The margin notes of a decade

I've been teaching Hilary Mantel to A-level students for eight years. Every autumn I hand out *Wolf Hall* and watch them discover that history can be written in present tense, that a woman who died four centuries ago can feel like someone sitting next to you on a bus. What I haven't told them is that I've been trying to write something in that tradition since 2016, and the manuscript lives in a folder called 'TUDOR DRAFT 4' because I keep starting over. The day job is secondary school English in Bristol, year 9 through year 13, and I love it more than I expected when I started. The Clifton branch of Waterstones is a professional hazard. I go in for one book and come out with three, and my flat off Whiteladies Road has run out of shelf space in a fairly decisive way. The novel is set in the 1530s, in a household that is not the Boleyns and not the Seymours but somewhere adjacent to both, because I got tired of writing about the people everyone already knows. The women who ran the kitchens and wrote the household accounts are more interesting to me. That's the thing I keep saying and the thing I keep failing to prove to myself on the page. But I'm still trying.