A few year later Affleck’s closed, and the whole district around it went to seed. It was taken over by pornographers, and those kinds of traders who sell plastic laundry baskets, dodgy electric fires and moulded Christmas novelties such as bouncing mince pies and whistling seraphim. The building itself was leased by a high-street clothing store, who traded briefly from its crumbling shell. I was long gone, of course, but I kept friends in the north, and had in my chain of acquaintances a Saturday girl who worked for the new occupiers. They only used the lower floors; from the second floor upwards, the building had been sealed. The fire doors had been closed and locked shut, the escalators had been removed, and the back staircases now ended in blind walls. But the staff were disturbed, said the Saturday girl, by noises from the bricked-in cavity above their heads: by footsteps, and by the sound of a woman screaming.
When I heard this I felt cold and felt sickness in the pit of my stomach, because I knew it was a true ghost story, as true as these things go. It had been no dizzy imp that came down from above and pulled buttons off the frocks, or walked them across the floor and mixed them in with the Jaeger. It was something staler, heavier, grossly sinister and perverse. But I only knew this in retrospect. When I looked back from, say, the age of twenty-three to the age of eighteen, I realised that, in those years, everything had been far worse than it seemed at the time.
The Clean Slate
About eleven o’clock this morning – after the nurses had ‘tidied her up’ as they put it, and she’d fixed her eye make-up – I sat down by my mother’s bed and coaxed her to do the family tree with me. Considering how self-centred she is, it worked out surprisingly well. She would like to write ‘VERONICA’ in the centre of the paper and strike lines of force running outwards from herself. But (although she thinks this would give you an accurate picture of the world) she does have a grasp on how these things are done. She has seen the genealogy of the Kings and Queens of England, their spurious portraits glowing by their names, stampsized and in stained-glass colours; their plaits of flaxen hair, their crude medieval crowns with gems like sucked sweets.
She has seen these, in the books she pretends to read. So she understands that you can also do a family tree for us, the poor bloody infantry.
The pictures by the names will be equally spurious. A woman once told me that there was no family so poor, when the last century ended, that they didn’t have their photographs taken. It might be true. In that case, somebody burned ours.
I began this enterprise because I wanted to find out something about my ancestors who lived in the drowned village. I thought it might provide a reason for my fear of water – one I could use to make people feel bad, when they advise me that swimming is good exercise for a person of my age. Then again, I thought it might be a topic I could turn into cash. I could go to Dunwich, I thought, and write about a village that slipped into the sea. Or to Norfolk, to talk to people who have mortgaged houses on the edge of cliffs. I could work it up into a feature for the Sunday press. They could send a photographer, and we could balance on the cliff edge at Overstrand, just one rusting wire between us and infinite blue light.
But Veronica was not interested in the submerged. She twitched at the ribbons at her bosom – still firm, by the way – and eased herself irritably against the pillows. The veins in her hands stood out, as if she had sapphires and wore them beneath the skin. She hardly listened to my questions, and said in a huffy way, ‘I really can’t tell you much about all that, I’m afraid.’
The people from the drowned village were on her father’s side of the family, and were English. Veronica was interested in matriarchies, in Irish matriarchies, and in reliving great moments in the life of matriarchies by repeating the same old stories: the jokes that have lost their punchlines, the retorts and witty snubs that have come unfastened from their origins. Perhaps I shouldn’t blame her, but I do. I distrust anecdote. I like to understand history through figures and percentages of these figures, through knowing the price of coal and the price of corn, and the price of a loaf in Paris on the day the Bastille fell. I like to be free, so far as I can, from the tyranny of interpretation.
The village of Derwent began to sink beneath the water in the winter of 1943. This was years before I was born. The young Veronica was no doubt forming up thoughts of what children she would have, and how she would make them turn out. She had white skin and green eyes and dyed her hair red with patent formulations. It didn’t really matter what man she married, he was only a vehicle for her dynastic ambitions.
