Biography

Novelist Jane Gardam was born Jean Mary Pearson in Coatham, North Yorkshire on 11 July 1928. She was educated at Saltburn High School for Girls, and won a scholarship to the University of London where she read English at Bedford College. In 1951 she worked as a Red Cross Travelling Librarian to Hospital Libraries, afterwards taking up editorial posts at Weldon Ladies Journal (sub-editor, 1952) and the literary weekly Time and Tide (Assistant Editor, 1952-4).

Her first book for adults, Black Faces, White Faces (1975), a collection of linked short stories about Jamaica, won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Subsequent collections of short stories include The Pangs of Love and Other Stories (1983), winner of the Katherine Mansfield Award; Going into a Dark House (1994), which was awarded the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award (1995); and Missing the Midnight: Hauntings & Grotesques (1997).

Jane Gardam's first novel for adults, God on the Rocks (1978), a coming-of-age novel set in the 1930s, was adapted for television in 1992. It won the Prix Baudelaire (France) in 1989 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Her other novels include The Queen of the Tambourine (1991), a haunting tale about a woman's fascination with a mysterious stranger, which won the Whitbread Novel Award; Faith Fox (1996), a portrait of England in the 1990s; andThe Flight of the Maidens (2000), set just after the Second World War, which narrates the story of three Yorkshire schoolgirls on the brink of university and adult life. This book was adapted for BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. In 1999 Jane Gardam was awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize in recognition of a distinguished literary career.

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Late Bloomer

Few novelists produce their best work in their 80s. Yet the English writer Jane Gardam, 82, has done just that with her new novel The Man in the Wooden Hat (Europa, November). It comes on the heels of her critically acclaimed Old Filth , which was shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Orange Prize.

Gardam, who published her first adult fiction at 47 and has published 29 books since then, traveled up to London for this interview from the pretty seaside town of Sandwich in Kent, where she and her barrister husband retired several years ago.

Asked if she regrets her late start as a writer, she says firmly, "I couldn't have written any earlier. I wasn't ready. I was a very anxious sort of woman." There were practical obstacles as well: after marrying a young barrister, Gardam had three children, and the demands of her husband's work specializing in construction litigation-cases that took him as far afield as Singapore and Hong Kong for months at a time-meant she often found herself looking after them singlehandedly.

But she always knew that she would write, a conviction planted firmly in childhood by her mother, who was largely uneducated but loved language and writing. Gardam grew up in Yorkshire, in the north of England, where her father was a math teacher at a boy's boarding school. And although she went south to London for college and stayed, she remains deeply attached to the landscape of her birthplace and only recently gave up the cottage she and her husband owned there for more than 40 years in the Pennine Mountains ("that was a wrench," she says).

Gardam's work was well-received from the beginning, and she is the only writer to have won Britain's Whitbread Prize twice, for her children's book The Hollow Land (1981), available from Walker Books, and for The Queen of the Tambourine (1991), reissued by Europa in 2007. Yet she remains relatively unknown to American readers, although publisher Kent Carroll is out to change that. " Old Filth was one of the first books I bought when we started Europa [although he had published Gardam before, at Carroll & Graf]. It had already been nominated for the Orange Prize, but to my surprise and delight it was still available for the U.S."

Gardam has never worked the London literary scene, though writer friends include Alison Lurie and Margaret Drabble. Her work, moreover, defies easy categorization. Marked by a prose style of compelling descriptive power, her novels often draw on her own past-teachers and schools and Yorkshire, and she is especially intrigued by the interplay between memory and fiction.

This fascination with the recollected past is a mainstay of The Man in the Wooden Hat , which goes hand in hand with Old Filth . The earlier novel told the story of Edward Feathers, a recently widowed barrister who has spent his career in Hong Kong (his nickname, "Filth," coming from an old adage, 'Failed in London, Try Hong Kong'). Now retired in the English countryside, he finds himself mentally reliving his complicated hidden past, including a war-time childhood of great emotional deprivation.

The new novel is told from the point of view of Feather's wife, Betty. "I felt I'd missed out on her," Gardam explains. "She seemed [in Old Filth ] so ordinary and dull. But nobody is ordinary and dull." Betty's own history, only hinted at in the earlier novel, proves as exotic (and damaged) as her husband's, and gradually we begin to see the pair's marriage as an unspoken pact to try and move beyond the wounds of the past. The two novels can be enjoyed independently, but they are best appreciated as a kind of literary duet.

Gardam is done for the moment with the Featherses, though she has a new book in mind: "it's brewing." She tends to write in waves of intense concentration: having mulled a story over endlessly in her head, she says she finally reaches a point where "it's now or never," and the writing begins. Looking back at her 35 years as a novelist, she muses that she's written too much. Told that most readers would demur, she smiles. "That's a wonderful thing to know."

Publishers Weekly

from Orphans of the imperial dream The Times Supplement

29 July 2005

Leonard Gordon

Last Children of the Raj - Empire Families Selections from article:

The British Raj still lives. It lives in the memories of quite elderly survivors in Laurence Fleming's fascinating but flawed two-volume collection of remembered childhoods. And it springs to complex life in beautiful works of scholarship as exemplified by Elizabeth Buettner's Empire Families . These works complement each other: the first volume of Last Children of the Raj is a series of often vivid and moving stories of life in India from the First World War to 1950, and the second, a sprightly yet subtle and thorough analytical work touching many of the same themes embodied in the memoirs. And Buettner's volume teaches us how to read memoirs and place the............

