Gail Benick

Author of Memory's Shadow

Look for the Silver Lining: On Reading Old Filth

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Old FilthA recent headline on the front page of The New York Times cried: “An Ebola Orphan’s Plea: Do You Want Me?” (December 14, 2014) The heart-rending plea came from Sweetie Sweetie, a four-year-old girl in Sierra Leone who witnessed her whole family succumbing to the deadly Ebola virus afflicting a number of countries in West Africa.

The impact of Ebola has been particularly severe on children, the NYT reported. More than 3,500 children have been infected and at least 1,200 have died. The worst off, by far, are the Ebola orphans. The United Nations Children’s Fund says that across the region there may be 10,000 Ebola orphans. Many are stigmatized and shunned by their own communities. “If there’s an earthquake or a war, and you lose a mother or a father, an aunt will take care of you,” said the head of UNICEF’s office in Sierra Leone. “But this is different. These children aren’t being taken in by extended family. This isn’t like the AIDS orphans.” People in hard-hit Ebola areas consider children to be mini time bombs. So far, the orphaned Sweetie Sweetie has not shown symptoms of the Ebola virus. Still no relatives have sent out a search party to find her.

Does it matter whether the precipitating event is war, ethnic strife, civil unrest, natural calamity, poverty or disease? The most vulnerable, whatever the circumstance, appear to be children who are often orphaned in the wake of these devastating events. Well, obviously. Whether we call them Ebola orphans, AIDs orphans or in the case of the British Empire, Raj orphans, the fact is self-evident: orphans are always with us. The enduring and haunting appeal of their stories perhaps explains the immense success of Old Filth (2004), a riveting portrayal of a Raj orphan written by the prolific English novelist Jane Gardam.

North American audiences are probably unfamiliar with the term “Raj orphans.” They were young children born in the warm colonies of the British Empire — India, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong — and sent back to the damp and chilly mother country to be raised either by relatives or strangers in foster homes. Their fathers were mostly senior personnel in the army, civil service, the church or higher levels of trade. Why would parents take such drastic measures? Fear that their children would die of tropical diseases was the official reason. Less frequently stated was the intention to Anglicize their offspring from an early age, thereby securing the next generation of loyal servants to the Empire.

Rudyard Kipling, as avid readers of colonial fiction may know, suffered woefully when, at age six, he was sent to England from his birthplace in Bombay, India. His experience as a Raj orphan, described in his story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” is the inspiration for Gardam’s novel, Old Filth. “I wanted to show what it does to a child — and how it shapes the grown-up that he or she becomes,” Gardam said in an interview. Edward Feathers, the protagonist in Old Filth is Kipling updated. Like Kipling, the fictional Edward Feathers was sent as a child from a British colony to England where he was beaten and bullied in foster care. And like Kipling, Edward Feathers becomes a driven, ambitious, yet emotionally stunted man. In the novel, Edward Feathers develops into a distinguished advocate and judge in Hong Kong. Indeed, his nickname “Filth” cleverly reflects his career trajectory. “Filth” is an acronym for Failed in London Try Hong Kong. His marriage, however, is a great deal less successful and sterile.

Gardam no doubt accepts the view that our childhoods mould us into the adults we become. Few would argue with that. In Old Filth, she focuses on the particular burden of the orphan who cannot escape the shadow of his or her ill-starred origins. Yet the charm of this novel rests in the energy and unexpected comedy Gardam infuses into the life of Edward Feathers, suggesting that there may be a silver lining to the orphan scenario after all.

That silver lining, albeit hidden under a cloud most of the time, may be the ray of hope sustaining orphans in such different eras and locales. To be sure, the stigmatized child, Sweetie Sweetie profiled in the NYT, lives in an impoverished group home with other Ebola orphans in Sierra Leone. But a reporter was able to locate a young healthcare worker who treated her mother and wants to adopt her. When the healthcare worker was found at a rundown teachers’ college in Port Loko, Sierra Leone and asked if he remembered a girl called Sweetie Sweetie, he said without hesitation: “She’s mine.”

Fictional Orphans: On Reading Orphan Train

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Orphan TrainI found the novel Orphan Train sitting on the Staff Pick shelf in my local branch of the Toronto Public Library. I had never heard of this title, nor read other works by the author, Christina Baker Kline. Yet, something lifted my arm and forced my hand to grip the book. Yes, yes, call me sappy. I’m a sucker for orphan stories. But isn’t everyone? Judging by the vast number of popular novels featuring orphans, including The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist and most recently, the Harry Potter series, I sense that many writers and readers are as attracted to fictional orphans as I am. But what do we talk about when we talk about orphans in literature? Orphan Train, while not in the upper echelons of orphan lit, may provide some clues.