Veronica’s mother – my maternal grandmother – was called Agnes. She came from a family of twelve. Don’t worry, I won’t give you a rundown on each one of them. I couldn’t, if I wanted to. When I ask Veronica to help me fill in the gaps, she obliges with some story that relates to herself, and then hints – if I try to bring her back to the subject – that there are some things best left unsaid.’There was more to that episode than was ever divulged,’ she would say. I did find out a few facts about the previous generation: none of them cheerful. That one brother went to prison (willingly) for a theft committed by another. That one sister had a child who died unchristened within minutes of birth. She was a daughter whose existence flickered briefly somewhere between the wars; she has no name, and her younger brother to this very day does not know of her existence. Not really a person: more like a negative that was never developed.
The village of Derwent didn’t die of an accident, but of a policy. Water was needed by the urban populations of Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham and Leicester. And so in 1935 they began to build a dam across the River Derwent. Ladybower was the dam’s name.
When Derwent was flooded it was already flattened, already deserted. But when I was a child I didn’t know this. I understood that the people themselves had left before the flood, but I imagined them going about their daily work till the last possible moment: listening out for a warning, something like an air-raid siren, and then immediately dropping whatever it was they were doing. I saw them shrugging into their stout woollen coats – buttoning in the children, tickling smiling chins – and picking up small suitcases and brown paper parcels, trudging with resigned Derbyshire faces to meeting points on the corner. I saw them laying down their knitting in mid-stitch, throwing a pea-pod half shelled into the colander: folding away the morning paper with a phrase half read, an ellipsis that would last their lifetimes.
‘Leicester, did you say?’ Veronica beamed at me. ‘Your Uncle Finbar was last seen in Leicester. He had a market stall.’
I shuffled my hospital armchair forward, across the BUPA contract carpet. ‘Your uncle,’ I said. ‘That’s my great-uncle.’
‘Yes.’ She can’t think why I quibble: what’s hers is mine.
‘What was he selling?’
‘Old clothes.’ Veronica chuckled knowingly. ‘So it was said.’
I didn’t rise to her bait. All I want from her is some dates. She likes to make mysteries and imply she has secret knowledge. She won’t say which year she was born and has told a blatant lie about her age to the admissions people, which could of course jeopardise her insurance claim. Also, I am conjoined to the same insurance scheme, and they might begin to wonder about me if they ever compare files and see that by their records my mother is only ten years older than me.
A man once told me that you can date women by looking at the backs of their knees. That delta of soft flesh and broken veins, he swore, it is the only thing that cannot lie.
‘They were a wild lot,’ Veronica said. ‘Your uncles. They were,’ she said, ‘you must remember, Irishmen.’
No, they weren’t. Irish, yes, I concede. But not wild, not nearly wild enough. They drank when they had money and prayed when they had none. They worked in the steamy heat of mills and when they knocked off shift and stepped outside, the cold gnawed through their clothes and cracked their bones like crazed china. You would have thought they would have bred, but they didn’t. Some had no children at all, others had j
ust one. These only children were precious, wouldn’t you think? But one failed to marry, and another spent much of his life in an asylum.
So far, so good: what sort of family do you expect me to come from? All-singing, all-dancing? You’d just know they’d be tubercular, probably syphilitic, certifiably insane, dyslexic, paralytic, circumcised, circumscribed, victims of bad pickers in identity parades, mangled in industrial machinery, decapitated by forklift trucks, dental cripples, sodomites, sent blind by measles, riddled with asbestosis and domiciled downwind of Chernobyl. I assume you’ve read my new novel, The Clean Slate. I was working on the first draft at the time I decided to tackle Veronica. I had the theory that our family was bent on erasing itself, through divorce, elective celibacy and a series of gynaecological catastrophes. ‘But I had children,’ Veronica said, bewildered. ‘I had you, didn’t I?’ Yes, Miss Bedjacket, you bet you did.
Probably the one thing you couldn’t guess would be that I come from the drowned village. As a child I could hardly realise it myself. There is such a thing as portent-overload. Of course, I had the whole thing wrong. I misunderstood, and was prone to believe any rubbish people put my way.
