Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Diamond jubilee: writers reflect on growing up Elizabethan


Hilary Mantel, William Boyd, Andrew Motion and Sean O'Brien – who were all born in 1952 – on the past 60 years

The Queen with S Morley, W Boyd, B Okri
The Queen with (from left) Sheridan Morley, William Boyd and Ben Okri. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA Archive/Press Association Ima

Hilary Mantel

Aged three or four, I paraded our back yard in what I called "my Prince Charles coat," double-breasted and knitted in canary-yellow. Somewhere I must have seen a similar item worn by the heir to the throne, and coveted it. I wonder if children are instinctive royalists. I was delighted when in a schoolbook belonging to my older cousin I found what I thought was a picture of the queen. My mother pointed out gently that it was Katherine of Aragon.
To my youthful mind, a gable hood was an improvement on Her Majesty's hats. I used to smirk at them, but now I like to imagine them being delivered by the van-load: in hat boxes with ribbons, I hope. I like to think of courtiers opening them with expectant cries, and multi-coloured tissue paper sailing through palace rooms. I have an active, anxious sympathy for the queen. My mother is just the same age. Though mysteriously, after a much harder life, she looks 20 years younger.
I count myself less a child of the Elizabethan age than a child of the 1944 Education Act, which gave a free grammar school education to those selected at 11. It was bad in that it wrote off most children as second-class. But it was a golden chance for a few, and it is what has made my life different from the lives of my eloquent foremothers. They were storytellers but I could become a writer. At the age I was studying Hard Times and Great Expectations they were minding looms; "mill girls," they were called, even when they had left girlhood behind. My cousin, 10 years my senior, was the first in our family to have a secondary education. But at 16 she needed to get out and earn, so she became a secretary. In 1970, my way was clear to university and whatever lay beyond.
Hilary Mantel
I try not to idealise those days. I don't forget the intense pressure and anxiety, the furiously competitive nature of my schooling, the need not to let my family down; and also the difficulty of moving between classes. I find it hard to decide whether Britain is less divided now. It's still true that you are judged as soon as you open your mouth. If you are asked: "Where do you come from?" it's because you're not white or have a regional accent. Those whose accent is heard as neutral are seen to come from a social class, not a place. Geography does not define or limit them. If no one enquires after your origins, it means you hold, unquestioned, the centre ground in life.
When I left university in 1973 I was already married; that was early, but not unthinkably early for those days. I graduated into the Womb Wars. "First comes love, then comes marriage / Then comes the baby in the baby carriage." In the 1970s, when a young woman was interviewed for a job, she was asked when she hoped to wed. "And when do you plan to start your family?" If you admitted you had such plans, you wouldn't get the job. If you disclaimed them, up would go the eyebrow. "What! A pretty girl like you! Of course you'll want to get married!"
Read the rest at The Guardian.

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