Orphan Train weaves a multi-layered story around a neglected, but significant moment in American history. Between 1854 and 1929, more than two hundred thousand orphaned, abandoned, and homeless children — typically first generation Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants — were transported by train from coastal cities of the eastern United States to the Midwest. As is often the case, the founder of the program believed he was saving helpless children from the depravity and poverty associated with urban dwelling at the time. His plan for the so-called adoption of these children by Midwestern Christian families turned out to be, in most instances, nothing more than indentured servitude. Kline’s novel features a ninety-one year old survivor of the program. Vivian Daly’s experience as an orphan-train rider unfolds while revealing her hidden past to Molly Ayer, a Penobscot Indian teenager living in foster care with a different family. Molly is fulfilling her community service hours by helping Vivian clean her attic. The narrative alternates between the stories of these two very different women, both orphans, who build an unexpected friendship.

It is easy to dismiss the contrived plot of Orphan Train and the forced connection between Vivian and Molly. The gaps in their age and culture would seem to make any relationship between the two women highly unlikely. Yet, their shared orphan identity creates a strong thematic bond that overrides the novel’s obvious contrivances. The more Molly assists Vivian to sort through her possessions and the memories associated with these secret objects, the more she discovers the parallels in their lives. As a Penobscot Indian, Molly is an outsider being raised by strangers in foster care, just as Vivian once was. Both women are characters out of place, compelled to make a home for themselves in alien families.

In literature, however, these two women are not aliens at all. Indeed, they are right at home, cut from the same cloth as other beloved orphans, such as Cinderella, Heidi, Jane Eyre and Anne Shirley. In Orphan Train, the author takes the traditional literary trope of the orphan protagonist and tweaks it by making Molly unappealingly Goth and not particularly virtuous. Little Goody Two-Shoes — another famous orphan in fiction — Molly is not. Her hair is dyed jet-black, accented with purple or white streaks. And she steals. Okay the stolen booty just happens to be a tattered copy of Jane Eyre from the town library. How bad (and ironic) is that? Still, Molly and Vivian are essentially novelistic characters, set loose from the established conventions of family life, always in search of some sort of closure. As Kazuo Ishiguro notes in his novel, When We Were Orphans, “For those like us, our fate is to face the world like orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents.”

What interests me most in Orphan Train is not the resilience which Vivian and Molly demonstrate. Most novels about orphans are narratives of second chances. But more significantly, there’s is a real social history behind these fictional orphans. Time and place do matter. And for orphans, context is everything. They are uprooted individuals who must interact with an unknown, yet precisely defined set of circumstances to survive. When we talk about orphans in literature, we are talking about their interaction with new spaces that will shape them, perhaps even define them, like laboratories of tomorrow.

 

This Changes Everything: Running for the Cure

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What’s on my bucket list of 101 things I want to do before I die? Write a comedy. Yes. Play the harp. Maybe. Run a race. Never in a million years. Even when I signed up for a Learn to Run program recently, I had no intention of participating in the race event concluding the ten-week program.

“Not interested in running a race,” I said to my instructor on the first Monday night. “I totally don’t care about how far or fast I can run. And I hate competition.”

“Okay,” she said without a trace of reproach. She tugged on her white baseball cap to shield her eyes from the glare of the setting sun.

“I just want to be able run. You know, in case I ever need to,” I told her.

“Are you expecting to need to?” she asked, fastening a small water bottle on her wrist, one of those new-age sports gadgets I’d never seen before. She pressed the start button on her stopwatch programmed for one minute intervals. “And we’re running,” she announced to the group.

Over the next two months, the run times increased by one minute per week. As my endurance level improved, I felt those rigid mental blocks formed in childhood shifting, like tectonic plates preparing to erupt. My legs no longer seemed like wooden beams banging against the pavement. Soon participating in the CIBC Run for the Cure with the other novice runners in my group seemed possible. And then, on a Sunday morning in early October, as the orange-yellow leaves fluttered to the ground, I found myself lining up with thousands of others to run a 5k race. (Read about my race day experience at Inanna Publications Blog)

How did I get there? I hadn’t given the process much thought. In fact, during the training sessions I wasn’t thinking about anything more than running to the next stop sign or counting the For Sale signs on the lawns of the upscale homes we passed. Yet, whether I knew it or not, a change process was underway. The Running Room supplied a strategy that avoided the grueling intensity of the extreme fitness trend and provided an instructor who functioned more as a cheerleader than a drill sergeant. She neither goaded us into submission, nor barked orders from behind.

What Makes Olga Run“Three minutes left,” she called out. “Almost there.”

“Thank you, Andrea,” we puffed in response.

Every journey needs a book. As the author Ann Quindlen once wrote: “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road.” On my running journey, What Makes Olga Run, was the book that took me from nowhere to home. Olga in the book title is the accomplished Canadian athlete Olga Kotelko, who began her track and field career in her late seventies. She was competing in the long jump, shot put, javelin throw and sprints into her eighties and nineties. When she died at ninety-five years old, Olga held twenty-six world records in her age category. Her secret: a life of moderation, exercise and a positive attitude. “I choose,” she said in an interview, “not to let the dark stuff have a negative effect on me.”

To complete the 5k Run for the Cure, I borrowed Olga’s determination. Somehow I don’t think she’d mind if I keep it.