Giving up the Ghost: A memoir. Hilary Mantel
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circa 1905, he ran all the way home shouting, ‘I’ve passed, I’ve passed.’ But there was no money for uniform; anyway, it just wasn’t what you did, go to the grammar school. You accepted your place in life. My mother would have liked to go to art school, but on Bankbottom nobody had heard of such a thing. She applied for a clerical job by competitive exam, but it went to a girl called Muriel; poor Muriel, she got all the questions wrong, my mother said, but you see her uncles had pull. Thwarted, unhappy, she stayed in the mill and earned, she said, a wage as good as a man’s. The work was hard and took a painful toll on immature muscle and bone. It would be many years before the effects showed; then, with energy to spare, she danced and sang through her evenings, in amateur shows and pantomimes. Cinderella was her favourite part. Her favourite scene: the Transformation. She asked herself, could she really be the child of her parents? Or some changeling princess, dropped into Bankbottom by accident?
For the whole of my childhood I worried about the glass slipper. It is such a treacherous object to wear: splintering, and cutting the curved, tender sole of the dancing foot. The writer Emily Prager once said that she had rewritten, as a child, the second half of the story; Cinderella gets to the ball and breaks her leg. My own feelings were similar; the whole situation was too precarious, you were too dependent on irresponsible agents like pumpkins and mice, and always there was midnight, approaching, tick-tock, the minutes shaving away, the minutes before you were reduced to ashes and rags. I was relieved, as an adult, when I learned that the slipper was not of verre, but of vair: which is to say, ermine. The prince and his agents were ranging the kingdom with a tiny female organ in hand—his ideal bride, represented by her pudendum. Never mind her face: he had not raised his eyes so far. All he knew was that the fit was tight.
Three, four, I am still four: I think I will be it for ever. I sit on the back doorstep to have my picture taken. Fair hair gushes from under my bonnet. My clothes are a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a pink woolly cardigan with a zip; I call it a windjammer. I have another just the same but blue. I have a yellow knitted jacket, double breasted, that I call a Prince Charles coat. Summer comes and I have a crisp white dress with blackberries on, which shows my dimpled knees. I have a pink-and-blue frock my mother doesn’t like so much, chosen by me because it’s longer; people of six, I think, have longer skirts, and I am beginning to see that youth cannot last for ever, and now hope to be taken for older than I am. The onset of boyhood has been postponed, so far. But patience is a virtue with me.
We go to Blackpool to stay at Mrs Scott’s boarding house, just the three of us: my mother, my father, myself. I insist that we stand before a mirror, all three. They are to pick me up and hold me between them, my fat arms across their shoulders, my hands gripping them tight. I call this picture ‘All Together’; I insist on its title. I know, now, that this tableau, this charade, must have caused them a dull, deep pain. We do it time and time again, I insist on it and I am good at insisting. As a knight I am used to arranging siege warfare, the investment of major fortresses, so the reluctance and distraction of a couple of parents isn’t going to stop me pulling life into the shape I want it to be.
Standing on the pier at Blackpool, I look down at the inky waves swirling. Again, the noise of nature, deeply conversational, too quick to catch; again the rushing movement, blue, deep, and far below. I look up at my mother and father. They are standing close together, talking over my head. A thought comes to me, so swift and strange that it feels like the first thought that I have ever had. It strikes with piercing intensity, like a needle in the eye. The thought is this: that I stop them from being happy. I, me, and only me. That my father will throw me down on the rocks, down into the sea. That perhaps he will not do it, but some impulse in his heart thinks he ought. For what am I, but a disposable, replaceable child? And without me they would have a chance in life.
