Hilary Mantel 1952-2022

The terribly early death of Hilary Mantel at 70 robs the British cultural scene of a huge shining light perhaps at the zenith of her formidable powers. Born in Derbyshire and brought up as a Roman 

Catholic, Mantel had lost her father by the age of 11, and her faith by the age of 12; she discussed her religious views in her 2003 memoir, Giving Up The Ghost, claiming religion had left a permanent mark on her.

...the real cliché, the sense of guilt. You grow up believing you are wrong and bad. And for me, because I took what I was told really seriously, it bred a very intense habit of introspection and self-examination and a terrible severity with myself. So that nothing was ever good enough. It’s like installing a policeman, and one moreover, who keeps changing the law. “

In a 2013 interview with The Telegraph, Mantel said, “I think that nowadays the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people. ….. When I was a child, I wondered why priests and nuns were not nicer people. I thought that they were amongst the worst people I knew.”

Hilary at 9

Mantel also partly attributed to the early onslaught from religion, her preoccupation with unseen reality; she never questioned the existence of ‘the next world’. When she was tiny, she lived with her grandmother whose sister lived next-door and whose nephew lived nearby in his deceased parents’ house and every day her grandmother and sister would sit by the fire like bookends, and gossip about the living and the dead with no distinction made between the two. The small Hilary listened and absorbed. “So, although I knew Martin and Harriet were dead, I felt as if they were barely dead.” "Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past and I felt a very intimate connection with it."

Gerald MacEwen with Hilary 

During her twenties, Mantel suffered a debilitating and serious illness. Initially diagnosed as a psychiatric sickness, she was hospitalised and treated with antipsychotic drugs which caused her huge suffering and deterred her for several years from seeking medical help. Finally, when living in Botswana in her twenties, she pored over medical textbooks and diagnosed that she was probably suffering from a form of endometriosis, which was eventually confirmed in London and which, at that time, was treated by surgery, which she endured, and which caused her a surgical menopause at 27 years of age. Thus, children were never an option. Endometriosis can be described as menstruation run amok. The cells in the lining of the womb that usually bleed during a period, instead grow in other parts of the body – the pelvis, the bladder, the bowel- and bleed there causing huge pain and leaving scar tissue. The distress from the endometriosis caused her and her husband, Gerald MacEwen, married in 1973, to divorce in 1981 though they remarried less than two years later. He eventually gave up his career as a geologist to become Mantel's business manager.

A younger Thomas Cromwell

Once her true condition was known, Hilary was put on medication which caused her hitherto slight figure to balloon permanently, and she suffered for the rest of her life from the attitudes and cliches associated with overweight people whom everyone knows “are lazy, undisciplined slobs” as she noted drily. And this illness and its consequences, remained both the curse of Mantel’s life and also the one she worked into the very being of her art. “Her magnum opus is made of blood and female bodies.” Her magnum opus is the Wolf Hall trilogy and Thomas Cromwell, its hero and villain, a giant character in life and literature, had “a certain attentiveness to the female condition”. He visits, and pities, Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s Queen of over twenty years, who never gave birth [as required] to a son who lived, and thus who failed in her royal reproductive duties, and was consequently, confined to a distant castle, replaced by a younger fertile Anne Boleyn. Catherine gradually succumbs to an internal cancer, rotting from inside the abdomen while Anne meanwhile, destroyed by Cromwell, after producing only a daughter, loses a son by miscarriage which Mantel portrays as trailing blood on the palace floor.

Anne Boleyn.
Used flirtation, faith and fertility to catch the King 

In her first two Wolf Hall books, Mantel invents a Cromwell who is courteous, even tender at times, rather belying his early brutal life as a street urchin with a violent father. He is usually logical, rational, but doing his best to serve an irrational, narcissistic, regal ego. He wants to live, after all. However, in the first two sentences of The Mirror and The Light, Mantel has Cromwell walking away from the decapitation of Anne Boleyn and wondering idly about a second breakfast. He is hugely powerful, having engineered Anne’s death, watched the head fall and the blood flow, but he is also so supremely confident and bien dans sa peau, to consider the treat for himself of a second breakfast as he leaves the execution site. Mantel thus sets the scene for his final chapter and the third book, demonstrating her skill in two lines!

