The First Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Only in moments of great sadness, Madam. Or extreme elation.’

  ‘Guthrie’s so looking forward to leading you. In his next big case.’

  This was an eventuality which I should have taken into account as soon as I saw Guthrie in silk stockings; as a matter of fact it had never occurred to me.

  ‘Leading me? Did you say, leading me?’

  ‘Well, he has to have a junior now… doesn’t he? Naturally he wants the best junior available.’

  ‘Now he’s a leader?’

  ‘Now he’s left the Junior Bar.’

  I raised my glass and gave Marigold a version of Browning. ‘Just for a pair of knee breeches he left us… Just for an elastic suspender belt, as supplied to the Nursing profession…’ At which the Q.C. himself bore down on us in a rustle of silk and drew me into a corner.

  ‘I just wanted to say, I don’t see why recent events should make the slightest difference to the situation in Chambers. You are the senior man in practice, Rumpole.’

  Henry was passing with the fizzing bottle. I held out my glass and the tide ran foaming in it.

  ‘You wrong me, Brutus,’ I told Featherstone. ‘You said an older soldier, not a better.’

  ‘A quotation! Touché, very apt.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘I mean, all this will make absolutely no difference. I’ll still support you Rumpole, as the right candidate for Head of Chambers.’

  I didn’t know about being a candidate, having thought of the matter as settled and not being much of a political animal. But before I had time to reflect on whatever the Honourable Member was up to, the door opened letting in a formidable draught and the Head of Chambers. C. H. Wystan, She’s Daddy, wearing a tweed suit, extremely pale, supported by Albert on one side and a stick on the other, made the sort of formidable entrance that the ghost of Banquo stages at dinner with the Macbeths. Wystan was installed in an armchair, from which he gave us all the sort of wintry smile which seemed designed to indicate that all flesh is as the grass, or something to that effect.

  ‘Albert wrote to me about this little celebration. I was determined to be with you. And the doctor has given permission, for no more than one glass of champagne.’ Wystan held out a transparent hand into which Albert inserted a glass of non vintage. Wystan lifted this with some apparent effort, and gave us a toast.

  ‘To the great change in Chambers! Now we have a silk. Guthrie Featherstone, Q.c, m.p.!’

  I had a large refill to that. Wystan absorbed a few bubbles, wiped his mouth on a clean, folded handkerchief, and proceeded to the oration. Wystan was never a great speech maker, but I claimed another refill and gave him my ears.

  ‘You, Featherstone, have brought a great distinction to Chambers.’

  ‘Isn’t that nice, Guthrie?’ Marigold proprietorially squeezed her master’s fingers.

  ‘You know, when I was a young man. You remember when we were young men, Uncle Tom? We used to hang around in Chambers for weeks on end.’ Wystan had gone on about these distant hard times at every Chambers meeting. ‘I well recall we used to occupy ourselves with an old golf ball and mashie niblick, trying to get chip shots into the waste-paper baskets. Albert was a boy then.’

  ‘A mere child, Mr Wystan,’ Albert looked suitably demure.

  ‘And we used to pray for work. Any sort of work, didn’t we, Uncle Tom?’

  ‘We were tempted to crime. Only way we could get into Court,’ Uncle Tom took the feed line like a professional. Moderate laughter, except for Rumpole who was busy drinking. And then I heard Wystan rambling on.

  ‘But as you grow older at the Bar you discover it’s not having any work that matters. It’s the quality that counts!’

  ‘Here, here! I’m always saying we ought to do more civil.’ This was the dutiful Erskine-Brown, inserting his oar.

  ‘Now Guthrie Featherstone, Q.c, m.p. will, of course, command briefs in all divisions - planning, contract,’ Wystan’s voice sank to a note of awe, ‘even Chancery! I was so afraid, after I’ve gone, that this Chambers might become known as merely a criminal set.’ Wystan’s voice now sank in a sort of horror. ‘And, of course, there’s no doubt about it, too much criminal work does rather lower the standing of a Chambers.’

  ‘Couldn’t you install pithead baths?’ I hadn’t actually meant to say it aloud, but it came out very loud indeed.

  ‘Ah, Horace.’ Wystan turned his pale eyes on me for the first time.

  ‘So we could have a good scrub down after we get back from the Old Bailey?’

