Old Filth by Jane Gardam
Jane Gardam’s Old Filth relates one man’s life, enclosing within the history of Sir Edward Feathers the story of Great Britain in the twentieth century. Both Feathers’ story and the story of Britain offer a sharply accurate illustration of justice, responsibility, and legacy, and of the damages done when justice fails, responsibility is shirked, and legacy is denied. Most profoundly, Old Filth is a compelling, very funny, and heartbreaking saga. I loved this book, its facts and its fictions, and I loved the man Old Filth himself. Gardam is a great writer and I look forward to immediately starting in on her most recent novel, The Man in the Wooden Hat, in which more of Sir Edward Feathers’ story is told.
“Old Filth” is the nickname for Edward Feathers, an acronym for “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong.” A successful and famous British lawyer in Hong Kong, the book begins upon his retirement to Dorset with his wife Betty. Gardam settles us into Dorset, then moves us abruptly and entirely to Malay in the 1920s, where and when Feathers is born. Too soon, he becomes a raj orphan, a phrase I was unfamiliar with but one much too commonly known in Britain itself during the heyday of the Empire. Raj orphans were those children borne by Brits abroad and sent home to England to be cared for by foster parents, for reasons of health and safety, but also just to get the brats out of the way. Too many of these children grew up with little knowledge of their parents, and even less experience of love or kinship.
Old Filth recounts Feathers’ shipping out to Wales from Malay (with the help of a wonderful missionary lady, Aunty May) and into the hands of a cruel and unloving foster mother, Ma Didds. Fortunately for us readers, Feathers is saved from Ma Didds, first by a Malaysian ritual and then by the English public school system (with greatest respect accorded to a character known as “Sir”, ruling headmaster and overall decent chap who was based on a real-life person). Feathers’ life unfolds in a series of scenes back and forth across decades and ages, in diverse war situations, personal relationships, and Empire realities. The colorful and rich scenes not only belie the seemingly staid life of Old Filth, but also illustrate the fascinating, true history of Britain in the twentieth century. Like the story of Feathers himself, Britain’s story is provoking and inspiring, sometimes lamentable and often laudable.
The Empire goes down, as we all know, but Old Filth survives. He believes he survived not having deserved it, but for luck. What he fails to understand is that despite having “been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone [he] loved or who cared for [him]”, he survives because he was loved and cared for by a whole array of bizarre and very British characters (everyone from missionary Auntie May to Pat Ingoldby, school mate and stand-in brother to cousin Claire to The Queen Mother Mary to Cumberledge who helps him during a snowstorm at Oxford to the old gardener Garbut) — and also due to flat out luck. Life is, after all, a mixture of love and luck with a little hard work thrown in to allow ourselves a pat or two on the back.
Gardam has a genuine talent for capturing the British way of doing things, and for relating, through a mordant wit and a genuine heart, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the erratically disarming of what it means to be born British, orphan or not. Her writing is electric, wry, intelligent, and moving, and must be read for enjoyment of good story telling and enlightenment of the Empire.
