Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  This has every misuse of language to which politicians are prone, including avoiding the words ‘identity card’, which sounds like the engine of a fascist dictatorship, and calling the same thing an ‘entitlement card’, which sounds as though you've won something. This is the hope behind changing the word ‘refugees’, which makes us feel sorry for fugitives from some tyranny, to ‘asylum seekers’, which seems to describe awkward people who are always trying to get something for nothing. We can no longer use the word ‘unemployed’ because unemployment has, of course, been abolished, so we have to talk about ‘job seekers’. To call the unfriendly act of shooting your own side ‘friendly fire’ or the death of innocent civilians ‘collateral damage’ is equally cowardly and inane.

  It is, of course, totally unfair but nevertheless instructive to compare Beverely Hughes to Queen Elizabeth I. You might say that they are both politicians, but Elizabeth lived at a time when you didn't seem to be able to open your mouth without speaking beautifully, whereas Beverley is of a generation that has seen our language reach the point of collapse. I don't know how long it took Elizabeth to work out what she was going to say to the fleet at Tilbury. Perhaps she did it off the cuff. I'm quite sure she didn't read her speech off a piece of paper with her head down. ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman,’ she said, ‘but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too; and I think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.’

  It isn't only the highly educated monarch in the distant past who can still teach us how our language can be clearly and beautifully used. The ‘Notable British Trials’ series is full of memorable phrases used by those convicted of serious crimes. Armstrong, a Welsh solicitor, handing a poisoned scone to an intended victim, politely said, ‘Excuse fingers’. Edith Thompson, an incurable romantic, a sort of Madame Bovary of Wanstead Park, was in love with a young seaman called Frederick Bywaters, whom, so it was said, she induced to stab her husband to death. One of her love letters to Bywaters is, I think, a fine example of the plain, simple but moving use of our language:

  It was rather fun on Thursday at the Garden Party. They had swings and roundabouts and flipflaps, coconut shies, Aunt Sallies, Hoopla and all that sort of thing. I went in for them all and shocked a lot of people, I think. I didn't care though. I'd got a rather posh frock on, a white georgette with rows and rows of jade ribbon and white fur and large white hat, but all that didn't deter me from going into a fried fish shop in Snaresbrook and buying fish and chips. Getting it home was the worst part – it absolutely smelt the bus out. I didn't mind – it was rather fun – only I wished you had been with me. I think two halves would have enjoyed themselves, better than one half by herself.

  Goodbye, for now, darlingest pal.

  Edith Thompson and her lover were both hanged in 1923. The Court of Appeal said it was ‘rather an ordinary sort of case’. Perhaps she died because she was too much in love, and expressed it too well.

  29. Avoiding Utopia

  A map of the world which doesn't contain Utopia, Oscar Wilde said, is not worth looking at. While I think it's admirable to have Utopia on your map and that you can keep it in mind, even set off in what you imagine to be its direction, there must be no serious danger of your ever reaching it. Utopia, should it exist, might be like the common view of heaven, with absolutely nothing to complain about. Boredom in Utopia might soon set in because there would be no more to try for.

  All the same, many people have described Utopia, from Thomas More to William Morris. In Samuel Butler's Erewhon (an anagram of nowhere), criminals are sent to hospital and the sick to prisons, an idea which has a superficial attraction but one which might not be entirely practical. In the real world attempts to produce Utopian societies have had, on the whole, disastrous results.

  Russia during the Stalin era was no doubt more like hell than heaven, a place of terror rather than a just city. But Russia in the time of glasnost, the early Gorbachov years and the end of the Afghan war seemed to many people a refuge from the shallow and monetarist West. It was a country with a blessed absence of advertisements, where everyone on the Underground had their heads stuck in War and Peace or the translations of Dickens and J. B. Priestley, where the workers went to the ballet, where Chekhov and Gogol were seen as gods and the population spent its leisure hours cultivating the deep resources of the Russian soul.

  I first met Gorbachov's Russia when I went to Moscow with our National Theatre. It was a tour of Shakespeare's three great last plays of reconciliation and forgiveness. There were minor inconveniences of course. I was shown into a hotel bedroom only to find two men in crumpled blue suits lying on the bed, watching television and eating pickled cucumbers out of a plastic bag. They were extremely reluctant to move, and I had to unpack and even start to undress before they finally left. One of the actors was less lucky. He came back late from the theatre to find a man asleep in his bed. When he complained to the stern-faced woman at the end of the corridor, she only gave an uncaring laugh and put up a small camp bed beside his unknown companion. Breakfast might take a couple of hours to come, but Muscovite friends would invite you to their houses and set out every piece of ham and cheese, every drop of vodka they still had in their cupboard, for your entertainment. Caviare and champanski were cheap at the National Hotel if you could pay by Barclaycard.

  Emily was learning Russian at school and she became fluent in the language on her first visit, when she fell in love with a Russian poet. It was he who led her across Red Square in the moonlight, with the red lights twinkling over the Kremlin, and told her it was an extraordinary honour to be walking across Red Square hand in hand ‘with a girl whose father defended the Sex Pistols…’ I found it to be a general rule that the children of reasonably well-off, middle-class homes fell in love with the soulfulness of Russia. Those with more working-class backgrounds found that it stood for everything they were determined to get away from and hated it. Peter Hall, the theatre's multi-talented director, left suddenly by train for England after the oppressive Moscow reminded him too painfully of his childhood before he got into Cambridge and became a star.

