Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  I have relied on many witnesses, far more than the usual two, to endorse my will. I have placed particular reliance on Shakespeare, Byron, Montaigne, Oscar Wilde, Yeats, Da Ponte and a number of barristers, judges, assorted criminals and companionable women. None of the advice I've offered needs to be taken, none of the likes and dislikes I've displayed have to be shared. There is only one paragraph I'd underline, one truth I hold to be self-evident.

  The meaningful and rewarding moments aren't waiting for us beyond the grave, or to be found on distant battlefields where history's made. They can happen quite unexpectedly, in a garden perhaps, or walking through a beech wood in the middle of the afternoon. If we are to have a religion, it should be one that recognizes the true importance of a single moment in time, the instant when you are fully and completely alive.

  The rain had fallen steadily out of a grey, gunmetal sky. On 4 January, the day of Emily's wedding, the sun appeared and shone brightly over the cold countryside. We rode to the village church in a karma car, a somewhat ornate vehicle lined with mirrors, smelling of flowers and incense, a small fleet of which had arrived from Notting Hill Gate. Turville Church has long been part of our lives. My mother and father are buried in the churchyard, which fades into the surrounding fields, as is Lucy, a close childhood friend of Emily's who was tragically killed by a car when she was no more than nine years old. The church was filled to bursting and I managed to walk my daughter reasonably quickly up the aisle as Jon Lord played the music he had written for her on the organ. At the end of the service, Sam Brown, daughter of Joe Brown of The Bruvvers, and her friends sang ‘I'm putting all my eggs in one basket’. Emily emerged, married, into the sunlight and, in a shower of confetti, arranged her bouquet on Lucy's grave.

  Then we had a party. A tent enveloped the terrace of the house. There was dinner and dancing to a Mexican punk band, friends of Alessandro's who had travelled from Los Angeles to the Chilterns. A small boy, commercially minded, collected autographs from Emily's film-star friends and sold them round the room, insisting on ‘hard cash’.

  After the fireworks I sat looking at the circular brick platform at the end of the terrace where the Mexican punks were playing and singing. It was where, as an only child, I had done my one-boy shows, having to be both Fred and Ginger or, in my savagely cut version of Hamlet, duelling with myself, quarrelling with myself as my own mother, or drinking my own poisoned chalice. It was where Emily had acted plays with her friends from school and here, sometime in the future, another person whose sex was, as yet, unascertained, might be showing off, performing or inventing a story on the same small, circular, open-air stage.

  So, at that moment, and what a moment, I could look round at my children and grandchildren, whose ages range from fifty-three to twelve. I could still trace my father's voice in their jokes, their laughter and their way with language. Their words will echo out into the future, with their children and their children's children. It's my father's claim to immortality – and mine also.

  It was a day worth passing on in any last will and testament.