Suppose that in Pompeii they had been given an alert: time, but not much of it. They would have left – what – their oil jars, their weaving shuttles, their vessels of wine, dashed and dripping? I can’t really picture it. I have never been to Italy. Suppose they had taken the warning and cleared out. That was how I thought Derwent would be: a Pompeii, a Marie Celeste.
I thought that the waters would rise, at first inch by inch, and creep under each closed door. And then swill about, aimless for a while, contained by linoleum. The first thing to go would be the little striped mats that people dotted about in those days. They were cheap things that would go sodden quickly. Beneath the lino would be stone flags. They would hold the water, like some denying stepmother, in a chilly embrace: it would be the work of a generation, to wear them down…
And so, thwarted, the water rises, like daughters or peasants denied, and plunges hungry fingers into the cupboards where the sugar and the flour is kept. The colander, resting on the stone sink, goes floating, the water recirculating through its holes. The half-shelled pea-pods bob, and eggcups, pans and chamber pots join the flotilla, as the water rises to the window sills. A street’s worth of tea brews itself. Cakes of soap twirl twelve feet in the air, as if God were taking His Saturday soak. Gabbling like gossips on a picnic, the water surges, each hour higher by a foot, riser by riser creeping up the stairs and washing about the private items of Derbyshire persons, about their crisply ironed bloomers floating free of lavender presses: the lapping of wavelets hemming their plain knee-bands with lace. The flannel bedsheets are soaked, and the woollen blankets press on the mattresses like the weight of sodden sin: till the mad gaiety of the waters takes them over, and buoys them up in the finest easy style. The beds go sailing, tub chairs are coracles; the yellowed long johns with their attached vests wave arms and legs, cut free from conjugal arrangements, and swim like Captain Webb for liberty and France.
This was what I imagined. I thought some upriver valve was eased, and the flood began.
But in fact, the Ladybower dam was downvalley from Derwent village. There was no flood. Derwent died by drips. The rain fell and was bottled. The streams flowed and were contained. Ladybower closed her downstream valves and gradually the valley filled, in the course of nature, from the hillside streams and the precipitation of Pennine cloud bursts. It filled slowly: as tears, if you cried enough, would fill a bowl. Veronica is old now. She does and does not understand this. She could always entertain what they call ‘discontinuities’. That is to say, slippages in time or sense, breaches between cause and effect. She can also entertain big fat sweating lies, usually told either to mystify people or to make her look good. I cannot tell you how many times she has misled me. I take the map of the Derwent valley to the light. I look back at her in the bed. I am sorry to say it – I wish I could say something else – but the plan of the reservoirs looks very like a diagrammatic representation of the female reproductive tract. Not a detailed one: just the kind you might give to medical students in their first year, or children who persist in enquiring. One ovary is the Derwent reservoir, the other is Hogg Farm. This second branch descends by Underbank to Cocksbridge. The other branch descends by Derwent Hall, past the school and the church, through the drowned village of Ashopton to the neck of the womb itself, at Ladybower House and Ladybower Wood: from there, to the Yorkshire Bridge weir, and the great world beyond.
What I know now is this: they demolished the village before they flooded it. Stone by stone it was smashed. They waited till the vicar had died before they knocked down the vicarage. I think of Derwent Hall and the shallow river that ran beside it, the packhorse bridge and the bridle path. They knocked down the hall and sold what they could. The drawing-room floor – oak boards – went for £40. The oak panelling was sold at 2s and 6d per square foot.
The village of Derwent had a church, St James & St John. There was a silver patten and an ancient font which the heathens at the hall had once used as a flowerpot. There was a sundial, and four bells, and 284 bodies buried in the churchyard. Nowhere could be found to take in these homeless bones, and the Water Board decided to bury them on land of its own. But the owner of the single house in the neighbourhood raised such objections that the project was called off. It seemed they would have to go under the water, the dead men of Derwent.
But the churchyard at Bamford offered to house them, at the last push. They were exhumed one by one and their condition recorded – ‘complete skeleton’, together with the nature of the subsoil, the state of the coffin and the depth at which they were found. The Water Board paid £500 and it was all settled up. A bishop said prayers.