What helps to bring unity and force to the second volume is the similar experiences of many participants during the war. Many who were in school in Britain were recalled to India during the war, attended school or college in India, and, if older, joined the war effort. Although the many writers come from a variety of backgrounds by class and some are Anglo-Indians, they are all thrown together into the melting pot of region and then wartime years. The compelling bits are the personal accounts of powerful emotional experiences and identifications while growing up in India. The sights, smells, sounds of India and the range of its beauty almost leap off the page.

One of the most compelling and common experiences described is that of being sent home to Britain at an early age for education or, occasionally, for health reasons. Some writers tell of the intense pain this caused them and how their fathers, in particular, became strangers to them.

Six-year-old Elspet Gray and her sister were shipped home in 1935. She comments: "The idea that children had needs and feelings was unheard of in those days; so back we went."

This experience is put into context masterfully by Buettner. After tracking British children in India through their early years and then charting the education some received in India, Buettner explains why it was so important for most British families in India to send their young children, especially boys, home to Britain for most of their formal education. It had to do with race and career paths. Those children who went to schools in India were jostled together with Eurasians (called Anglo-Indians in the 20th century) and Europeans born in India. Placed with these children, the very whiteness of the British children was made suspect and their futures endangered. They also would not have access to the schools and colleges and examinations that channelled the young men to the best career paths in India and elsewhere. So they had to be sent home even though it meant a wrenching break with family. They might be sent (or taken by their mothers) "home" to the British Isles, boarded at school during term and with relations or others during vacations. They might see their mothers every second or third year and their fathers perhaps for a while every five years. Many suffered emotional traumas, most adapted to their plight. This was a cost of empire and of keeping the family in its appropriate class position............

The 125 people in the childhood volumes come from a variety of backgrounds, but most are middle class, some lower middle, and hardly any from the lower ranks. The lives of the European soldiers, for example, are unmentioned.

Fortunately, there are a number from the railways, jute mills and tea plantations. A few more missionary children would have been helpful.

The final and fascinating chapter of Buettner's book, "From somebodies to nobodies..." concerns the retirement of those who served the Raj. Upon retirement, Raj families had to face a sharply lowered income and important decisions about where and how to live out the rest of their days. Some favoured Bayswater, others Cheltenham or Bedford. Others tried white settler colonies where they had a better chance of approximating their previous lifestyle.....

IAlthough Indians enter both of these works reviewed as servants, co-workers, subordinates and, occasionally, friends, they are peripheral to the narratives in both. Buettner stresses that the Raj was about rule and hegemony. However benevolent the Raj, Indians were not making the crucial choices about their own country and in the end they demanded it back from their foreign rulers. These works have been completed as we reach the end of the period in which participants in the Raj are still around to shape our views. In 15 years, we will have to look at the Raj as an important episode in the life of India and Britain, but one that we can learn about only from documentary sources.

Leonard A. Gordon is emeritus professor of history, Brooklyn College, City University, New York, US.

from Elizabeth Buettner. Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Reviewed by: Maya Jasanoff, Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia.
Published by: H-Albion (May, 2005)

Ordinary Imperialists

...Empire Families roughly follows the arc of a human life, beginning with a discussion of British childhoods in India; continuing with investigations of schooling and the separations between parents and children it generally entailed; and concluding with a description of the often-disappointing returns many empire families faced when they retired back "home." Extending from hill-station boarding schools to the Anglo-Indian enclaves of Cheltenham and Bayswater, Empire Families offers up a sweep of stimulating, original research on the rhythms and routines of raj family life. Perhaps the most intriguing material rests in the earlier chapters, which explore the consequences of the terrible double-bind in which British parents in India found themselves. They could opt to keep their children close by, which meant--according to contemporary medical and moral thinking--putting them in danger of being carried off by disease, or of being corrupted by Indian society. Or they could ship the kids off to Britain, and have them grow up thousands of miles away, in the custody of others, more often than not strangers serving as guardians. It is no wonder that children who were sent to Britain so often remembered their time in India as a pre-lapsarian idyll of sun and warmth: going to Britain meant leaving behind formative emotional relationships with loving parents.

It is also no wonder that adults in India regularly portrayed themselves as "suffering for the empire." Buettner is at her best when probing the pains experienced by both children and their parents: of wives made to choose between staying with their husbands in India, or shifting to Britain with the children; of mothers and fathers whose only way of chronicling their childrens' development was to inspect the curves of their handwriting; and of children effectively orphaned by separation. These partings may have been self-imposed, but that made them no less difficult, and had a direct impact on the way that Britons during and after the raj conceived of and represented the imperial experience. Buettner notes that British accounts of decolonization in India take on a "family romance" quality. Surely the tendency to characterize the end of the raj in terms of a family split stemmed in part from the actual family separations which so many Britons in India experienced.

The single greatest contribution of Empire Families, however, rests in its careful excavation of the British middle classes in India, whose lives have so often been obscured by flashier profiles of officers and high-ranking civil servants. For no period of British Indian history has the condition of the imperial rank-and-file--common soldiers, minor bureaucrats, planters and merchants--been explored in nearly enough detail. Buettner performs a thorough, and much-needed, task of recovering this substantial tier of British society from historiographical neglect. The middle-class experience of empire differed considerably from that of the privileged top brass. They were hit hardest, for instance, by the dilemma of children's education--in part because the great expense meant that, even if parents could afford to send children to Britain for school, they probably could not afford to visit them; and in part because schooling choices had a defining impact on sons' future career options.