  ‘Now, Horace Rumpole. And I mean no disrespect whatever to my son-in-law.’ Wystan returned to the oration. From far away I heard myself say, ‘Daddy!’ as I raised the hard-working glass. ‘Horace does practise almost exclusively in the Criminal Courts!’

  ‘One doesn’t get the really fascinating points of law. Not in criminal work,’ Erskine-Brown was adding unwanted support to the motion. ‘I’ve often thought we should try and attract some really lucrative tax cases into Chambers.’

  That, I’m afraid, did it. Just as if I were in Court I moved slightly to the centre and began my speech.

  ‘Tax cases?’ I saw them all smiling encouragement at me. ‘Marvellous! Tax cases make the world go round. Compared to the wonderful world of tax, crime is totally trivial. What does it matter? If some boy loses a year, a couple of years, of his life? It’s totally unimportant! Anyway, he’ll grow up to be banged up for a good five, shut up with his own chamber pot in some convenient hole we all prefer not to think about.’ There was a deafening silence, which came loudest from Marigold Feather-stone. Then Wystan tried to reach a settlement.

  ‘Now then, Horace. Your practice no doubt requires a good deal of skill.’

  ‘Skill? Who said “skill”?’ I glared round at the learned friends. ‘Any fool could do it! It’s only a matter of life and death. That’s all it is. Crime? It’s a sort of a game. How can you compare it to the real world of Off Shore Securities. And Deductible Expenses?’

  ‘All you young men in Chambers can learn an enormous amount from Horace Rumpole, when it comes to crime.’ Wystan now seemed to be the only one who was still smiling. I turned on him.

  ‘You make me sound just like Fred Timson!’

  ‘Really? Whoever’s Fred Timson?’ I told you Wystan never had much of a practice at the Bar, consequently he had never met the Timsons. Erskine-Brown supplied the information.

  ‘The Timsons are Rumpole’s favourite family.’

  ‘An industrious clan of South London criminals, aren’t they, Rumpole,’ Hoskins added.

  Wystan looked particularly pained. ‘South London criminals?’

  ‘I mean, do we want people like the Timsons forever hanging about in our waiting room? I merely ask the question.’ He was not bad, this Erskine-Brown, with a big future in the nastier sort of Breach of Trust cases.

  ‘Do you? Do you merely ask it?’ I heard the pained bellow of a distant Rumpole.

  ‘The Timsons… and their like, are no doubt grist to Rum-pole’s mill,’ Wystan was starting on the summing up. ‘But it’s the balance that counts. Now, you’ll be looking for a new Head of Chambers.’

  ‘Are we still looking?’ My friend George Frobisher had the decency to ask. And Wystan told him, ‘I’d like you all to think it over carefully. And put your views to me in writing. We should all try and remember. It’s the good of the Chambers that matters. Not the feelings, however deep they may be, of any particular person.’

  He then called on Albert’s assistance to raise him to his feet, lifted his glass with an effort of pure will and offered us a toast to the good of Chambers. I joined in, and drank deep, it having been a good thirty seconds since I had had a glass to my lips. As the bubbles exploded against the tongue I noticed that the Featherstones were holding hands, and the brand new artificial silk was looking particularly delighted. Something, and perhaps not only his suspender belt, seemed to be giving him special pleasure.

  Some weeks later, when I gave Hilda
the news, she was deeply shocked.

  ‘Guthrie Featherstone! Head of Chambers!’ We were at breakfast. In fact Nick was due back at school that day. He was neglecting his cornflakes and reading a book.

  ‘By general acclaim.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Hilda looked at me, as if she’d just discovered that I’d contracted an incurable disease.

  ‘He can have the headaches - working out Albert’s extraordinary book -keeping system.’ I thought for a moment, yes, I’d like to have been Head of Chambers, and then put the thought from me.

  ‘If only you could have become a Q.C.’ She was now pouring me an unsolicited cup of coffee.

  ‘Q.C? C.T. That’s enough to keep me busy.’

  ‘C.T.? Whatever’s C.T.?’

  ‘Counsel for the Timsons!’ I tried to say it as proudly as I could. Then I reminded Nick that I’d promised to see him off at Liverpool Street, finished my cooling coffee, stood up and took a glance at the book that was absorbing him, expecting it to be, perhaps, that spine-chilling adventure relating to the Footprints of an Enormous Hound. To my amazement the shocker in question was entitled simply Studies in Sociology.

