The First Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Khan! My dear fellow. You come warmly recommended from the Inn. An apt pupil… Ready to start work, are you?’

  … As soon as you say so, Mr Horace Rumpole. I am mustard keen, I must say.’

  ‘That’s the ticket! This is the client Mr… No, sorry, Captain. Captain Rex Parkin.’

  ‘And young Simmonds. Our instructing solicitor. My new pupil…’

  ‘Lutaf Ali Khan. At your service, Captain.’

  The Captain avoided Khan’s eager eye. There was an awkward silence.

  ‘Yes. Well, why not sit down here, dear boy. Learn to take notes, I never have.’

  Khan sat on the other side of Rumpole’s desk, his pen poised. Captain Parkin cleared his throat.

  ‘I would like to stress, Mr Rumpole. This is a confidential matter.’

  ‘Oh, don’t mind Khan. It’s the only thing to do with pupils. Throw them in at the deep end. You know what we have here, Khan? A rather nasty charge under the Race Relations Act.’

  ‘Let’s see what I know about our client, the Captain. You are ex-Pay Corps.’ I flicked through my brief for Khan’s benefit.

  ‘Served. Overseas…?’

  ‘I served my country as best I could. Given my medical condition.’ The Captain looked dignified.

  ‘Flat feet…’ I read it in the brief, and comforted the client. ‘Don’t worry. I was in the R.A.F. groundstaff. We both avoided the temptations of heroism.’

  ‘Worked after demobilization selling…World Wide Encyclopedia. Married for twenty-five years to Mavis Parkin. Owns his own bungalow “Mandalay”, Durbar Lane, Bexley Heath. Employed since 1958 as a clerk in the South-East Area Gas Board…’ It sounded like a life full of incident and romance.

  ‘Captain Parkin wishes it to be known that he’s absolutely sincere.’ This was young Simmonds’s contribution.

  ‘Unfortunately that isn’t a defence in law. I’ve known quite a number of very genuine robbers. They sincerely wanted to be rich.’ I continued to read. The answer is… Blood.’

  ‘Mr Rumpole. On the question of sentence…” The Captain raised a delicate question.

  ‘Sorry. You want to know what you might be in for?’ ‘The maximum. If you please, sir.’

  ‘Two years’ imprisonment. Or a fine. Or both. Section 6 of the 1978 Act.’ The admirable Khan had the answer at his fingertips.

  ‘And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,

  That one small head could carry all he knew…

  You see what a huge advantage a pupil is, Captain. Well, now you know the worst.’

  And then Captain Parkin said something so unexpected, so unknown in a client, that I was left staring at him in amazement.

  ‘I want you, sir, to ask for the maximum penalty.’

  ‘Now Captain Perkins… Parkin. Now listen to me a moment, my old darling… Regard me,’ I told him, ‘as your professional attendant. Who cares for your health. Now if I were treating you for a nasty go of ‘flu, Captain Perkins, I couldn’t allow you to dance naked in the East wind at midnight, on a damp lawn, could I?’

  ‘I intend, in the trial, sir, to behave as Ghandi did before the District Magistrate in Ahmedobad. I intend to argue for the maximum sentence.’ Captain Parkin had risen to his feet and seemed to be standing to attention.

  ‘Excuse me, Captain, but wasn’t the Mahatma of foreign extraction?’

  ‘One can learn at times, sir, from the enemy. Mr Ghandi asked for life imprisonment. It was the best way he could serve his cause - as a martyr.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I have a cause too, of a sort,’ I told him. ‘I defend people. I don’t think I could ask a judge to send a client of mine to prison. It’d be against my religion.’

  ‘Then, sir. I am wasting your time.’ Captain Parkin moved to the door. ‘I’ll conduct my own case. I presume I’m entitled to do that?’

  ‘It’s a free world… For the moment.’ Before I’d got the words out the door slammed, my client had gone off on his own.

  ‘He’s a fool, Mr Rumpole. If he won’t take your advice.’ Young Simmonds looked intensely embarrassed.

  ‘It’s his affair entirely,’ I comforted him, ‘our prison system’s open to all, old darling. Regardless of creed or colour.’

  When I told Hilda I had a pupil, she was pleased. She re membered that her ‘Daddy’, old C. H. Wystan, had had a pupil, namely me. She told me to bring my pupil home to dinner one night and promised to make him a nice roast. Remembering the nonsense she had talked about the old days of the British Raj I agreed to do so.

