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As a Catholic that was the theology I had at my command

As a Catholic, that was the theology I had at my command.” The family home itself was haunted and this presence seemed like “a concentration of things that were going on in the house – the unhappiness of our family and the pressure of secrets and lies”

When Hilary Mantel was seven, she met the devil. In the story “Third Floor Rising”, from her collection Learning to Talk, screams issue from an empty bricked-up department store. Mantel understands how the inexplicable disturbs and spooks us.Now she is laying to rest a few demons of her own in the memoir Giving Up The Ghost (Fourth Estate, £16.99), and in Learning to Talk – a series of fictionalised out-takes from the memoir. “My childhood seemed very much haunted,” she explains, “so I’ve tried to get a sense of that without doing the headless horseman and the rattling chains.”As a writer, Mantel always achieves a topical resonance. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988) considers the implications of creeping Muslim fundamentalism A Change of Climate (1994) involves “medicine murder”. (Ten years ago, who could have foreseen the recent disposal of “Adam’s” torso in the Thames?). The Giant O’Brien, with its freak-show character, poses questions about medical ethics and what it means to be human, while the marvellous epic A Place of Greater Safety charts the free-fall and chaos of the French Revolution.

“I don’t want to talk about Iraq,” says Mantel, “but I keep thinking about what Robespierre said: ‘Who likes armed missionaries?’”In turning to memoir, Mantel joins a host of writers who have used the absence of a parent to question their own identity Mantel’s father vanished when she was young But her story is not just a daddy-I-hardly-knew-you. Constant illness from the age of 19 meant that at times she hardly knew herself, as a result of the cocktail of drugs on which she has been forced to rely.As a child, Mantel often missed school through illness. “Because of my absences I was squeezed into an observer’s role.” A large vocabulary also set her apart. “I didn’t know that you didn’t use all the words at your command,” she says, smiling. “So I retreated into being virtually dumb and hardly uttered during the rest of my primary education.” That all changed at grammar school, where she became head girl “School saved my sanity. It was an oasis of civilisation and calm.”Mantel is the oldest of three children. Her mother, who went to work in a mill at 14, was ambitious for her daughter to excel academically This wasn’t the only pressure Mantel’s parents had taken in a lodger.

“By the time I was 10, Jack was more of a power in the household and my father became marginalised, living in the house like a ghost.” Her mother couldn’t get divorced and later, everyone had to keep up the pretence that she was married to Jack When Mantel’s father finally left, they never saw him again. Does that sadden her? “In the scale of what’s given grief it comes surprisingly low down,” she says “But I am what I am because of him. The quiet habits of the introvert were nourished by him.”The first person in her family to go to university, Mantel found herself having to beg for money, much like Carmel in her girls-of-slender-means semi-autobiographical novel, An Experiment in Love. Jack, now her stepfather, refused to support her financially When Mantel wanted to marry, her parents cut her off “If I hadn’t married I would have had to leave university.

It was a difficult situation and one where every choice was a bad one.”Married, Mantel spent several years teaching abroad, exposed to “the grievous things that Africa does to the European psyche.” The expat experience led her to conclude “the world is profoundly other”. She soon realised that some things simply couldn’t be communicated “Botswana was so remote and cut off. How can you talk to people back home who are still stuck in the same perceptions? The gap is too great.”Her health, meanwhile, was deteriorating. Misdiagnosis had led to Mantel being fobbed off with anti-depressive drugs. By the time doctors discovered the she was suffering from endometriosis she was 27 and her condition so advanced that her reproductive organs had to be removed.