Photograph by Brendan O’Sullivan.

www.thefield.co.uk

THE FIGHT for hunting has thrown up some unlikely allies. One is writer Jeanette Winterson, whose credentials, at least on paper, were hardly Pony Club. She blazed on to the literary scene at 24, when Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit won the Whitbread Award for First Novel. It is an extraordinary and very funny book about growing up in a hellfire-preaching Pentecostal household in Accrington and falling in love with another girl.

Eleven books on, she has been fêted and vilifi ed in equal measure as a political radical, experimental novelist and gay icon. No impassioned anti could ever accuse hounds of doing to a fox what the press has done to Winterson. She has been savaged, particularly over her private life. Stories emerged of her living amid a court of admiring handmaidens (“I wish,” was her response). By her own admission, she brought some of it on herself: on one occasion, Winterson doorstepped a journalist to harangue her about a profile that had been written about her.

A natural terrier – friendly, cheerful and incapable of passing up a challenge – Winterson has never been shy of a scrap. She has written pro-hunting pieces for The Guardian and taken on Rupert Murdoch. Recently, she has argued eloquently against banning country sports. “The ban makes me so angry,” she says. “This wasn’t some academic exercise; it was about real people losing jobs. These are people who live very simply and cheaply.

Often they don’t have their own homes. They’re not part of our 24-hour getting and spending culture; they stood for a way of life where money isn’t everything. And now even the little they have has been taken from them. And what are they meant to do? They don’t want to go and run bloody tea-shops. My assistant’s man was professional huntsman of the Old Berkeley beagles. He was a welder by trade but he gave up an awful lot to do that job because he was passionate about the hounds and their bloodline.

“ Unlike the miners’ strike, hunting wasn’t sexy. The middle class got on the miners’ bandwagon as a romantic, son-of-the-soil thing and the government was shamed. I’ve had lots of arguments, and hostility, over hunting. There isn’t a lot of sympathy for hunting in the arts world but if you get people on the economic and rural realities, you can usually get them to listen. You have to be such an advocate, almost evangelical – but that comes naturally to me,” she grins. “It’s the usual thing – all prejudice comes out of ignorance and a refusal to understand.”

Winterson left London for Gloucester- shire in 1994. “Friends couldn’t understand it. They said: ‘You’re a radical left, gay writer. They’ll hate you.’ But I have never found any problems. People think everyone comes as a package, whereas it’s not that simple. You have to learn to live and let live. We’ve got very bad at that. I did think, ‘God, they’ll hate me because I’m another blowin.’

Then I decided the best thing I can do is spend money here. It’s amazing how many people in the Cotswolds bring workmen in from London. I try to redirect my income back into the countryside, by using local shops and skills.”

She has created work, building dry-stone walls instead of erecting fencing and planting lots of trees and hedges. Now she lives outside Burford, in an ancient cottage with fishing rights on the Windrush. She catches crayfish, shoots rabbits and squirrels, keeps hens, grows vegetables on two acres and drives a “scary, black and chrome” Land Rover Defender.

She keeps “an apartment” in London, a 1780s house she saved from dereliction in Spitalfields. Below, with its original fittings, is her tiny jewel of a food shop, Verde’s.

Does she sell her own produce? “Can’t,” she says. “The assumption is that what I grow in my good earth is going to poison people. I couldn’t even sell half a dozen of my eggs without four salmonella tests at £250 a throw. And this government talks about sustainable farming.

“ Farmers are endlessly vilified. They’re portrayed either as greedy bastards or environmental vandals, but I don’t see why they should become saints so people can enjoy a picturesque countryside. I’m no supporter of agri-business: I’d prefer a system whereby farmers do what they do best, earn money and protect the land.

“ A lot of farmers would part company with me over organic farming, but I think growing food with fewer pesticides has to be better. I shopped organic right from the start.

God, was it cranky then. I’d make endless furtive calls from phone boxes, bartering with some hippy in Essex, then drive miles to collect a bag of cabbages he’d dumped for me. It looked like a drugs drop. Now I find myself at the height of fashion.

“ I was vegetarian for 17 years, because of factory farming. It wasn’t political, more a gut reaction. I knew I could no more eat a battery chicken egg than jump off Big Ben. Then I discovered organic farming and started eating meat again. You’ve got to do something with the boys, after all.” She lights up with mischief. “See? My feminist principles kicking in – so you might as well eat them!”