Jane Gardam - Old Filth

Scene: The Inner Temple Garden.

Two judges standing beside the monument that is inscribed, Lawyers, I suppose, were children once . The bell of the Temple Church is tolling on and on, as it does, once for every year of a dead Bencher’s life.

The Queen’s Remembrancer: That’ll be for Filth.

A Lord of Appeal: There’ll be ninety of them then.

QR: Not quite. Nearly. Did you read the obituaries?

L of A: Yes. Short. So difficult to say exactly what he’d done. When it came to it. Not a great lawyer. Never changed anything. Very old-fashioned delivery. Laughable, I expect, now. Good judge, of course.

QR: He’d just got off a plane. Did you know? Going back to his roots.

L of A: Game of him. About the most imaginative thing he ever did, I suspect. In his long and uneventful life. Was he travelling alone, d’you know?

QR: Oh, yes. Travelling alone. Quite alone.

As will be obvious, I am very much indebted to Rudyard Kipling’s Autobiography and to his story “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” Also to Christopher Hudson’s fine novel, “Colombo Heat,” about the last days of the Raj in Ceylon (Sri Lanka); I have even taken the liberty of borrowing one of his characters and giving her a walk-on part with a crutch. Sir was suggested by Geoffrey Grigson’s autobiography, The Crest on the Silver.

I am also very grateful to friends, dead and alive, who were once Raj Orphans, and to Peter Leyland, K. S. Chung and my husband, David Gardam, all of whom set off in Wartime convoys to the East and two of whom returned.

I am very grateful to the late Michael Underhill, QC, who was for a few months junior Platoon Commander in the Royal Gloucestershire regiment which guarded Queen Mary at Badminton House. He talked to me about it, as did his wife, Rosalie Beaumont, who showed me a charming, innocent correspondence between her husband and Queen Mary. Thanks also to Mrs. Nettles, one-time housekeeper at Badminton, and her sister. I drew on Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy (1959) and HRH Princess Adelaide, Duchess of Teck (1900), a mighty work by C. Kinloch Cooke, Barrister-at-Law. John Saumarez Smith of the Heywood Hill bookshop in Curzon Street kindly introduced me to Osbert Sitwell’s hilarious Queen Mary and Others (1974).

To the Benchers of the Inner Temple, the Clerks and members of Atkin Chambers I am particularly grateful for many things over fifty years; especially to Stewart Goldsmith who often got me to foreign parts and home again.

Those who believe that they recognise any of my characters are mistaken, for they are all from my imagination except for Queen Mary; her lady-in-waiting; the Duchess of Beaufort; the stationmaster of Badminton (who, it appears, really did wear white gloves and call the platforms “lawns”); and my husband who in only one instance resembles Filth: he ate thirty-seven bananas on Freetown beach. (There were no ill effects.) His friend at Oundle School, “the best I ever had,” was called Pat Ingoldby; he was lost at sea in 1942 and I have made use of his name in his memory.

Any historical mistakes are my own.

Jane Gardam,

Sandwich,

Kent

2004

Jane Gardam’s first book, Black Faces, White Faces (1975), a collection of short stories, 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 , winner of the Katherine Mansfield Award, and Going into a Dark House , which was awarded the PEN Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1995. Gardam’s first novel, God on the Rocks was adapted for television in 1992. It won the Prix Baudelaire (France) in 1989 and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. She is the only author to have twice been awarded the Whitbread Prize for the Best Novel of the Year (for the Queen of the Tambourine , in 1991, and for The Hollow Land , 1981). She is also the author of The Flight of the Maiden , which was adapted for BBC Radio’s Woman’s Hour. In 1999, Jane Gardam was awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize in recognition of a distinguished literary career. She lives with her husband in England.