0:00:02 > 0:00:05Hilary Mantel used to be one of Britain's most under-rated writers,
0:00:05 > 0:00:08but since winning The Man Booker Prize in 2009,
0:00:08 > 0:00:10for her novel Wolf Hall,
0:00:10 > 0:00:13she has received international recognition.
0:00:13 > 0:00:17Her fiction is dark, compelling and richly textured.
0:00:17 > 0:00:20Its subject-matter ranges from The French Revolution
0:00:20 > 0:00:22to the Court of Henry VIII,
0:00:22 > 0:00:24from dysfunctional families in the North of England
0:00:24 > 0:00:27to the life of a troubled psychic in Woking.
0:00:27 > 0:00:32"Wolf Hall" is an epic account of the rise of Thomas Cromwell
0:00:32 > 0:00:34during the reign of Henry VIII.
0:00:34 > 0:00:37It was praised for the immediacy of its prose,
0:00:37 > 0:00:41the power of its characterisation, and its savage sense of humour.
0:00:41 > 0:00:44Despite a recent interruption due to illness,
0:00:44 > 0:00:48she's now working on its sequel, The Mirror and the Light.
0:00:48 > 0:00:50In this intimate portrait for The Culture Show,
0:00:50 > 0:00:55film-maker James Runcie talks exclusively to Hilary Mantel
0:00:55 > 0:00:58about her life and her work.
0:00:58 > 0:01:00She begins with a piece of advice.
0:01:12 > 0:01:16This is what I recommend to people who ask me how to get published.
0:01:16 > 0:01:20Trust your reader. Stop spoon-feeding your reader.
0:01:20 > 0:01:24Give your reader credit for being as smart as you at least.
0:01:25 > 0:01:30Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility.
0:01:32 > 0:01:35Cut every page you write by at least one third.
0:01:37 > 0:01:40Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours.
0:01:41 > 0:01:44Work out what it is you want to say.
0:01:45 > 0:01:49Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can.
0:01:51 > 0:01:54Eat meat. Drink blood.
0:01:55 > 0:01:59Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends.
0:02:00 > 0:02:04Rise in the quiet hours of the night
0:02:04 > 0:02:06and prick your fingertips,
0:02:06 > 0:02:08and use the blood for ink.
0:02:11 > 0:02:13But do I take my own advice?
0:02:15 > 0:02:17Not a bit.
0:02:21 > 0:02:26Hilary Mantel is an intense, troubling, and evocative writer.
0:02:26 > 0:02:30Her principal themes are of history and individual identity,
0:02:30 > 0:02:32religion and rebellion,
0:02:32 > 0:02:35and the influence of the dead upon the living.
0:02:35 > 0:02:39Her fiction asks how we come to be the people we are
0:02:39 > 0:02:41and it occupies the hinterland
0:02:41 > 0:02:45between what is real and what is imagined.
0:02:45 > 0:02:49It's a world in which nothing is quite what it seems.
0:02:50 > 0:02:52Hilary, whenever I read your work,
0:02:52 > 0:02:56I have to say I find it rather unsettling and disturbing.
0:02:56 > 0:02:58It makes me feel unstable.
0:02:58 > 0:03:02Is that a deliberate effect? Are you seeking that effect?
0:03:02 > 0:03:04I don't think I can help it.
0:03:04 > 0:03:07It's very much...
0:03:07 > 0:03:10the way I view the world, I think.
0:03:10 > 0:03:12I don't trust it tremendously.
0:03:13 > 0:03:17I always feel that if I put my hand through the wall,
0:03:17 > 0:03:19my hand might go through it.
0:03:20 > 0:03:24I think as a child, you see, I was always listening hard,
0:03:24 > 0:03:28I was always trying to get some purchase on what was going on
0:03:28 > 0:03:31or work out what was happening in the next room.
0:03:31 > 0:03:34And...there's a little bit
0:03:34 > 0:03:40in Wolf Hall, where Cardinal Woolsey says,
0:03:40 > 0:03:42"Never let me hear you say
0:03:42 > 0:03:46"you don't know what goes on behind closed doors.
0:03:46 > 0:03:48"Find out!"
0:03:48 > 0:03:52And that, I spent my childhood trying to do that,
0:03:52 > 0:03:54so that becomes a habit.
0:03:54 > 0:03:58You really do need to know for your self preservation
0:03:58 > 0:04:01whether the devil is behind that door.
0:04:03 > 0:04:05Not everyone thinks that.
0:04:08 > 0:04:09Fools!
0:04:09 > 0:04:12SHE LAUGHS
0:04:15 > 0:04:17Hilary Mantel's disquieting imagination
0:04:17 > 0:04:20has its roots in her childhood experiences
0:04:20 > 0:04:23in the North of England in the 1950s.
0:04:25 > 0:04:29I grew up in a village on the fringes of the Peak District.
0:04:29 > 0:04:32A village called Hadfield, a mill village.
0:04:33 > 0:04:36A strange place, rather bleak,
0:04:36 > 0:04:39on the edges of the moorland.
0:04:39 > 0:04:42There was a sense of it being not just at the end
0:04:42 > 0:04:48of the railway line from Manchester but rather at the end of everything.
0:04:48 > 0:04:50It's a self-contained community,
0:04:50 > 0:04:56where the people had a mordent sense of humour,
0:04:56 > 0:04:59if it was a sense of humour.
0:04:59 > 0:05:01The winter was very long in Hadfield.
0:05:01 > 0:05:04The darkness seemed to last a long time.
0:05:08 > 0:05:12"There is a colour of paint that doesn't seem to exist any more,
0:05:12 > 0:05:16"that was a characteristic pigment of my childhood.
0:05:16 > 0:05:20"It's a faded, rain-drenched crimson,
0:05:20 > 0:05:23"like stale and drying blood."
0:05:24 > 0:05:26"I use this paint scrape -
0:05:26 > 0:05:29"oxblood, let's call it -
0:05:29 > 0:05:33"to refurbish the rooms of my childhood,
0:05:33 > 0:05:37"which were otherwise dark green, and cream,
0:05:37 > 0:05:40"and more lately a cloudy yellow,
0:05:40 > 0:05:45"which hung about at shoulder height, like the aftermath of a fire."
0:05:50 > 0:05:53Hilary was born in 1952.
0:05:53 > 0:05:58This is the street where she lived, 12 miles from Manchester.
0:05:58 > 0:06:02Her grandparents and great aunt lived at numbers 56 and 58
0:06:02 > 0:06:07and Hilary's childhood home was at number 20 Brosscroft.
0:06:07 > 0:06:10The family were originally Catholic Irish immigrants
0:06:10 > 0:06:16and that Catholicism was to have a profound impact on Hilary's writing.
0:06:16 > 0:06:21I grew up unquestioningly within Catholicism,
0:06:21 > 0:06:24so unquestioningly that I took it all onboard
0:06:24 > 0:06:27and of course what it's telling you,
0:06:27 > 0:06:33what you're being inducted in, from the age of four,
0:06:33 > 0:06:37is the knowledge that there is another world,
0:06:37 > 0:06:40that there is an invisible reality
0:06:40 > 0:06:43which is far more important than this one.
0:06:43 > 0:06:49It is the realm of invisible angels around you,
0:06:49 > 0:06:53it's the realm of what happens after death,
0:06:53 > 0:06:57that life is actually transient and fairly meaningless.