Her preoccupation with death and the next world appears in others of Mantel’s book. For instance, in The Giant, O’Brien, Mantel explores and contrasts the lives of two real-life 18th century figures, a freakishly tall Irish sideshow performer, O'Brien, and a Scottish scientist, Dr. Hunter, who is preoccupied with what happens at the moment of death; he is frustrated because he doesn’t know where the dead have gone nor how he can get them back. He was interested in resuscitation after apparent death and in suicides who sought death in the Thames.

Thomas Cromwell, all powerful statesman.

Mantel’s research was legendary; she took over ten years seeking facts and feelings in the mediaeval world and beyond, for the first of her Wolf Hall trilogy, for example. She sought, not to imagine her characters, but to see them, almost to inhabit them, and Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker pictures the indefatigable Hilary after her death, in the next world, busily finding and questioning the historical figures about whom she has written, to finally discover what actually happened at critical moments. She suggests that we readers can boast to those born in the future that we were alive at the time of Hilary Mantel! Larissa also suggests that if Britain were as grateful for her as it ought to be, there would be another funeral as magnificent as the one for the Queen, strangely, a sentiment I expressed to someone the day of Hilary’s death. However, there has been genuine, widespread, world-wide mourning online, on air and in print, expressing strong feelings of incalculable loss over the premature departure of this extraordinarily talented writer.

“There are not many writers who, like prophets, seize, melt down and reshape the archetypal stories of their people.” [ MacFarquhar. Sept 24, 2022. New Yorker.]

After receiving an honorary degree from 
University College, Dublin. 2016.

AWARDS

1987 The Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an article on Jeddah.

1989 The Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for Fludd.

1989 The Cheltenham Prize for Fludd.

1989 The Southern Arts Literature Prize for Fludd.

1992 The Sunday Express Book of The Year for A Place of Greater Safety.

1994 The Sunday Express Book of The Year for A Change of Climate.

1995 The Sunday Express Book of The Year for An Experiment in Love.

1996 The Hawthornden Prize for The Giant, O’Brien.

2006 Short-listed for Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Beyond Black.

2009 The Man Booker Prize for Fiction for Wolf Hall.

2009 Short-listed for the 2009 Costa Novel Award for Wolf Hall.

2010 The Inaugural Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction for Wolf Hall.

2010 Short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction for Wolf Hall

2012 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for Bring Up The Bodies.

2020 Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Mirror and The Light.

2021 The Walter Scott Prize for The Mirror and The Light.

REWARDS

2006 Awarded a C.B.E. 

2013 Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies were both adapted for the stage and performed

          by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon.

2014 Both plays transferred to the Aldwych in the West End after which they moved to Broadway.

2014 Awarded a D.B.E. becoming Dame Hilary.

2015 Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, adapted into a six-part mini-series on BBC 2.

 "The things you think are the disasters in your life, are not disasters really.

Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch,

a path, if only you can see it."

"I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered, stony-faced into

middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag, just in case."

An Everyday Life in Pictures

In Scotland, at the wedding of eldest grandson
and his Flora. Photo shows me in 
unaccustomed fascinator with son and bridegroom
on September 3rd, in glorious marquee.

 

Tried to place this below but Paddington refused.
Splendid current example of Kniffiti.
The latest kid on the block.

Me in the Abbey Gardens on September 14th

 

This splendid advertisement was on the wall 
at our Dunkeld hotel which was really
a hunting, shooting, fishing lodge, I think!
Not my sphere of interest or expertise, 
but aesthetically perfect in its appropriate setting.

Skinner Street by Reg Siger.
Recently bought from exhibition in the Cathedral

 

Skinner Street, September 2022.
Found Skinner Street and SO sad to see a
plethora of bins crowding the street.
This stretch was the only one unadorned.
Reg's version is much to be preferred.

