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. We had a lot of Bible quizzes at church and my mother like me to win. The novel contains some brilliant observations on the mother’s determination to take every opportunity to do the Lord’s work, converting the heathen in the ‘Great Struggle between good and evil’, and how family life revolves around this quest: Jeanette’s mother is heavily involved, obsessed even, with the local Pentecostal church and is grooming young Jeanette for a future as a church missionary. There were friends and there were enemies (pg. In the eyes of Jeanette’s mother, everything is either black or white, either good or evil.
As the novel opens, we begin to get a sense of Jeanette’s world and the dominant role her adoptive mother plays in her life – there is a father, but he’s largely absent from the story. Oranges is narrated by Jeanette, a young girl living in a working-class family in the North of England.
I recall watching the 1990 TV adaptation with my mother – it screened shortly before she died – but it’s taken me far too long to get around to the book. In 1984, Jeanette Winterson wrote Oranges are not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel in which she draws on elements from her own life she was twenty-four at the time.
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