June 9, 2002

The British journalist and novelist, Angela Lambert, belongs to a generation which grew up in the shadows of the Second World War, but was shaped by the cultural and social revolution of the 1960’s. Her own rebellion and struggle for independence, led her from a cloistered private school to Oxford, followed by marriage and divorce, to single parenthood and a successful but demanding career. Most of her books revolve around the issues of class or gender, which have been pivotal to her life. But her seventh novel The property of rain explores the narrative of empire too. At the heart of the novel are two ill-fated fourteen year-olds, Sam Savage, a poor Suffolk boy, and Lakshmi, a sweeper’s daughter in Kanpur. Both have great inner resources and gifts of kindness, despite a childhood of hardship. They are caught up in a chain of events which propel Sam into the British India army and leave him deeply scarred. Lakshmi was destroyed. The riveting plot is held together by brief images of Sam on television, in the 1980’s.

In an e-mail interview, Angela Lambert said:

“The book sprang directly from a TV programme I watched from a series about the British Empire entitled “Ruling passions”. This episode told the story of ‘a little Indian girl’ in the thirties who was raped to death by some 50 or 60 young soldiers stationed with their regiment in Kanpur. The horror of the girl’s death and the fact that it was covered up and never reported or punished — the old man who told the story was doing so for the very first time — moved me so deeply that I felt I must commemorate her life.

“Out of this sprang five years’ detailed research, a number of visits to India and the reading of more than 60 books. The story is of course fictional; only the girl’s horrific death is taken directly from the old soldier’s account. He had gone out to India aged 14 1/2 as a bandboy, not as a soldier, since boys with musical talent were accepted at a younger age. I also invented the murderous revenge he eventually exacts, nearly 20 years later, upon the bully who forced him to take part.

“I chose Suffolk as the location for the English scenes in The property of rain partly because it’s a county I’ve been visiting since I was 20, but also because there are at least two brilliant local social historians, whose works preserve much of the old speech, traditions and customs of rural Suffolk. I was able to make a reconstruction of Sam’s childhood and the life of his village that was at least as accurate as that in which I placed my little Indian girl, Lakshmi.

“Thanks to the generosity of a former Professor of Sociology at the University of Kanpur, Professor R.N. Misra, I had expert guidance and very privileged access to a village near Kanpur. I was allowed to take photographs of the inhabitants and these I mounted on board and festooned around my desk while I wrote. They represented the village characters I was describing. I later made them up into a book and sent them to the village, as a token of thanks for their hospitality.”

A sensitive, powerful and poignant novel, The property of rain is written in quiet, tightly woven prose which builds in small, important social details and absorbs a grand sweep of history from the first world war to the last decades of the twentieth century.

The novel is particularly unusual because it draws parallels between the life of the labouring agricultural classes in England and India between the two world wars.

“In the course of research, it gradually became clear that the lot of the poor in Suffolk in the 20s and 30s was only marginally better than that of labourers in India at the same period,” Lambert says. “Poverty tends to have the same consequences wherever you are — rage and brutality on the part of men unable to support their families adequately; religious mania on the part of the helpless women who have to watch their children die of sickness and malnutrition. The property of rain is not an easy book to write or read. It’s a very ‘dark’ book, but it meant more to me than all the others put together. If ever in my life I have written a good or important book, this has to be it,” Lambert adds.

She first saw Germany in 1947-8 when her father was posted there. “I vividly remember the utter poverty and near-starvation of the inhabitants of Hamburg, where we spent the first nine months of a five-year stay in Germany,” she says. “The fact that it was also my mother’s home town, and she hadn’t seen it since leaving to get married in 1936 made its ruined state all the more vivid and memorable. My German grandfather and great aunt, both of whom I adored, had lived through and survived the war in Hamburg. That made the experience all the more harrowing,” she observes.

In 1950, Lambert was sent to Wispers, a Victorian boarding school in England, which was to provide material for her extraordinarily evocative third novel No talking after lights. She never did quite fit in there. Being a voracious and precocious reader also set her apart. The school’s kindly old fashioned headmistress, constantly exhorted her pupils “to do something useful” with their lives, but few had any ambitions but marriage.

Lambert’s parents wanted her to go to a finishing school or secretarial college, but she was determined to get into Oxford, which she did. She loved Oxford and the opportunity to meet really clever people for the first time. She was also caught up in the cultural and political excitement of the era, which included the CND movement, nouvelle vague films, Kitchen Sink plays, the clothes of Mary Quant, the music of The Beatles, all of which transformed Britain.

“Feminism was just beginning to come over the horizon with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The feminine mystique and Germaine Greer’s The female eunuch. Both had a tremendous impact on me,” she says. “Resonance of all these formative experiences, crop up in my writing. In my novel The constant mistress I combine my own life in the two King sisters. Constance, the good wife who stays at home and rears her children, only to be abandoned by her husband; Laura, the clever, liberated, ambitious and successful younger sister who has a globe-trotting career as an interpreter, but ultimately fails to find satisfaction. Readers were not intended to draw any moral here. The two women simply reflect the fundamental choice that feminism posed.”

Her first book, Unquiet souls: the Indian summer of the British aristocracy 1880-1918 was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. A group biography, it revolved around “an intriguing group of people” including Lord Curzon, Arthur Balfour and Henry Cust, “the Warren Beatty of his time”. Subsequently, Lambert was commissioned to write 1939: the last season of peace. This looked at the British debutante system which, on the eve of war, had not changed since the seventeenth century and was all about manipulating marriages.

“The book continued my research into the British upper classes,” Lambert says. She remains intrigued by the manner in which class still permeates British society to a much greater extent than other European countries and America.

“What is it about class that so obsesses us?” she asks. “A number of my books have attempted to unravel this question including A rather English marriage in which the two male characters were, oddly enough, both based on my father. Reggie Conyghame-Jervis had more or less his class, his manners and his attitude towards marriage; the other man, Roy Southgate, had his character. Through them I attempted to deconstruct my father’s laconic, rigid, undemonstrative and parsimonious nature.”

An incisive novel, with a lively interplay of characters and tensions, A rather English marriage, revolves around two men, from vastly different backgrounds, trying to cope with the loss of their respective wives. The book was made into a major, award winning TV drama starring Albert Finney, Tom Courtney and Joanna Lumley. Meanwhile, Lambert won the 1998 Romantic Novelists’ Award for her novel Kiss and kin, which clearly draws on Romeo and Juliet “but transposes the passionate love from the young teenagers about whom Shakespeare writes to their grandparents”. Angela now lives between England and France and has co-authored a TV drama with Joanna Lumley Brightest and best, set in a 1950’s boarding school

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