  But even then, in Moscow, where the ideal Utopian city was still only a distant shape on the map, I remember talking to the chain-smoking director of the Moscow Art Theatre, who was lamenting the lack of any new writers to replace not only Chekhov and Turgenev but the lesser-known authors who managed, in subtle ways, to ridicule the Party tyranny. ‘They used to shake the bars of the cage,’ he said, ‘and that gave them their strength. Now the cage no longer has bars, they can walk about freely and they don't know where to go.’ This was an unusual argument for censorship, and another warning against the discovery of Utopia.

  So we moved on to Tbilisi, which is less like Utopia and more like Naples, and the Georgians, who gave birth to Stalin, think less about their souls than drinking endless toasts and persuading girls to make love at first sight. One of the actresses, wandering through the town, was accosted by a man who said, ‘You have very nice breasts and I know a quiet square where we can make love immediately.’

  The lorries containing the scenery and costumes broke down on the road from Moscow so that the three last plays had to be performed by actors in jeans and T-shirts, using rulers for swords. This made them look even more wonderful, but we wondered why we ever thought there was, during the Cold War, any serious danger of Russia conquering the world when they couldn't deliver the scenery for The Tempest.

  I next visited the country some thought of as Utopia when Emily was spending a year in Moscow as part of her course at university. The soul was not, by then, the only concern of the Russians, nor did its study provide their main occupation. A big and beautiful art deco hotel near Red Square had been restored to become one of the most expensive in Europe. Having booked a table there with some difficulty, I had to feign a sudden heart attack when I saw the prices on the menu and take refuge back in the old National H
otel.

  Life, however, had become easier. Great jars of caviare, duck, pork chops and Georgian wine were available for a few dollars in the market. We didn't have to take taxis (the statue of Lenin with his hand raised is said to have caught him in a vain attempt to stop a Moscow taxi). Emily walked into the middle of the road to stop any passing car which would postpone its original journey and take us to wherever we wanted to go for a few more dollars. I have seen, to my horror, Muscovites divert ambulances and even fire engines in this way.

  Emily's first love, her Russian poet, still seemed to stand for the old soulful days although their romance was over. He took us to the Writers' Union, beautifully housed in the building Tolstoy used as the Rostov mansion in War and Peace. When we'd first gone there it had, in fact, contained many writers. Now there were as many businessmen talking on their mobile phones. Our poet fetched bottles of variously flavoured vodka from the cellar, read us his published poem for Emily and lamented the break-up of the Soviet Union. We got seriously drunk, remembering lost times.

  But there were still great moments. Emily took a course at the Moscow Art Theatre, and I watched her teacher recite Pushkin with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. We stocked up with food from the market and had a party in Emily's flat. The place was filled with actors, some sang and one mimed the dilemma of a hunter who, with a fat bird in the sights of his gun, had an irresistible urge to visit the lavatory. There was something of soul left.

  More recently Emily went back to Russia, wanting to find Stanislavsky's house and undertake further research for a book about Olga Knipper, Chekhov's wife. Her poet met her at the airport and suggested they retire to the lavatory to smoke dope and then have lunch at the Pizza Hut. Moscow, where the streets and subways were once the safest in the world, is now a city of rapes and muggings, and automatic rifles can be bargained for and bought in the kiosks which once sold sweets and magazines or, occasionally, a single shoe.

  Emily went to find Stanislavsky's house, where Chekhov, writing in the garden, heard the distant sound of a little train that was reproduced in The Cherry Orchard. All she found was an empty field with a small notice telling visitors that Stanislavsky's house was once there. Travelling further, she found, still standing, the home of Nemirovich-Danchenko, Stanislavsky's and Chekhov's great inspirer at the Moscow Art Theatre. The house was full of workmen who had been sent to repair it but, never having been paid, couldn't get back to Moscow. Utopia was finally off the map, or it had been converted to the everyday world of crime, poverty and the doubtful values of the marketplace.

  Communism and Christianity, it's been said, are the two great Utopian ideals, and we don't really know if they'd work because they've never been tried. Much the same thing can be said about democracy, which Western states, believing they have come nearer to Utopia than the darker tyrannies of the Third World, claim as their great glory and the solution to all political problems.

  I suppose democracy was most nearly achieved in ancient Greece, when everyone except women and slaves took part in the government. The result was usually disastrous and led to the death of Socrates, just as the introduction of democracy in England would lead to the restoration of hanging, which the majority of the population favour. Far from having government by the people and for the people, in England we hand over what amounts to absolute power to the leader of the party with the majority of seats in Parliament. Far from the people having a say in government, the present Prime Minister has involved us in a war that most people didn't want when it started. France and Germany, whose governments obeyed their people's wish to have no part in the war, are abused as traitors to the cause of peace and democratic rule.

