When she was seven years old, the writer Hilary Mantel saw something nasty in the woodshed. She describes this on page 106 in my copy of her memoir, Giving Up The Ghost, in such indelible, irrefutable and hackle-raising detail that I find I have scrawled "Christ!" in the margin, to draw my attention to its significance at some later, less emotionally charged, date.
So there it is. She saw, sensed, felt, experienced, knew, call it what you like, this Thing of unspeakable malignity and terror that moved, unsubstantiated, towards her petrified little body and infiltrated her physical fibre. A premonition more than a creature. And she was never the same again. When she grew up, she could laugh about it, how it had made her doomy like old Aunt Ada Doom, except sometimes, when she is alone and has nobody to amuse, she can hardly raise a timorous grin. That's the thing about these solitary trips down memory lane, eyes wide open, nostrils a-quiver; you have to take what comes, even if it damned near kills you. It's not an exercise for sissies.
You wouldn't have to be faint-hearted, either, to choose to make your home in an old lunatic asylum. Yet here in deepest Surrey stands this early-Victorian monument to misery and confusion, transformed by millennial enterprise into highly desirable residences for those who would not dwell uncomfortably in the past. The gates are spanking new, with electronic doodahs to keep people out, the broad driveways crunchily gravelled for Home Counties posh, and there, bang in the middle of the double-fronted edifice, is a clock tower, its authentic clock de-chimed and keeping perfect time.
"Ask for the old hospital," Mantel had said, "else no one will know what you're talking about." And she giggled. As well she might. It is all a bit, well, spectacular. Then, when you've negotiated the gates and the entrances and the lift - a lift that goes right up to the bit you own, no less, where nobody else can go without your say-so - and she pops her head around the door, you get further disconcerted by the fact that she looks like a leprechaun, all uncannily green eyes, when you were expecting Thackeray or Swift or Hazlitt or some such literary grandee. You shouldn't be so presumptuous, of course.
Mantel's literary reputation is a little daunting. It's not just the prizes, though she has bagged several; rather that over the years she has made incursions into most of the genres there are and stamped them with this peculiar aestheticism and prescience you'd probably think of as perfectionism if it didn't all look so damned effortless. It is well to remember she wrote them only one at a time. The enormous doorstep of a historical novel, A Place Of Greater Safety, generally believed to be the finest - and certainly the funniest - exposition of the French Revolution. Then the books about expat life in Saudi Arabia, about Lazarus, about young offenders; then the transparently autobiographical novels and the allegorical swipes at 20th-century institutions and mannerisms in which she seems to be able to change the microscopic and telescopic lenses of insight and give you that timeless sense of human morality as an ongoing cock-up without being remotely preachy about it. She writes, in other words, like an angel.
She is also this smiling woman, introducing you to her husband and her cat, and urging you to come and look at her balcony from which, at night, you can get a perfect view of the sky, unsullied by the pollution of street lighting. She's very big on stars. Knows all their names. Then, if you crane your neck ever so slightly, you realise that you're under the clock and that, better yet, its tower belongs to her and you can climb up a spiral staircase and sit in it.
It is a small, square room, private, intimate, studio conditions for a tape recorder, all you could wish for. Except for this last: the intimacy. Mantel has written her memoir and I have read it, during the course of which I laughed and wept and wrote "Christ!" in the margin and afterwards went around telling everyone it was a masterpiece. Now, bringing it up as a topic of conversation seems somehow sleazy. I mean, I know her. Suddenly, what passed between the writer and her Apple Mac has nothing to do with what might pass between her and a stranger. Obviously, if you are one of those people who can sleuth the computer of memory and find the precise shape of your soul in there and chat about it, you wouldn't be a writer in the first place. Nor, if you were a writer, would you have much truck with such blatherers. But once you've done it, and it's a book, you're free to cast off from it. It's over. The ghost is given up. That's the idea, anyway. It isn't necessarily true.
At least, the cat doesn't think so. She's yowling at the bottom of the stairs, making that deep-throated wail of complaint highly bred, oriental cats make, which seems odd, as she's a tortoiseshell moggy. Mantel says the cat doesn't approve of the spiral staircase and doesn't believe there's anything at the top of it. As for the voice, well, she hadn't noticed, but now that I mention it, she must suppose it comes from a Burmese they had who died a few years ago. Isn't that sweet, she's mimicking! By this token, the cat remembers and is making no bones about it.