0:06:57 > 0:07:00You have a destination - it's heaven or hell.
0:07:02 > 0:07:07I think I took it as read that there was an unseen realm
0:07:07 > 0:07:12and that's the bit I retained
0:07:12 > 0:07:18when I ceased to believe in doctrine
0:07:18 > 0:07:22and ceased to practice as a Catholic.
0:07:22 > 0:07:27I think I still had a very profound sense of...the invisible,
0:07:27 > 0:07:31which is just as well because it's in invisible worlds
0:07:31 > 0:07:33that the writer spends her time.
0:07:36 > 0:07:40When I was about eight years old...
0:07:41 > 0:07:48..I was in the garden of our house in Hadfield.
0:07:48 > 0:07:53I was alone. I cannot say I saw something...
0:07:54 > 0:07:59..but I sensed something. Something seemed to be there.
0:08:00 > 0:08:05And it was more a movement than an object.
0:08:07 > 0:08:11A sort of slow spiral movement.
0:08:11 > 0:08:16And yet I couldn't say that I saw it, I was just aware of it.
0:08:18 > 0:08:23And it just seemed to me to be incredibly evil,
0:08:23 > 0:08:26the essence of evil.
0:08:27 > 0:08:30I immediately felt very sick.
0:08:30 > 0:08:37I felt as if in no time at all the thing had travelled inside me
0:08:37 > 0:08:43and as if all the cells of my body were being spun around
0:08:43 > 0:08:45in this really sinister motion.
0:08:46 > 0:08:49I don't really call it seeing the devil.
0:08:49 > 0:08:52That's just the easiest way to describe it.
0:08:52 > 0:08:56It was as if I had come upon a principle of evil.
0:08:57 > 0:09:02And I immediately felt ashamed and as if I were to blame,
0:09:02 > 0:09:07because if I had just looked the other way,
0:09:07 > 0:09:10I wouldn't have seen it. It was...
0:09:10 > 0:09:12um...
0:09:12 > 0:09:15A scene you were not meant to witness.
0:09:18 > 0:09:22This vision was the first manifestation of Hilary's obsession
0:09:22 > 0:09:24with a world beyond our own.
0:09:24 > 0:09:27It was a defining moment in her childhood,
0:09:27 > 0:09:30one of many that are described
0:09:30 > 0:09:33in her 2003 Memoir, Giving up the Ghost,
0:09:33 > 0:09:37an account of her life that goes right back to her earliest memory.
0:09:41 > 0:09:44"This is the first thing I remember.
0:09:44 > 0:09:47"I am sitting up in my pram.
0:09:47 > 0:09:50"We are outside, in the park called Bankswood.
0:09:50 > 0:09:52"My mother walks backwards.
0:09:52 > 0:09:56"I hold out my arms because I don't want her to go.
0:09:56 > 0:10:00"She say's she's only going to take my picture.
0:10:00 > 0:10:03"I don't understand why she goes backwards,
0:10:03 > 0:10:07"back and aslant, tacking to one side.
0:10:07 > 0:10:12"The trees overhead make a noise of urgent conversation,
0:10:12 > 0:10:18"too quick to catch. The leaves part, the sky peers down at me."
0:10:19 > 0:10:23"Away and away she goes till she comes to a halt.
0:10:23 > 0:10:28"She raises her arm and partly hides her face.
0:10:28 > 0:10:32"They sky and trees rush over my head. I feel dizzied.
0:10:32 > 0:10:35"The entire world is sound, movement.
0:10:35 > 0:10:38"She moves towards me, speaking."
0:10:39 > 0:10:41"The memory ends."
0:10:43 > 0:10:45What's your mother like?
0:10:45 > 0:10:52My mother is a very beautiful, lively, gregarious,
0:10:52 > 0:10:54rather dramatic woman.
0:10:56 > 0:11:00Extroverted. And full of talents,
0:11:00 > 0:11:06which, if she'd been born in a different place or a different time,
0:11:06 > 0:11:10might've come out. She's a good singer, a dancer.
0:11:10 > 0:11:14She has all the minor graceful household arts.
0:11:16 > 0:11:20But of course at the age of 14, 15,
0:11:20 > 0:11:22she was working in the mill.
0:11:22 > 0:11:26That was what life was like, she did what everybody else did.
0:11:26 > 0:11:28She could've had a far bigger life.
0:11:28 > 0:11:32And I think, you see, she was struggling for something else,
0:11:32 > 0:11:37she wanted to get beyond the limitations of Hadfield.
0:11:38 > 0:11:41And she was towing us children with her.
0:11:43 > 0:11:48Hilary's mother Margaret was married to a man called Henry Thompson.
0:11:48 > 0:11:51There are no surviving family photographs of him.
0:11:51 > 0:11:54This is because, in the late 1950s,
0:11:54 > 0:11:57Margaret found a new partner, Jack Mantel.
0:11:57 > 0:12:00At first, Hilary's father didn't leave home,
0:12:00 > 0:12:03but moved into the spare room.
0:12:05 > 0:12:07Henry, my father, was...
0:12:09 > 0:12:12..a very quiet man, it seemed to me.
0:12:12 > 0:12:16He liked doing cross-word puzzles. He taught me to play chess.
0:12:16 > 0:12:21And he taught me that it is possible to sit quietly in a room.
0:12:22 > 0:12:25And you can be reading a book and be a companion to someone else
0:12:25 > 0:12:28who's sitting in that room reading a book.
0:12:30 > 0:12:34When Jack came into the household,
0:12:34 > 0:12:37Jack was interested in weightlifting.
0:12:39 > 0:12:41And he used to sing and be noisy
0:12:41 > 0:12:46and I thought it was great, really, at first.
0:12:46 > 0:12:48I didn't know what was happening.
0:12:50 > 0:12:52And then, over the years,
0:12:52 > 0:12:56from my being about seven years old to ten years old,
0:12:56 > 0:13:00my father was still living in the house but more and more like a ghost.
0:13:00 > 0:13:04It was as if he was just melting into the wall.
0:13:04 > 0:13:08And then the year I was 11, the summer I was 11,
0:13:08 > 0:13:13he melted away entirely, and I never saw him again.
0:13:13 > 0:13:15He just left?
0:13:15 > 0:13:20He left on the day the furniture van came and took us off to Romiley.
0:13:20 > 0:13:26So there was abrupt closure.
0:13:26 > 0:13:27My childhood was over.
0:13:27 > 0:13:30I was starting again, new town, new name.
0:13:32 > 0:13:35And it was as if the past was just written out, erased.
0:13:35 > 0:13:39And we had to not talk about the past.
0:13:39 > 0:13:44But, of course, we'd only gone about eight miles,
0:13:44 > 0:13:48so the secret we were keeping was a kind of open secret.
0:13:49 > 0:13:55And...we spent our days frantically bolting a door
0:13:55 > 0:13:57that had already been kicked open.
0:14:00 > 0:14:05"After my first week at the convent, I went home to my mother, worried."
0:14:06 > 0:14:14"'Big girls at school,' I told her, 'ask my why I've changed my name'
0:14:14 > 0:14:18"'Tell them,' she said, 'that it's for private reasons.'"
0:14:19 > 0:14:22"I tried out this turn of phrase.
0:14:22 > 0:14:24"Private reasons."
