Old Filth

Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the
nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a
respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally
hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free
from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back
into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers
approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away.
Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard
Kipling’s “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” that retraces much of the twentieth century’s torrid and momentous history