Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (John MacRae Books) by Hilary Mantel

Author:Hilary Mantel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2004-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Now that Grandad was retired, he had more time for testing me on spellings. First every day he oversaw my dinner, indulging me—take that piece of the loaf, it is what you prefer. Let’s see you eat this cake; this kind of cake is what we call a Savoy. My sad and nauseous days gave him the more excuse for ingenuity, carving an apple into slices, and laying it out on a plate, tempting and sugared.

But a day came when he felt his age, and mine too, and then he led me up the steep stair to the garret, a room whistling with cold. There were white planks underfoot, and standing in the middle of the room, under the skylight, was a rabbit hutch. And in it were books.

Their pages were crisp and sallow, nibbled at the edges by time, or perhaps by rabbits. Their covers, once green, burgundy, and navy blue, now inclined to the condition of black, so ancient and tarry that I thought it would come off on my fingers: not that I gave a bugger, excuse me Father for swearing. I wanted books like a vampire wants blood. My daddy, Henry, took me to the Hadfield library, where there was one bookcase for children, and I had read it upside down and inside out. I had read the books so hard that when I gave them back the print was faint and gray with exhaustion, and I thought that one day the librarian would notice how I had been depleting them and tear my ticket up.

My own bedroom at Brosscroft was a room where the sun shone, the only room in the house in which you were safe to put anything down without it being sucked into phantomland. Such books as we had were dumped there. Some had come to Jack in the course of his life: a set of yarns called Out with Romany, country lore and country life. Looking into it made me ask, was Hadfield the country, or the town? It seemed to occupy some no-man’s-land, some place not well-defined in any book. There were very few streets, but very few trees. There were no badgers, curlews, kestrels. There were starlings who settled, their group mind instructing them, with their private glamour which shone out when the sun lit their sequined wings. Scattering, startled, their beaks darting, they bobbed about like debutantes searching for the buffet; even the most hard-hearted women fed them, with crumbs ground from the heels of loaves.

I read Romany; I learned to love the hedgehog, and the ways of sneaky fox. I read the horrible, foxed, moldy volume of Tennyson, someone’s Sunday School prize: Mariana in the moated grange. I read Steps to Literature: Book Five. It was a small book, its pages yellow and decaying, its greasy cover stamped with the word “Specimen.” Look inside: the subtitle was “Readings on Europe.” It was a book of extracts. I read them all.

“In a certain village in La Mancha, there lived not long ago one of those old-fashioned gentlemen … .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.