Son and two friends walking the Pyrenean Way, the GR10,
begun two years ago; they returned to finish the job two
days after the wedding.

While my middle grandson and his girl are 
"travelling" first in the U.S. then in Asia.
Here he is pretending to climb El Cap.

And the honeymoon is in Brazil!

Meanwhile I do my early walks in the Abbey Gardens
where talented garden designers place silver with purple
blooms in aesthetic delight, 

...and I admire these pompom dahlias which
remind me strongly of my mother who
was besotted with dahlias and planted 
half of the garden with them each year.

Oops! Nearly left out the first bride of the family year. She has 
spent time with her wife, touring part of Scotland during 
early September.

Bury's Darkest Day

 

 

Mediaeval remains of Jews murdered by
a mob, Feb 6th, 1190. Found in ancient
well in Norwich, 2004.

I recently read a report of the finding of the remains of Jewish children and adults in an ancient, disused well in Norwich. The discovery had, in fact, been made in 2004 during the construction of a shopping centre, and research on the remains of the 17 people revealed evidence of a bloody mediaeval pogrom. Eventual radiocarbon dating analyses have revealed that the bodies were thrown into the well often head-first, between 1161 and 1216. Historical records show that there was an antisemitic massacre in 1190 on February 6th when all the Jews in Norwich were taken from their houses, and some from the castle where they had taken refuge and murdered. This item caught my eye because of the date. I had recently learned that an unbelievable 57 Jews had been murdered here in Bury on 19 March, 1190. The dates of the two massacres were clearly not coincidental.

Mediaeval Anglo-Jewish deeds.

Jewish people had first come to England with William the Conqueror from Normandy where there was a sizeable population, by 1066 and they had financed the castle and cathedral building of William through which he cemented his control over the country. Jews were often rich because they practised usury; the lending of money at interest, something forbidden to Christians, and many powerful men financed castles and wars this way. Jews were outside the feudal system, could not own land and could not bear arms but their legal facility to practice usury aroused much envy from the general population. They were not party to the laws of the land but were dependent on the protection of the king which also meant that they were subject to his every whim. In all probability, Jews in Britain never felt secure; there are many examples in mediaeval times of deeds and debts, legally documented, signed and sealed, being seized and destroyed by interested parties. Although Britain's Jews were originally centred on London, in the 1100s, many moved away with some settling in East Anglia, including in Bury St Edmunds where the siting of the large, prosperous Abbey would have provided countless opportunities for usury.

Mediaeval view of Moyses Hall with
arched windows and gables intact
before the collapse of the east wall
and subsequent re-building 
in 1803-4.

The Jewish quarter of Bury was centred on Hatter Street, then bluntly labelled, Heathenman’s Street. Between Hatter Street and Whiting Street, was a stretch of the present Abbeygate Street, entitled Spicer

Row in mediaeval times and was the centre of the town’s highly popular spice trade. The spice trade, importing, retailing, wholesaling, was one of the very few trades open to Jews and there were almost certainly Jewish businesses in Spicer Row in what was part of the Jewish ghetto. It is likely there was a Jewish Synagogue in Bury, and the case has been made for Moyses Hall; a building of the appropriate period and size though the proximity of a nearby pig market makes this less likely. There are numerous early references to Moyses Hall [Moses’ Hall] as the Jewish House or the Jewish Synagogue and it was built in 1180 during a period of great prosperity and stability for the Jews of Bury St Edmund. Fronting on to the marketplace, Moyses Hall could certainly have been an ideal hub for Jewish businesses and a large expensive stone building, in an age of wattle and daub, would have provided security for financial dealings. However, Robert Butterworth, in his Not Saint Edward’s Men, makes a plausible case for the synagogue being situated in the Jewish quarter, in Heathenman’s Street, in the present Numbers 25-26 which is on high ground [a requirement] and has evidence of an old well in the basement which would have been a necessary source for ritual washing. It was also later the site of the chantry of St Robert; Robert was a choirboy reputedly murdered by the Jews in 1181. Wherever there were settlements of 

The narrative of Little St Robert of Bury.

