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By Root 311 0

she was a history teacher doing her stint at Scripture, as most of them did. Scripture didn’t have important teachers, either, and got shared out as a chore. She was unusual, in those days (the early 1950s), for being married. She had a lot of long curly dark hair, and red lips, and wickedly pointed very high heels, on which she clipped along between our desks. Youngish, for a teacher at that good, ancient establishment for girls. Not a good teacher, you remember those. I am quite sure, though I don’t remember a word she did say, that she gave us no explanation of why we had to study and illustrate that peculiarly disagreeable and morally equivocal story. Anyway, for some reason, the experience of making that pool of red with my good pencil on the bad paper has stayed with me. I was telling the cameraman in the studio in Brussels about it, over lunch. We were talking about how your past life is mapped two ways, with significant things that of course you remember, births, marriages, deaths, journeys, successes and failures, and then the other sort, the curiously bright-coloured, detailed pointless moments that won’t go away. He’s in his early thirties, he looked a bit sorry for me, when I told him about Jael, that I was old enough to have memories so far back. So small and bright and faraway, like illuminations in manuscripts. We discussed the horrible story, and he was very struck by it. (He had a completely religion-free upbringing, I don’t think he ever opened a Bible in his life.) I said, and I’m sure I’m right, that I didn’t think I was remembering it for its shocking morals, I said I was sure I was remembering it because of the excitement I’d felt over spreading more and more of that red over the paper. Like the blown-up-and-up shot we used in the Spanaranja commercial, all those glistening exploding sacs lying together in a segment of a blood orange. You didn’t get much intense sensuous excitement at Armadale High School, Girls’ Public Day School Trust, GPDST.

Anyway, that caused me to think, not for the first time, about Jael and Sisera. I’m sure all those Scripture stories we did at the ages of nine and ten are the reason I find religion not only incredible, but disgusting and dangerous. At that stage, you’re already doing bits of Shakespeare, at least at the kind of segregated high-powered school I was at, and even if you say, or believe, you’re bored or indifferent, there are all those passionate people, all those complicated motives, all that singing language, all the power, and, later, you know it changed you for ever. But the Scriptures were both dead and nasty. And all we did was illustrate them, frame by frame, the Coat of Many Colours, the Manna in the Wilderness, the Plagues, Jael and Sisera.

Explaining it to Jed, our cameraman, I said, it’s not even a story about treachery or loyalty. I told it him from memory, as it came into my head whenever I saw that red sheet. It happens in the Book of Judges, when the Judge, unusually, is a woman, Deborah. (No, we were not offered her as a rôlemodel for leadership qualities. I’m not sure the concept existed in the early 1950s. If it did, she wasn’t it, more likely Florence Nightingale or Elizabeth Fry.) The Israelites as usual had done evil in the sight of the Lord who sold them into the hands of Jabin, King of Canaan, whose captain, Sisera, mightily oppressed them with nine hundred chariots of iron for twenty years. Then Deborah traps Sisera in the river of Kishon. The Bible says ‘The Lord discomfited Sisera and all his chariots, and all his host, with the edge of the sword.’ The Lord did his own killing at that point of the Bible, but Deborah organised it. Sisera got out of his chariot, and fled away on his feet, and came to the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, who was at peace with Sisera’s King Jabin. And Jael said to Sisera, ‘Turn in, my lord, turn in to me; fear not.’ And he went in, and when he asked for water, she opened a bottle of milk, and covered him, and invited him to rest. And he asked her to stand in the door of the tent, and say no man