"Learning to talk" by Hilary Mantel

An audio book of short stories from 2003.

• "King Billy is a Gentleman" - in a village the father of a boy, 8, left the house and a lodger moves in. Neighbours complain about the mother's morality. Philip is 3 years older than the boy narrator. A priest comes to the school with trick questions - "Draw me a soul". When someone draws a blob he says "No, that's a heart". They move to a town. The boy becomes a lawyer. Many years later he learned that Philip died. Suicide? He blew himself up in his shed in IRA times.
• "Destroyed" - The young girl narrator's mother didn't believe in substitutes - everything was unique. The aunt next door was a widow and had a dog, a mongel that died. The narrator thought that "mongel" was a type of dog, and "widow" didn't imply that there used to be a husband. The girl gets a dog or two, and a younger brother whose middle name is that of the aunt's late husband. The mother aspires to be middle class. The dog disappears. The narrator goes with her little brother to look for it, imagines killing her brother.
• "Curved Is the Line of Beauty" - the narrator's father still lives in their house, but Jack's moved in. Jack drives them to Birmingham to see his friend who'd been a victim of racial discrimination. He was now married to a white woman and had children. The narrator (who describes something as "silver-grey in colour") gets lost with a girl, thinks about mortality.
• "Learning To Talk" - a clever Derbyshire girl is sent to have elocution lessons. She goes to an oral exam in a big town.
• "Third Floor Rising" - A daughter who's recovered from chronic illness has a brother with chronic illness. In her gap year she works at the same department store as her mother, who's head of a clothes department in Manchester. Colleagues are envious of the mother and take revenge on the mother. The daughter learns that her boss might be stealing and that her mother smokes at lunchtime. Years later she finds that the department store has closed, and that the area "was taken over by pornographers, and those kinds of traders who sell plastic laundry baskets, dodgy electric fires and molded Christmas novelties such as bouncing mince pies and whistling seraphim”.
• "The Clean Slate" - a female author is by her mother's hospital bed. She refers to her mother as Veronica. She tries to extract a family history from her mother. She knows that her mother tells lies. Part of the family come from a drowned village. The narrator used to think that the village was flooded at short notice - a Pompeii. In fact, the village was vacated, the graves were tranferred, and buildings demolished before water levels slowly rose during 1944.

Residual Catholicism, ghosts, mothers with middle class aspirations.

Other reviews

• Nicholas Delbanco
• Kirkus reviews (Mantel writes in her preface. “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.” They read, then, as lightly fictionalized memoir. In fact, the last story, “Giving Up the Ghost,” acknowledges the author's memoir of the same title, published in 2003. Mantel’s family situation was peculiar: When she was about 7, her mother moved her lover into the house that she shared with her husband.)
• Sarah Moss (It shares the qualities of the contemporary novels she wrote for 20 years: sharp observation, alertness to the tomfooleries of class and gender, an uncanny capacity for the child’s-eye view, a door always open to the supernatural. ... These stories are also about that experience, their narrators children and teenagers at odds with their families, neighbors and schools, striving to decipher the unspoken, and often hindered more than helped by cleverness and curiosity.)