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New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Jane Gardam's dispatches from the past
Phoot by GL Portrait / Alamy Stock Photo In Showing the Flag, Jane Gardam's 1989 volume of short stories, the final story, 'After the Strawberry Tea', describes the troubled house move of James and Elisabeth, a couple in their mid-60s who are leaving their family home in Wimbledon for a new life in east Kent. As they load their indignant cat into the car, they have an unsettling encounter with an elderly neighbour, who warns of nuclear catastrophe on the Kent coast. Turning from the motorway into the Kentish landscape of fields and orchards, Elisabeth is overcome with thoughts of impending doom. Not long ago I followed James and Elisabeth's route down the old pilgrim's road from London to Kent. My former home was in south-east rather than prosperous south-west London, but I had lived there for 30 years, raised my child there, and although no dotty old neighbour turned up to warn of nuclear meltdown at Dungeness, I set off for my new house with an equivalent sense of foreboding. The following night, amid a chaos of unpacking, I opened a box at random and found three volumes of Gardam's great last trilogy: Old Filth (published in 2004 when she was 78), The Man in the Wooden Hat (2011) and Last Friends (2013). It was a strangely appropriate discovery: uprootings, changes of landscape and the quest for a home, for love and belonging haunt these novels, set amid the twilight of Empire and punctuated by memorial services. Jane Gardam's own death, at the age of 96, was announced on 29 April. For her admirers, her obituaries made strange reading. They dutifully reviewed her childhood in the seaside town of Redcar in Yorkshire in the 1930s, her post-war studies at London University, her marriage to a barrister, David Gardam, and her writing life, whose early promise was delayed by raising their three children. While her many literary awards were noted, the consensus was that 'she never achieved the literary acclaim of contemporaries such as Margaret Drabble or Penelope Lively' – novelists with whom Gardam had little in common, beyond a vague generalisation that they were all old ladies. But Gardam was, among her remarkable qualities, a great storyteller, whose narratives of apparently remote figures of a postwar era as emotionally distant as the Bronze Age are as plangently resonant as the human dilemmas of love and loss depicted by Chekhov or Tolstoy (when she appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2017, Gardam said she would take War and Peace as her book of choice). Old Filth and its two sequels are often considered Gardam's greatest works. We first encounter the octogenarian Sir Edward Feathers, the 'Old Filth' of the title, as an absence. His inappropriate nickname – he is a fastidiously groomed and distinguished old lawyer – is a hoary legal acronym for ex-pats: 'Failed In London? Try Hong Kong'. Sir Edward had dropped in for lunch at the Inner Temple, but now his chair is empty and the remaining Judges and Benchers are gossiping about its recently-departed occupant. Great advocate, they say. Had a soft life. Made a packet at the Far Eastern Bar. Good to see the old coelacanth… Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe As is usually the case with gossip, some of this is true, and some spectacularly not. Filth's practice in Hong Kong has made him rich, and for decades the former British colony was where he and his wife, Betty, felt a sense of belonging, intensified by the fact that both were born in the far East. But as the end of British rule in Hong Kong approaches, Betty understands that their old age must be spent at 'home' – that term inexorably applied by British expatriates to the place where they believed their values, and their children, were best formed. And so Filth and Betty move to a prosperous village on the Dorset/Wiltshire borders where, Gardam writes, 'They put their hearts into becoming content, safe in their successful lives.' That simple sentence is fraught with jeopardy. If their lives are successful and safe, why must they put their hearts into being content? Filth's safety rests, it seems, on firm foundations: his brilliant legal career and his long marriage to sensible, sturdy Betty. But after her sudden death – planting tulips in the garden, he is unmoored. When a rapprochement with a once-loathed adversary at the Hong Kong bar ends with his death, Filth's careful detachment fragments into a chaotic quest to understand the horrors of his past. The epigraph of Gardam's novel is a quotation from Charles Lamb: 'Lawyers, I suppose, were children once'. An admirer of Charles Dickens, Gardam noted that Dickens wrote on the manuscript of The Old Curiosity Shop, 'Keep the child in view'. It is advice that she takes in Old Filth, whose structure tracks the convergence of appalling childhood experience with desolate late old age, culminating in a moment of transcendent redemption. 'All my life… from my early childhood,' Filth says, 'I have been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone I loved or who cared for me. I want to know why.' Gardam's novel employs many of the devices of the 19th-century novel: the damaged, resilient orphan child; shattering revelations overheard, or revealed in devastating letters; benefactors in unexpected guise; the magic of coincidence and the redeeming (but dangerously frangible) qualities of friendship. Money is an urgent preoccupation, and Gardam vividly depicts the lack of agency that comes with slender means. But her technique is anything but Victorian. In Old Filth, the deforming experiences of childhood are mirrored and intercut with those of old age in vivid, filmic fashion. 'I suppose you know,' says one character, 'that there are those who believe that endurance of cruelty as a child can feed genius.' 'I have no genius,' Filth replies, bleakly. As the memorial services of major characters accumulate, the minor characters ('There are no minor characters,' said Gardam) take centre stage in a trilogy whose theme is, as Gardam put it, 'The way that what happened to the child… shapes the adult forever.' 'Nobody in the swim is ever really interesting,' Gardam once remarked. But even now, when a social media presence is a prerequisite for many authors, mere name recognition is little gauge of literary worth. The value of Gardam's writing rests in less perishable qualities: her fine observation and psychological acuity, her remarkable gift for storytelling and her unforgettable depiction in these three late, great works, off how fate, chance and the tectonic shifts of world politics bruise and sustain the human heart. Related
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jane Gardam obituary
The prolific novelist, short-story writer and children's author Jane Gardam, who has died aged 96, had a taste for the absurd and an extraordinary facility for characterisation and social comedy. Accused once of being a 'muslin and tea party writer', she shot back: 'I'm more hair-cloth and gin.' It was a remark that deftly summarised two features of her work: religion and the more subversive side of middle-class life. Gardam's commitment to literary experimentation was evident from early on. She hated the idea of writing as a genteel occupation, and set out to challenge both herself and her readers. She did this partly in terms of form: Crusoe's Daughter (1985) ends with a playlet; The Queen of the Tambourine (1991) is epistolary; the denouement of Faith Fox (1996) features the prayers muttered in church by various characters. Her much praised short-story collection Missing the Midnight (1997) explores the many permutations of the ghost story. Changing perspective was another of her interests: The Man in the Wooden Hat (2009) is a sympathetic retelling of the earlier Old Filth (2004) from the point of view of Betty, a judge's frustrated wife, while the final work in the series, Last Friends (2013) , picks up the story of Filth's rival in law, Terry Veneering. These experiments were not always convincing, and there is a sense, even in some of Gardam's most enjoyable works, that too much is going on. Thus the exhilarating God on the Rocks (1978), which was nominated for the Booker prize, features a Christian sect, a psychiatric facility, a tyrannical mother, a thwarted love affair, a husband falling into sin and a wife joyously rushing towards it. The equally vibrant Faith Fox includes various abandoned children, a charismatic vicar, a grieving mother, a disillusioned wife, some disregarded grandparents, a former lover with Alzheimer's disease and a troupe of Tibetans. The tangle of stories in The Flight of the Maidens (2000) risks distracting the reader from Gardam's sensitive recounting of the case of Lieselotte, a Kindertransport refugee. But if her narrative can be overcrowded, Gardam met the other challenge of her writing – to recreate the melodrama and passion of domestic and suburban life – with finesse. 'There's no point in writing anything if it doesn't disturb you in some way,' she said. 'A novel must be about what everyone is thinking, but nobody dares say.' One of her most unsettling books, The Queen of the Tambourine, took its inspiration from life. Gardam had seen a perfectly dressed and made-up woman running down Wimbledon High Street screaming. No one stopped to help her. 'I wanted to show how a suburban street has tentacles that go out into the world and how a woman who seems to be civilised is as totally alone in a savage environment as someone in the jungle,' she explained. Her portrait of the mental disintegration of a fervent do-gooder, Eliza Peabody, won her the Whitbread best novel award. Born Jean Pearson in Coatham, North Yorkshire, Gardam grew up in the North Riding and in Cumbria, where she spent summers on her grandfather's farm. It was a background of which she was proud and which informs much of her work. Yorkshire and its coast are the setting for many of her novels and she uses its dialect in the Whitbread children's book award-winning The Hollow Land (1981), for the blowsy maid Lydia in God on the Rocks, and for the Smikes, the good-hearted but terrifying ex-burglars of Faith Fox. In fact, she attributed her career to her forebears, explaining: 'Cumbrians can't tell anything without making a story out of it. I suppose that's where I learned most.' Her parents were another influence. Her father, William Pearson, a mathematician turned headmaster, was bitterly disappointed by what he saw as her lack of academic prowess, and Gardam's response is reflected in the alienated, underappreciated young women of her early fiction. Her mother, Kathleen (nee Helm), was a more positive force. Gardam said that she learned her love of language, and her strong sense of religion, from her mother. Crusoe's Daughter is her most politically astute novel and she described this, her own favourite, as partly about her mother. The sense of frustration at women's lot is clear in her heroine Polly Flint's letter to her aunt: 'Because I am a girl … I was to be stood in a vacuum … left in the bell-jar … Nothing in the world is ever to happen to me.' Jane was educated at Saltburn high school for girls and Bedford College, London (now part of Royal Holloway London), where she read English and caught up on the artistic delights of the capital (she had only visited the theatre once before, and often went hungry as a student to finance her craving for drama). She hoped to become a literary scholar, and began a doctorate on the 18th-century essayist and literary figure Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Lack of funds, and perhaps temperament, led her to stop after a year. 'I longed to be an academic,' she said, 'but that time working in the British Museum was the closest I've ever come to going mad myself.' Her first job was as a travelling librarian for the Red Cross, visiting military, naval and mental hospital libraries. She moved into journalism, working first as a sub-editor on Weldon's Ladies' Journal and then as assistant literary editor of Time and Tide, where she met TS Eliot and John Betjeman. Her marriage to the high-ranking lawyer David Gardam in 1954, and the birth of their first child, Tim, in 1956, meant the end of that career. The next 15 years of Gardam's life were taken up with child-rearing. She had started to write as a child, but stopped when she became a mother. 'I just couldn't separate myself completely … There didn't seem much choice,' she said. 'I did have quite exhausting children and their father was working abroad in the far east a lot.' After her second child, Kitty, started school, she wrote a novel in Wimbledon library. It was rejected by Oxford University Press as 'improper' (the protagonist was a gay curate) but her next project, begun the day her youngest child, Tom, first went to school, was successful. A Long Way from Verona, a novel for teenagers, was published in 1971. After this, Gardam became unstoppable. A book of linked short stories for older children, A Few Fair Days, appeared in the same year, and a vivid work for teenagers, The Summer After the Funeral, two years later. In 1975 her first work for adults was published: the short-story collection Black Faces, White Faces, inspired by a trip to Jamaica where her husband was working on a case. The age distinction is questionable for Gardam, however. Long before the teenage/adult crossover fiction of Philip Pullman and Mark Haddon, The Summer After the Funeral's struggling adolescent heroine Athene, feeling her way through vastly strange adult worlds of depressed aunts, lesbian couples and lascivious artists, was straining at the boundaries of teenage fiction. The Summer After the Funeral and the later Bilgewater (1977) are now published as works for adults. Comedy and sympathy are the marks of Gardam's talent. God on the Rocks offers a tender portrait of the struggle of a mother, Elinor, to maintain her close relationship with her eight-year-old daughter, Margaret, following the birth of her new baby, alongside the comic delights of Margaret's misunderstandings of the adult world and the billowing figure of no-better-than-she-should-be Lydia. Faith Fox recounts the bereaved Thomasina's almost violent love for her dead daughter, Holly, amidst the wild social satire of the clash between north and south. The much-celebrated Old Filth trilogy offers a compassionate exploration of the ravages of old age, and its myriad embarrassments. It is for this emotional and social understanding, as well as her ear for comic dialogue, that this joyous and challenging writer will be remembered. Muslin and tea never had much of a place in her work. Gardam was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976 and OBE in 2009. David died in 2010, and their daughter, Kitty, also predeceased her. She is survived by Tim, Tom, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Jane Mary Gardam, writer, born 11 July 1928; died 28 April 2025
