The First Rumpole Omnibus

by John Mortimer

  ‘Just because you’re tied hand and foot by the Income Tax and the V.A.T.-man and when Henry’s going to find you another brief, and “She Who Must Be Obeyed”.’

  ‘Featherstone! Is that any way to speak of Mrs Hilda Rumpole?’

  ‘I don’t know. You do.’

  ‘That, sir, is a husband’s privilege. Anyway. Why do you say I’m jealous?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is it because you want to be the only anarchist in Chambers?’

  Featherstone moved away and lit a cigarette. I stood and looked at him, thoughtful, and if I’m honest I must say worried. Was there a certain truth in what he said? Had Guthrie Featherstone put his finger on the Achilles Heel of Rumpole? Did I need him to make me feel a free, roving spirit. With Guthrie gone should I be reduced to a mere barrister, perhaps a deadly respectable Head of Chambers, calling meetings about the regrettable failure of learned friends to switch the light off in the loo, and their extravagance with the soap? I decided to deny his allegations.

  ‘I don’t need your sort of adventure to be a free soul, Featherstone. I can be bounded in the Temple and count myself a king of infinite space.’ I went to the door, using that moment to remind him of a case in which he was prosecuting. ‘Remember we’ve got a case on next week. Importation of cannabis. You’re against me.’

  ‘Prosecuting?’ He sounded doubtful.

  ‘That is…’ I looked at him accusingly, ‘unless you’ve “Gone Dancing”.’

  I am not especially proud of what I did then, but the chance of Guthrie Featherstone appearing as the Protector of Society against the insidious attacks of the drug culture seemed too good to miss. Before the Q.C., M.P. rose to open the prosecution, I had phoned Chambers and asked Harry to send Angela straight down to the Old Bailey as I had urgent need of her services as a shorthand note-taker. When I got to Court I was delighted to see our Head of Chambers standing erect as a pillar of the Establishment, saying exactly what I required him to say.

  ‘In this case I appear with my learned friend Mr Owen Glendour-Jones to prosecute and the defence is represented by my learned friend Mr Horace Rumpole. Members of the jury, this case concerns the possession of a dangerous drug - cannabis resin.’ Guthrie began promisingly. At which moment the glass door swung open to admit that girlish G.I. Angela. She came to my side and I asked her to sit and take a note of Guthrie’s opening speech. Intent on his work he seemed not to have noticed her arrival. As he carried on I could feel Angela’s indignation glowing behind me.

  ‘Cannabis, whatever you may have read in the papers, members of the jury, is a dangerous drug. Prohibited by Parliament,’ said Featherstone. ‘Oh, it may be very fashionable for young people to say that it does less harm than a whisky and soda, or that smoking cannabis in some way makes you a better, purer soul than squares like us, members of the jury, who may prefer an honest pint, or in the case of the ladies of the jury, a small gin and tonic? You will hear a lot in this case about the defendant feeling it his mission to “turn us all on”, as if we were electric lights. The fact remains, says the prosecution, that the dealer in cannabis resin is merely a common criminal, engaged in breaking the law for sordid commercial gain…’

  The Court door banged. The outraged Angela, by now totally disillusioned with her swinging lover, had gone. We never saw her round the Temple or the Bailey again.

  Christianity has no doubt brought great benefits to humanity, but in my opinion Christmas is not one of them. With a sickening of the heart I began to notice, as I went quietly about my life of crime, the dreadful signs of the outbreak of Christmas fever. My take-away claret from Pommeroy’s was wrapped in paper decorated with reindeer and robins, Henry and Dianne began to put up holly in the clerk’s room. Soon we should have to struggle down Oxford Street so that I could buy She the lavender water she never uses, and She could buy me the tie I never wear. Paper streamers went up in the list office at the Bailey, and there was plastic holly in the gate room at Brixton Nick. In time more decorations were hung in Featherstone’s room in Chambers, where was held our annual Christmas thrash (wives and girl- friends invited, warm gin and vermouth and Dianne traditionally far from steady on her pins before the end of the evening). I had gone through a drink or two at this gathering when I found myself in the centre of a group which consisted solely of Erskine- Brown and Miss Trant. I took the opportunity of telling them that I would take no part in a Chambers revolution; and that having looked carefully into the allegations against Guthrie Featherstone I found that the prosecution had not made out its case, indeed I believed the unfortunate Guthrie had this in common with Dave Anstey. They were both victims of cases of mistaken identity.

