Time travel is child's play
Jane Wheatley

The author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit has written a new book with the help of her best friend's children 
 
Jeanette Winterson, the novelist, has known her goddaughter Eleanor all the child’s life — literally — because she was there at the birth: “I got to the house where my friend Vicky was in labour, popped my head round the door and the baby shot out as if jet-propelled. The midwife said she must have been waiting for me to arrive.”

The mother, Vicky Licorish, and Winterson had been friends since the day they arrived at the same Oxford college, both from state schools — still something of a novelty in those days: “This ghastly old tutor [he’s dead now so I can speak ill of him] looked at us and said: ‘Ah yes, you are the working class experiment [that was me] and you [Vicky] are the black one’.” 
 
Eighteen years later, Licorish asked Winterson to be her birth partner. “I was at home in the Cotswolds when Vicky’s husband Paul rang from Richmond to say she was in labour,” Winterson recalls. “For some reason I decided to wash the car before setting off and then took some time deciding what clothes to wear.

There was a lot of traffic and by now it was several hours since Paul had called and I was getting anxious. I saw a policeman and told him I was on my way to a home birth. He must have thought I was a doctor because he switched his blue light on and escorted me at great speed to the house. I arrived just in the nick of time.”

While Licorish had a bath, Winterson held the baby: “I told her a story and I’ve been telling her stories ever since. As she got older, whenever she cried or had a tantrum, I would start telling a story, as if to myself, and eventually curiosity would get the better of her, the sobs would subside and she’d creep up to listen. So I’ve never had to do that tedious thing of trying to soothe her or find out what the matter is.”

The latest story — a collaboration between Winterson, Eleanor, 10, and her seven-year-old sister Cara — is now a book. Published by Bloomsbury next month, Tanglewreck is an action-packed, imaginative tale involving travel through time and space and an attempt at world domination by a clever, evil and beautiful woman called Regalia Mason. There is a heroine, the 11-year-old orphaned Silver; her friend and fugitive from Bedlam, the heartbreaking Gabriel; Silver’s horrible guardian, Mrs Rokabye; her pet rabbit, Bigamist; and sundry sinister characters all plotting to find the Timekeeper, an alchemist’s watch that alone can steady time and bring an end to the “time tornados” that threaten everyone’s lives.

Early on, Winterson and the two girls dreamt up the characters and elements of the plot: “I told them, if it works, we’ll write it,” says Winterson. “They are obsessed with being orphans so we got rid of Silver’s parents straight away. We talked about time: children know very well that one day is not the same length as another; they are much more attuned to the maverick nature of time and they live in a kind of eternal present, feeling boundaries as more malleable. We talked about what would happen if time ran out — like oil — and could be traded. If it did, Eleanor thought people would have to go back into the past to collect more. She said you’d need a clock to tell you what the real time was; this became the Timekeeper in the book.”

Winterson’s London home, a restored Huguenot lacemaker’s house in Spitalfields, is only metres from where the girls live and the three of them like exploring the city and the shore of the Thames at low tide. “Eleanor wanted the book to be set in places she knew,” says Winterson. “They were bringing all their experience, the environment they inhabit, to the story; it was my job to make it into a book but it wouldn’t have happened without them.”

What did they think of the finished product? “Eleanor gave it 8½ out of 10,” says Winterson. “She took off marks because I had redeemed Mrs Rokabye instead of bringing her to a sticky end.”

In her autobiographical novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson describes her childhood as the adopted daughter of a controlling, narrow-minded, God-bothering woman. “Mrs Rokabye was a return to the Mrs Winterson character,” she says, with evident satisfaction.

Eleanor and Cara are the nearest that 46-year-old Winterson will come to having her own children. She takes them on holidays, has them to stay every other weekend (when Eleanor was a baby, she slept in Winterson’s bed) and pays Eleanor’s school fees. They are as unquestioned a staple of each other’s lives as the girls’ parents or Winterson’s partner. Did she never yearn to have a child of her own? “No,” she says, “I don’t mind that biological lack — I think because I’m adopted, that part of me is blanked off. Anyway, I’m an obsessive; I can only do what I do. If I had children, I’d focus on children and I wouldn’t be able to write. This is perfect for me — I have them for the weekend, we have a great time, I return them to their parents, get on the train and go back to my other life.”

Winterson is as exceptionalist about the girls as any parent. According to her, both are pretty, clever and “unusually thoughtful, kind kids, not selfish and, thank God, well mannered. I really mind about that.” Private school fees for Eleanor are money well spent, she says: “The local state schools are not great, and she’s very bright and needs to have a lot going on. Both of them adore school; I just think that’s worth a lot.”

Their mother claims she has never worried about her children’s safety when they are away: “Jeanette may seem eccentric but she is very careful — I think the girls are fortunate to have another adult in their lives.”

The family has a big black Newfoundland dog called Belle. Licorish says she will never forget the time Winterson brought the dog and the children back in her open-topped Porsche: “The girls were strapped in to the tiny bucket seats in the back, Belle was sitting up in the front passenger seat and all four had hair standing up in haloes round their heads from the wind.”

Winterson says she and the girls have a robust outdoor life: “They ride the pony and play by the river — they do fall in occasionally but they can both swim. “They cook with me and I have taught them how to use knives safely. Eleanor keeps an eye on me: she found a tin of eucalyptus oil in the dresser recently. ‘Jeanette!’ she said, ‘this says Keep out of reach of children’.

“She’d forgotten her hairbrush once so I lent her the dog brush. She was appalled but so am I appalled about her pink Barbie coiffeur set. It’s the lowest of the low and she knows it is.”

Tanglewreck, by Jeanette Winterson, is published by Bloomsbury at £12.99. Read Jeanette Winterson's column and a review of Tanglewreck in Books on Saturday

Eleanor and Cara on life with Jeanette Winterson

Eleanor: “Tanglewreck is such a good story about an evil woman trying to steal time. I read the first chapter of one of Jeanette’s adult books: she has just gone so much further with this one. Mrs Rokabye is so cool; now I consider it again, I think I should have given the book nine and a half out of ten.”

Cara: “At Jeanette’s we play with the cats and by the river.”

Eleanor: “Cara fell in the other day; Belle pushed her in by accident.”

Cara: “Yes! Whoever heard of a rescue dog drowning someone?”

Eleanor: “There were loads of cats but some of them died. There’s Minnie and Silver and Silver’s kittens, Smudge and Jack. Jack is also called Plug. Jeanette froze some dead moles and I took one in a cool bag to school for my English Speaking Board exam. Basically I just talked about moles but I was able to point to the real thing and it got me a distinction.”

Cara: “I make fishing rods and grow sunflowers. Jeanette doesn’t have rules except ‘Don’t wake her up in the morning before 8.30’. Otherwise, it’s just general adult stuff like ‘be careful by the river’ and ‘don’t pull the cat’s tail’. Mum’s a bit stricter. For instance, she wouldn’t let me have eight sausages whereas Jeanette did once.”

Eleanor: “Yes, also Jeanette is willing to cook two different suppers for us which Mum certainly is not.”

The Times, June 22, 2006
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2236462.html