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The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A natural storyteller': Jane Gardam remembered by Tessa Hadley
Jane Gardam, who has died aged 96, was such an exuberant, inventive writer. It's the sheer energy of the voice you notice first, picking up one of her books from the shelf; she had the easy authority of a natural storyteller. Her first book, A Long Way from Verona, was written for children and published in 1971, when she was in her early 40s. 'I ought to tell you at the beginning,' announces Jessica Vye in the first sentence, 'that I am not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine.' In the book, clever bookish girls, at a private school in wartime, are hungry for adventures and also for tea with cress sandwiches and chocolate eclairs; they belong to that class beloved of British fiction in the old days, educated people fallen on hard times. Jessica's father has left his job as a schoolmaster to follow his vocation as a poor curate. The Summer After the Funeral, published in 1973, begins with the death of Athene Price's elderly vicar father, when his young wife and children have to move out of the vicarage with no money. Athene believes she's a reincarnation of Emily Brontë; Jessica has mentioned Henry James, Chopin and Shakespeare by the end of her second chapter. These books belong to the tail-end of that rich period of English middle-class children's writing, which depended upon an audience of sophisticated and informed young readers; it was partly through the books that their readers grew sophisticated and informed. These books are set in the north of England; Gardam grew up mostly in North Yorkshire. The difference between the rugged north and the posh home counties, which are the other half of her subject, cuts across her fiction. In her adult novel Faith Fox she describes two tribes, 'South and north, above and below the line from the Wash to the Severn, the language-line that is still not quite broken to this day.' Gardam was born Jean Mary Pearson in 1928 in Coatham, Redcar, where her father was a schoolteacher. She won a scholarship to Bedford College in London to study English, where the 'work was dreary, heavy with Anglo Saxon' and she was bored 'except for when I was in the wonderful but ice-cold Bedford College library (no coal or heating in the 40s).' She married David Hill Gardam, who became a distinguished KC and expert in construction law; they had three children. When she met Stevie Smith at a party, she told her she was 'a Wimbledon housewife who writes novels'. Smith persisted: 'But who are you really?' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Faith Fox Gardam writes that a mask was 'slapped on' by 'the fearless, comic, incorruptible battle-axe Englishwoman … out of consideration, out of a wish not to increase concern and also out of a genetic belief that our deepest feelings are diminished when we show them'. Maybe it's partly that inheritance which explains why many of Gardam's adult novels carry something over tonally from her beginnings in children's fiction. The opening of Crusoe's Daughter, published in 1985, promises all the enchantments of childhood reading. 'I am Polly Flint. I came to live at the yellow house when I was six years old. I stood on the steps in the wind, and the swirls of sand, and my father pulled the brass bell-knob beside the huge front door.' Although the novel goes on to narrate the whole of Polly's life, including her alcoholism and thwarted love affairs, it can't quite get out from under that brisk, intelligent over-voice, helpless not to be reassuring, however dark the material. It's in her final trilogy (Old Filth, 2004, The Man in the Wooden Hat, 2009, and Last Friends, 2013) that she achieved the perfect balance between manner and matter. Each novel tells the story of the same three lives, but from a different perspective: 'old coelacanth' retired judge Edward Feathers (Failed in London Try Hong Kong), Feathers' wife Betty, and his career rival, Veneering, who was once – just once – Betty's lover. The books gather up these lives retrospectively, from the vantage point of old age and death; their collage of fragments, contradictions and memories compose a portrait of a vanished world of manners, politics, class, sex, empire. Gardam's knowing ironies come into their own, and all the jeopardy and pain, which can feel tamed or missing in earlier books, crowds into the cracks between the fragments, around the edges of the masks. Yet the trilogy isn't gloomy: it's funny, ruthless, clever and somehow uplifting, without a trace of sentimentality. The whole is a triumphant achievement.