  ‘What’re you up to now, Houdini?’ Miss Trant asked sus- piciously.

  ‘It may be. It may very well be,’ I suggested, ‘that there has been someone, a totally different someone, masquerading as Guthrie Featherstone!’ I looked towards Featherstone, well- turned-out in a grey suit, who had arrived, escorting a smiling Marigold. ‘All I can tell you for certain is,’ I went on to the plotters, ‘our respected Head of Chambers is clearly not the person you saw whooping it up in the disco. Look at him now, graciously escorting his lovely wife to our Christmas celebration. Look at him carefully, Erskine-Brown! Observe him closely, Miss Trant. Is that the man you saw? Certainly not! Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Not in the least, Rumpole,’ Erskine-Brown grumbled and frowned displeased. I moved off. Marigold Was enjoying a stimulating sherry. I came up to her. ‘Mrs Featherstone. Marigold. I owe you an apology…’

  ‘Mr Rumpole?’

  ‘Keeping your husband out late boozing in Pommeroy’s. Dis- gusting behaviour! I have put a complete stop to it.’

  ‘So I’ve noticed.’ Marigold smiled graciously. ‘The all-night sittings seem to have dropped off lately, too. I get Guthrie for dinner nowadays.’

  ‘How delicious!’ I gave her a small bow and She Who Must Be Obeyed hove into view, clutching a large G and T.

  ‘Rumpole!’ She trumpeted.

  ‘You know She… you know my wife, of course.’ I did my best to introduce her.

  ‘Of course,’ Marigold inclined her head. ‘We sing together.’

  ‘You’re coming to the Messiah, Rumpole,’ Hilda said.

  ‘Oh yes, Mr Rumpole,’ Marigold added her pennyworth. ‘Do come. We make a jolly brave stab at the “Hallelujah chorus”.’

  ‘Do you really? How very sporting of you. I hate to miss it: but you see, the pressure of work in Chambers…’

  ‘You are coming to the Messiah, Rumpole!’ In She’s mouth it was an announcement, not an invitation. Further conversation was precluded by Henry calling for silence for our Head of Chambers.

  ‘I’m not going to make a speech…” Featherstone began to general applause. ‘I just wanted to welcome you all… Members and wives and girlfriends who are members also…’ Here he raised his glass to our Portia, Miss Trant. ‘To our annual Christmas “do”. We have had a pretty good year, Henry tells me, in Chambers…’ In fact Henry was wearing a new suit as a small tribute to his ten per cent. Featherstone boomed on, ‘And we have managed to stick together throughout this year…’

  ‘Except for one departure in the typing department,’ I reminded him tactlessly.

  Featherstone ignored this and continued, ‘Glendour-Jones has joined us, since the departure of George Frobisher for the Circuit Court Bench. I only want to say…’

  ‘ “That he which hath no stomach to this fight”…’ I felt it was time to put some force into this oration, so I almost shouted King Harry’s call to battle.

  ‘Did you want to say something Horace?’ Featherstone smiled and I cantered on, after draining my glass.

  ‘Let him depart; his passport shall be made,

  And crowns for convoy put into his purse:

  We would not plead in that man’s company

  That fears his fellowship to plead with us.’

  ‘What on earth’s your husband talking about?’ I hear
d Marigold whisper to She.

  ‘It’s Shakespeare. He does it all the time at home. I wish he wouldn’t do it when we’re out. So dreadfully embarrassing.’

  ‘When people speak of a split in Chambers or of the possibility of any other head but our distinguished Q.C., M.P.…’ I turned my eyes on the subversive Erskine-Brown, ‘they are making a grave error, and a terrible mistake… Like the mistakes in identity which may do such terrible injustice in our Courts. My learned leader, Guthrie Featherstone Q.C., M.P. is a man fashioned by nature to be Head of Chambers. He couldn’t possibly be anything else. So we Old Bailey Hacks, we common soldiers at the Bar, will attack a New Year, under his leadership, crying together, “God for Guthrie, Henry and Dianne!” ‘

  I moved to Featherstone, put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Sorry, old darling,’ I said quietly. ‘You’re lumbered with it!’

