A man called Jack moved into a young Hilary Mantel’s house – and her mother’s bed

I’m remembering all over again the books my stepfather brought into the house when he arrived in our lives. I was seven or eight, the eldest child of three, and I already had a mother and a father, a family that seemed to need no supplementation, but my mother thought differently. First, Jack Mantel came as a visitor, then he moved in, and his possessions, books included, arrived by degrees from his mother’s house.

When Jack arrived at the family home, Hilary Mantel’s father Henry did not move out.Credit: Andrew Testa/The New York Times

The books were tattered, brown-spotted. They did not seem cared for, or read, or to have anything to do with Jack in particular. But in gleaming repair were the steel bars and weights he used to exercise. They chimed like bells when he lifted them, and his breathing – a specialised system of grunts and gasps, which helped him bear the poundage – rolled through the house and out into the street. He had a stack of magazines banded together, with black-and-white photographs of other men with big muscles. The magazine was called Health & Strength. Both these things were in short supply in our house.

When Jack arrived, my father Henry did not move out. Jack was not tall but he was a solid and vehement individual and my father’s body was about as thick as one of Jack’s legs. Jack occupied my mother’s bed and the back of our house, the kitchen and the glass lean-to, puffing and blowing, clanking the weights and trundling through from the street with the black, greasy parts of broken-down cars.

Meanwhile, my father went meekly to his clerical job. He came home, occupied the front of the house, played his jazz records and read his library books. I read them too, whether they were suitable for me or not.

In these circumstances, a child cannot maintain loyalty unaided. It was only a matter of time before I peered into the boxes of Jack’s books. Many of them were textbooks of electrical engineering, yellow and impenetrable. Jack didn’t go to the library. It would have been unlike him to have a ticket for anything, especially a public institution revered by right-thinking people. He hated the BBC, run as it was by snivelling establishment lackeys; I thought for years that “Dimbleby” was a swear word.

A number of the books in Jack’s boxes were Sunday school prizes, awarded to unknown persons. I had learnt about Sunday school from reading Tom Sawyer. Catholics didn’t have it. I thought then, and still do, that there were nooks and crannies of the faith that the Pope didn’t want explored, though if there had been an RC version, I’d have attended it faithfully till I was 18, just to get me out of the house at weekends. Jack, of course, belonged to no religion. The Holy Trinity was nothing but another scheme to fleece the man in the street.

When I was 11, we moved away and changed our name, left my father behind and became, to outward view, a normal family.

HILARY MANTEL

Some of Jack’s books made it out of the boxes and on to a shelf. There was Universal Knowledge, a one-volume encyclopaedia published in the 1930s; the later parts of the alphabet had dropped out, so it was less than it claimed to be. Perhaps it was Jack who brought the disintegrating copy of Enquire Within Upon Everything, the domestic reference book published in many editions since 1856.

I do not know the date of ours, but the advice had an Edwardian flavour. I dwelt for hours on the section called “Etiquette” and the section called “Poisons”. I liked best the advice on leaving visiting cards, which seemed to me mandarin-like and very particular, a distinguished thing to know; I also cherished those poisons that had no effective antidote, and inevitably led, after 48 hours of cruel and pointless suffering, to “convulsions and death”.

When I was 11, we moved away and changed our name, left my father behind and became, to outward view, a normal family. Jack even got a library ticket. He only took out science fiction. I looked into them and found the stories devoid of human interest. Unfair, I know. I have never given the genre a chance. It brings to my mind the chink of the weights and the smell of oil and grime.

Jack was still a library-goer in his 60s, when a heart attack carried him off. In retirement – enforced on him early by a health crisis – he had taken to watercolour painting. His character had softened, although he became agitated and indignant when the library lady dared to recommend titles to him. His books were his private affair, and she should stamp them without intruding; that was his view.

Jack and I never had a conversation, about books or anything else, till a short time before his death. I think he read the first of my novels to be published, though none after that. It was characteristic of him that, once he started a book, he finished it, however much he despised it.

He liked seeing my name in print, and I don’t think it was just because it was his name, too. I think it was, perversely, because he was proved wrong: the literary career, if no other, was open to talents, and in the airy world of Dimblebies I had cut loose and floated free.

Edited extract from A Memoir of My Self (Hachette) by Hilary Mantel, out now.

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