0:14:25 > 0:14:30"'Oh, yes,' the big girls said. 'We understand that.
0:14:30 > 0:14:32"'But we want to know what they are.'"
0:14:35 > 0:14:39The move to Romiley, just under ten miles from Manchester,
0:14:39 > 0:14:42sharpened Hilary's awareness of the uncertain gap
0:14:42 > 0:14:47between what could be spoken aloud, and what had to remain hidden.
0:14:47 > 0:14:51And this gap, between public statements and private thoughts,
0:14:51 > 0:14:53lies at the heart of her fiction.
0:14:55 > 0:15:00When I was a child, things happened that very often
0:15:00 > 0:15:03you didn't know if they were tragic or hilarious,
0:15:03 > 0:15:08so...you stayed poised on that tightrope,
0:15:08 > 0:15:12not quite knowing how to react.
0:15:13 > 0:15:18And I think there is something gleeful and childlike
0:15:18 > 0:15:23in the humour that runs through all my books.
0:15:23 > 0:15:27What I hope to do is knock the reader off balance for a moment
0:15:27 > 0:15:31so they don't know whether to laugh or scream.
0:15:32 > 0:15:36I don't want my reader ever to be settled.
0:15:36 > 0:15:42In the ideal world, the reader wouldn't be able to guess
0:15:42 > 0:15:44what the next sentence might contain.
0:15:45 > 0:15:48I aim to disconcert, I suppose.
0:15:48 > 0:15:53But then I find life disconcerting, I find that it is like that,
0:15:53 > 0:15:59that there are layers beneath the obvious of almost every interaction.
0:16:03 > 0:16:06Hilary lived in Romiley until she was 18.
0:16:06 > 0:16:10Although she was educated at a good Catholic girls school,
0:16:10 > 0:16:13the '60s did not pass her by.
0:16:14 > 0:16:20When I was a teenager I wasn't pretty but, I had the looks
0:16:20 > 0:16:22that were very fashionable in the '60s,
0:16:22 > 0:16:26because I had this long, fair hair
0:16:26 > 0:16:29and...I was very slim.
0:16:29 > 0:16:32It was what everyone wanted to look like in those days,
0:16:32 > 0:16:35you know, walking around behind a curtain of hair.
0:16:36 > 0:16:38Did you get propositioned a lot?
0:16:38 > 0:16:42People used to sing songs at me on the street.
0:16:42 > 0:16:44SHE LAUGHS Yes!
0:16:46 > 0:16:51When Hilary was 17, her social life centred around Manchester.
0:16:51 > 0:16:54Here she started dating Gerald McEwan,
0:16:54 > 0:16:58a man she's married not once, but twice.
0:16:59 > 0:17:03Hilary, have you got any pictures of Gerald as a groovy young man?
0:17:03 > 0:17:08Well, we were just 20 when we were married so, um...
0:17:10 > 0:17:12Yes, here is on our wedding day.
0:17:12 > 0:17:16He looks profoundly unhappy.
0:17:16 > 0:17:18Of course, because we were so young,
0:17:18 > 0:17:22people thought that our marriage was going to be a disaster.
0:17:23 > 0:17:27Maybe that's why there was no professional record of it.
0:17:27 > 0:17:31People thought it could be expunged all the easier
0:17:31 > 0:17:33if there was no wedding album.
0:17:35 > 0:17:38What does Gerald give you?
0:17:38 > 0:17:44When I first met him, I thought, "How kind he is."
0:17:44 > 0:17:47He was immensely good natured
0:17:47 > 0:17:50and to me...
0:17:52 > 0:17:56I don't like disputes and arguments on the domestic front.
0:17:58 > 0:18:02I want a quiet life, not to be torn up
0:18:02 > 0:18:05by melodrama going on all the time.
0:18:07 > 0:18:10And I think I saw the chance
0:18:10 > 0:18:17of a much better, calmer, quieter life with Gerald.
0:18:17 > 0:18:19Young writer's partners have a tough time of it.
0:18:21 > 0:18:23Yes, I think so.
0:18:23 > 0:18:27This is why it's good to marry early and get them trained!
0:18:29 > 0:18:33Hilary and Gerald were married when they were still students.
0:18:33 > 0:18:35Gerald was set to be a geologist
0:18:35 > 0:18:38while Hilary was training to be a lawyer,
0:18:38 > 0:18:42first at the London School of Economics and then at Sheffield.
0:18:42 > 0:18:45She was hoping to become a politician.
0:18:45 > 0:18:49At first she had no intention of being a writer.
0:18:49 > 0:18:51Then she fell ill.
0:18:53 > 0:18:56I first complained when I was 19.
0:18:56 > 0:18:59Going to the student health service and saying,
0:18:59 > 0:19:04"I don't know really in what way I am ill, but I have strange pains
0:19:04 > 0:19:08"and I really need to find out what's the matter."
0:19:11 > 0:19:13But I was told that there was no physical condition
0:19:13 > 0:19:17that could account for these pains, they were all in my mind.
0:19:17 > 0:19:23I was an over-sensitive, too intense, over-ambitious girl
0:19:23 > 0:19:27putting too much pressure on myself
0:19:27 > 0:19:33and producing these pains as symptom of stress
0:19:35 > 0:19:38and I was dosed up with Valium and all the rest
0:19:38 > 0:19:40and I was told to go away.
0:19:41 > 0:19:48And...once it's in your medical records that you're a neurotic,
0:19:48 > 0:19:53then, you know, everything you say or do goes to prove the case.
0:19:53 > 0:19:56You can't break out of it, and all this time,
0:19:56 > 0:19:58the physical damage was running on.
0:20:00 > 0:20:04How has illness affected your life and your writing?
0:20:06 > 0:20:08It's such a big question, you know.
0:20:08 > 0:20:10Part of the reason I became a writer,
0:20:10 > 0:20:13I think, part of the reason I made that choice...
0:20:15 > 0:20:20..was that by the time I'd come out of university
0:20:20 > 0:20:23I realised there was something badly wrong with me
0:20:23 > 0:20:28and it wasn't madness and it wasn't being neurotic.
0:20:30 > 0:20:32There was something physically wrong.
0:20:33 > 0:20:36I obviously wasn't going to be a lawyer.
0:20:36 > 0:20:38I wasn't going to be a politician.
0:20:38 > 0:20:43Both careers need more stamina than I had at my command.
0:20:44 > 0:20:45And I began to think
0:20:45 > 0:20:49that some of the visions I'd had of what my future would be,
0:20:49 > 0:20:51I would have to write them off.
0:20:51 > 0:20:55I would have to find an occupation that left me in control.
0:20:55 > 0:20:58Where I could work my own hours.
0:20:58 > 0:21:03And so very consciously I set up my stall to be a writer.
0:21:06 > 0:21:12In 1974, at the age of 22, Hilary began to embark on an epic,
0:21:12 > 0:21:15800 page account of the French Revolution
0:21:15 > 0:21:19concentrating, essentially on the lives of three men -
0:21:19 > 0:21:21Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins -
0:21:21 > 0:21:25from the beginning of the Revolution to The Terror.
0:21:25 > 0:21:29The novel was called A Place of Greater Safety.
0:21:29 > 0:21:34She researched and wrote it in Manchester Central Library.