  ‘It’s interesting,’ Nick sounded apologetic.

  ‘You astonish me.’

  ‘Old Bagnold was talking about what I should read if I get into Oxford.’

  ‘Of course you’re going to read law, Nick. We’re going to keep it in the family.’ Hilda the barrister’s daughter was clearing away deafeningly.

  ‘I thought perhaps P.P.E. and then go on to Sociology.’ Nick sounded curiously confident. Before Hilda could get in another word I made my position clear.

  ‘P.P.E., that’s very good, Nick! That’s very good indeed! For God’s sake. Let’s stop keeping things in the family!’

  Later, as we walked across the barren stretches of Liverpool Street Station, with my son in his school uniform and me in my old striped trousers and black jacket, I tried to explain what I meant.

  ‘That’s what’s wrong, Nick. That’s the devil of it! They’re being born around us all the time. Little Mr Justice Everglades… Little Timsons… Little Guthrie Featherstones. All being set off… to follow in father’s footsteps.’ We were at the barrier, shaking hands awkwardly. ‘Let’s have no more of that! No more following in father’s footsteps. No more.’

  Nick smiled, although I have no idea if he understood what I was trying to say. I’m not totally sure that I understood it either. Then the train removed him from me. I waved for a little, but he didn’t wave back. That sort of thing is embarrassing for a boy. I lit a small cigar and went by tube to the Bailey. I was doing a long firm fraud then; a particularly nasty business, out of which I got a certain amount of harmless fun.

  Rumpole and the Alternative Society

  In some ways the coppers, the Fuzz, Old Bill, whatever you may care to call them, are a very conservative body. When they verbal up the criminal classes, and report their alleged confessions in the nick, they still use the sort of Cockney argot that went out at the turn of the century, and perfectly well-educated bank robbers, who go to the ballet at Covent Garden and holidays in Corfu, are still reported as having cried, ‘It’s a fair cop, guv,’ or ‘You got me bang to rights,’ at the moment they’re apprehended. In the early 1970s however, when Flower Power flooded the country with a mass of long hair, long dresses and the sweet smell of the old quarter of Marrakesh, the Fuzz showed itself remarkably open to new ideas. Provincial drug squads were issued with beads, Afghan waistcoats, headbands and guitars along with their size eleven boots, and took lessons in a new language, learning to say, ‘Cool it man,’ or ‘Make love not war,’ instead of ‘You got me bang to rights.’

  It was also a time when the figures of the establishment fell into disrepute and to be a barrister, however close to the criminal fraternity, was to be regarded by the young as a sort of undesirable cross between Judge Jeffries and Mr Nixon, as I knew from the sullen looks of the young ladies Nick, who was then at Oxford and reading P.P.E., brought home in the holidays. I have never felt so clearly the number of different countries, all speaking private languages and with no diplomatic relations, into which England is divided. I cannot think for instance of a world more remote from the Temple or the Inns of Court than that tumble-down Victorian house in the west country (No. 34 Balaclava Road, Coldsands) which the community who inhabited it had christened ‘Nirvana’, and which contained a tortoise who looked to me heavily drugged, a number of babies, some surprisingly clean young men and women, a pain-in-the-neck named Dave, and a girl called Kathy Trelawny whom I never met until she came to be indicted in the Coldsands Crown Court on a charge of handling a phenomenal amount of cannabis resin, valued at about ten thousand pounds.

  Coldsands is a rather unpopular resort in the west of England with a high rainfall, a few Regency terraces, a large number of old people’s homes, and a string quartet at tea-time in the Winter Gardens; on the face of it an unlikely place for crime to flourish. But a number of young people did form a community there at ‘Nirvana’, a place which the local inhabitants regarded as the scene of numerous orgies. To this house came a dealer named Jack, resplendent in his hippie attire, to place a large order for cannabis which Kathy Trelawny set about fulfilling, with the aid of a couple of Persian law students with whom she had made contact at Bristol University. Very soon after the deal was done, and a large quantity of money handed over, Jack the Hippie was revealed as Detective Sergeant Jack Smedley of the local force, the strong arm of the law descended on ‘Nirvana’, the Persian law students decamped to an unknown address in Morocco, and Rumpole, who had had a few notable successes with dangerous drugs, was dug out of Old Bailey and placed upon the 12.15 from Paddington to Coldsands, enjoying the rare luxury of a quiet corner seat in the first-class luncheon car, by courtesy of the Legal Aid Fund of Great Britain.

