Giving up the Ghost: A memoir. Hilary Mantel
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them up a wall. He calls them storshions, and says you can pickle and eat the seeds, good in what they call a sallet, but I think, what a waste. My whole vision is filled with these pale leaves, these flowers. When I try to put names to their imperial colours, to the scarlet and striated amber, my chest seems dangerously to swell; I imagine them to be musical instruments, broadcasting stately and imperial melodies from their own hearts, because their shape is like that of gramophone horns, which I have seen in pictures. These flowers combine every virtue, the portentous groan of brass, the blackish sheen of crimson: to the eye, the crushable texture of velvet, but to the fingertip, the bruise of baby skin.
Evelyn’s dad, Arthur, grows geraniums. Their flowers are scarlet dots, their stems are bent and nodular. When Arthur comes in from work in his bib and brace, his sleeves are rolled up above his elbows, and I see the inside of his arms, the sinews and knotty veins. I think his arms are the stems of plants, that he is not human, perhaps an ogre. When I hear him at the front door I run out of the back door and run home.
I am aware, as time passes, that adults talk about this, and that it makes them laugh. He who laughs last, I think darkly. Evelyn’s father has sap, not blood. If they don’t know he’s dangerous, so much the worse for them. Fear is nothing to be ashamed of, nor is running away, when the retreat is tactical and the enemy is a green man.
I am four. Four already! Ivy Compton-Burnett describes a child with ‘an ambition to continue in his infancy,’ and I have that ambition. I am fat and happy. When I am asked if I would like to give up my cot for a sweet little bed, the answer is ‘no’. Every day I am busy: guarding, knight errantry, camel training. Why should I want to move on in life?
My grandfather lifts me up and sits me on his folded arms. We scan Albert Street, a cobbled road that runs at the end of our yard. Unsmiling, he nods his head across the street, to where there is a sturdy wall, higher than a man, topped with vast, flat flags, so broad an army could march on them. Its stones are black with soot, and it is a wall so stout, so formidable, that it appears it will stand for ever. He says, without emphasis, almost casually, ‘Your great-grandfather built that wall.’ I feel his pride, I feel the strength of his arms. I think, we built everything!
At the back of the yard is a nursery school, a prefabricated building with a plaque on it, to say that it was opened by Lady Astor; I employ someone to read it out to me. My grandfather tells me the people from the nursery hang over the back wall, saying can’t Ilary come to our school? But he says, he tells me, that he wants my company, that I am too useful about the place. Grandad and I have special food, at different times from other people. When he comes off his shift he eats alone, tripe, rabbit, distinctive food that is for men. Around noon each day I take a lamb chop, and a slice of bread and butter.
Winter: we go to the pantomime. We sit high up in a box, in the dark of the afternoon. I like the box better than Mother Goose. A man wearing ordinary man’s clothes comes out on to the stage. He holds up his arms. He says to the audience, ‘I am Anthony Eden.’ The audience roars at him. I know he is not.
Two problems occur. First, the spaniel. From time to time a dog would trot down the steps to our yard, look about with its tail wagging and then trot away again. It was a decrepit dog, aged and shapeless; I had been seeing it for a long time. It had a long sad face and was brown and white in patches. ‘When I was young,’ I said diffidently, ‘I used to think that dog was a cow.’ I was hoping to prompt the reply, ‘Well, actually, secretly, it is,’ but the reply I got was, ‘Don’t be silly.’
I knew it was a dog. But I couldn’t help thinking that, in some way, and secretly, it was a cow. Deception seemed to be in the air. The true nature of things was frequently hidden. No one would say plainly what was what: not if they could help it.
Somehow, I got into trouble. I was supposed to have said that my friend Evelyn was a liar. She had complained to her mother Kath about it. The word ‘liar’, I now learned, was a terrible word, prohibited, and one such as no child might say. Even if one adult were to say it to another, it would still be a cause of scandal.