Jews, they were almost automatically, and falsely, accused of many such child murders. Although the boy was never canonised, he became known, popularly, as Little St Robert with his tomb in the Abbey attracting many worshippers and with incidental income from the devout faithful, for the Abbey. Butterworth feels that the siting of the chantry of Little St Robert on the site of the previous Synagogue, might well have appealed to the mediaeval clerical mind!

Coronation of Richard the Lionheart.

In 1189 Richard the Lion-Heart came to the throne and Jews were turned away from his coronation banquet in London “under the apprehension that they would bewitch the king”; and a number were killed the same night in riots. During the following year when soldiers were being recruited to accompany the king on his forthcoming Crusade, religious fervour was high and there were more anti-Jewish riots and rampages with many murdered in King’s Lynn, Norwich, Stamford and York immediately before the Bury episode. 

On St. Edmunds Day on November 20 1189 the new king visited his friend, Abbott Samson, in the Abbey and spoke of his imminent Crusade to the Holy Land to vanquish the infidel. In Lent, when normally antisemitism was high, a sermon was preached in the Abbey church, probably by Samson, on “vanquishing the infidel.” The local population took this to mean, the Jews and a riot ensued. The Jews, probably unofficially warned, fled Heathenman Street for the normal sanctuary of the Abbey granted by William the Sacrist who was on good terms with Bury’s Jews. He had allowed them free access to the Abbey and given permission for the Jews to keep their valuables in the Abbey’s treasury. But on this Palm Sunday when the town was engaged in anti-Jewish rioting, Abbot Samson denied them entry and 57 were killed in a part of what are now the Abbey Gardens. Soon after this terrible event, on 9 October 1190, Abbott Sansom obtained from his friend, King Richard, permission to banish all the Jews from Bury St Edmunds. Normally, during a formal banishment, all belongings, houses, land owned by Jews, were confiscated by the king and this happened in Bury.

The central teardrop symbol in the Memorial
Peace Garden

On or near the killing field now stands the lovely Memorial Peace Garden, with a shiny sculpted teardrop, a universal symbol of sorrow, in the centre. There are 57 cobblestones embedded round the edge of the garden to commemorate the 57 local Jews murdered here in 1190. These are intended as a reflection of the Jewish tradition of placing stones on a cairn to remember the dead. Most appropriately, the local Holocaust Memorial Day service has been held here every 27^th January since 2001 although, interestingly, the 57 commemorative cobblestones and the inclusion of the memorial status of so many Jewish deaths in the riot of 1190, has apparently only been here since January 2015. It is a beautiful peaceful glade, ripe for meditation.

The Bodleian Bowl
A bronze alms vessel, found in the River Lark
in 1696. Probably stolen and then discarded
during the 1190 massacre.
It bears the name of Joseph Sancto of Bury.
He was the son of Yechial Sancto, Bury's 12th century Rabbi.

Star of David, one of two in the Norman tower and traditionally
said to be there because local Jews contributed to the 
re-building of the tower, 1330-1380, after a disastrous riot and fire. However
there were no Jews living in Bury during this period.

Bibliography.

Robert Butterworth. Not Saint Edward's Men. 2004.

Memorial Peace Garden and the Jews of Medieval Bury St Edmunds. Civic pamphlet. Rob Lock 2015.

 

Bonnie Flora

Space at a premium.

 The second wonderful family wedding this year giving me two of the best weekends of my life! And this second, in Scotland, involved a variety of travel adventures. Planes cancelled; road traffic at a standstill; trains also cancelled or so late that connections were missed! I travelled with my son on the Royal Caledonian Express and I was ridiculously excited at the thought. We did enjoy it, perhaps son David less than I as he hardly slept. But I was totally amazed at the lack of space; if each bunk was occupied, then two small, unopened cases filled the entire space available for the two occupants of the bunk beds should they step down! Behind a sliding door to a toilet, hung a tiny conglomeration of pipes and tubes proclaiming itself to be a shower. How? Where? We didn’t discover. I lay, enjoying the rhythm of the moving train [Left Euston at 9.15 pm; arrived Dunkeld at 6.01a.m.] and the background noise of the engine and the passage over the tracks but David less so, I think. I slept like the proverbial log!

