Fludd (1989) by Hilary Mantel

Children often have a close connection to the supernatural, or what we call the supernatural: ghosts, spirits, apparitions, the dead and gone. See Jane Eyre: when her friend Helen Burns dies in her arms it’s as though she's just going to live somewhere else for a while. "I am very happy, Jane; and when you hear that I am dead, you must be sure and not grieve . . . by dying young I shall escape great sufferings.” Helen is the voice of Christian innocence but she also has a child’s pragmatism about death. To die is to enter a region of happiness unknown to those on earth.

As a child I loved churchyards, and with my brothers deliberately took the route to and from school to cross through the churchyard of St. Mary the Virgin, where we amused ourselves by reading the strange names on the gravestones. Ethels and Ednas, Esthers and Edwards and Edgars, so many E’s, all locked into the past. We scraped at their mossy names with our fingernails and wondered what sort of lives they’d had in our home town in 1883. Behind us the church loomed and glowered but we didn’t dare go in: that was for the Christmas carol service and even then only once or twice: when mum was well enough or spiritually charged to take us.

The complete sentence above from Hilary Mantel’s Fludd reads like this:

Last Wednesday and the Battle of Bosworth are all one; the past is the past, and Mrs. O’ Toole buried last Wednesday, is neck and neck with King Richard in the hurtle to eternity.

This is a wise adage regarding the dead which tells us that the dead are all the same if the past is our great leveller of difference. Historic time is a singular thread, or perhaps one long muddy route or field through which we all move, with or without a horse. King Richard III lost his horse at Bosworth - “a kingdom for a horse” — he famously yells across the battle field. Without his horse his time is up; he’s the same as the rest of us: a foot soldier wandering into eternity without a map. Mrs. O’ Toole, summoned as a local genius loci, is perhaps the woman who changed the flowers, swept the nave, and busied herself with ecclesiastical housekeeping. Mrs. O’ Toole is no more or less than the famous king now they both prone lie beneath the ground saying their prayers.

I like the image of the neck - there are two necks, I imagine: the neck of the horse that Richard looks for to carry him away from the scene of carnage; and then the neck of the man himself — Richard, and the rest of us — down on the ground looking for some sort of salvation. The sentence arises from deep within the bowels of a church: the Church of St Thomas Aquinas in the fictitious village of Fetherhougton, a place surrounded by moorland, gothic winds, rumours and superstition and much ritual. But the architect who built this church had a sense of history:

a Shakespearian sense of history, with a grand contempt for the pitfalls of anachronism.

In other words, the church has been designed to look as though it has always been there. It arises from a place the villagers call eternity, where differences of time past and time present are meaningless. It is wrongheaded, our narrator suggests, to imagine that the past is any different from now when considering who has come before us, who lies buried in the ground beneath. Someone just the same as the rest of us, with hard balls on the bottom of our feet, I thought, as I crossed over Ethel Bream’s grave feeling rather disgraceful. Did Ethel have cod and chips on Fridays? Did she make her chips soggy by adding as much vinegar as I did?