Learning to Talk. Hilary Mantel

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       King Billy Is A Gentleman

      I cannot get out of my mind, now, the village where I was born, just out of the curl of the city’s tentacles. We were too close to the city for a life of our own. There was a regular train service – not one of those where you have to lie in wait and study its habits. But we did not like the Mancunians. ‘Urban, squat and packed with guile’ I suppose was our attitude; we sneered at their back-to-back accents and pitied their physiques. My mother, a staunch Lamarckian, is convinced that Mancunians have disproportionately long arms, as a result of generations of labour at the loom. Until (but this was later) a pink housing estate was slammed up, and they were transplanted in their hundreds, like those trees plucked up for Christmas whose roots are dipped in boiling water – well, until then we did not have much to do with people from town. And yet if you ask me if I was a country boy – no, I wasn’t that. Our huddle of stones and slates, scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues, had no claim on rural England, where there is morris dancing and fellowship and olde ale flowing. It was a broken, sterile place, devoid of trees, like a transit camp; and yet with the hopeless permanence that transit camps tend to assume. Snow stood on the hills till April.

      We lived at the top of the village, in a house which I considered to be haunted. My father had disappeared. Perhaps it was his presence, long and pallid, which slid behind the door in sweeps of draught and raised the heckles on the terrier’s neck. He had been a clerk by profession; crosswords were his hobby, and a little angling: simple card games, and a cigarette-card collection. He left at ten o’clock one blustery March morning, taking his albums and his tweed overcoat and leaving all his underwear; my mother СКАЧАТЬ