0:21:35 > 0:21:39Sometimes people talk about the historical novel
0:21:39 > 0:21:43as if there were two opposed camps, fact and fiction.
0:21:43 > 0:21:45That isn't so, at all.
0:21:47 > 0:21:52And as soon as we learn any history
0:21:52 > 0:21:56we should learn to be suspicious of that history.
0:21:56 > 0:21:59We should learn to question the historical record all the time,
0:21:59 > 0:22:04say, "I think I know this but why do I think I know it?
0:22:04 > 0:22:07"Who's telling me this, and who wants me to believe it?"
0:22:07 > 0:22:13"Who starts the riots that lead to the fall of the Bastille?
0:22:13 > 0:22:18"Why him, why then? Why that particular moment?
0:22:18 > 0:22:22"Could it have been someone else?
0:22:22 > 0:22:25"And if it could have been, why wasn't it?"
0:22:25 > 0:22:28These questions perplex me and they intrigue me
0:22:28 > 0:22:32and I come back to them time and time again.
0:22:32 > 0:22:36The difference between political history as it is written on the page
0:22:36 > 0:22:41and the way it feels to the person who is an actor inside it.
0:22:43 > 0:22:48The intention behind the novel is to give history drama and immediacy.
0:22:48 > 0:22:51The reader is thrown right into the middle of the action,
0:22:51 > 0:22:55and follows Queen Marie Antoinette all the way to the guillotine.
0:22:57 > 0:23:00"The tumbrel waited in the courtyard.
0:23:00 > 0:23:05"It was an ordinary cart, once used for carrying wood,
0:23:05 > 0:23:08"now with planks across it for seats.
0:23:08 > 0:23:12"At the sight of it she lost her composure, she gaped in fear,
0:23:12 > 0:23:14"but she didn't cry out.
0:23:14 > 0:23:19"She asked the executioner to untie her hands for a moment,
0:23:19 > 0:23:23"and when he did so she squatted in a corner, by a wall, and urinated."
0:23:24 > 0:23:28"Her hands were tied again, and she was put into the cart.
0:23:28 > 0:23:31"Under the shorn hair and the plain white cap,
0:23:31 > 0:23:36"her tired eyes searched for pity in the faces around her.
0:23:36 > 0:23:42"The journey to the place of execution lasted for an hour."
0:23:42 > 0:23:44"She didn't speak.
0:23:44 > 0:23:50"As she mounted the steps, paid, indifferent hands kept her balanced.
0:23:50 > 0:23:54"Her body began to shake, her limbs to give way.
0:23:54 > 0:23:58"In her blindness and terror she stepped on the executioner's foot.
0:23:58 > 0:24:01"'I beg your pardon, monsieur,' she whispered.
0:24:01 > 0:24:03"'I didn't mean to do it."
0:24:03 > 0:24:07"A few minutes after noon, her head was off."
0:24:15 > 0:24:18While writing A Place of Greater Safety,
0:24:18 > 0:24:21Hilary continued to experience the symptoms of an illness
0:24:21 > 0:24:25that was to remain undiagnosed for eight years.
0:24:25 > 0:24:29It was finally discovered to be endometriosis.
0:24:30 > 0:24:35Unfortunately, you can't describe endometriosis in one sentence.
0:24:35 > 0:24:38The endometrium is the lining of the womb
0:24:38 > 0:24:44so this is a special tissue which is shed every month
0:24:44 > 0:24:49in response to hormonal influence.
0:24:49 > 0:24:55In endometriosis, this kind of tissue is found in other parts of the body,
0:24:55 > 0:24:57typically through the pelvis
0:24:57 > 0:25:01but it can be virtually everywhere in the body.
0:25:01 > 0:25:05Wherever it is, it acts like itself, so it bleeds every month.
0:25:05 > 0:25:09And then scar tissue builds up in the small spaces of the body.
0:25:09 > 0:25:13Depending where it is, you get a variety of symptoms.
0:25:13 > 0:25:15Quite a large variety of symptoms.
0:25:15 > 0:25:19Mostly involving pain and nausea and fatigue.
0:25:19 > 0:25:22So by the time it was diagnosed, I was 27,
0:25:22 > 0:25:25and I was in a very bad way.
0:25:25 > 0:25:29I was rendered immediately infertile
0:25:29 > 0:25:31and it wasn't just a case of having a hysterectomy,
0:25:31 > 0:25:35my ovaries were removed so that at the age of 27,
0:25:35 > 0:25:37I was plunged into menopause.
0:25:40 > 0:25:47And...it was...worse than one could have ever imagined.
0:25:50 > 0:25:55"The visitor's idea of hospital is different from the patient's idea.
0:25:55 > 0:26:00"Visitors imagine themselves trapped in that ward, in that bed,
0:26:00 > 0:26:04"in their present state of assertive wellbeing.
0:26:04 > 0:26:07"They imagine being bored,
0:26:07 > 0:26:10"but boredom occurs when your consciousness ranges about,
0:26:10 > 0:26:13"looking for somewhere to settle.
0:26:13 > 0:26:17"But the patient's concentration is distilled,
0:26:17 > 0:26:20"moment by moment. Breathing,
0:26:20 > 0:26:23"not being sick,
0:26:23 > 0:26:27"not coughing or else coughing in the right way,
0:26:27 > 0:26:29"producing bodily secretions
0:26:29 > 0:26:34"in the vessels provided and not on the floor.
0:26:34 > 0:26:39"The visitor sees the hospital as needles and knives, metal teeth,
0:26:39 > 0:26:45"metal bars, sees the foggy meeting between the damp summer air outside
0:26:45 > 0:26:48"and the overheated exhalations of the sickroom."
0:26:51 > 0:26:53"But the patient sees no such contrast.
0:26:53 > 0:26:57"She can't imagine the street, the motorway.
0:26:58 > 0:27:03"To her, the hospital is this squashed pillow,
0:27:03 > 0:27:06"this water glass, this bell pull,
0:27:06 > 0:27:10"and the nice judgment required to know when to use it."
0:27:11 > 0:27:14"For the visitor, everything points outwards,
0:27:14 > 0:27:18"to the release at the end of the visiting hour,
0:27:18 > 0:27:22"and to the patient, everything points inwards,
0:27:22 > 0:27:26"and the furthest extension of her consciousness
0:27:26 > 0:27:30"is not the rattle of car keys, the road home,
0:27:30 > 0:27:33"the first drink of the evening,
0:27:33 > 0:27:36"but the beep and plip-plop of monitors and drips,
0:27:36 > 0:27:40"the flashing of figures on screens.
0:27:40 > 0:27:43"These are how you register your existence,
0:27:43 > 0:27:46"these are the way you matter."
0:27:49 > 0:27:53After the endometriosis reoccurred,
0:27:53 > 0:27:56when I was in my early 30s,
0:27:57 > 0:28:01I was given a drug which...
0:28:02 > 0:28:04..doubled my size.
0:28:05 > 0:28:12So, from being something like a pencil line on the wall,
0:28:12 > 0:28:19I became the blossoming sofa-like creature you see now before you.
0:28:19 > 0:28:24And that is very strange and, of course, it's...
0:28:24 > 0:28:27for a woman...
0:28:29 > 0:28:35It's terribly destroying to one's self image and self projection.
0:28:35 > 0:28:38But what can you do? You're only given one body to live in.
