 Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantell, narrated by Anna Bentink, Jane Collingwood, and Patrick Moy. King Billy is a gentleman. I cannot get out of my mind now, the village where I was born, just out of the curl of the city's tentacles. We were too close to the city for a life of our own. There was a regular train service, not one of those where you have to lie and wait and study its habits. But we did not like the Mancunians. Urban, squat and packed with guile, I suppose was our attitude. We sneered at their back-to-back accents and pitied their physiques. My mother, a staunch Lamarckian, is convinced that Mancunians have disproportionately long arms as a result of generations of labour at the loom. Until, but this was later, a pink housing estate was slammed up, and they were transplanted in their hundreds, like those trees plucked up for Christmas whose roots are dipped in boiling water. Well, until then we did not have much to do with people from town. And yet, if you ask me if I was a country boy—no, I wasn't that. Our huddle of stones and slates scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues had no claim on rural England where there is morris dancing and fellowship and oldie ale flowing. It was a broken sterile place, devoid of trees, like a transit camp, and yet with the hopeless permanence that transit camps tend to assume. Snow stood on the hills till April. We lived at the top of the village, in a house which I considered to be haunted. My father had disappeared. Perhaps it was his presence, long and pallid, which slid behind the door in sweeps of draught and raised the heckles on the terrier's neck. He had been a clerk by profession, cross-words whereas hobby, and a little angling, simple card games and a cigarette-card collection. He left at ten o'clock one blustery March morning, making his albums and his tweed overcoat and leaving all his underwear. My mother washed it and gave it to a jumble sale. We didn't miss him much, only the little tunes which he used to play on the piano, over and over, pineapple rag. Then came the lodger. He was from further north, a man with long, slow vowels, making a meal out of words we got through quite quickly. The lodger was choleric, his flash-point was low. He was very, very unpredictable. If you were going to see the shape of the future, you had to watch him carefully, quiet and still, with all your intuitions bristling.