vigorous days of the whole week; we had a radiogram at home with an
imposing mahogany front and a fat Bakelite knob to twiddle for the
stations. Usually we listened to the Light Programme, but on
Sundays always the World Service, so that my mother could record
the progress of our missionaries. Our Missionary map was very fine.
On the front were all the countries and on the back a number chart
that told you about Tribes and their Peculiarities. My favourite
was Number 16, The Buzule of Carpathian. They believed that if a
mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got
a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad. As far as
I knew no missionary had yet visited them. My mother got up early
on Sundays and allowed no one into the parlour until ten o''clock.
It was her place of prayer and meditation. She always prayed
standing up, because of her knees, just as Bonaparte always gave
orders from his horse, because of his size. I do think that the
relationship my mother enjoyed with God had a lot to do with
positioning. She was Old Testament through and through. Not for her
the meek and paschal Lamb, she was out there, up front with the
prophets, and much given to sulking under trees when the
appropriate destruction didn''t materialise. Quite often it did, her
will of the Lord''s I can''t say. She always prayed in exactly the
same way. First of all she thanked God that she had lived to see
another day, and then she thanked God for sparing the world another
day. Then she spoke of her enemies, which was the nearest thing she
had to a catechism. As soon as ''Vengeance is mine saith the Lord''
boomed through the wall into the kitchen, I put the kettle on. The
time it took to boil the water and brew the tea was just about the
length of her final item, the sick list. She was very regular. I
put the milk in, in she came, and taking a great gulp of tea said
one of three things. ''The Lord is good'' steely-eyed into the back
yard. ''What sort of tea is this?'' steely-eyed at me. ''Who was
the oldest man in the Bible?'' No. 3 of course, had a number of
variations, but it was always a Bible quiz question. We had a lot
of Bible quizzes at church and my mother liked me to win. If I knew
the answer she asked me another, if I didn''t she got cross, but
luckily not for long, because we had to listen to the World
Service. It was always the same; we sat down on either side of the
radiogram, she with her tea, me with a pad and pencil; in front of
us, the Missionary Map. The faraway voice in the middle of the set
gave news of activities, converts and problems. At the end there
was an appeal for YOUR PRAYERS. I had to write it all down so that
my mother could deliver her church report that night. She was the
Missionary Secretary. The Missionary Report was a great trial to me
because our mid-day meal depended upon it. If it went well, no
deaths and lots of converts, my mother cooked a joint. If the
Godless had proved not only stubborn, but murderous, my mother
spent the rest of the morning listening to the Jim Reeves
Devotional Selection, and we had to have boiled eggs and toast
soldiers. Her husband was an easy-going man, but I knew it
depressed him. He would have cooked it himself but for my mother''s
complete conviction that she was the only person in our house who
would tell a saucepan from a piano. She was wrong, as far as we
were concerned, but right as far as she was concerned, and really,
that''s what mattered. Somehow we got through those mornings, and in
the afternoon she and I took the dog for a walk, while my father
cleaned all the shoes. ''You can tell someone by their shoes.'' My
mother said. ''Look at Next Door.'' ''Drink,'' said my mother grimly as
we stepped out past the house. ''That''s why they buy everything from
Maxi Ball''s Catalogue Seconds. The Devil himself is a drunk''
sometimes my mother invented theology. Maxi Ball owned a
warehouse, his clothes were cheap but they didn''t last, and they
smelt of industrial glue. The desperate, the careless, the poorest,
vied with one another on a Saturday morning to pick up what they
could, and haggle over the price. My mother would rather not eat
than be seen at Maxi Ball''s. She had filled me with a horror of the
place. Since so many people we knew went there, it was hardly fair
of her but she never was particularly fair; she loved and she
hated, and she hated Maxi Ball. Once, in winter, she had been
forced to go there to buy a corset and in the middle of communion,
that very Sunday, a piece of whalebone slipped out and stabbed her
right in the stomach. There was nothing she could do for an hour.
When we got home she tore up the corset and used the whalebone as
supports for our geraniums, except for one piece that she gave to
me. I still have it, and whenever I''m tempted to cut corners I
think about that whalebone and I know better. 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 out own swept out into the Pennines,
broken now and again 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 flagged street with a cobbly road. When you
climb to the top of the hill and look down you can see everything,
just like Jesus on the pinnacle except it''s not very tempting. Over
to the right was the viaduct and behind the viaduct Ellison''s
tenement, where we had the fair once a year. I was allowed to go
there on condition 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. They taste wonderful. The
gypsies made a mess and stayed up all night and my mother called
them fornicators but on the whole we got on very well. They turned
a blind eye to toffee apples going missing, and sometimes, if it
was quiet and you didn''t have enough money, they still let you have
a ride on the dodgems. We used to have fights round the caravans,
the ones like me, from the street, against the posh ones from the
Avenue. The posh ones went to Brownies and didn''t stay for school
dinners. Once, when I was collecting the black peas, about to go
home, the old woman got 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
did
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