Hilary and her husband, Gerald, came into my life nine years ago, yet it feels as though I’ve always known them. It was the autumn of 2013 at the Royal Shakespeare Company rehearsal rooms on Clapham High Street in south-west London. I had been cast to play Thomas Cromwell in the stage adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and the company had met for a read-through. I had devoured the novels earlier that year and now, somewhat starstruck, I approached Hilary, who was sitting – as she so often did – with Gerald close by. I told her that her stories had made me rethink what it meant to be English. She absorbed this with a genial “Oh”, accompanied by a nod, a smile and a look into the middle distance. Gerald did likewise with a kind neutrality. We said little else that day, but from that point on Hilary became a lifeline. There wasn’t much opportunity to talk in rehearsals. Time was short, and in those early days, being new to the process, Hilary was not entirely sure of her place in the rehearsal-room hierarchy. We soon discovered that the best way to communicate was by email.
The first thing Hilary ever wrote to me was: “Dear Ben, are you OK?”
This would be her opener each time we met over the years of our friendship and working life. Those three small words are a testament to her unending kindness. It was never a general inquiry, always a precise question. There was an intensity, a specificity to her concern for your wellbeing. Hilary could place a unique kind of bespoke benevolence in the hearts of anyone she came across. Whole acting companies were lifted by her passion for the plays, her wit and her delight in seeing the characters she had lived with in the solitude of her writing room for so many years made flesh before her eyes. I saw a much-lauded, well seasoned actor reduced to tears as a consequence of Hilary’s discreet, perfectly timed and exquisitely phrased offer of praise. She knew what made people tick, and she knew the power of words.
In that same initial email to me, Hilary went on to say: “Please let me help with anything I can.” Her willingness to encourage and enable was the foundation of the following near-decade of our collaboration. What moved me most about Hilary was her generosity of spirit. To her, the authorship of Cromwell’s narrative never meant the ownership of it. She saw herself only as a custodian of the stories. Her knowledge, vast in scope, and her indisputable genius were matched by her humility and openness to anyone who shared an insight or voiced a query. Such as this:
Dear Hilary, Could you help with a few details on the state of things before our story begins, please? In scene 1 of Wolf Hall, we meet our hero having returned from the north to Cardinal Wolsey’s palace at York Place. I wonder what might be the kind of things turning over in Thomas’s mind on his long, damp journey back from Yorkshire to London?
Her reply read: “Gerald’s contribution: ‘He is inventing the M1.’” There then followed a 1,000-word response. This degree of support, this warm welcome into her creative universe, never diminished, only increased over the years.
From the very beginning of my time with Thomas Cromwell, I had taken photographs of places and things that I felt had some resonance with his story. My brother, the photographer George Miles, soon joined me on this journey. George and I had fashioned a booklet containing some of the photographs we had taken so far. We decided to show it to Hilary. From that point on, a three-way collaboration began between us. We would visit castles, palaces, libraries and ruins: Hilary with her notebook, George and I with our cameras. While writing The Mirror and the Light, Hilary would send us extracts in early draft. Some might contain passages inspired by our photographs or the observations I had made about Cromwell in performance. It gladdened me so much to see this union of kindred spirits made manifest in the book the three of us created together, The Wolf Hall Picture Book – the last of hers to be published in her lifetime. I know I speak for George when I say that we have lost a dear friend; a close ally and a partner in fun in our collective quest for the weird, the unseen, the otherness of things.
Hilary has joined that otherness, where she so often lingered happily. I miss her greatly. It was an immeasurable gift to have known her and worked alongside her. In the heavy days following Hilary’s death, I found solace in this message from her during our time at the RSC: “Though officially in Devon, I am really in Stratford. I take a reading from the fingertips of my right hand and don’t so much see as sense how things are. On the visible spectrum, and in the ordinary sense, I’ll be back next week for [the show on] Wednesday night. Keep on communicating. Words welcome, but thoughts transcribed.”
Thoughts sent. Thanks given.