  A couple of weeks later Khan and I received another visit from Captain Rex Parkin and his distraught solicitor. It seemed that the central committee for the South-Eastern Region of the ‘Britain First’ Party had met at my client’s bungalow ‘Mandalay’. Prominent members, a Mr ‘Cliff Worseley, a local garage owner and a Mr Sidney Cox, a quantity surveyor and local party chairman, had persuaded the Captain that it was in the party’s interests that the case should be fought. The Captain had told them I was an ageing junior barrister with a Pakistani pupil whereupon’Cliff Worseley had said that was an excellent thing as it would prove to the jury that ‘Britain First’ was not a racialist party. During this account Khan smiled politely, and I promised to fight the good fight and forget the Captain’s former ambition to be convicted.

  There were those, of course, who didn’t approve of my having taken on Captain Parkin’s defence. When I went into Pom- meroy’s Wine Bar for an evening jar I met the most distinguished member of our Chambers, Guthrie Featherstone, Q.c, m.p., who looked at me from his considerable height and in his most dis- tinguished manner.

  ‘Rumpole. I’m prosecuting you in the Race Relations case.

  Phillida Tram’s my junior.’

  ‘Sounds a formidable combination.’

  ‘You know, Rumpole,’ Featherstone went on, ‘I was talking to old Keith from the Lord Chancellor’s office the other day. He was suprised at you of all people… defending a wretched Fascist beast.’

  ‘I defend murderers. Doesn’t mean I approve of murder.’

  ‘No, but politically. I was thinking. The time may come, Rumpole, when you might think of subsiding gently on the Circuit Bench.’

  ‘Rumpole a Circus Judge?’ It was a fate which has always seemed to me considerably worse than death.

  ‘It’s not a job the Lord Chancellor’s office hands out, to fellows who stand up for Fascists.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ I sank a large glass of Chateau Fleet Street and began to negotiate with Jack Pommeroy for more.

  ‘Afraid so, Rumpole. I mean, you’re not getting much younger. I don’t know what your pension scheme is…’

  My pension, as he well knew, consisted of my growing overdraft and the dwindling lease on my flat at Froxbury Court, Gloucester Road. However, I was rapidly losing patience with Guthrie Featherstone, Q.c, m.p.

  ‘My pension scheme is about as non-existent as your friend old Keith’s knowledge of Voltaire.’

  ‘Voltaire?’ The Q.C, M.P. looked puzzled.

  ‘M. Arouet,’ I explained. ‘Remember what he said, “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”? You might read that to the jury, when you’re opening the little matter of the Queen against Captain Rex Parkin…’

  The evening came when I took Mr Khan home to meet my wife Hilda and her roast. She Who Must Be Obeyed didn’t actually scream or send for the police when she clapped eyes on my pupil, but she looked severely shaken, and matters were so tense round the festive board that I was constrained to tell one of my best stories as I carved the beef. I chose the beauty about two men charged with an act of buggery under Waterloo Bridge and tried by dear old Judge Darcy at the Bailey.

  ‘These two men were caught misbehaving themselves under Waterloo Bridge and when he was passing sentence that exquisite old Judge Hubert Darcy said, “You two men have done an abominable act. A most disgusting and horrible act… And what makes it worse - you chose to do it unde
r one of the most beautiful bridges in London.” ’

  I laughed loudly at this conte, as I always do. Khan smiled politely, Hilda was appalled. She looked even more anxious as she pushed a laden plate of roast to Khan.

  ‘Oh dear. I didn’t realize. Can you eat beef?’

  ‘Of course he can, Hilda. What do you think? He’d be afraid it was a reincarnation of his grandmother?’ I looked at Khan reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry, dear boy. We got it at Sainsbury’s.’

  ‘Roast beef of old England. Perfectly fine. Suits me down to the ground.’ Khan sounded enthusiastic. I tried to pour claret into his glass, but the young Pakistani put his hand over it.

  ‘Oh, come along. If you’re starting a career at the Bar, we’ve got to introduce you to the delights of Pommeroy’s claret.’

  ‘Well then, just a snifter.’ I was glad to see him lap up the claret. I went to turn off one bar of the electric fire.

  ‘What are you doing, Hilda, turning the place into the hothouse at Kew?’