  Rumpole and the Course of True Love

  Love, although the staple diet of the Oxford Book of English Verse, and the subject which seems the concern of the majority of its contributors, has not, so far, much disturbed the even course of these memoirs, which have been mainly concerned with bloodstains, mayhem, murder and other such signs of affection. I cannot help thinking that the time occupied in the course of an average lifetime in the pursuit of love has been greatly exaggerated. Dr Donne and Lord Byron, I am convinced, spent many more of their spare moments asleep, or staring aimlessly into the middle distance, or having a lonely chop and an early night than they would have us believe. The days spent by Rumpole, for instance, in the hectic pursuit of passion during the course of an average lifetime at the Bar, if laid end to end, would hardly fill out a summer holiday.

  I was, it is true, extremely fond of Miss Porter, my fiancée, the daughter of my old Oxford tutor, but our engagement had to be broken off by reason of her inappropriate and quite unexpected death. She was a docile young woman, with a gentle uncomplaining voice, and had I married her I would no doubt have been spared the more military aspect of home life with She Who Must Be Obeyed, whose tone of voice often seems more suited to the barrack square than to the boudoir. I stumbled, rather than plunged, into marriage with She (Mrs Hilda Rumpole) as the result of a gentle push from her father, old C. H. Wystan, my one-time Head of Chambers, and was rash enough to propose to her when my gills were awash with champagne during a distant Inns of Court Ball (we all make mistakes during our early years at the Bar). It can hardly be said that hectic passion has been the keynote of my married life with She Who Must Be Obeyed, although I remember a holiday we took around 1949 in Brittany when She showed an unwonted enthusiasm for the stuff (I have always put it down to the shellfish). Although embarrassing at the time this holiday did ultimately produce the enduring benefit of my son Nicholas Rumpole, with whom I found considerable rapport and formed what I sincerely hope is a lasting friendship.

  It would be idle, of course, to pretend that the Rumpole heart has been forever chilled and that those lyrical effusions which fill so much of my old Oxford Book (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch edition) have no resonance for me. I was deeply taken with a comrade-in-arms, young ‘Bobby’ O’Keefe who looked, in those days, as pert and exquisitely rounded as ladies on the cover of Reveille. I met ‘Bobby’ when she was in the W.A.A.F. and I was doing my best to serve my country in the Air Force groundstaff, but her sudden marriage to Pilot Officer Sam ‘Three Fingers’ Dogherty broke off this potentially inconvenient romance.

  I should also add, in the interests of honesty, that there is a girl with copper-coloured hair and an engaging smile behind the urn in a cafe opposite the Old Bailey who brightens my breakfasts, with whom I enjoy what can only be described as light banter (although my heart sinks unaccountably when she tells me about her boyfriend who is apparently in the weight-lifting business).

  So much for love and Rumpole. I must now deal with the disastrous effects of this disease on the learned Head of my Chambers, Guthrie Featherstone, Q.c, m.p. and on a client of mine, Ronald Ransom, teacher of English Language and Literature at the John Keats Comprehensive School in the wilds of Hertfordshire.

  The John Keats was, so my client Ransom told me, the very model of a modern comprehensive school: designed to enhance the name of State Education, and to empty the public schools of all but a hard core of sado-masochists and the children of Asiatic bankers. The John Keats was, it seemed, so free and yet so self-disciplined, so well-equipped and yet so ‘caring’ (unlike my old public school where they certainly didn’t care whether you lived or died), and so genuinely ‘civilized’ that many Labour M.P.s and even some Cabinet Ministers bought homes in that part of Hertfordshire, so that they could enjoy the double advantage of an excellent education for their children, and an easy conscience when presenting themselves as men of the people.

  The John Keats Comprehensive was enlightened in its teaching methods. In History, so Ransom told me, the social life of the medieval village, or the economic basis of the Industrial Revolution were taught, rather than the dates of the Kings and Queens of England. The Domestic Science students could run up a reasonable ‘moussaka’ or ‘salade Nicoise’; the Literature classes spent a great deal of time extemporizing short playlets on the hopelessness of life in a comprehensive school; Sex Instruction took place from an early age, and the John Keats pupil graduated from basic intercourse in Junior Three, to ‘The Value of Foreplay’ and ‘The Toleration of Sexual Minorities’ in the Sixth.

