Angela Carter cultivated the role of fairy godmother and/or witch, and – in The Bloody Chamber (1979) – rewrote the Bluebeard story with pistol-toting Mother riding to the rescue at the last minute. However, it was not her own mother, one of a family of ‘great examination-passers’ (a scholarship girl who had left school at 15, to work at Selfridges in what was then acceptably genteel fashion, as a sales lady), who provided the model for this kind of figure, but her maternal grandmother, who had come originally from south Yorkshire. Granny came to the rescue in the year of Angela's birth (1940), and evacuated herself and her grandchildren from south London back to the gritty coal-mining village of Wath-upon-Dearne, kidnapping them safely into the past for the duration of the war.

Skipping a generation took Angela back to ‘Votes for Women’, working class radicalism, outside lavatories, and coal-dust coughs. Granny ought, perhaps, to have surfaced in the fiction as the spirit of social realism – though actually it makes sense that she is in the magical mode, since her brand of eccentric toughness was already thoroughly archaic from the point of view of the postwar and the south. In Angela's last novel, Wise Children, the granny-figure is killed in the blitz, but bequeaths to her adoptive granddaughters Dora and Nora (possibly her natural daughters?) the Brixton house that offers them a safe haven when they have to retire from the stage. ‘When the bombardments began, Grandma would go outside and shake her fist at the old men in the sky…. She was our air-raid shelter; she was our entertainment; she was our breast’, says Dora (WC 29).

Expanding on this theme in a late interview, Carter said that she had often been asked why there were so few mothers in her books, and had realized that in her imaginative topography houses stood in for mothers: ‘When mother is dead, all the life has gone out of the house.