Showing the Flag

Philip, twelve, is given a little union-jack to pin to his coat. At the Gare du Nord the Major who is to meet him will be wearing such another. It seems a foolproof arrangement, but during the short, solitary journey Philip's world somersaults towards chaos. Most of the stories in this, Jane Gardam's third collection, are about flags, and why the English wave them now -- old military flags like the ones hanging threadbare in churches, revered by The Dixie Girls, three ancient daughters of the regiment; and new flags like the one the public schoolboy flies (reluctantly) in his social work for a poor but exotic Chinese family in Nine Elms. There are the flags flown for the old English values in suburban Surrey -- mistakenly when they become self-congratulatory and exclusive. And there is the flag, in Groundlings, flying as proudly and steadily as ever, for Shakespeare. This collection also includes a ghost story, the story of a hanging in 1919 of a young boy, and a terror story of an English Chernobyl off the coast of quiet Kent -- After the Strawberry Tea. This is the first collection of short stories by Jane Gardam exclusively about England, the so-called soft South. It is full of insight and quirkiness and marvellous writing.