People who say Goodbye by P Y Betts, and Hilary Mantel

I was looking for Victorian memoirs and couldn't find any; Perhaps Edwardian memoirs are just more popular? I ordered this one as it said it was funny; I do love a funny book. This one does not disappoint. P. Y. Betts was an indecently intelligent child who never had her originality knocked out of her which is rather surprising, but perhaps this was because her mother was the same. Throughout the book this is the central relationship - mother and daughter sizing each other up through narrowed eyes, and the mother keeping her knives very, very sharp.

Phyllis asks "What happens to you after you die?"
Mother replies "You rot."

We see the neighbourhood of Wandsworth through Phyllis's eyes. How extraordinary; there were fields at the bottom of their garden! It sounds idyllic. But up the road there's a hospital for the war wounded, across the road there's an undertaker and regular funerals, close by there's a lunatic asylum (with joyful loonies). There are sudden attacks of possibly fatal illness, an incompetent doctor, but also some relatives who are made of very stern stuff and seem capable of living for ever. I wish Phyllis had written more.

Another review here

I have also just read Hilary Mantel's book "Giving up the Ghost" which is also a memoir but poles apart in a way. Hilary was also a clever and spirited girl, who would have liked to have been a boy, and enjoyed her grandfather's company. Her parents' troubled marriage is sensed and not explained to the child. Really, their lack of explanations is everything that's wrong with being a child. Then her school is the most backward type of provincial Catholic school which at times employed cruel and stupid teachers. I too, went to a convent school, and was so much luckier because I loved and respected my nuns, which is terribly unfashionable to say these days. Some of them were, I think, thoughtful and disciplined in a good way. Hilary concludes that being a child didn't suit her personality, and I think, yes, I understand, I was rather similar, and as I grew older I grew more able to draw the lines under and move on, which is what Hilary does. But Hilary has a medical condition which must have been such a terrible drawback to her life, as to say, my life is fine, I have a good brain and a strong spirit but I AM IN TERRIBLE PAIN IN ALL MY BODY except, she says, her ankles and feet. She even has to diagnose her own condition. She seems not to meet a single intelligent doctor, or even a concerned and caring one. The insensitivity she encounters in the medical profession is pretty appalling.

I can say that doctors have improved, even in women's medicine, and I am pretty sure that teachers have improved and are no longer allowed to do the stupid things they used to do. Although, when my neighbour was a teaching assistant, she used to tell me about young teachers who would stand up and gabble at the children without pause, not realising that the children had withdrawn their attention after the first couple of incomprehensible sentences. Young people, pah. (I don't mean this, some of you are great, but listen to yourselves!)

Hilary's book is far more ambitious, in a literary sense, she knows how to create effects that will intrigue a reader. There is a strange intuition that I get from reading Mantel's work that she thinks she knows better than we do - your "mother" is feeding you the ideas/information she thinks are suitable for you, carefully knitted into a shape which she thinks is suitable for you. PY Betts has also shaped her information into a story, but she hasn't made it to suit anyone but herself or used fancy stitches that show her knitting skills; it's just what it is, funny and sharp, and smack, there you are. They are both well worth reading. 5 stars.