Diary 
Hilary Mantel
Let us say, life changes at a glance. Let us say you’re walking forward, you turn your head to look over your shoulder, and behind you the landscape has changed. One life, a life you might have led, is snatched back into the shadows. A different life begins.
This is the day I meet my stepfather; it is the day he meets me. I must not take for granted that you know the topography. You have not seen with your own eyes the long snaking road, nor the hedge on one side, behind which the land rises, nor the wall on the other side, beyond which the land falls away. I am four now. I don’t go to school yet. I am small. I wear a bonnet. And everything about me is as sweet as sweety-pie. My head is slightly too big for my body. The inside of it is bulging with knowledge.
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Hilary Mantel whose books include A Place of Greater Safety, Giving up the Ghost and Beyond Black, is working on a new novel called Wolf Hall.
Other articles by this contributor:
The Shape of Absence · The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Saartjie Baartman’s Ghost · The New Apartheid
If you’d seen his green eyes · The People’s Robespierre
What He Could Bear · A Brutal Childhood
Some girls want out · spectacular saintliness
That Wilting Flower · The Lure of the Unexplained
‘What a man this is, with his crowd of women around him!’ · Springtime for Robespierre
I have washed my feet out of it · Growing up in Ghana
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