0:28:38 > 0:28:40You've just got to get on with it.
0:28:42 > 0:28:46"What I would have liked was a choice in life.
0:28:46 > 0:28:49"Leisure, to reverse my earlier decision
0:28:49 > 0:28:52"that children didn't matter to me.
0:28:52 > 0:28:57"Leisure, to ask if circumstances or my mind had changed.
0:28:57 > 0:29:02"No-one can predict that the game will be over for them
0:29:02 > 0:29:04"at the age of 27.
0:29:04 > 0:29:09"The time I fell in love is the time I should have acted,
0:29:09 > 0:29:12"and now that an era of my life is over,
0:29:12 > 0:29:16"and my school friends are becoming grandmothers,
0:29:16 > 0:29:19"I miss the child I never had."
0:29:20 > 0:29:26What's to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?
0:29:36 > 0:29:38In the mid to late 1970s,
0:29:38 > 0:29:43Hilary was still investigating the lives of the dead in her writing.
0:29:43 > 0:29:45She supported herself financially by working,
0:29:45 > 0:29:48as her mother had done, in ladies fashions
0:29:48 > 0:29:51at one of Manchester's largest department stores.
0:29:53 > 0:29:56Did it help your interest in people, working in the department store,
0:29:56 > 0:30:00seeing what people wore, seeing how they behaved,
0:30:00 > 0:30:02early versions of characters?
0:30:02 > 0:30:08I think I was doing it really so that I could keep my mind clear.
0:30:08 > 0:30:14You know, I was at a bit of a loose end, um, professionally speaking.
0:30:14 > 0:30:18What I wanted to do by that stage was to write my book.
0:30:18 > 0:30:20I wanted to write A Place of Greater Safety.
0:30:20 > 0:30:24I used to stand there, as it might be,
0:30:24 > 0:30:28in the sheepskin department in August,
0:30:28 > 0:30:31on a totally deserted fashion floor,
0:30:31 > 0:30:36dreaming up what I was going to write when I got home.
0:30:36 > 0:30:38So it was a job that left your mind vacant.
0:30:42 > 0:30:47Hilary worked as a shop assistant for four years, but in 1977,
0:30:47 > 0:30:51just before she finished writing A Place of Greater Safety,
0:30:51 > 0:30:57her husband Gerald was offered a new job, as a geologist in Botswana.
0:30:57 > 0:31:01The couple moved, but Hilary continued to work as she wrote,
0:31:01 > 0:31:05this time as a teacher in the local school.
0:31:05 > 0:31:08We were in Botswana for five years, the end of the 70s,
0:31:08 > 0:31:14the early '80s. It was a very, very underdeveloped country at that time.
0:31:14 > 0:31:19You had just one tarred road between our town and the capital.
0:31:19 > 0:31:24It...was a good life in many ways, I did a lot of writing there,
0:31:26 > 0:31:31But you were working in one of these very closed communities,
0:31:31 > 0:31:35the expatriate society was very small,
0:31:35 > 0:31:37very gossipy, very destructive.
0:31:37 > 0:31:43Things happened that just wouldn't have happened in England,
0:31:43 > 0:31:47the rate of attrition was terrible.
0:31:47 > 0:31:52The...bad accidents, the premature deaths, the suicides,
0:31:52 > 0:31:58the illnesses... the fulminating adulteries.
0:31:58 > 0:32:02It's all the expatriate cliche, actually.
0:32:02 > 0:32:06And the fact that you were cut off there,
0:32:06 > 0:32:12it intensified, concentrated the evils of the whole process.
0:32:12 > 0:32:15- Evils? - The evils, yes, I think so.
0:32:15 > 0:32:18It was an unnatural way to live.
0:32:20 > 0:32:22It was a difficult time.
0:32:22 > 0:32:25Although she was still writing, Hilary fell ill once more,
0:32:25 > 0:32:29and the pressure on her marriage proved intolerable.
0:32:31 > 0:32:36When you marry so early, obviously what you're going to have
0:32:36 > 0:32:39is a series of different marriages almost.
0:32:39 > 0:32:44And it's a cliche to say it, but it's true that you're going to change,
0:32:44 > 0:32:47maybe in different ways and at a different rate.
0:32:47 > 0:32:52We'd come to one of those points
0:32:52 > 0:32:55where we seemed to be going in different directions.
0:32:55 > 0:32:59I felt not understood.
0:33:01 > 0:33:04And, I think...
0:33:04 > 0:33:09also it was important to say that it was a double life crisis,
0:33:09 > 0:33:13in that I had finished my book about the French Revolution.
0:33:13 > 0:33:16I'd taken it back in the hope of selling it...
0:33:18 > 0:33:23and I found myself in hospital instead.
0:33:23 > 0:33:27The book was seen by one publisher, who rejected it.
0:33:29 > 0:33:35And...it felt like a series of doors slamming, you see.
0:33:36 > 0:33:41So, by the time I went back to Botswana,
0:33:41 > 0:33:44a lot of the things that had seemed important to me
0:33:44 > 0:33:46now seemed irrelevant.
0:33:46 > 0:33:48We separated.
0:33:51 > 0:33:5518 months later, we met again.
0:33:56 > 0:33:59Gerald was on the brink of going to Saudi Arabia.
0:34:01 > 0:34:03And everything looked different.
0:34:06 > 0:34:10The couple had divorced in 1980 and re-married in 1982.
0:34:10 > 0:34:14Gerald went to Saudi Arabia as a scientific editor
0:34:14 > 0:34:17for the Ministry of Mineral Resources.
0:34:17 > 0:34:20It was a secretive, claustrophobic world,
0:34:20 > 0:34:24where it was made difficult for women to go out alone.
0:34:24 > 0:34:26In many ways, Hilary was trapped.
0:34:28 > 0:34:33In the flat I lived the longest, I had to have the lights on all day
0:34:34 > 0:34:36There were small windows,
0:34:36 > 0:34:39they were high up and they were made of frosted glass.
0:34:39 > 0:34:45The Saudis did not like the idea of people looking in or you looking out.
0:34:46 > 0:34:50It was immensely lonely.
0:34:50 > 0:34:53What I did was to start another book.
0:34:54 > 0:34:56I think I had seen
0:34:56 > 0:35:00that A Place of Greater Safety was not the novel
0:35:00 > 0:35:04that I was going to break through into the market place with
0:35:04 > 0:35:08and that I'd better write something that was short,
0:35:08 > 0:35:12was more commercial, was the best I could do.
0:35:12 > 0:35:16That book was Every Day is Mother's Day,
0:35:16 > 0:35:22the story of Muriel and Evelyn Axon, a reclusive mother and daughter
0:35:22 > 0:35:27who are shut up in an English suburb and they work on each other.
0:35:27 > 0:35:31At the beginning of the book Muriel is pregnant.
0:35:31 > 0:35:35How can this be, as she never leaves the house?
0:35:35 > 0:35:38Or, apparently not.
0:35:38 > 0:35:44And that whole first book leads up to the birth of Muriel's baby
0:35:44 > 0:35:47and the question implanted in the reader's mind,
0:35:47 > 0:35:49"What on earth will happen when the baby is born?"
0:35:52 > 0:35:55When Muriel Axon's child finally arrives,
0:35:55 > 0:35:59her mother suggests that the baby is not a real human being at all
0:35:59 > 0:36:01but a fairy changeling.
