No one would want to live in Jane Gardam’s stories – but they’re an amazing place to visit

In the world of Jane Gardam’s stories the past is always present, solid and often unwanted and always too big, like a heavy antique sideboard crammed into a modern retirement flat. Her characters are easily imagined surrounded by such furniture, among them ex-pats returning after careers in Hong Kong or India, their houses full of the sad paraphernalia of former empire: elephant’s foot umbrella stands or old watercolours of Bengal.

Many are seeing out their days in some poverty and solitude, occasionally visited but seldom comforted by their resentful grown-up children. There is no saccharine here. Relations between offspring and parents are marked by mutual disdain and almost wilful misunderstanding, lit up from time to time by flares of bewildering love. It would be awful to live in Gardam-land, but it’s a fascinating place to visit.

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She often writes about old people for the same reason, I think, that she often writes about children. It is because what interests her are moments of truth. The old can’t be bothered to dissemble — or they relish the shock value of refusing to — and the young have not yet learned to do so. Their candour is unsettling. Both old and young abbreviate, get straight to the heart of things. The convention, pride and status-seeking of young marrieds holds no appeal for Gardam, and they seldom gets a look in. A typical character might be sprightly, curious and amused, ‘a trim, spare little woman’ in faded tweed, with a cluster of heavy rings on claw-like old fingers and something shameful or tender in her past.

This is not to say that the secrets of these people are easily guessed at. A wife visiting her husband in Hong Kong does not go out and buy expensive shoes, as you might think, but instead finds herself led to a funeral feast outside a brothel, eating little sizzling things with the painted ladies.