Childhood Reclaimed: On Hilary Mantel’s "Learning to Talk"

Hilary Mantel | Learning to Talk: Stories | Henry Holt and Co. | 2022 | 176 pages

You remember a fragment of childhood horror. You’re on the day camp bus, and your seatmate decides to punch you, hard, in the thigh. It is unprovoked. You turn toward the window, blinking in the sunlight, stunned into silence.

No one captured this you better than Hilary Mantel. She could dip into the protean inner monologue of any human being—her characters, herself, and by extension her readers—and pin down the thoughts that attend a moment in progress. Her work preserves life unfolding, making it possible for you to revisit and decipher what happened. “Stories transmute into other stories; although you don’t know this when you write them, they turn out to be rehearsals, interim reports,” she wrote in a new preface to her short story collection, Learning to Talk, whose first U.S. edition was published this summer.  

The collection dwells in stories of youth, a stage of life that haunted Mantel’s clear-eyed prose from her early pieces to the Wolf Hall trilogy, which brought her acclaim overdue. Consider, for instance, her searching London Review of Books essay on Blake Morrison’s As If, a book about the 1993 murder of a toddler by a pair of ten-year-old boys. Or spend time with a group of schoolgirls in her 1995 novel, An Experiment in Love. Of course, there’s the opening scene of Wolf Hall, in which young Thomas Cromwell is beaten down by his father. More explicitly than those works, Learning to Talk features childhoods drawn from Mantel’s own. “All the tales arose out of questions I asked myself about my early years,” she explains. “I cannot say that by sliding my life into a fictional form I was solving puzzles—but at least I was pushing the pieces about.”

Let’s establish the nonfiction that animates the collection, as Mantel herself does, before poking around in her fictitious renderings. Mantel grew up amid “soot-blackened textile mills,” and “streets lined by small cold terraced houses” in Northern England. This was England in the 1950s and 1960s: studded with industrial towns and villages and saturated with Protestant and Catholic tensions, where “the first thing you learned about anyone was their religion,” and where everyone was “policed by gossip.” Scandalmongers could not have designed a scenario more intriguing than what Mantel encountered at home. “[W]hen I was about seven, my mother moved her lover into our house,” she writes. Mantel’s father stayed there, too, she tells us. But after four years of this arrangement, mother, lover, and children moved out, bearing a new name, the lover’s surname, Mantel; his first name was Jack.

You acclimate, but mostly you absorb. Children and adolescents meander across Learning to Talk’s seven stories, which are populated by siblings, schoolmates, acquaintances, parents, relatives, neighbors, dogs, and the occasional ghost. These young people are keen observers—so keen that their observations lodge in their minds as vivid memories. They can play anything back years later like archival footage that retains all sensory details, including sense of self. Mantel knew that she possessed this skill, not just for recollecting but for reviving: “As I say, ‘I tasted,’ I taste, and as I say, ‘I heard,’ I hear: I am not talking about a Proustian moment, but a Proustian cine-film,” she writes in the collection’s last story, “Giving Up the Ghost,” which is excerpted from her 2003 memoir of the same name.

It’s you as a child brought to life by you as an adult. Mantel gives her characters the same impressive access to their pasts. In the collection’s third story, “Curved Is the Line of Beauty,” the unnamed narrator jumps back into her “middle childhood” years, the atmosphere still palpable. “If the speeding driver caught you at the wrong moment—let us say, at the midpoint between monthly confessions—then your dried-up soul could snap from your body like a dead twig,” she quips. This story emerges like a charcoal rubbing of Mantel’s biography, an impression that smudges facts onto a blank page before fiction takes hold of the pencil.

The narrator of this story, her toddler brothers, her mother, and her mother’s lover (whose name is Jack) are making a daytrip to Jack’s friend, Jacob, in Birmingham, England. Along the way we receive an exquisite profile of Jack: “Jack had sunburned skin and muscles beneath his shirt. He was your definition of a man, if a man was what caused alarm and shattered the peace.” She also describes Jack’s car with a startling attack: “The car’s character was idle, vicious and sneaky. If it had been a pony you would have shot it.” At Jacob’s, our narrator meets Tabby, Jacob’s niece, and the pair ditch the adults to trespass in a junkyard. It’s fun until you’re lost. Do you panic or perhaps turn to prayer? The narrator’s fist strikes Tabby’s reverent mouth.

Throwing punches and stones can be instinctual activities; some children might have a knack for ostracizing, too. Liam, the eight-year-old frequently sick (like Mantel was as a child) protagonist of “King Billy Is a Gentleman,” observes this in his classmates: “They were wild children, with scabbed knees, and hearts full of fervor, and intolerant mouths and hard eyes; they had rites, they had rules, and they made me an outsider in their tribe.” These lines are drawn in some pulsing corner of the mind where much darker or stranger ideas that you’d never act on, nor even say aloud, simmer. A sister briefly visualizes drowning her younger brother in the story “Destroyed,” and in the title tale, a teenager en route home from elocution lessons imagines she’s a spy shopping on the black market. It’s the mal à l’aise feeling, that foreign expression which rolled off your tongue in French class. The phrase translates to “ill at ease,” but evokes some indefinable discomfort. Mantel’s characters are ordinary people and her scenes take place in plain sight, but in her tone lies danger. Something wrong is there even if you’re all right.

What entraps the reader is the deceptive depth of Mantel’s sentences. They might look unassuming, approachable, but don’t take them for granted: Together they will knock you down. “All I owned was the space behind my ribs, and that too was a scarred battleground, the site of sudden debouchments and winter campaigns,” Liam thinks in “King Billy Is a Gentleman.” Or here is the title story’s nameless narrator on her daydream-walk home, feeling listless and somewhat out of place: “There should be support groups, like a twelve-step program, for young people who hate being young.” Mantel pinpoints what it is like to be a certain kind of young person (bright, thinking, attuned to your interior and exterior landscapes), or in some ways every young person—recognizing where you stand among peers, seeing through the bluster and baloney of adults.

During the first half of the family’s visit to Birmingham in “Curved Is the Line of Beauty,” Jacob watches the narrator draw stick figures and is impressed. Mantel’s avatar lurks, then pounces: “I whispered, ‘I am nine,’ as if I wanted to alert him to the true state of affairs.” The boundary between character and author remains porous. Mantel as herself issues this corrective during a chess game with her father, a scene in the last story, “Giving Up the Ghost,” the unmediated memoir excerpt that appears in the collection. Mantel “castles” her father—the only instance where two pieces, king and rook, can move at once—and, riveted, he asks, “did you know you were allowed to do that?” As ever she contemplates the answer: “The truth is between yes and no. I am eight and not such a fool as I appear.”