  You should be wary of Members of Parliament who claim special wisdom and the right to power because they are ‘democratically elected’. At periodic elections we vote for the party we have always supported and the leader who most appeals to us. Nowadays, when the hustings have fallen silent and barracking has gone out of style, few people can remember, or perhaps have ever heard, the name of their local MP unless he's a member of the government or appears on television. It's noticeable that the House of Lords, where, at the moment, no one is elected by the public, has on the whole more interesting and better-informed debates and is far more active in protecting civil rights against the brutal assaults perpetrated by Labour home secretaries who represent the party that won the election. Perhaps the House of Lords, as it is at present constituted, is attractive because, as Lord Melbourne said of the Order of the Garter, ‘There's no damned merit about it.’

  Our system, which we call democracy, at least leaves us the right from time to time to get rid of those who wish to govern us. And, if it's nowhere near Utopia, it is probably the best of all imperfect systems. All I can do is to advise you to be very cautious of those who claim to represent you and order you about for your own good.

  Oscar Wilde, who knew Bernard Shaw and went to meetings of the Fabian Society, had socialism on his Utopian map. The great advantage of such a system, he thought, was that you would no longer have to endure the pain of feeling pity for the poor and the oppressed and could happily devote yourself to life and art with a clear conscience. It's an attractive argument and might be more persuasive if socialist governments had been more successful in putting an end to poverty and oppression.

  It was in his life, in spite of all its imperfections and misfortunes, rather than in his political beliefs, that Wilde showed the true sweetness of his nature. His friend Oswald Sickert had died and his widow had shut herself away in her room, inconsolable, and refused to see anyone. Wilde called at the house but Nellie Sickert, her daughter, told him her mother wouldn't see him. When the mother repeatedly called out, ‘Send him away,’ from behind a locked door, Wilde said he'd stay in the house until she opened it to him. Finally she did and he was admitted to her room. Nellie Sickert waited downstairs for the inevitable inconsolable tears.

  There was a long silence and then, incredibly, she heard a strange and unexpected sound. It was her mother laughing. Wilde had charmed her, cheered her, amused her and brought her back to life. Perhaps in that moment he got nearer to Utopia than all the political systems ever thought of or looked for on maps.

  30. Fires Were Started

  One of my heroes has always been Prometheus, chained to a rock, his liver pecked out by the birds every day and restored for further torture each night – and all for conferring one of the greatest benefits on mankind. He gave back fire to us after the king of the gods, an unreliable character with dubious morals, had withdrawn it. Prometheus tricked the Olympians into eating merely the bones and fat of the beasts sacrificed to them. He also described that yawning gap which still exists between us and our gods.

  Thanks to Prometheus, fire played a great part in my childhood. We had a daily ceremony, during school holidays, of burning the rubbish to the accompaniment of ‘You're the cream in my coffee’ played on a wind-up gramophone. We would light fires in one of the two copses in the garden and cook sausages, or bake potatoes in the dying embers, pulling them out with sticks, blowing off the grey ash and eating them with butter.

  One of the few advantages of my public-school education was the fireplace in our rooms. You could not only make toast but start a self-taught cooking course with, say, an occasional mushroom omelette. In those extraordinary days the butler, whose name was George, would appear in your room and, Zeus-like, rake out the fire with a poker, say, ‘Good night, sir,’ and shut us down for the night. It was my difficult room-mate Tainton who heated the poker handle until it was just red hot and left it out in the hope that George would seize it and burn off several fingers. George knew exactly what was going on. He used Tainton's best Sunday trousers as a readily available poker holder and burned a large hole in the seat.

  Forget Proust's little cake, for me there is no smell more reminiscent of childhood than leaves burning in the autumn, and the place of the fire in the garden, behind the frames and the small greenhouse, has alwa
ys been a source of great pleasure. Christmas and birthdays are especially welcome because of the vast amounts of wrapping paper to be burned. At other times you have to make do with the ‘Business’, ‘Money’ and ‘Sports’ sections of the heavyweight newspapers. Add to these the usual household rubbish, the mass of uninvited faxes and half of each morning's post and you can get a blaze which sends sparks into the trees and lights up the cabbages.

  Of course I have had accidents. For some reason I put a pair of tailor-made trousers, my braces and a short-wave radio into a cardboard box in order to carry them downstairs. At the end of my session with the bonfire, I heard a faint murmuring, a voice, possibly speaking in a foreign language, uttering a vague complaint among the ashes. It was what remained of the short-wave radio. Further investigation revealed the metal parts of the braces. It was a misfortune, but slight and bearable when you compare it to what happened to Prometheus.

  Am I, then, a closet pyromaniac? Possibly. There was one unpleasant judge down at the Old Bailey who, when sentencing arsonists, always alleged that setting fire to things caused such offenders to experience an orgasm. I can honestly say that lighting a fire has never had this result so far as I'm concerned. To me a satisfactory fireplace is a sign of peace, happiness and good will, as it was for Dickens when the fires lit up and warmed the Christmases at Dingly Dell. Scrooge's miserliness was proved by the fact that he allowed only one coal on his clerk's fire, and kept the coal box locked in his own room. A roaring fire is the Dickensian sign of generosity.