[2024-02-11] You're a writer
In her 2017 interview on the BBC's Desert Island Discs program, English writer Jane Gardam told a story of meeting L.A.G. Strong. An English novelist, critic, historian and poet, Strong gave a lecture that Gardam attended. She had read one of his books and was delighted he was there. Gardam said:
I was painfully shy, almost ill with shyness. Not then. I followed that man to the station, and I got in the same carriage, and I sat beside him.
— And he said, "Were you at the lecture?"
— And I said, "Yes." So we got talking.
— And he said at the end, "I think you're a writer."
— And I said, "Yes, I am." I hadn't sort of told anyone else that.
— And he said, "Send me something."
So I went back in absolute joy, and I sent him a short story I had ready. And two weeks passed, and then a letter came. And it was in bright blue type, and it said, "Jane Gardam, you're a writer—beyond all possible doubt."
Though she would pursue a number of literary jobs, then care for her three children, Gardam never forgot her encounter with Strong. She was a writer. "I knew that's what I was," she said. And on the day her youngest child started school, Gardam began to write her first novel. In a 2011 article published by The Guardian, Gardam said:
"I started to write the day—no, the morning—that Tom went to school. Came back, sat down and started writing, rubbish, I'm sure. I started writing about Yorkshire and children and folktales and things like that, I just couldn't stop. I was bursting to get on with it."
Gardam, who was born in 1928, published her first book in 1971. She has written 13 children's books, 10 collections of short stories, 9 novels and 1 non-fiction work. She is 95.