Through 1944, the water rose steadily. By June 1945, only a pair of stone gateposts and the spire of the church could be seen.
When I was a child, people would tell me AS A FACT that in hot summers, the church spire would rise above the waters, eerie and desolate under the burning sun.
This is also untrue.
The church tower was blown up, in 1947. I have a photograph of it, blasted, crumbling, in the very act of joining the ruins below. But even if I showed this to Veronica, she wouldn’t believe me. She’d only say I was persecuting her. She doesn’t care for evidence, she seems to say. She has her own versions of the past, and her own way of protecting them.
Sometimes, to pass her time, Veronica knits something. I say ‘something’ because I’m not sure if it has a future as a garment, or if she’ll be wearing it anywhere out of here. She has a way of working her elbows that points her needles straight at me. When the nurse comes in she drops her weapons in the fold of the sheets and smiles, nicey-nice.
Every Saturday night, in the village where Veronica grew up, the English fought the Irish, at a specified street, called Waterside. As a child I used to play on this desolate spot. Bullrushes, reeds, swamps. (Be home for half past seven, Veronica always said.) I expect they were not serious fights. More like minuets with broken bottles. After all, next Saturday night they would have to do it all over again.
No; it was the Derbyshire people who were the wild bunch, in my opinion. Two brothers used to go around the pubs and advertise each other: my brother here will fight, run, leap, play cricket or sing, against any man in this county. The cricketer destroyed his career by felling the umpire with a blow in his only first-class match. Another brother, making his way home by moonlight, manslaughtered a person, tossed him over a wall and took ship for America. Another walked the bridle path from Glossop to Derwent in the company of a man who described himself as a doctor, but was later discovered to be an escaped and homicidal lunatic.
I like to imagine cross-connections. Perhaps this ‘doctor’ was my psychotic Irish relative who was committed to a madhouse. I tried to run my theory past Veronica, and see if the dates fitted at all. She said she knew nothing about the bridle path
, nothing about a lunatic. I was about to take her up on it when a nurse put her head around the door and said, ‘The doctor’s here.’ I had to stand in the corridor. ‘Coffee?’ some moron said, gesturing to two inches of sludge on a warm-plate. I just ignored the question. I put my head on the clear, clean plaster of the wall, which was painted in a neutral shade, like thought.
After a time, a doctor came out and stood by my elbow. He did a big act of ahem to attract my attention and when I continued to rest my head on the restful plaster he percussed my shoulder till I looked around. He was a short, irate, grey-haired man. He was smaller than me, in fact, and trying to impart news of some sort, almost certainly bad. As I write, the average height of an Englishwoman is a hair’s breadth below 5’5”. I barely scrape 5’3”, and yet I tower over Veronica. A tear stings my eye. So small. Within the space of a breath, I witness myself: tear is processed, ticked, and shed.
The Ladybower Reservoir has a surface area of 504 acres. Its perimeter is thirteen miles approximately. Its maximum depth is 135 feet. One hundred thousand tons of concrete were used in its building, and one million tons of earth. I am suspicious of these round figures, as I am sure you are. But can I offer them to you, as a basis for discussion? When people talk of ‘burying the past’, and ‘all water under the bridge’, these are the kind of figures they are trading in.
Giving Up The Ghost
Hilary Mantel – known throughout her early years as Ilary – has told the story of her childhood and young adult life in her memoir Giving Up the Ghost. She was born in 1952 in a Derbyshire mill village, and passed four happy and useful years under her grandparents’ roof, preparing for her intended careers as a railway guard, knight errant, Egyptian camel trainer and Roman Catholic priest. When she was four she had to go to school; she disagreed with it, but knew it was the law. When she was six she moved with her mother, father and their growing family to a haunted house a few minutes’ walk away. A new ‘father’ joined the household shortly afterwards. Though in the course of time Ilary would cross continents, the ghosts were never far behind, and in time other ghosts joined them – the wistful phantoms of her unborn children. In her memoir she explains how, after her strange childhood, she came to be childless herself, and how the children who never saw the light have trailed her through the years and become part of her life and her fiction.
Learning to Talk Page 8