"I am often struck," said the cat's mother, "by how people don't remember, or say they don't remember, their childhood." In the course of her career, she has tutored those adult writing courses much patronised by people at pivotal points in their lives, when they hope to reconstruct themselves through the process of putting pen to paper. Yet most are fiercely unwilling to think about their childhood. Most men will say they either can't or don't want to remember, while women can't even speak about not speaking about it without manifesting almost unbearable emotion. She would think to herself, well, all right, I'm not here as a psychoanalyst, but how can anyone become a writer if they refuse to make something out of their own strongest emotions? Perhaps, she says, it is just too painful for most people to recall the vulnerability of childhood, so it becomes something you guard, like a shameful secret. Perhaps they think that, if they give themselves away, they will become vulnerable again; have their power taken away from them and used against them. So they prefer not to. If you're not a writer, she says, there is no particular value in welcoming the ambiguity of your own memory when you construe your own past, since what does that give you but confusion?
This isn't about analysis, it's about ambiguity. People analyse when they want clarification. That's easy. Ambiguity is not. And most people cannot tolerate ambiguity to the extent that they wilfully cut themselves off from their childhood selves. She had a student once, a man of 60, the youngest of a large family. She asked him to tell her two things about himself when he was five years old. He thought about it and told her some things, but they were all about his older brothers. He was simply not there. People fear what is rooted in themselves. It is a territory they think they have left behind, or they feel it never belonged to them in the first place. Like this man who grew up thinking of himself entirely in terms of his brothers, then as a husband, then as a father, always on a trajectory to another role he could fit into. And that's most people, determined to shrink away from the examined life. Always in a role. "And someone like me," she says, "isn't." There ought to be other words to describe people like her, she sighs, because in popular parlance, when we say a person is self-absorbed, we do not mean it as a compliment. If you take up a writer's life, you have to accept that you're going to spend an inordinate amount of time cudgelling your brains for symptoms of the ambiguities and contradictions festering in there. As Walt Whitman admitted, he contained multitudes. It's not everyone's cup of tea
There were years - four, to be precise - when Mantel was a happy bunny. Half a century ago, Our Ilary, as she was known to her family (they gave her an aspirational name, she says wittily, but lacked the necessary aspirant), was born to a working-class family in Derbyshire. She was a robust toddler, an only child, the joy of her grandparents, her mum and dad, uncles and aunts, and everybody else who conspired ruthlessly to persuade her that she was the centre of the universe, competing for the pleasure of attending to her every whim. As was right and proper.
When she grew up, she would be a railway guard, a camel trader, a knight of the Round Table, a priest. But before that, somewhere around the occasion of her fourth birthday, she would become a boy. So much was certain. Her ego was pure and undented, everything in her garden was lovely. Sometimes, for bliss, she would make her mum and dad stand in front of a mirror with her, Our Ilary, between the pair of them, arms round, all together, inviolable, permanent. When her fourth birthday came and went and she hadn't turned into a boy, she was fairly sanguine about it. She went on hoping, quietly confident of the inevitability of her transformation. She was utterly fearless. Then, one summer's day, her mum and dad took her to Blackpool for an outing, and she remembers being on the pier and looking down into the waves and realising with awful certainty that, as she puts it now, "All was not well above my head."
She knew two things. One, her mother and father were unhappy together; and, two, it was her fault. The big moment in the evolution of consciousness was upon her: if she was not there, had she never existed, her parents would be happy. Her ego was no longer pure. She was peripheral. She remembers the shock of that realisation. And she remembers waking up in bed with a high fever. The beginning of trouble and the beginning of illness arrived together.
They used to call her Little Miss Neverwell after that. Her ego survived its initial battering, of course, as egos do. She thought, when she first went to school, that all meaningful life back at home would cease. How would they manage without her? She even thought the trains would stop running, since she'd put in all this training for being a railway guard. And who would her grandad have to talk to when he came off his shift? School was a disaster. A joke. "What was it like?" she says. "Boredom and containment with a lot of violence thrown in." She smiles reassuringly. "But don't forget I was a fully paid-up member of the machine gun corps by then."