Mrs Aldous came down the yard to complain to my mother. She stood and looked stout. There were high words. My mother took me aside and spoke to me tactfully. She was trying to negotiate a formula that would suit all parties. She put it to me: ‘Is it possible that you said, Evelyn, you tell lies?’ I denied it. No such conversation had taken place. I was baffled. There were more high words, family to family. I stopped Kath as she was crossing the yard. I wanted to have this out. I put my hand up to detain her, and tugged at her pinny. ‘I didn’t say it,’ I told her. She leant over me, smiling, oozing Scots sweetness, her hands spread on her thighs: ‘Ahh, but lovie, you did.’
The incident fizzled out somehow. I was left with a sense of injustice and bewilderment. My friend had lied about my having said she lied. Why? Must she always be believed, and me never? I knew I had not uttered the words complained of, because I was not concerned with whether she told lies. She was a steady and regular confabulator, but what could you expect of someone with a plant for a father? I could hardly say that in my defence. It seemed like one of those knots that gets harder to untie the more you try to pull it apart.
I sensed trouble ahead. One of these days I had to go to school. My mother, who worked as the school secretary, had already brought a reading book home and tried to coax me towards it. I had taken it up secretly, and been knocked back by the ‘Introduction for Teachers.’ When my mother turned the pages and showed me the short squat words I would be required to master, I was simply not interested.
My grandad, when he was under arms, was an instructor in the Machine Gun Corps. He could still recite the manual, and I learnt it from him, just as, when she was a child, my mother learned it. I expect we thought it would be handy.
I spent time with my grandmother, time with her sister Annie. At no. 58, they sat by the fire on upright chairs, wooden and unforgiving; they were old, I thought, but sadly had no armchairs. They talked and talked, in an interweaving pattern of old and interesting words, and the refrain was, ‘Kitty, we were born too soon. Oh, Kitty, Kitty. I wish I were ten years younger.’ ‘Oh Annie, we were, and so do I.’ Annie Connor says she hopes she will never hate anyone, but the thing she could not fail to hate was a Black and Tan. And for people of the Orange persuasion she can’t care. My grandmother simply doesn’t speak on the topic. I think if a Black and Tan came to the door looking peckish, she would probably feel sorry for him and make him a strawberry pie.
At no. 56, only my grandfather occupied an armchair, his cigarette between his fingers, his brass ashtray balanced on the chair arm. Women didn’t take their ease; when young, I thought, they ran about, and when old they perched on upright chairs until they died, simply slumping to the linoleum, knocking their heads on the fireplace and waiting to be carried away to the undertaker, Mr Worsley, who buried Catholics. Maggie, Annie Connor’s daughter, was neither old nor young. She never sat down. Neither did my mother, nor my cousin Beryl. My grandmother was so creased by anxiety that her face resembled a pleated skirt. Like her elder sister’s, her hands were fat, with cracked and harsh palms, and I thought she had got these from washing clothes with Fairy Soap, from wiping the fireplace with Vim. Grandma was forever on hands and knees, mopping, towing a little flat black mat she called ‘me kneelin’ mat’. When someone came to the door, and she didn’t know who it was, she would hide on the stairs. She never went out. Officially this was because of her bad leg but I knew there were other reasons and I was sorry for them: like a child, she was too shy to speak to strangers. When something made her laugh, tears sprang out of her eyes, and she swayed on her hard chair: swayed as much as her corsets allowed, and creaked. She and Annie Connor had the most terrible corsets, salmon-pink: like the Iron Maiden, from which their heads stuck out.
My mother would tell me, later, of her parents’ narrow and unimaginative nature. My grandmother had become a millworker when she was twelve years old; my mother herself was put into the mill at fourteen. She was of diminutive size and delicate health; she was pretty and clever and talented. Her school, by some clerical error, had failed to enter her for the scholarship exam that would, her parents permitting, have sent her to grammar school. But it didn’t matter, she said later, because they would not have permitted. It would have been just as it was for her father, a generation earlier, for