  ‘Don’t you find England very cold, Mr Khan?’ Hilda asked nervously.

  ‘No. No, I assure you. It is much much colder in the Punjab in the winter.’

  ‘Wasn’t your Aunt Fran in the Punjab, Hilda?’

  ‘Oh, that was in the old days. The British Raj, you know.’

  ‘All gone now, eh Khan? Much to the regret of our client Captain Parkin.’ I gave them a bit of Kipling.

  ‘Far-call’d our navies melt away

  On dune and headland sinks the fire…

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh, and Tyre…’

  ‘My uncle was District Railway Officer Percy Wystan. I don’t know if you ever met him?’ Hilda asked, a singularly stupid question.

  ‘Rather before my time, I’m afraid, Mrs Rumpole. All the same. We had some sensible fellows in the government then. Not these silly asses we get today.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ She Who Must Be Obeyed seemed to be thawing slightly.

  ‘All the same, they are your own silly asses. Isn’t that the point?’ I put it to Khan.

  ‘Oh yes. But they make us blush sometimes.’

  At which Hilda actually smiled and I raised a beaker to young Khan’s future at the Bar.

  ‘How can I go wrong,’ Khan said, ‘with such a distinguished teacher as Mr Horace Rumpole?’

  ‘You think he’s a distinguished teacher?’ She was incredulous.

  ‘Oh gosh, yes, Mrs Rumpole. Your husband’s bound to end up seated on the Bench, at least at Circuit Judge level.’

  ‘Rumpole! Do you hear that?’ She was delighted.

  ‘Never. Never in a million years…’

  ‘I always thought, if you would take a bit of prosecution work, Mr Rumpole. That seems to be the path to the Bench nowadays.’ Khan said, and Hilda agreed.

  ‘Mr Khan. That’s exactly what I’m always telling him.’

  ‘I don’t fancy the idea of people locked up with their own chamber-pots. Not for years on end, anyway. I wouldn’t like to cross-examine them into it… And I don’t want to sentence them to it either.’

  ‘Someone has to do it, Mr Rumpole,’ Khan said, winning more of Hilda’s approval.

  ‘Someone has to clean out the sewers. Just so long as it isn’t me.’

  ‘You know, Mrs Rumpole. I don’t entirely agree with my learned pupilmaster. There are two dreadful Pakistani students in my digs and I can swear they stole my transistor radio. I’d send them inside, double-quick pronto.’

  At which Hilda smiled at him sweetly. I could see that life at the Bar would hold no further terrors for Khan. The Lord Chief. The Court of Appeal. The House of Lords. The Uxbridge Magistrates. They’d all be child’s play to him now. Like shooting fish in a water butt. Now he’d dealt in so masterly a fashion with She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  Meanwhile Mr Khan was looking at me with serious concern.

  ‘I honestly think Mrs Rumpole has a point though, sir. You should think in terms of a judgeship, in the years to come.’

  Judge ‘Jimmie’ Jamieson was a thin, ferret-faced Scotsman of about my age. He had his wig off and was offering a silver cigarette box round to me, Guthrie Featherstone, Q.c, m.p. and Miss Trant in the privacy of his room before we started on the case of R. v. Parkin.

  ‘You are an O.L., aren’t you, Rumpole?’ The judge asked me and I wondered if his Honour was gratuitously insulting. ‘You were at Linklater’s, weren’t you?’

  Linklater’s! My old school. A wind-blasted penal colony on the Norfolk coast, where thirteen-year-olds fought for the radiators and tried to hide the lumpy porridge in letters from home.

  ‘I haven’t seen you at the O.L. dinners recently,’ the judge went on.

  ‘No.’ He hadn’t seen me at the Embalmers’ Annual Ball, either.

  ‘They put on a very good show for us last year, at the Con-naught Rooms. – This case going to last long, is it?’

  ‘Three days, Judge. Three or four days at the most.’ Guthrie Featherstone had the time-table. Now I remembered the judge. A small trembling child from Scotland. He wore a chest protector and was incredibly mean about his tuck.

  ‘I’m hoping to get a week’s fishing in starting on Monday,’ Jamieson said. ‘I just wanted to get the timing from you fellows. Remember our last case, Rumpole?’

  ‘The Paddington affray.’

  ‘Crowds of piccaninnies scraping with knives on Paddington Station.” The judge smiled as if at a happy memory.

  ‘Only real worry was… some passing white might have got hurt.’

