This ‘war’ included two women who ran a local newsagent who were rumoured to indulge in ‘unnatural passions’ (Jeanette thinks this means they put chemicals in their sweets). One family from this area had moved next door and became part of mother’s war with the unholy. Mother was a snob in general but reserved much of her snobbery towards those who lived in an area called Factory Bottoms, who worked in the mills and were generally quite poor. As Pentecostal Christians the world was divided on clear, simple lines between friends and enemies, good and evil there were no grey areas within this particular sect.Įvil and ungodliness were everywhere, including their hometown. Her mother was one of those formidable northern women: forthright, driven, certain of the correctness of her opinions, and not to be messed with! Her father was, by contrast, a quiet, compliant father and husband who went along with whatever his wife wanted to have relatively strife-free life. Jeanette grew up with an extremely rigid view of the world, a binary one consisting of Good and Evil. Their God was not kind and forgiving, it was the vengeful God of the Old Testament. Mother did not send Jeanette to school, condemning it as a ‘Breeding Ground’ for sin and evil she taught Jeanette a basic level of education using the Bible as her main teaching aid. Jeanette was her personal project to train to serve the Lord as a missionary, going out to convert the ‘heathens’ to Christ (attitudes such as this were prevalent and generally unchallenged in the 1960s and 70s).
It was one of the many half-truths her mother told her throughout her childhood and adolescence. This was not strictly true, as Jeanette would later find out when her birth mother tried, and failed, to see her. She chose not and adopted her, telling her that she was a foundling. Jeanette’s mother could have had children of her own.
Winterson drew on her own unusual childhood, growing up in a strict religious home and church in a mill town in the North of England.
North West Reads Book 10: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson Published in 1985, Jeanette Winterson’s debut novel won the Whitbread Award for a First Novel and was adapted as a drama by the BBC.
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