I had the very great pleasure of attending one of Jane Gardam’s last public events some years ago at the Rye Arts Festival in East Sussex. She entertained a full house who all knew and loved her work. It was a great privilege to hear her speak about her much loved novels, short stories and characters.
Her New York Times obituary this week described Gardam as the ‘Witty Novelist of a Waning British Empire’, and she certainly was that in part. But I think her trilogy of books: Old Filth, The Man in the Wooden Hat andLast Friends, that tracked the end of empire lives of an old Hong Kong judge and Raj orphan Edward Feathers – Old Filth – his working class rival-in-law, Terry Veneering, and his frustrated wife Elizabeth from post-war colonial Hong Kong to a cranky old age in retirement in England. The Man in the Wooden Hatthen retold the story from the point of view of Elizabeth (“Betty”), her early life in a Japanese Internment Camp, their marriage in Hong Kong shortly after WW2 and her relationship to Veneering, who has a Chinese wife and an adored son. And finally Last Friendswhich completes the trilogy by seeing the period through the eyes of Veneering, the son of a Russian emigre circus performer settled in northern England and a local girl, who finishes his army service in the war in Hong Kong and stays on to become Old Filth’s great rival at the Bar.
The Old Filth trilogy is an incredible master class in expansive story telling in a concise writing style, evoking post WW2 colonial Hong Kong, the malaise of the end of Empire and the twilight of lives lived in exciting places ending up in boring suburbs. Throughout the trilogy Gardam draws out the characters and their backgrounds/motivations in a masterful Rashomon style three books. If you haven’t read them then you really should (and they’re all still in print).
Gardam was nearly 100 – she had worked as a journalist, for a time as assistant literary editor of Time and Tide, where she met many influential people in English twentieth century literature including TS Eliot and John Betjeman. Her husband was a high-ranking lawyer, which provided much legalistic fodder for the Old Filth trilogy. She wrote much else apart from the Old Filth trilogy, but, for me at least, these three novels were her defining work.
From Wikipedia: “The one-cent banknote was the smallest denominated banknote issued in Hong Kong. They were issued by the government and were initially released on 30 May 1941 and printed by Noronha and Company Limited[1] to provide small change because of a lack of coinage brought on by the Second World War. The first issue was 42 by 75 mm, the obverse was brown with a serial number of seven numbers with either no prefix or an A or B prefix. This side was mostly in English, except for “Government of Hong Kong” which was also in Chinese. The reverse was red and the denomination in English and Chinese.”
I’d suggest it’s perhaps harder to visualise the Hong Kong Wallis experienced than it is to envisage the Shanghai or Peking she knew in 1924/1925. Shikumen and lilong remain, the Bund remains, hutongs too (just about)…. But old Hong Kong is almost impossible to touch now. Here an autumn rainy day on Queen’s Road Central in the mid-1920s with Chinese men in windmill palm rainproof capes pulling a Cold Storage ice wagon. Photo by William Stewart.
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…
“A weed from Catholic Europe, it took root Between some yellow mountains and a sea, Its gay stone houses an exotic fruit, A Portugal-cum-China oddity.
Rococo images of Saint and Saviour Promise her gamblers fortunes when they die; Churches beside the brothels testify That faith can pardon natural behaviour.
This city of indulgence need not fear…”
— WH Auden, Macao: A Sonnet
For the third in my Destination series, it’s time to journey to the former Portuguese enclave of Macao, for me as much a place of the imagination as of reality. Constantly portrayed as the louche, sinful sister of Hong Kong, it was also a key trading post and early melting pot on the South China Sea.
From the Macao of artists George Chinnery and George Smirnoff, the writers Deolinda da Conceição and Maurice Dekobra, to the pulp fiction fantasies and cinematic fever dreams of Josef von Sternberg and Jean Delannoy; from those like Dr Pedro Lobo and Ian Fleming who came to Macao to chase gold, as well as those who sought refuge from war and the combatants who sought secret passage through ‘neutral’ Macao; from the earliest days of the China coast trade and its assorted cast of innkeepers and adventurers to the bizarre tales the changing times in the colony created. Did Japan really try to buy Macao in 1934? Who really sailed with Macao’s pirate queen Lai Choi San? Who were the Portuguese rebels who sought to declare Macao a republic in the 1920s?
Available from March 6 from Blacksmith Books and bookshops in Hong Kong and Macao – on amazon and everywhere else when the boats arrive! Click here to order…
Bill Lascher talking wartime Chungking to The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong and the original China FCC inspired by the book A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War (available now Blacksmith Books, Bookazine & elsewhere and with a foreword by me!)…click here to watch…
How Maoism Was Made focuses on the history of the early years in China after 1949, featuring new scholarship by academics across Europe and North America. The field of early PRC history has been transformed by the unprecedented accessibility of archives from the 1990s to the early 2010s. Sixteen contributors show how the revolutionary system was built and maintained by the efforts of non-elite actors, including scientists, farmers, designers, artists, cadres, and ordinary citizens. By abandoning the Cold War political work of vilifying or celebrating Chinese communism, How Maoism Was Made aims to render the history of the Maoist system comprehensible to specialists and non-specialists alike, by viewing it through the lens of people who made it. Chinese communism is revealed to be a set of beliefs and practices that inspired millions of people to (re-)build their country and find a new life within it, at times with tragic consequences.
Interesting photographs of Winifred Jackson (I think from Kent) and other British women in post-war occupied Japan with the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF). BCOF supported the American government in Japan and included British, Indian, Australian and New Zealand personnel between 1946 and 1952. Despite the dominance of the Americans (in reality and certainly culturally) the BCOF was about 25% of the post-war occupation foreign forces presence. They were involved in demilitarisation and the destruction of surplus war materiel. BCOF HQ was at Kure Port near Hiroshima…
