Bilgewater by Jane Gardam

First published: 1976

Type of work: Domestic realism in a school setting

Themes: Coming-of-age, love and romance, education, and friendship

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century, somewhat after World War II

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: Coastal Yorkshire, England

Principal Characters:

• Bilgewater, (
• Marigold Daisy Green, ), a highly intelligent but unworldly seventeen year old
• Bill Green, her father, a sweet-tempered, abstracted intellectual
• Paula Rigg, a no-nonsense young woman from Dorset
• Uncle Pen (Edmund) Hastings-Benson, an aging master at St. Wilfrid’s, who has a habit of falling violently and inappropriately in love
• Tom Terrapin, a boarding student, who is a tease and torment to Bilgewater
• Jack Rose, the handsome, athletic head boy,on whom Bilgewater has a crush
• Edward Boakes, a quiet student, who helps Bilgewater nurse a roomful of sick boys
• Grace Gathering, the headmaster’s beautiful daughter, recently expelled from her second boarding school
• Miss Ursula Bex, a teacher at Bilgewater’s school, who has designs on her father

The Story

The narrator, Marigold Green, whose mother died at her birth, is known at St. Wilfrid’s boys’ boarding school where her father is a housemaster as “Bill’s daughter,” and therefore nicknamed by the boys “Bilgewater.” She has led an odd life with her eccentric father and the house matron, Paula Rigg, a whirlwind of energy and common sense, who also looks after her and her father. Although for years Bilgewater was thought to be retarded because a visual problem kept her from reading, at seventeen she is highly intelligent but convinced that she is ugly and unlovable. Bilgewater has no friends except the boys who take her for granted, notably Tom Terrapin, who has grown up to look Arthurian, and Jack Rose, the head boy whom she has adored from afar. Then Grace Gathering, the headmaster’s beautiful, confident daughter, returns and takes “Bilgie” in hand, gets her bushy red hair cut in a becoming style, and chooses new clothes for her.

When Jack Rose relays an invitation from his mother, who says she knew Bilgewater’s mother at school, to spend a holiday with his family, she is both thrilled and afraid. Once she arrives, to her horror, Jack’s mother has forgotten that she is invited, and when Jack arrives, he has brought Grace Gathering with him. A nightmarish weekend follows. Everyone, including Bilgewater, drinks too much. Finally, she catches a bus toward home with a vague idea that she will borrow money for the rest of the fare from the housekeeper at Marston Hall.

To her amazement, Terrapin opens the door at the Hall. Bilgewater’s affections veer toward him, and the two are actually in bed together when she has second thoughts and insists that he take her back to the Roses’. She gets in touch with her courtesy uncle, Edmund Hastings-Benson, who rescues her the next morning in his Rolls Royce, accompanied by an old friend of his and the friend’s son, who turns out to be Edward Boakes from St. Wilfrid’s. Back at school, they find turmoil, with Paula gone, Miss Ursula Bex fussing over Bilgewater’s father, and the younger boys returning from holiday with measles and flu. Moreover, Terrapin has run off with Grace, Jack has run off with Grace’s mother, and no one knows where to reach Paula.

Although both Bilgewater and Boakes have exams coming up, they take charge of the sick room and, as the boys begin to recover, find themselves in bed together. Suddenly, Bilgewater remembers where she has seen Paula’s address, leaps up, and writes a frantic message begging her to return. The exams and the next few days pass in a haze of flu and confusion, with Miss Bex moving in on Bilgewater’s father until Paula arrives, routs her, and brings the mail with acceptances for both Bilgewater and Boakes to Cambridge.

Context

Bilgewater is one of a number of Gardam’s protagonists who are enough alike to be the same girl at different ages or at least different aspects of one witty, frank, uninhibited character in varied settings. Typically, the father is either a schoolmaster or in the church, the mother is less important or less able to understand her daughter, and the girl herself is very bright and given to strong affections or antagonisms for her teachers, who often underestimate her abilities. Most similar to Bilgewater is probably Jessica Vye in A Long Way from Verona (1971), a twelve-year-old aspiring writer during World War II. Lucy, in A Few Fair Days (1971), grows in a series of stories from perhaps three years old to eleven, just before the beginning of the war. In The Summer After the Funeral (1973), the character seems to be split in two, with the older daughter, Athene Price, being a beautiful, accomplished girl who hides her inner turmoil and her sister, Beams, resembling Bilgewater in being highly intelligent but having been considered retarded as a younger child. Despite these similarities, the novels are not imitative but distinct variations on a theme.

In its use of a teenage narrator, Bilgewater follows a long tradition, early employed by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), of a perceptive but naive speaker reporting more than the character fully understands. In many novels for young people published since the mid-1960’s, the first-person voice is either inconsistent or wearying, but Gardam deftly keeps the tone convincing, and Bilgewater has such a lively mind and looks at events with such unblinking honesty that she keeps the reader’s interest.

Although coincidence plays a large part in the story, this choice seems to be deliberate rather than a defect of plotting: It emphasizes Bilgewater’s frequently distracted sense of reality, in which many events appear to be controlled by odd chance and ordinary logical happenings sometimes seem strangely grotesque. Through the novel runs a rich vein of humor, embodied both in the eccentric figures of Bilgewater’s Yorkshire life and her fresh and clever descriptions of occurrences. At the same time, in an economical and unsentimental style, Gardam makes some touching comments on the torment and wonder youth can be.