  I could afford the first-class luncheon, and spread myself the more readily, as I was staying in a little pub on the coast not five miles from Coldsands kept by my old mates and companions in arms (if my three years in the R. A.F. ground staff can be dignified by so military a title), ex-Pilot Officer ‘Three-Fingers’ Dogherty and his wife Bobby, ex-W.A.A.F., unchallenged beauty queen of the station at Dungeness, who was well known to look like Betty Grable from behind and Phyllis Dixey from the front and to have a charm, a refreshing impertinence and a contempt for danger unrivalled, I am sure, by either of those famous pin-ups from Reveille. I have spoken of Bobby already in these reminiscences and I am not ashamed to say that, although I was already married to Hilda when we met, she captured my heart, and continued to hold it fast long after the handsome Pilot Officer captured hers. I was therefore keenly looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with Bobby; we had had a desultory correspondence but we hadn’t met for many years. I was also looking forward to a holiday at the seaside, for which Miss Trelawny’s little trouble seemed merely to provide the excuse and the financial assistance.

  So I was, as you can imagine, in a good mood as we rattled past Reading and cows began to be visible, standing in fields, chewing the cud, as though there were no law courts or judges in the world. You very rarely see a cow down the Bailey, which is one of the reasons I enjoy an occasional case on circuit. Circuit takes you away from Chambers, away from the benevolent despotism of Albert the clerk, above all, away from the constant surveillance of She Who Must Be Obeyed (Mrs Hilda Rumpole). I began to look forward to a good, old-fashioned railway lunch. I thought of a touch of Brown Windsor soup, rapidly followed by steamed cod, castle pudding, mouse-trap, cream crackers and celery, all to be washed down with a vintage bottle of Chateau Great Western as we charged past Didcot.

  A furtive-looking man, in a short off-white jacket which showed his braces and a mournful expression, looked down at me.

  ‘Ah waiter. Brown Windsor soup, I fancy, to start with.’

  ‘We’re just doing the Grilled Platter, sir.’ I detected, in the man’s voice, a certain gloomy satisfaction.

&nb
sp; ‘Grilled – what?’

  ‘Fried egg and brunch-burger, served with chips and a nice tomato.’

  ‘A nice tomato! Oh, very well.’ Perhaps with a suitable anaesthetic the brunch-burger could be taken. ‘And to drink. A reasonable railway claret?’

  ‘No wines on this journey, sir. We got gin in miniatures.’

  ‘I don’t care for gin, at lunchtime, especially in miniatures.’ Regretfully I came to the conclusion that circuit life had deteriorated and wondered what the devil they had done with all the Brown Windsor soup.

  *

  At Coldsands Station a middle-aged man in a neat suit and rimless glasses was there to meet me. He spoke with a distinct and reassuring west-country accent.

  ‘Mr Horace Rumpole? I’m Friendly.’

  ‘Thank God someone is!’

  ‘I was warned you liked your little joke, Mr Rumpole, by London agents. They recommended you as a learned counsel who has had some success with drugs.’

  ‘Oh, I have had considerable success with drugs. And a bit of luck with murder, rape and other offences against the person.’

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t do much crime at Friendly, Sanderson and Friendly. We’re mainly conveyancing. By the way, I think there’s a couple of typing errors in the instructions to counsel.’ Mr Friendly looked deeply apologetic.

  I hastened to reassure him. ‘Fear not, Friendly. I never read the instructions to counsel. I find they blur the judgement and confuse the mind.’

  We were outside the station now, and a battered taxi rattled into view.

  ‘You’ll want to see the client?’ Friendly sounded resigned.

  ‘She might expect it.’

  ‘You’re going to “Nirvana”?’

  ‘Eventually. Aren’t we all? No, Friendly. I shall steer clear of the lotus eaters of No. 34 Balaclava Road. A land, I rather imagine, in which it seems always afternoon. Bring the client for a con at my hotel. After dinner. Nine o’clock suit you?’

  ‘You’ll be at the George? That’s where the Bar put up.’