The novel begins: ‘Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. The mother has a handle – she’s called ‘Kindly Light’. The girl leaves home, gets herself to Oxford University, returns home to find her mother has built a broadcast radio and is beaming out the Gospel to the heathen. The girl is supposed to grow up and be a missionary. It is semiautobiographical, in that it tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. She was alive when my first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published in 1985. We do that for our parents – we don’t really have any choice. She hated being a nobody, and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. I know that she adopted me because she wanted a friend (she had none), and because I was like a flare sent out into the world – a way of saying that she was here – a kind of X Marks the Spot. I do not know why she didn’t/couldn’t have children. A woman with a prolapse, a thyroid condition, an enlarged heart, an ulcerated leg that never healed, and two sets of false teeth – matt for everyday, and a pearlised set for ‘best’.
A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father. She was a flamboyant depressive a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. The image of Satan taking time off from the Cold War and McCarthyism to visit Manchester in 1960 – purpose of visit: to deceive Mrs Winterson – has a flamboyant theatricality to it. When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.’
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