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jane Gardam, author of Old Filth and The Hollow Land, dies aged 96
Jane Gardam, author of books for adults and children including Old Filth and The Hollow Land, has died at the age of 96, her publisher has confirmed. The Yorkshire-born novelist's career spanned 50 years, and she was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2009. Her books were also nominated for the Booker prize, the Orange (now Women's) prize and the Folio (now Writers') prize. She remains the only person to have won the Whitbread prize (latterly the Costa) in two categories: she won the children's book category in 1981 for The Hollow Land and the best novel category in 1991 for The Queen of the Tambourine. Old Filth was named as one of the BBC's 100 greatest British novels in 2015. Gardam was much admired by fellow authors, with Ian McEwan calling her 'a treasure of English contemporary writing'. Describing Old Filth when it came out in 2004, fellow novelist Maggie Gee said Gardam's writing 'crackles with energy, variety, sensuous richness. It is the writing of a 25-year-old with the wisdom and subtlety of a razor-sharp 100-year-old.' Born in 1928, Gardam was raised in the seaside Yorkshire town of Redcar by a maths teacher father and a stay-at-home mother who was passionate about writing. 'She wrote all the time, endlessly. She'd just say to any child in the street, excuse me, could you just take this letter to the post. And she was always writing sermons,' Gardam told the Guardian in a 2005 interview. Her 1985 novel Crusoe's Daughter, about an isolated woman who is obsessed with books, specifically Robinson Crusoe, was partly inspired by Gardam's mother, she said. It 'has a lot to do with a girl not being educated, when if she had been a boy the money would have been found'. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion After the second world war, Gardam moved to London for the education her mother never had, attending Bedford College (part of London University). After completing her degree in English, she had a number of book-related jobs, including a stint as a Red Cross travelling librarian, and then a career as a journalist, first as a subeditor on the Weldon's Ladies' Journal and then as assistant literary editor at Time and Tide. She married a barrister, David Gardam, whose career partially inspired her most famous novel, Old Filth, a tragicomedy about a retired judge grieving his wife. The couple had three children, and it was only when the youngest had started school that she began her first book. 'I think I would have died if it hadn't been published,' she said in a 2011 Guardian interview. 'I was desperate to get started – I was possessed.' Gardam and her husband moved to Sandwich in 1987, where she remained after his death in 2010, before moving to Oxford in her final years. Her last book was Last Friends, published in 2013 and shortlisted for the 2014 Folio prize. The finale to a trilogy that began with Old Filth and continued with The Man in the Wooden Hat, Last Friends was described as 'exuberant and funny and dizzy and a little bit frightening' by Guardian reviewer Tessa Hadley. Gardam was one of the first novelists published by Abacus, an imprint of Little, Brown. A spokesperson from the publisher said the novelist was 'hugely loved by us all. Her warmth, humour and wisdom are quite irreplaceable.' 'I discovered that writing was very nice indeed when I was very young, and I never changed,' Gardam told the Telegraph in 2013. 'I don't think my style has changed very much at all – though I hope what I say is a bit more interesting. It's about getting to know a character and loving them, I think.'
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Tony Nicholls obituary
My husband, Tony Nicholls, who has died aged 81, was a documentary maker, activist and video consultant. During his career, he worked on many hundreds of projects, including TV documentaries, feature films, commercials and education videos. Tony integrated his professional production work with a commitment to teaching. While he worked in higher education, including as course leader in media at Bedford College (1995-2005), he especially enjoyed working with schools and community groups. He was also a video consultant and trainer for the UN, working in Pakistan, Ghana, Ethiopia, and with many organisations in Nigeria (1992-2000). Born in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, Tony was the son of Betty (nee Stokes) and Clifford Nicholls, who was in the RAF. The family moved many times in England, Scotland, Kenya and Egypt before Tony was 14, finally settling in Kingsbury, north-west London, in 1958, where Tony attended Kingsbury County grammar school. He and his friends became a force to be reckoned with, setting up the local Young Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament branch in 1960, and in 1962 joining the Young Communist League and the Communist party. The same year Tony was sent to Reading prison for three weeks for 'obstructing a policeman' at Greenham Common. In 1963, in search of models of socialist living, Tony stayed in kibbutzim in Israel. During this time he became a keen photographer, and, still a member of the Communist party, on his return to the UK Tony began working as a photographer for the Morning Star newspaper (1965-69), through which he travelled in the then closed communist countries, including Russia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Albania. He also covered a sports match for the paper that led to one of his photos making the cover of Private Eye, in 1969. In 1972, Tony was accepted on to the newly founded National Film School in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, to study documentary film-making. A man ahead of his time, in one of his student films he explored hidden cameras in cities that enabled governments to follow and collect data on the inhabitants. Following graduation, Tony worked as a camera assistant on two features, and edited a film on projects in Chad for Christian Aid. He then worked as a director and cameraman for Liberation Films, producing health education films, community arts documentaries and campaign videos for various organisations. He went to produce six one-hour documentaries for Channel 4 on the history of trade in tea, sugar and coffee (1983-85); he made educational and promotional documentaries in Nigeria and Ethiopia and produced and directed Music and Musicians of the Commonwealth (1993), a film of a gala concert for Queen Elizabeth at Lancaster House, commissioned by the Royal Overseas League. As well as his position at Bedford, he lectured at the North London and City polytechnics, and the American College in London. We met in 1989 and in 1993 our son, George, was born. We married in 1998. He is survived by me and George, and by his brothers, Phillip and Geoffrey.
