When Roy’s father died she volunteered to help with the catering after the funeral, but made herself scarce when family arrived so as not to intrude.Īt the time she was living in the house of a merchant banker in exchange for domestic chores. Anything that didn’t produce hysterical laughter went forward for further consideration. Editorial routines didn’t need to be solemn: on one occasion she and Roy sifted poetry submissions by reading them aloud in a Barnsley accent. When the two men who ran the press, Roy Trevelion and Tenebris Light, went on holiday to Gran Canaria, she willingly redecorated their flat. She was efficient and didn’t mind hard work. When I met Jeanette she was working as the women’s editor at Brilliance Books, a gay publishing house that received funding from the GLC and was based on Clerkenwell Green, near where I lived.

Otherwise my memories are from the period before she was ‘Jeanette Winterson’, the outsider who gatecrashed the canon, or alternatively the self-sabotaging golden girl and egomaniac who could never match that first success. We ran into each other occasionally after the publication of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and we once read to an audience of nine in Burnley (I doubt if even one of the nine was there to hear me).

I went slightly cool on the friendship, though she didn’t exactly do anything wrong. I was friendly with Jeanette Winterson in the 1980s – we even went away for a weekend together.

Oranges are not the only fruit feminism