I went to Hilary Mantel’s memorial service at Southwark Cathedral last week. Sir Mark Rylance and Ben Miles, who both played her hero Thomas Cromwell, did readings and there were memories from her friends and family. Two things emerged: Mantel the feminist and Mantel the muse. They are the same thing: women writers loved her because she showed us the possibilities of art, and the importance of manners. (She had great manners). Thankfully, the priest didn’t stay on long: Mantel and the patriarchy are at odds, and, genial though he was, I scowled at him.
Mantel was self-created. She had nothing but a gift and the hunger to pursue it to the end. Her schoolfriend, Anne Preston, described the summoning of it: they read Shakespeare together on the hearthrug and went to Stratford to watch plays. There was “violence and volatility” in Anne’s house and “underlying tension” in Hilary’s. The lodger Jack Mantel became her mother’s lover, and her father moved out — but “with great delicacy and intuitive teenage wisdom we chose never to refer to them”. They made, instead, a world of happiness and words. What is it like, I thought, to have 12-year-old Mantel as your teacher, as she is learning things herself? And who was the devil squatting on her bed?