0:36:03 > 0:36:08"'Look at it,' Evelyn said. 'You can't say it's human.'"
0:36:10 > 0:36:12"'It might be a changeling.
0:36:12 > 0:36:14"'If it is a changeling,
0:36:14 > 0:36:18"'you ought to give some thought to getting the real one back.
0:36:18 > 0:36:22"'The ones they take lead miserable lives.
0:36:22 > 0:36:24"'They look in at people's windows.
0:36:24 > 0:36:29"'Their growth's stunted. They're always cold.'"
0:36:30 > 0:36:33"'It's a simple matter, Muriel.
0:36:33 > 0:36:37"'You have to find some water, a river or something.
0:36:37 > 0:36:39"'Float it along,
0:36:39 > 0:36:45"'and sometimes they pick it up and give you your own back.'
0:36:45 > 0:36:48"They waited on the bank for ten minutes.
0:36:48 > 0:36:51"It was quite dark now.
0:36:51 > 0:36:54"'It must be dead,' Evelyn said at last.
0:36:54 > 0:36:58"'They won't give you anything for a corpse.'"
0:37:06 > 0:37:10Every Day is Mother's Day, published in 1985,
0:37:10 > 0:37:12and its sequel, Vacant Possession,
0:37:12 > 0:37:14created Hilary's reputation
0:37:14 > 0:37:18as an investigator of the darkness of the human heart,
0:37:18 > 0:37:21reflecting the terror of living below consciousness,
0:37:21 > 0:37:24of going down every day and every night
0:37:24 > 0:37:28into the realm where the demons lie and the bodies are buried.
0:37:28 > 0:37:33Critics began to wonder what the real Hilary Mantel was like.
0:37:35 > 0:37:39Your house, your arrangements are really normal.
0:37:40 > 0:37:43They're almost a deliberate attempt to be normal.
0:37:45 > 0:37:51I try to organise daily life to be as boring as possible...
0:37:52 > 0:37:57..because you need to lead a boring life,
0:37:57 > 0:38:00if the contents of your head are very exciting.
0:38:02 > 0:38:06You cant have instability in every area of your life.
0:38:06 > 0:38:10And if your internal thought processes are full of horrors...
0:38:12 > 0:38:16..then what you need in...
0:38:17 > 0:38:20..everyday life is niceness.
0:38:20 > 0:38:26You need blandness, security, safety and routine.
0:38:28 > 0:38:29I don't believe it.
0:38:31 > 0:38:37My daily life really is like that, as far as I can manage for it to be,
0:38:37 > 0:38:43I'm a person who finds the world too much at every turn,
0:38:43 > 0:38:49I have difficulty with noise, sometimes with bright light.
0:38:49 > 0:38:54I have difficulty with people. I feel impinged upon.
0:38:54 > 0:38:58I don't like too much conversation,
0:38:58 > 0:39:02I like everything to be rationed,
0:39:02 > 0:39:06so that my writing in my head can go on undisturbed.
0:39:06 > 0:39:13So a very little excitement is quite enough for me
0:39:13 > 0:39:16because the contents of my head are exciting.
0:39:17 > 0:39:21From the publication of Every Day is Mother's Day
0:39:21 > 0:39:26and for the next 20 years, Hilary was able to write full time.
0:39:26 > 0:39:30She used her experience in Botswana to write A Change of Climate
0:39:30 > 0:39:35and in Saudi Arabia to publish Eight Months On Ghazzah Street.
0:39:35 > 0:39:38She also continued to work in historical fiction,
0:39:38 > 0:39:44finally publishing A Place of Greater Safety in 1992
0:39:44 > 0:39:46and then a disturbing account of the relationship
0:39:46 > 0:39:53between the surgeon John Hunter and the Irish Giant O'Brian in 1998.
0:39:53 > 0:39:56Then, in 2005, she put the two together
0:39:56 > 0:40:01in a novel that was appropriately titled Beyond Black,
0:40:01 > 0:40:04an unashamedly dark account of the permeable boundaries
0:40:04 > 0:40:07between the living and the dead,
0:40:07 > 0:40:11featuring the spiritualist medium Alison Hart.
0:40:12 > 0:40:15I was writing about a medium,
0:40:15 > 0:40:18for whom those borders are very uncertain.
0:40:18 > 0:40:26That's not me. I thought, "Let's just exaggerate my position a little."
0:40:27 > 0:40:32As it is, I have control over what I imagine
0:40:32 > 0:40:37and I'm able to say to myself, "This is probably a hallucination,"
0:40:37 > 0:40:39and, "This is probably real."
0:40:39 > 0:40:43But when I was writing about the medium, Alison,
0:40:43 > 0:40:48I was writing about someone who...
0:40:49 > 0:40:53She's like a swinging saloon door, you know,
0:40:53 > 0:41:00the dead just push through any time they like and she can't control it.
0:41:02 > 0:41:06"Al talked about passing, she talked about spirit,
0:41:06 > 0:41:09"she talked about passing into spirit world,
0:41:09 > 0:41:14"to that eventless realm, neither cold nor hot,
0:41:14 > 0:41:17"neither hilly nor flat, where the dead,
0:41:17 > 0:41:22"each at their own best age and marooned in an eternal afternoon,
0:41:22 > 0:41:26"pass the ages with sod all going on."
0:41:30 > 0:41:36"Spirit world, as Al describes it to the trade, is a garden,
0:41:36 > 0:41:40"or, to be more accurate, a public place in the open air,
0:41:40 > 0:41:43"litter free like an old fashioned park,
0:41:43 > 0:41:47"with a bandstand in a heat haze in the distance."
0:41:48 > 0:41:51"Here, the dead sit in rows on benches,
0:41:51 > 0:41:56"families together on gravelled paths between weedless beds."
0:41:57 > 0:42:01"There's a certain 1950s air about the dead,
0:42:01 > 0:42:03"or early '60s perhaps,
0:42:03 > 0:42:06"because they're clean and respectable
0:42:06 > 0:42:08"and they don't stink of factories,
0:42:08 > 0:42:13"as if they came after white nylon shirts and indoor sanitation,
0:42:13 > 0:42:18"but before satire, certainly before sexual intercourse."
0:42:20 > 0:42:22"Damaged livers have been replaced,
0:42:22 > 0:42:25"so their owners live to drink another day.
0:42:25 > 0:42:31"Blighted lungs now suck at God's own low tar blend.
0:42:31 > 0:42:37"Cancerous breasts have been rescued from the surgeons' bin
0:42:37 > 0:42:41"and blossom like roses on spirit chests."
0:42:43 > 0:42:45How much of this do you believe?
0:42:47 > 0:42:53There's a division in my mind between what I believe logically
0:42:53 > 0:42:56and what I believe out of experience.
0:42:57 > 0:43:00Logic and reason tells me that...
0:43:01 > 0:43:04..we don't have consciousness after death,
0:43:04 > 0:43:07there IS nothing after death, there are no ghosts.
0:43:09 > 0:43:14And certain known scientific laws are obeyed by all no matter.
0:43:15 > 0:43:17But my experience suggests to me,
0:43:17 > 0:43:21yes, there are ghosts and objects do move about
0:43:21 > 0:43:25without human agency or mechanical means
0:43:25 > 0:43:29and that the world is far stranger place...