  Oh dear! Oh my ears and whiskers! We could hardly hope for a trial in the spirit of Voltaire. Miss Trant, I thought, looked especially disgusted.

  Shortly thereafter the case was underway in one of the New Courts at the Bailey, and Ie was cross-examining the officer in charge.

  ‘This broken window, of the grocer’s shop, Inspector. You have no way of knowing if the perpetrator of that act had heard my client’s oration, had you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Let us hope he was not at Linklater’s, Rumpole!’ said the judge, and seemed to find it amusing.

  ‘Now, you say my client said something… about blood?’ I carried on, killing the laugh.

  ‘He said. “The answer is… blood!” ‘ The Inspector consulted his notebook. ‘I couldn’t hear all that clearly.’

  ‘Exactly! The rival factions were yelling their heads off. So he might have said “The answer is in the blood”?’

  ‘Really. If my learned friend thinks there is any difference…’ Guthrie Featherstone rose wearily.

  ‘Let me instruct my learned friend. If he said, “The answer is blood”, it might well be an incitement to violence.’

  ‘I am glad my learned friend at least appreciates the point of the prosecution case…’

  ‘But if he said, “The answer is in the blood”, he was merely referring to some supposed difference in racial characteristics, and the remark was quite innocuous.’

  ‘There is a clear distinction, is there not, Mr Featherstone?’ I was half-ashamed to discover that the judge was on my side.

  ‘If your Lordship pleases.’ Featherstone subsided, and I gave the jury a friendly smile as I said:

  ‘I am glad that my learned friend has at last grasped the nature of the defence.’

  ‘Straight up, Mr Rumpole. He’s got the Union Jack flying on his bungalow.’

  I was in the pub opposite the Bailey to which I had inveigled my pupil Khan, who was taking a note for me in the case, for a quick shepherd’s pie and a pint of draught Guinness (Khan had become quite a healthy drinker under my tuition, and a good companion both in the pub at lunchtime and in Pommeroy’s after the battle of the day was done) and I had been approached by a tall, overweight individual, with a blotchy pink face, whose long tow-coloured hair hung over the rabbit-fur collar of his ‘car coat’. It appeared that this unpromising individual was ‘Cliff Worseley, garage-owner of Purley and committee member of
the South-Eastern section of the ‘Britain First’ movement. ‘Cliff had been giving me a number of details of the character and way of life of my client, Captain Parkin, including a description of the decor of his bungalow ‘Mandalay’, his relationship with his wife Mavis, and his addiction to homemade curries and homing pigeons.

  ‘Union Jack on his bungalow? I don’t suppose,’ I asked hopefully, ‘he lowers it at sunset by any chance?’

  ‘He does Mr Rumpole! I swear to you he does,’ ‘Cliff laughed delightedly. ‘Is that sort of stuff any use to you?’

  ‘I would say extremely useful.’

  ‘Cliff disappeared into the crowd, and I went over to the bar to find Miss Trant in sympathetic conversation with my pupil. As I arrived she went off to join her learned leader, Guthrie Featherstone, who was on the point of returning to Court.

  ‘That woman!’ Khan said looking after her. ‘Is she of immoral character or what is she?’

  ‘Why? Whatever did she say?’

  ‘She said that she and I had the same problems. She wanted us to be friends and allies.’

  ‘Oh, Khan…’

  ‘I told her that my father, who is Chief of Police in the Punjab, had gone to financial sacrifices to send me to England, and I was in no position to form any alliance with her even if I wanted to. In my country we would call that an immoral woman.’

  Poor Miss Trant. The way of the liberal is extremely hard, as I found out when I came to address the jury at the end of the proceedings of R. v. Parkin.

  I had worked carefully on my final speech and I joyfully incorporated all the information about my client that ‘Cliff’ had given me. As a matter of fact I thought it went rather well.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,’ I said, ‘let me introduce you to a dreamer! He doesn’t dream of money, or women - he dreams of the ancient days of the British Raj. Captain Rex Parkin. It’s true. He’s an ex-Captain of the Pay Corps. True that he’s never been further East, as far as I know, than a day trip to Boulogne.’

  One jury woman smiled, gradually others started to smile.

  ‘The closest he’s got to India is the weekly night out he has with his Memsahib, Mrs Mavis Parkin, in the “Star of India Curry House” in Bexley Heath.’