The next thing is that I am in bed with a fever raging. My lungs are full to bursting. The water boils, frets, spumes. I am limp in the power of the current that tugs beneath the waves. To open my eyes I have to force off my eyelids the weight of water. I am trying to die and I am trying to live. I open my eyes and see my mother looking down at me. She is sitting swivelled towards me, her anxious face peering down. She has made a fence of Mrs Scott’s dining chairs, their backs to my bed, and behind this barrier she sits, watching me. Her wrists, crossed, rest on the backs of the chairs; her lady’s hands droop. For a minute or two I swim up from under the water: clawing. I think, how beautiful she is: Monday’s child. Her face frames a question. It is never spoken. My mother has brought her own bedlinen, from home, and below my hot cheek, chafing it, is a butterfly: spreading luxuriant wings, embroidered on the pillowcase by my mother’s own hand. I see it, recognise it, put out my hot fingers to fumble at its edges. If I am with this butterfly, I am not lost but found. But I can’t stay. I am too hot, too sick. I feel myself taken by the current, tugged away.
I am changed now. Not in that fever but in one of the series, one of those that follow it, my weight of hair is cut off. What remains is like feathers, I think, like fluff. I lose my baby fat. For another twenty-five years I will be frail. In my late twenties I have a narrow ribcage, a tiny waist and a child’s twig arms fuzzed with white-gold hair. At twenty-nine I am cast as a ghost in a play: as Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, walking with noiseless slippered feet, a phantom of air and smoke. But then my life will change again, and I will find myself, like one of Candia McWilliam’s characters, ‘barded with a suit of fat.’ I will be solid, set, grounded, grotesque: perpetually strange to myself, convoluted, mutated, and beyond the pale.
All of us can change. All of us can change for the better, at any point. I believe this, but what is certainly true is that we can be made foreign to ourselves, suddenly, by illness, accident, misadventure, or hormonal caprice. I am four, and my mother tells me this story about myself: that when I was born my hair was black and thick. At the age of five I mourn for it, weaving in my mind the ghost of a black plait that trails over my right shoulder. Once, I say to myself, I was a Red Indian. I get a feathered headdress and a tepee, bought for me in Manchester: so clear am I, about my new requirements, about my antecedents. The tepee is erected in the middle of my grandmother’s floor and in it I have a small chair and small table. People step around me. I take my meals in the tepee, and believe my hands are brown, as they wield the spoon. But already it feels like a game, whereas in some previous time, in another life, I believe I had a right to this kit. I know that there is no truth in this belief. But it has created in me a complex emotion; what I feel, for the first time, is nostalgia.
It is 1957. Davy Crockett is all the go. I get a fur hat with a tail. We sing a stupid song that says Davy, Davy Crockett, is king of the wild frontier. It makes me want to laugh but I’m not sure who the joke’s on. We sing he killed a bear when he was only three. Somehow I doubt it. Even I didn’t do that.
Where are the knights of the Round Table? In abeyance, while I get to grips with the how the West was won. Now another thing occurs. I make a fuss! It is related to my role in life. When exactly do I become a boy?
My mother and father have been to Manchester, without me. We have brought you a present, they say, as they take off their coats. What is it? Well, it is a cottage set. It is taken out, extracted from a long cardboard box which has a cellophane window to show its contents. It is a doll’s teaset, a teapot, milk jug and sugar bowl made to look like rustic cottages, with little doors and windows: though only the teapot has a roof, a thatched one. I am puzzled at first—what is the use of it or where is the amusement to be derived? Then they say, we have bought your cousin Christopher a shooting range! A shooting range? I open my mouth and bawl. Shooting range!
Well! I can hear them saying. She did make a fuss! We had to give it her!
The shooting range consisted of a metal bar on a stand, which you placed on the carpet. On the bar swung four crude animal shapes made of moulded plastic, painted in primary colours. I only remember the owl; perhaps it was the only one I recognised, or perhaps I knew that people don’t shoot owls. You were supplied with a tiny rifle, which shot out a cork. You had to lie on your belly, very close, if you were going to hit the animals; you knew you had hit them if you made them swing on the bar. That was all there was to it. I found the thing tame. I had thought ‘a shooting range’ would entail actual destruction. Slaughter.
Everyone is disappointed. Them, because they thought I was too mature