Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  I listened carefully to the elderly man who carried out a number of alleged ‘mercy killings’ who told me his evidence would be given by his ‘puppet master’, who would speak through a hole in my client's head. I defended a certain Anthony Sorely Cramm, of whom the judge said, ‘Best name for a bugger I ever heard’, and, being in a merciful mood, said he might go instead of prison to a Salvation Army hostel, at which Mr Cramm called out in desperation from the dock, ‘For God's sake, send me to prison!’ I learned how a talented artist came to invent a non-existent Victorian photographer and forged a large number of photographs of the slum children of Victorian London which completely fooled the National Portrait Gallery. I also heard the story of a rich young man who, when asked what he had done when he stabbed his mother, said, ‘I have either murdered a prostitute or killed a peacock in paradise.’

  But strange, almost unbelievable stories are not available only to lawyers. They are all around you if you are prepared to listen. After a brief acquaintance a friend told me that, when he was a youngish boy, his mother left his father. The father, a correct and presumably sane army officer, told his son that his mother was dead. This is what he believed until he was in his late twenties, and was staying in a house in Scotland. There was a grey-haired woman there who was married to an air vice-marshal. After dinner she took my friend aside and told him she was his mother but it would embarrass her husband if he found this out, so would he please call her ‘auntie’. Another casual friend told me that when he was a small boy his father came to his bedroom and said, ‘I found this chap had been making love to your mother, so I shot him. I hope that's all right.’ He then switched off the light and left the room.

  It's not only friends, however casual, but total strangers who, in the first chance encounter, have told me about their unhappy marriages, their request to God for advice on divorce and even about the size, often a disappointment to them, of their virile members. All that is needed to open the floodgates is a look of rapt attention and an opening request which can be as unsubtle as, ‘Do please tell me the story of your life.’ Ten to one, no one has ever asked them this and they've been longing to tell it.

  All this will be of great assistance to you if you're thinking of going in for the business of writing; at least it will convince you that there is no such thing as an ordinary life. Such encounters may be of even more direct assistance. I found myself sitting at lunch next to a grey-bearded, energetic-looking man who started the conversation by asking me a question. ‘What do you do,’ he said, ‘when your boat meets a force eight gale in the Channel – what do you do with your female crew?’

  I confessed that I had no experience of yachting and asked him what he would do.

  ‘Double my fist, punch her on the chin and stun her.’ He spoke as though it was the most obvious course to take. ‘If she's unconscious she's far less likely to slip overboard.’

  ‘And what do you do when she wakes up?’

  ‘Get her to make a cup of tea.’

  It was time to ask if his sport of yachting wasn't extremely dangerous.

  ‘It's not dangerous at all if you can't swim,’ he told me. ‘If you can swim you try to swim to the shore and invariably drown. If you can't swim, you cling to the wreckage and they'll send out a helicopter for you.’ So he gave me the title of a book called Clinging to the Wreckage. It was at the same lunch table that an elderly man, who had remained silent throughout the meal, suddenly asked me, in a loud voice, if I could get my gamekeeper to eat rooks.

  So there's no better occupation than listening, only interrupting to ask for further and better particulars. An acquaintance came up to me with a friend and asked if I knew ‘Baghdad Price’.

  ‘No, I don't know Mr Price,’ I had to confess, and was lucky enough to ask why he was called ‘Baghdad’. Did he perhaps come from Iraq?

  ‘No. It's just that he's a most terrible shot. And when out shooting once he shot his father by mistake. So they call him Bag Dad.’

  There aren't many Iraqi jokes around at the moment, so this was one worth listening for.

  10. Believing in Something

  We used to have them – once we had them quite seriously – passionately held political beliefs. In England, at least; perhaps in Europe and America, they disappeared long ago. You could, I suppose, say that a cure has been found and, like tuberculosis and scurvy, we no longer suffer so badly from them. Or you might take the view that they have just gone out of fashion, like waistcoats and long johns. For whatever reason, they are certainly not around much any more. It's difficult to know, in these grey days, when the left has become the right, what sort of political beliefs, if any, I could hand on to another generation which has shown, so far, an almost passionate lack of interest in the subject.