She was always a child unsuited for childhood. This is not a reflection, something she has recollected in tranquillity; it is a statement of the facts as she experienced them at the time. She perceived both herself and her contemporaries as alien creatures, unknowable one to the other. It wasn't a conflict, exactly, more an awareness of the divisions between people; something intangible to do with being a Catholic or a Protestant. You knew who was who. You knew your little friend was a Protestant because one day you didn't see her any more because she went to the other school. You knew the kids next door were Protestants because they threw stones at you and bawled a song about King Billy being a gentleman. And you knew that pianos were Catholic because Protestants didn't have them in their houses. You went to the school marked out for you, and there they taught you that Protestants were all right to be going on with, but when the big sorting out came, they'd be going down and you'd be going up. She dwelled on these things. And, for a long time, she held on to her priestly vocation, nipping next door to her great-aunt to give her absolution when she had nothing better to do.
She has no interest in religion now. So far as she is concerned, the Catholic Thing, as she calls it, began or encouraged her predilection for self-absorption. "As a little girl, I was told to examine my conscience," she says. You are supposed to confess. To own. You explore the innermost resources of your heart and look at what is dark. You think about what has gone wrong and how you can make it right. "A lot of Catholics say they grew up oppressed by a sense of sin, and to a certain extent I would go along with that. Sin is inside. Guilt is out there. But with a sense of sin there is also a sense of redemption and of transformation, of working of the past. A sense of the active construction of self, I think. So if this is dinned into you as a child, you get the idea that life can change. You're not just stuck with yourself."
That she might break the mould of a long, distaff line, bounded by the northern, working-class limitations of home, hearth and mill, was also her mother's ambition for her. The only change in living memory to the prospects of women in Derbyshire villages was the postwar demise of the textile industry, swiftly followed by the pungent possibilities of the pickle factory. It wasn't that her mum had a career for their Ilary all mapped out, more that she let her daughter know that it was all right to want something different from her own narrow existence. To this end, she determined Ilary should go to the posh convent school where they dressed up the girls in collars and ties like pretend boys, and purported to educate them towards a life in the world at large. It seemed like a good idea at the time. There was one particularly heady moment when her mother was prepared to sacrifice Ilary's beauty on the altar of better things. She took her boldly to the head nun and brightly suggested they cut her hair off. Just to make her a better bet, you understand.
At school, Mantel found nothing to admire. It all seemed silly and trivial, a sentence to be served during which time she would be ridiculed and brow-beaten and from which she could exclude herself, in her capacity of Little Miss Neverwell, and take to her sickbed. Schooldays were about feeling foolish and learning to survive repression through the simple expedient of contempt. You just decide to despise it all. For this she had an excellent teacher in her mother who, having separated from Ilary's dad and taken up with the lodger, became the focal point of village gossip and ostracism. Mantel observed with admiration her mother's Snow Queen reaction to nosy parkers and abusers, and cultivated the same aloofness in herself. She treated with contempt people who asked about her family, then learned to extend that contempt. She believed that what is important in this life lay elsewhere, an elsewhere she had read about in books, and that she would get to one day.
She must keep a steady eye on things, not be pushed around by other people's judgments, be different, be untouched by.
But the back, as they say, is always as broad as the front. The proof of Mantel's studied intimacy with ambiguity is clanking about downstairs, preparing lunch for us. Her husband, a man who would not look out of place seated on a white horse and carrying a lance with a flag on it, has been central to her life since schooldays. The archaic word "cleave" springs to mind when you see them together. They met and they cleaved to each other. In fact, they have been married twice, which Mantel prefers not to explain at the moment for fear of being pursued as some kind of a relationship expert before she has done what she calls "proper remembering" and written a book about it. Suffice it to say, their alliance survived a divorce. More importantly, it has survived endometriosis and all the pain, sadness, confusion and anger that go with it. As the conversation turns in that difficult direction, he maintains a watchful silence, the paragon spouse who never indicates by yawn or sigh that he has heard you out on this one a dozen times and more. This is Mantel's personal crusade. She can do no other.