The bridge at Dunkeld.
Tay House Hotel was opposite one side of this bridge.

When we alighted together with one grandson and his girl who had travelled without benefit of beds or cabin, it was to rural surroundings. Our hotels were obviously some distance away so we split, in a proposed race to Tay House, my destination, and as Dave and I were enjoying walking along, dragging small suitcases as we braced against the 8 degrees temperature in inadequate clothing, a car drew up, the driver asked where we were bound for and then uttered the sweetest sentence ever. “Would you like a wee lift?” We hastily, and joyfully, indicated that a wee lift would be most welcome and the lovely lady drove us across town to the hotel. It was next to the river with a pub and pub garden on one side, and a super hotel offering great cooking, on the other. In other words, in a perfect location. The little town, Dunkeld, turned out to be a lovely place, obviously used to tourists and visitors, with excellent coffee places, a bakery, a Californian wine merchant who sold his own wine grown in Napa, and two art galleries. Plus many other extras!!

White water rafting was available on Friday morning. Some
played golf; others got acquainted with Dunkeld; I visited an art gallery

I won’t list the activities engaged in or bore with details of a perfect wedding but have to claim that the long weekend was probably the best, or at least one of two or three, very best of my life. It was joyful, incredibly well-organised, had amazing catering with unlimited alcohol which seemed to be thrilling for many [though not for me!] and a large guest list of people who all seemed interesting and fun to be with. The humanist service in Murthly Castle chapel surprised and delighted. Rather differently from the usual church weddings I have attended, it was totally informal, with people clapping and whooping approval whenever so inclined. Mercifully no hymns but we did sing loudly and happily, Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World. The bride’s mother read an extract from Just William and I read the superb The Art of Marriage by Wilferd Arlan Peterson. I especially liked the exit; guests stood, edging the route away from the chapel in a single line and when the happy couple appeared, we all threw our handfuls of rose petals over them. Poetry!!

The rose petal-strewn post-ceremony walk

Murthly Castle chapel was magnificent.

The bride, Flora, a Metropolitan girl I would say, who has always lived in London, comes from a Scottish family hence the venue and the kilts on display! Both bride and groom love Scotland and one can see why with its stunning scenery and lovely people. Dunkeld is almost certainly a little town where people don’t even think of locking their doors! As she is now in Brazil and almost certainly won’t see this blog, I think I can mention that Flora is not only indeed bonnie beyond beautiful, but also tall and clever and simpatica! What a brilliant addition to our family!

No caption needed.

Instead of white-water rafting, a small group went to see the Beatrix Potter garden nearby which incidentally enabled me to refresh my memory about dear Beatrix. I had not realised the strong connection of the Potter family with the Dunkeld area. The gift shop was, in fact, so full of Peter Rabbit and Co, there was little room for non-Potter pots 'n' things!!

I went with my son for a lovely walk from the centre of Dunkeld; we were immediately into the most green and rural landscape and eventually came to the Cathedral with part of the roof demolished. In spite of that, its huge size means that weekly services are still held here; its size also reminds that there must have been huge wealth somewhere in the area to enable the building of such a huge structure. Perhaps something to do with the Duke of Atholl who seems to own thousands of local acres!! British landed gentry estates are large; Scottish are huge!

Dunkeld Cathedral.
Built of grey sandstone between 1260 and 1501.
Dedicated to St Columba.
Church of Scotland.

Dunkeld Larches. Near the Cathedral is one 275 year old
larch, survivor of the original five, introduced
into the Atholl estate and grown from seeds obtained in the Austrian
Tyrol in 1738.
Successive Dukes planted over 14 million larches on the Atholl estate over the
following century, on 10,500 acres of land too poor for farming.
The land was thus stabilised and the larches provide
an effective habitat for wildlife.