  We certainly had political beliefs when I was young, and got them as inevitably as measles and chickenpox and other long-lasting infectious diseases. The world seemed so simple then. The right, in the shape of Nazis, Fascists and those Conservatives who tolerated them, was indisputably evil. The noble left was for liberty, socialism and the rights of man. An added attraction, for those of us who were growing up in public schools, was that the left was, on the whole, in favour of the abolition of these uncomfortable and, we believed, class-ridden institutions.

  But my political beliefs began before I arrived at Harrow. I was at a preparatory school at the time of the war in Spain, which seemed a clear conflict of the goods versus the bads. It was also an age when a great part of the map was coloured pink, and I wrote poems expressing my contempt for the British Empire and the works of Kipling, both of which attitudes I have now lived to regret. I read Orwell and Auden and Hemingway, and I saw myself in Spain, bumping in a bullet-holed car across a dusty orange grove with a gun in one hand and a guitar in the other, prepared to die fighting the Fascists.

  When I got to Harrow I did become, encouraged by a circular from Esmond Romilly, Jessica Mitford's husband, who was anxious to stir up a spirit of rebellion in public schools, a one-boy Communist cell, and I got puzzling and contradictory instructions from party headquarters in King Street when Stalin and Hitler were, for a short time, allies, until Germany invaded Russia. I first saw London burning from Harrow churchyard and, although the prospect of reaching a respected old age seemed dicey, we never doubted, even when France fell, that Fascism would eventually be defeated.

  I spent the war in a government film unit writing scripts and joining the union. So at meetings I got called ‘Comrade’ and ‘Brother’, which was a great improvement on school, when I was ‘Mortimer’ or ‘Boy’ when they wanted me to clean their shoes. We added to our simple belief that the Nazi hordes would be defeated the hope that, when peace returned, there would be a new classless society, with free dentistry, free milk for schoolchildren and jobs for all. In short, we longed for the return of a Labour government. Much to our amazement, our wishes were granted.

  Looking back down the long corridor of the years, I can't remember England ever being so united as it was during the war, or so hopeful as during the Attlee government. It was the world dreamed of by those who took part in army education schemes and who read Penguin New Writing and the New Statesman. It introduced the welfare state and dented, although it couldn't destroy, the class system. It did sensible deals with various unions. Nye Bevan became our favourite politician, a silver-tongued, champagne-drinking reformer who loved the arts and enjoyed parties. Politics had changed, to conform to some of our dearly held beliefs.

  Many of these achievements survived during subsequent Conservative governments. The welfare state continued, the Health Service appeared to work and trade union leaders were invited in for beer and sandwiches, not treated like dangerous revolutionaries who undermined the state. Then came the Sixties, and the flower power children, offered new exotic delights, not unnaturally lost interest in domestic politics and found Harold Wilson and James Callaghan unexciting figures compared with Mick Jagger, Dr Timothy Leary and the Bhagwan.

&
nbsp; Some sort of consistency remained, however, until the advent of Mrs Thatcher, when beliefs, strong and strident, re-entered the world of politics. She believed totally in the ethics of the corner shop, the values of the marketplace, the dribbling down of prosperity from the seriously rich to the less fortunate classes and the unreliability of foreigners.

  In these circumstances, of course, those of us on the leftish side of politics had our beliefs strengthened and our faith increased. No doubt there could be, there undoubtedly had to be, a better way, liberal, humane, concerned with justice, equality and the pursuit of happiness, with perhaps still a little socialism in it. All this would come about with another Labour government.