0:43:30 > 0:43:33..than we usually acknowledge.
0:43:33 > 0:43:37What I think is that if I hadn't had an education...
0:43:38 > 0:43:45..if I hadn't learned to think and put the brakes on fantasy,
0:43:45 > 0:43:50then instead of being a novelist, I would pursuing Alison's trade.
0:43:50 > 0:43:54I would be a professional psychic. I think that's quite a possibility.
0:43:54 > 0:43:57You talk to the dead one way or another.
0:43:57 > 0:43:59And you make it pay.
0:44:02 > 0:44:06Financial success has enabled Hilary to live more comfortably
0:44:06 > 0:44:09and from 2001 until earlier this year,
0:44:09 > 0:44:13she lived on the edge of Woking, in a late Victorian building
0:44:13 > 0:44:16that had previously been home to people
0:44:16 > 0:44:19considered to be of unsound mind.
0:44:21 > 0:44:23We're in a former lunatic asylum.
0:44:23 > 0:44:28One of the hospitals built in the 1860s,
0:44:28 > 0:44:33this great ring of asylums around London.
0:44:33 > 0:44:37And this was a place that grew and grew.
0:44:37 > 0:44:40It was a self-sufficient community.
0:44:40 > 0:44:42As many of the hospitals were.
0:44:42 > 0:44:47And it was actually converted about ten years ago,
0:44:47 > 0:44:49since when I've lived here.
0:44:49 > 0:44:51It's tempting fate I suppose, isn't it?
0:44:51 > 0:44:53Do you know, it's not tempting fate,
0:44:53 > 0:44:55what it is, it's teetering on the brink.
0:44:55 > 0:45:01It's saying, "I can mix with the insane dead and they can't get me."
0:45:01 > 0:45:07Actually it's singularly free from ghostly manifestations.
0:45:07 > 0:45:09It's disappointing, in a way.
0:45:13 > 0:45:17I did a lot of thinking about the relation of a place like this
0:45:17 > 0:45:23to its own past and about history, as opposed to heritage.
0:45:23 > 0:45:27About what the history people think they know.
0:45:27 > 0:45:28And about memory.
0:45:30 > 0:45:34This obsession with the past, buried historically and geographically
0:45:34 > 0:45:37underneath the contemporary world,
0:45:37 > 0:45:42became the catalyst for Hilary's next novel, Wolf Hall.
0:45:42 > 0:45:44Told entirely in the present tense,
0:45:44 > 0:45:47with the career of Thomas Cromwell at its heart,
0:45:47 > 0:45:51Wolf Hall is a startlingly modern account of ambition,
0:45:51 > 0:45:55survival and political intrigue in the 16th century.
0:45:57 > 0:46:02I think it's a book that I was seeing as well as hearing,
0:46:02 > 0:46:05as a sort of gold and black swirl
0:46:05 > 0:46:09a kind of movement of darkness and light.
0:46:09 > 0:46:14Something very glittery, something very much of another time
0:46:14 > 0:46:20and so it was presenting itself at once through voices,
0:46:20 > 0:46:23through image and drawing me on.
0:46:23 > 0:46:28How do you know when you've done enough historical research to begin?
0:46:28 > 0:46:30You don't.
0:46:30 > 0:46:34Because I think when you're writing a particular scene
0:46:34 > 0:46:37it may throw up a certain demand and you realise
0:46:37 > 0:46:40you haven't got enough context.
0:46:40 > 0:46:44You can't just have someone walk in
0:46:44 > 0:46:47without them trailing their complete biography,
0:46:47 > 0:46:51which, of course, the reader never sees but you may need to know.
0:46:51 > 0:46:54So, for me, the duel processes, writing
0:46:54 > 0:47:00and research are interwoven, so there isn't a line you can draw.
0:47:00 > 0:47:05You don't know what you need to know until the moment comes.
0:47:07 > 0:47:13I have files that go alphabetically, on people.
0:47:14 > 0:47:16Just their biographical facts.
0:47:16 > 0:47:22And then I have files of ideas and objects...
0:47:24 > 0:47:25..customs and manners,
0:47:25 > 0:47:31in which there might be anything from philosophy to cookery.
0:47:31 > 0:47:38It goes, "Memory, money, Machiavelli, magic, medicine,"
0:47:38 > 0:47:43and then, for some reason, it skips onto, "Palmistry, place, prophecies,
0:47:43 > 0:47:48"Penshursts, round table, "Rome, 'sack of,'
0:47:48 > 0:47:53"saint's days, tennis, Welsh, wardrobe and world views."
0:47:53 > 0:47:55SHE CHUCKLES
0:47:56 > 0:47:59I work from my notes onto the screen,
0:47:59 > 0:48:04because my notes will evolve from being fact based
0:48:04 > 0:48:05to being dialogue based.
0:48:05 > 0:48:12They'll...shift themselves imperceptibly into drama.
0:48:14 > 0:48:16But that's what I do.
0:48:16 > 0:48:18I do dialogue.
0:48:18 > 0:48:23So if you gave me the telephone book, I would make you a play out of it.
0:48:26 > 0:48:29"He stands by a window.
0:48:29 > 0:48:35"A flock of starlings settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree.
0:48:36 > 0:48:42"Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings,
0:48:42 > 0:48:47"they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion,
0:48:47 > 0:48:52"air, wings, black notes in music."
0:48:52 > 0:48:56"He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure,
0:48:56 > 0:49:02"that something almost extinct, some small gesture towards the future,
0:49:02 > 0:49:05"is ready to welcome the spring.
0:49:05 > 0:49:10"In some spare, desperate way, he is looking forward to Easter,
0:49:10 > 0:49:15"the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence."
0:49:16 > 0:49:20"There is a world beyond this black world.
0:49:20 > 0:49:23"There is the world of the possible.
0:49:23 > 0:49:26"A world where Anne can be queen
0:49:26 > 0:49:30"is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell.
0:49:30 > 0:49:35"He sees it, then he doesn't. The moment's fleeting.
0:49:35 > 0:49:38"But insight can't be taken back.
0:49:38 > 0:49:42"You can't return to the moment you were in before."
0:49:45 > 0:49:49The winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, 2009,
0:49:49 > 0:49:51goes to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall.
0:49:51 > 0:49:53APPLAUSE
0:49:53 > 0:49:56The power of the story
0:49:56 > 0:49:59and the arresting individuality of the prose,
0:49:59 > 0:50:02muscular, unsentimental and acutely observed,
0:50:02 > 0:50:05made Wolf Hall a prize-winning success.
0:50:05 > 0:50:08What was it like on the night for you?
0:50:08 > 0:50:11The night of the Booker, what was that like?
0:50:11 > 0:50:13Two of you go, the one who's going to win
0:50:13 > 0:50:16and the one who's going to be the greatest loser
0:50:16 > 0:50:22with a grin plastered on her face
0:50:22 > 0:50:27I have had a lot of experience being the gracious loser...
0:50:27 > 0:50:31so I made sure I was rehearsed in both roles.
0:50:31 > 0:50:34'It was very undignified, really,
0:50:34 > 0:50:36'because at the moment of the announcement,
0:50:36 > 0:50:40'I shot to my feet as if I'd been fired out of a canon,
0:50:40 > 0:50:45'as if not one more moment was going to go by.