  There’s no doubt that my client Ransom enjoyed his life and work at the John Keats Comprehensive. He had been brought up by a strict Methodist family in Scotland and sent to a grimly academic school, where Shakespeare had been reduced to a grammatical exercise and the construing of Virgil was no more exciting than lower mathematics. Neither that, nor his teachers’ training college, had led him to hope of an educational establishment where art was held to be more important than exams, where Mahler was thought to be more exciting than football, and where Romeo and Juliet was discussed as a poetic and sexual experience and not picked over for familiar quotations. His pleasure in his work was in no way diminished by the fact that there sat in the front row of his classroom, eagerly drinking in his explanation of the convoluted passions of Dr John Donne, and deeply grateful for his soft Scottish reading of Andrew MarvelPs impatient verses to his coy mistress, a Miss Francesca Capstick, the moderately bright daughter of a local bank manager. It was to her that he addressed MarvelFs dire warning not to hang about until ‘worms should try, that long-preserved virginity’, and she was, of course, the reason for his ending up in my Chambers .one summer morning. Miss Capstick was, at the time relevant to the offence, fifteen years and eleven months old.

  I had, later, an opportunity of examining Miss Capstick in some detail. She was by no means the blousy, tarty sort of girl who misleads men as to her age with make-up or hair dye. In fact she wore no make-up, her hair was long, brown and very clean, her eyes were large and gentle, her voice quiet, at times hardly audible. Her face can be seen in a hundred reproductions among the nymphs attendant upon Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’; she was called ‘Frank’ by her friends and chewed gum during some part of her evidence.

  ‘I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I

  Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then,

  But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

  Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den?’

  The Headmaster of the John Keats read out the verses with initial anger and disgust which turned, Ransom told me, to the sincere guttural trill of a Radio Three poetry reader. The Head always produced the school play and fancied himself as some mute inglorious Gielgud who had got lost in the State Education system. He therefore could not read the immortal words, even in a document he felt to be incriminating, without giving them a little rhythm, a touch of projection.

  ‘Twas so, but this all pleasures fancies bee

  If any beauty I did see

  Which I desired and got,

  Twas but a dream of thee,
’

  Ransom supplied helpfully.

  ‘That’s not the point.’ The Headmaster threw the letter down on his desk and started to pace the room with the nervous rage he had tried to get into his Sixth Formers’ rendering of the quarrel scene in Julius Caesar. ‘The point is that you were writing these amorous ravings to a young girl who has not yet had the maturing experience of attempting O-levels. Francesca Campstick.’

  ‘Her name’s Francesca Capstick and I’m teaching her John Donne. So naturally I sent her that quotation.’

  ‘And since the night at the Festival Hall, and the cannelloni and Orvieto at “Luigi’s”, I realize I love you spiritually and physically more than anyone I’ve ever loved in my life before.’ The Headmaster had now repossessed himself of the letter. ‘Is that a quotation from John Donne?’

  ‘No. As a matter of fact, it’s a quotation from me.’

  ‘I rather thought it was.’ The Headmaster was quick as a bloodhound on the scent, although it was not a difficult deduction to make as the letter was undoubtedly in his English master’s handwriting. ‘You see, I’ve got your letter!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ronnie. ‘And I rather wonder who gave it to you.’

  ‘A… A well-wisher.’

  ‘A well-wisher of yours, or mine?’

  ‘I think, perhaps, a well-wisher of Francesca’s. And what exactly does that passage mean?’

  ‘It means we went to the Royal Festival Hall, where we heard a Vivaldi concert conducted by Neville Marriner, and afterwards we went to “Luigi’s” in Covent Garden where we had cannelloni and a bottle of Orvieto.’

  ‘Anything else?’ By this time, apparently, the Headmaster was playing the sneering role of the minor inquisitor from St Joan.

  ‘Anything else? Oh yes.’ Ronnie kept his head admirably. ‘Fran-cesca had a large cassata ice and I had a cup of black coffee and a Strega.’