  And then the politicians of the left, both in England and in America, performed a surprising somersault. They became Conservatives. This, they no doubt thought, was rather a clever thing to do. It meant they could appeal to a basically Conservative electorate and leave right-wing politicians gasping for breath, lost for words and with absolutely nothing to complain about. It also had the effect of leaving the left's longtime supporters disenfranchised, disappointed and understandably confused. No doubt the new leadership thought that such party faithfuls would vote for them anyway, so their old-fashioned principles could be safely ignored.

  Now we have watched a Labour government with a huge majority behave as though the word ‘liberal’ were a term of abuse and ‘human rights’ an easy way out for criminals. It has sought to diminish trial by jury, chip away at the presumption of innocence by introducing evidence of previous convictions and has abolished the principle of double jeopardy. It proposes to imprison suspected terrorists and the mentally sick without trial. It contemplates returning refugees to countries where they may face torture, in contravention of our obligations under the Convention of Human Rights. I was recently talking to Michael Heseltine, once the Tarzan of the right-wing jungle. I asked him if he was still active in any way in politics. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘We've got a Conservative government in power, so why should I worry?’ Politicians do make it very hard to have deeply held political beliefs.

  There are certain principles, however, which have to be clung to in spite of party loyalty or the contortions of politicians. The rights of man, fair trials and justice for the poor and oppressed have to be maintained, regardless of the discouragement and disillusion which go with the fight for all liberal causes. These are attacked, as we have seen, by those who advertise their left-wing credentials. Such concerns may not be the whole of a life and may be an unexpected part of it. In this context, it might be interesting to consider the often-ignored political conscience and concerns of Lord Byron.

  I first got to know Byron because we went to the same school, not at the same moment of history, but his dagger and his Turkish slippers were still in the library and I tried to lie on that grave in Harrow churchyard where he lay to write poetry. An iron grille made the stone hard to lie on, and the suburban view is not as inspiring as it no doubt was in his day.

  In the business of leaving, to my heirs and assigns, poet's imaginings, I couldn't leave out the poet whose great acts of imagination undoubtedly included himself. The wonder and lovable quality of Byron is that, having cast himself as a beautiful but damned romantic poet, limping towards some inevitable doom, he felt an irresistible urge to take the piss out of this carefully invented character.

  Byron's Don Juan is one of the great masterpieces of European literature, but he called his work ‘poeshy’ and said he didn't rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence. Speaking of religion, he said, ‘I deny nothing, but doubt everything.’ Everything, of course, included himself. No one's set of beliefs was further removed from the domino theory. You could, if you chose, call him inconsistent; but when his wife, Annabella, accused herself of inconsistency, Byron regretted he had found her guilty of no such offence and added, ‘Your consistency is the most Formidable Apparition I have ever encountered.’ In his own life, he was careful to avoid the Formidable Apparition, managing to combine his innate conservatism with a true love of liberty and revolutionary fervour, his romanticism with downright common sense and his puritanism with sensuality. Such potent mixtures, and contradictions, produced a more interesting character than his wife's mathematical certainties.

  I once went to speak to the boys at Eton. I was in a long room which used to contain many classes in which the boys were beaten, bullied and bored by the slow, laborious recitation and translation of Virgil and Horace. The walls are decorated with the names of hundreds of dead Etonians, carved by their owners, and all in capital letters. There is, however, one name in cursive or italic script – and that is ‘Shelley’. At Harrow there is an identical room, and there also all the names are in capital letters, with one exception – ‘Byron’. There is no reason to think that they had ever met during their schooldays. In later life Byron found ‘poor Shelley, the least selfish and mildest of men – a man who had made more sacrifices of his fortune and feelings for others than any I have heard of’. A remarkable testimonial, although the puritan in Byron thought it necessary to add, ‘with his speculative opinions I have nothing in common, nor desire to have’. One thing they did have in common, however: they were two boys determined to be different from everyone else.