Nobody in her right mind wants to trumpet to the world the story of her insides, but Little Miss Neverwell never was well, nor could she resist a story with strong feeling and a historic undertow. The crux of the matter will be familiar to any woman who was young in the 1970s and watched her GP write "career girl", "highly strung" and "too thin" on her case notes. It happened to me, it happened to most of my contemporaries. It happened to Hilary Mantel. She told the doctor she was in pain, and he told her it was all in her mind. She was a pretty girl, thin as Twiggy, a law student, a bit above herself. A perfect candidate for dismissal. Psychosomia was born in 1972. Then, doctors thought they were being frightfully advanced if they could spot a mental element to physical disease. Uppity females brought it on themselves. Give them Valium and send them packing. From the vantage point of our maturity, we can easily see how it happened, how they didn't bother with any diagnostic procedure beyond the knee jerk of the medical culture of the time. We can even sympathise with the useless sods.
"I know the grim reaper stands at their shoulders at an angle to their endeavours," Mantel says elegantly. "But this was misogyny."
"We have no idea how much men hate us," I bat back. "How Germaine!"
"Yes," she replies tartly, "and what an indecent thing to say with a man at the table!"
But it's true, she goes on while I grovel and abase myself, and if you don't believe it, go to a cricket match and listen to men talking about their wives and girlfriends, and see what you think. How few people follow this prescription, she says. The tone of voice, the malignity, the aren't we all men together and aren't women silly and don't we have to give in to them and don't we resent it? Try it and see. And you thought you were just filling in the scorecard? Ha!
By the time her illness was diagnosed as endometriosis, it was too late. Too late for the life she might have chosen. Her endocrine system was shot, the disease was chronic, she was infertile and, lest insult failed to follow injury, she ballooned from her natural Twiggy-self to a woman who wears clothes in sizes she didn't know existed. And, yes, she is very angry about it. People say to her, "You're really angry, aren't you?" allying themselves to today's politically correct disapproval of the emotion, as though it were something militantly negative and destructive, something a proper person would have grown out of by now, or at least have the grace to repress or deny.
And perhaps she might be less angry had the situation changed very much. A few weeks ago, she wrote an article in the Guardian giving her views on the subject and has since received communications from young women currently in receipt of the "It's all in your mind" diagnosis, plus a missive from a retired woman doctor advising her not to be such a whinger. How can she leave it alone, "go on with her life", as the arch-guardians of banality phrase it? "I am not putting up an anti-doctor diatribe," she says. "I am merely saying there is an alternative way of thinking that does not involve supporting and colluding with colleagues who have made mistakes. You can't enforce it, but you have to try. And if that makes them think back through their entire lives, then so much the better."
She has a good doctor now, one of those chaps who listens to you and says, "If you find anything interesting on the net, be sure and let me know." Which makes a refreshing change from the ones who go all sarky if you take an intelligent interest in what ails you and inquire where you got your medical degree. And then again, had she not been chronically ill, she would probably never have become a writer, it being an enterprise you can conduct from the sanctuary of your sickbed if you have to. Illness, she says, does concentrate the mind. It restricts your choices rather as lack of education or lack of money does. You marshal your energy, cram in as much as you can while you feel well, against the likelihood of feeling not so hot in the future. You can cope. In her case, to the effect of securing herself a serious place in the history of English literature. This is entirely comprehensible to me. I have often noticed that people with debilitating or chronic illnesses seem to have more psychic energy than anyone else. I had imagined it was a compensatory gift, but of course it isn't. It's a pragmatic decision you can make if you have two brain cells to rub together. The big thwart, the loss of the choice of motherhood, is a more complicated struggle, because it involves instinct - and instincts, as Mantel has discovered, are "kind of ghosts".
You know intellectually that you are never going to have children, but you don't know it all through. Mantel was always one of those women who shopped and cooked as though for an imaginary tribe, a meal for two would be extended to accommodate the possibility of visitors turning up out of the blue. That was the rationalisation. She lived in houses with umpteen rooms. What was it all for but the children who would be coming?
There seemed to be no end to it, particularly since ghost children never grow up and leave home. And then the ghosts just dropped into place. She gave up two houses, huge shopping lists and living life as if, as if, as if... Giving Up The Ghost draws the line, ends a section, done that, story over. "It is essential," she says, "for a writer to know when the chapter is finished." She calls it The Clean Slate, but it's not really about getting a clean slate, it's about the exploration of the idea of a clean slate.
"In my kitchen now," she says with smug satisfaction, "there is no storage space."
· Giving Up The Ghost, by Hilary Mantel, is published by Fourth Estate on May 8 at £16.99.