0:50:45 > 0:50:48'I should probably, you know,'
0:50:48 > 0:50:52have had to be gently ushered to my feet by my friends.
0:50:52 > 0:50:55It would have been more gracious.
0:50:55 > 0:50:59But, yes, part of you thinks, "I've worked for this,"
0:50:59 > 0:51:04and it is the ultimate recognition, the Man Booker,
0:51:04 > 0:51:06that's what it's become
0:51:06 > 0:51:10and, in a sense, it's something you want to get past.
0:51:10 > 0:51:15Once you've won it, nobody thinks you ought to win it twice
0:51:15 > 0:51:17and the pressure is off, in a sense,
0:51:17 > 0:51:19so that you're waiting for that moment
0:51:19 > 0:51:22and then you can start becoming the writer
0:51:22 > 0:51:24that you meant to become all along.
0:51:26 > 0:51:27This doesn't mean, however,
0:51:27 > 0:51:31that the actual act of writing becomes any easier.
0:51:31 > 0:51:35Hilary is now at work on the sequel to Wolf Hall,
0:51:35 > 0:51:37The Mirror and the Light, and, in many ways,
0:51:37 > 0:51:40it's like starting all over again.
0:51:41 > 0:51:46I never take for granted that anything is going to come right,
0:51:46 > 0:51:51so every day I'm writing, I feel like a beginner.
0:51:51 > 0:51:54There are absolutely no guarantees
0:51:54 > 0:51:59that because you could do it yesterday you can do it today.
0:51:59 > 0:52:05You can always write something but sometimes you have to endure...
0:52:05 > 0:52:09barren days, when you're just plodding across the terrain, going,
0:52:09 > 0:52:13"Subject, verb, object, subject, verb, object."
0:52:13 > 0:52:17It will actually carry you there and give you something to work on...
0:52:19 > 0:52:22..but, at the time, it can feel like the end of the world
0:52:22 > 0:52:24because you're going so slowly,
0:52:24 > 0:52:28as if you've forgotten everything you've ever learned.
0:52:30 > 0:52:35I do have faith that given enough input,
0:52:35 > 0:52:40just given enough graft, eventually it will take off
0:52:40 > 0:52:46and you'll see that fleeting shape of a section in front of you
0:52:46 > 0:52:50and you'll be able to grab it, get it onto the page.
0:52:50 > 0:52:54That's very like chasing the ghost.
0:52:54 > 0:52:57It already exists, you see.
0:52:57 > 0:53:00It's like the sculpture in the marble,
0:53:00 > 0:53:04the ideal shape and form of the chapter exists,
0:53:04 > 0:53:08you've just got to be there to grab it quickly.
0:53:10 > 0:53:14Commencing in Wiltshire in September 1535,
0:53:14 > 0:53:18The Mirror and the Light begins with the fall of Anne Boleyn
0:53:18 > 0:53:22and the rise of Henry VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour.
0:53:22 > 0:53:26Once again, Thomas Cromwell is at the heart of the novel.
0:53:28 > 0:53:31He's the arch plotter and schemer.
0:53:31 > 0:53:35I don't think he quite knows what schemes
0:53:35 > 0:53:39he might be forming up around Jane.
0:53:39 > 0:53:45He has a...a feeling about her that she's in some way important.
0:53:45 > 0:53:47But...
0:53:48 > 0:53:51..until, in the first chapter of the sequel,
0:53:51 > 0:53:53he looks out of the window,
0:53:53 > 0:53:57he sees the king walking with her in the garden.
0:53:59 > 0:54:04And when Henry comes in, he's wearing an expression, I say,
0:54:04 > 0:54:08rather like a calf that's just been stunned by the butcher...
0:54:08 > 0:54:10And then Cromwell knows.
0:54:10 > 0:54:15And on that moment, a great deal will pivot.
0:54:15 > 0:54:18Henry doesn't know.
0:54:18 > 0:54:19Jane does.
0:54:19 > 0:54:24That's great fun, you know, trying to work out
0:54:24 > 0:54:27the characters various levels of awareness.
0:54:27 > 0:54:31And I think it's something to...
0:54:33 > 0:54:35..always bear in mind.
0:54:36 > 0:54:41Henry didn't know he was going to have six wives. We all know.
0:54:41 > 0:54:43But he was hopeful with each one.
0:54:43 > 0:54:48Each one was a fresh disaster waiting to happen in a different way.
0:54:48 > 0:54:50But he had no perception of that.
0:54:50 > 0:54:55We can look back and say, "Well, that one was doomed from the start."
0:54:57 > 0:55:00But it is what historians can sometimes forget,
0:55:00 > 0:55:04that people in the past...
0:55:05 > 0:55:09..they could not adjust their behaviour
0:55:09 > 0:55:11according to what was to come.
0:55:11 > 0:55:14They could not draw morals from their own behaviour.
0:55:14 > 0:55:18They were just sleep walking, they were walking into the dark.
0:55:18 > 0:55:20And I think when you are a historical novelist,
0:55:20 > 0:55:22your job is to walk with them.
0:55:28 > 0:55:29Earlier this year,
0:55:29 > 0:55:33Hilary and Gerald felt that they wanted a change of scene
0:55:33 > 0:55:38and decided to move to the seaside, to Budleigh Salterton in Devon.
0:55:38 > 0:55:42It was intended as the fulfilment of a childhood dream.
0:55:42 > 0:55:46This is a photograph of Hilary on the beach at Budleigh,
0:55:46 > 0:55:48taken when she was 16.
0:55:48 > 0:55:53She has, perhaps at last, found a kind of peace.
0:55:55 > 0:55:57Are you happy?
0:55:59 > 0:56:02From time to time, yes.
0:56:02 > 0:56:06It may sound like a superficial answer,
0:56:06 > 0:56:11but it depends almost entirely on the last sentence I wrote.
0:56:11 > 0:56:14If it was a good one, I'm happy.
0:56:14 > 0:56:18If I'm plunged into uncertainty about that sentence,
0:56:18 > 0:56:21I have to live with a lot of ambivalence
0:56:21 > 0:56:26and ambiguity as to whether something is going to work,
0:56:26 > 0:56:28whether my scene is going to work.
0:56:28 > 0:56:32So I don't have the temperament that's ever going to be able
0:56:32 > 0:56:36to stand back and say, "I am happy,"
0:56:36 > 0:56:37cos I'm always going to say,
0:56:37 > 0:56:41"Could be a bit happier, with a few adjustments."
0:56:42 > 0:56:45But I am beginning a new phase of my life.
0:56:46 > 0:56:51Because I'm going to live by the sea, which I've always wanted to do.
0:56:55 > 0:56:56And...
0:56:58 > 0:57:02..I'm hoping for a bit more inner calm.
0:57:02 > 0:57:05I want to watch the sea
0:57:05 > 0:57:06and learn from it.
0:57:10 > 0:57:15Because the pattern is irreversible, irreducible.
0:57:15 > 0:57:19There may be a storm blowing up
0:57:19 > 0:57:23but basically you have the same...
0:57:23 > 0:57:28waveform...coming and going.
0:57:28 > 0:57:31It's almost as if I'm wanting to hear my own heartbeat.
0:57:33 > 0:57:37I think that's what I'd like to be able to do.
0:58:00 > 0:58:03Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
0:58:03 > 0:58:06E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk