Jane Gardam's dispatches from the past

New Statesman​

07-05-2025

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…
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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.
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