The Stories

  ‘'A sweet, spring darkness and the cherry blossom smelling in all the pleasant gardens. The blossom whitened in the April evening. In some rooms in the decorous streets lights were coming on. In some - really rather prettily, she thought, ‘I don't know why I ever despised them ‘ - the lights of television sets flickered blue. Dark as it was someone was giving his patch of grass the first mowing of the year in St Agnes Road and the wet, summer, heartbreaking smell of the sap hit her as she stepped from the cab at the door of the church. It seemed the smell of all her life - the essence of the best of all her life - a new moon, she thought, suburban grass and summer coming. She thought how happy she had been in this place.''
I am ashamed to admit that I had never explored Jane Gardam's work before this collection attracted my attention. Its cover spoke to me. It felt so contradictory, yet genuinely ‘English', not to mention that short stories melt my reading heart. It was one of the wisest reading choices I've ever made because this collection is pure gold and Jane Gardam is one of the genre's queens. 
‘'She had left London with the grass on Barnes Common brightening and long and all the candles shining on the avenue of chestnuts that crosses the pretty railway line. London had had the smell of summer - airy and fresh. Here there was grit in the air and rubbish blew about the streets like rags.''
In the extraordinary, heart-breaking Hetty Sleeping, a young mother meets the man she has never forgotten while on vacation with her children and in the deliciously British Gothic story A Spot of Gothic a newcomer to a picturesque village has to come to terms with the suspicious friendliness of its inhabitants and its ghosts. The Pig Boy makes poignant remarks on the way a wife has to put up with loneliness and cultural shock while waiting for her husband to ‘come and rescue her', in a land where the ‘foreign' city, its ugliness and the isolation within the crows come in stark contrast to the familiar warmth of London. But is she really unhappy or has she found the means to fight the feeling of Otherness? At first glance, Rode by All With Pride is about the dreams and aspirations parents project on their children and their disappointment when their offspring stick to their own choice but this story delves deeper and deeper until its dubious ending.
‘'Perhaps, thought Veronica, if you live so closely, so densely together, you have to develop this isolation. Nobody noticed her, walking, walking, marching, marching. And, she turned off into a side street for no real reason and marched on she realised that she had stopped being unhappy.''
The Easter Lilies contains some of the most beautiful, moving descriptions of calm, spring evenings while The Pangs of Love is a spirited, subversive retelling/continuation of Andersen's The Little Mermaid through the eyes of the youngest mermaid who didn't have the chance to meet her legendary sister and tell her what a fool she was to sacrifice everything for the sake of a mere man. Stone Trees is a moving study of bereavement, set on the Isle of Wight and An Unknown Child is a heartfelt account of a miscarriage that threatens to tear a couple apart, set in the mysterious land of Northern Italy.
‘'We are the elect. By many we suppose we are considered dreadful. We are all true blue, even if we are radicals, or the odd eccentric socialist. We are staunch, we are loyal, we are innocent in a way, bless us. We are rather happy people and when bad times come we comfort one another.''
Swan deals with the unique cruelty of children and Damage is a confession of family issues, language and regrets. Groundlings is an elegy for a bygone era of British Theatre in a country where the greatest of visual arts is a universe on its own. In Light, Gardam narrates a legend from the Himalayas, vastly different to the subtle sarcasm and sadness communicated in the quintessentially British Miss Mistletoe. From London to Cremona, Telegony is an acute apology for the well-known, criticised Englishness that can drive you mad.
‘'It was January. The park was cold and dead. The grass was thin and muddy and full of puddly places and nobody in the world could feel the better for seeing a blade of it. Plants were sticks. There were no birds yet about the trees, and the water in the lake and all round the little island was heavy and dark and still, like forgotten soup.''
Gardam uses Magical Realism at its finest in The Boy Who Turned Into a Bike, a story of young love and regrets, while family issues become prominent once again in Missing the Midnight but with a rather hopeful outcome. The Green Man pays homage to one of the longest-standing British traditions, the Green Man, the protector of Nature, the one who watches all, the misunderstood. It is a true masterpiece of a story. Tragic and moving and poignant as is Soul Mates, a tale of mystery, eerie and complex.
‘'In winter all the lights are out along the river - only the occasional window shining high up in the Shell building and the odd street-lamp on the bridge. As the dawn comes up somebody, somewhere switches on long necklaces of light-bulbs, pink and gold, all along the riverside terraces. They come on as it gets light.''
This is only a handful of the beautiful stories included in the collection. Jane Gardam writes about everyday people, people like you and me, caught in the risks of what we have come to call ‘'our daily life'', situations that are potentially trickier and more sinister than the uncunniest of tales. In ‘ordinary' tales that are odes to human emotions, set in a plethora of places from London to Tibet, from Italy to Hong Kong, The Stories has earned its place in my most treasured short stories collections.
‘'He will watch in secret. You can see carvings of him in churches like this. Watching you. It has always been so. He has always been there. Sometimes he is a leaf-mask on a frieze. Sometimes he looks like leaves only.''
‘'Human beings, it seems to me, are dependent on story - stories - painted on cave walls, sung on jangling instruments, chanted or spoken in lullaby from their beginnings. Children deprived of stories grow up bewildered by their own boredom.''        Jane Gardam
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