  There are writers, like Oscar Wilde, whose lives are so colourful, exotic and apparently doomed that the stories they lived overshadowed the stories they invented. Byron is one of these. It's enthralling to read about his finding fame and infamy in England, his shrugging off the exhibitionist Caroline Lamb, who stalked him dressed as a pageboy, speculating about whether or not his love for his half-sister was ever consummated, following him into exile as he rattles across Europe in his coach with his doctor and his silver dinner service, to his loves and adventures in Italy.

  We can picture the damp, dark ground floor of the Palazzo Mocenigo, where Byron stored his carriages and his menagerie of dogs, birds and monkeys, which included the alarming Swiss mastiff Mutz, who once turned tail and ran to avoid the attack of a pig in the Apennines. We can see him among the ‘gloomy gaiety of the gondolas on the silent canals’. Following the accounts of this exotic life, we may easily forget Byron's strong belief in freedom and social justice.

  The jobs of the stocking weavers of Nottingham, in Byron's home county, were threatened by the introduction of new frames, that would increase production and reduce the number of workers needed. In fact the new frames produced shoddier and less marketable stockings. Their introduction was welcomed by the employers and cursed by the workers, who, facing unemployment, responded by breaking the new machinery in a Luddite rage and occasionally rioting. A Tory government introduced a bill which would punish such irresponsible behaviour with the sentence of death.

  On 27 February 1812, before he awoke to find himself famous and when Childe Harold was still in the press, Byron rose in the House of Lords to oppose this measure in a speech that achieved Dickensian heights of irony and anger. The frame breakers, he said, were men convicted ‘on the clearest evidence, of the capital crime of Poverty; men, who had been nefariously guilty of lawfully begetting several children, whom, thanks to the times, they were unable to maintain. Considerable injury has been done to the proprietors of the improved Frames. These machines were to them an advantage, inasmuch as they superseded the necessity of employing a number of workmen, who were left in consequence to starve.’

  Dealing with this horrific imposition of the death penalty, he said, ‘Is there not blood enough upon your penal code, that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and testify against you? How will you carry the Bill into effect? Can you commit a whole country to their own prisons? Will you erect a gibbet in every field… Place the country under martial law? Depopulate and lay waste all around you? And restore Sherwood Forest as… an asylum for outlaws?’

  At the end of his speech, he described the only sort of court likely to hang a frame breaker: ‘there are two things wanting to convict and condemn him; and these are,
in my opinion, – Twelve Butchers for a Jury, and a Jeffries for a Judge!’

  This superb speech has been criticized as an ‘overwrought vision of a nation reduced to political anarchy’. Lord Holland thought it ‘too full of fancy’, although Byron, ‘having put the Lord Chancellor very much out of humour’ (still a worthwhile thing to do), was glowing with success. His critics seem to have regarded the Tory bill as some more or less harmless addition to the criminal law. The outrageous nature of the proposal called for all the rhetorical weapons available in a great poet's armoury.

  A week after this speech Childe Harold was published and on 21 April in the same year he was on his feet again, speaking in favour of Catholic emancipation in Ireland. Catholics were not allowed to become sheriffs who appointed jurors, with the result that an all-Protestant jury acquitted a Protestant when three ‘reliable and respectable witnesses saw him load, take aim, fire at, and kill’ a Catholic. He also pointed out that had the Irish Duke of Wellington been a Catholic, he would never have been allowed to command an army or even rise from the ranks.

  He also spoke in favour of a petition to reform the ludicrous and corrupt electoral system presented by a certain Major Cartwright. Typically, the Whigs, alleged to be the more liberal party, had, in the manner of politicians, failed to support these sensible proposals and Byron was a lonely and brave voice, encouraged only by an elderly earl who was unpopularly in favour of the French Revolution. When Byron told his friend Moore about it he said, ‘in a mock heroic voice’, that he had been delivering a speech that was a ‘most flagrant violation of the Constitution’. When Moore asked him what it was about, he seemed to have forgotten. As his most recent biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, here fairly says, the things he cared most about (poetry, love and liberal causes) he spoke of with ‘a throwaway response’, or even the greatest frivolity.