On the whole, and over the years, there have been few child-sex cases and those I have dealt with have always involved men of low mentality or of “innocence”—this weird innocence I have already mentioned and which is hardly believable until you have come up against it. There was the thirteen-year-old girl who had become her stepfather’s mistress and everybody cried, “Oh, what will happen to her now, poor child?” This was after the case and when we were trying to decide what to do with her. After talking to her I was absolutely determined that she shouldn’t be sent to a girls’ approved school where ninety per cent of the inmates were already hardened little tarts, and who were destined to be tarts for the rest of their lives. This child, for all that had happened, simply wasn’t a tart. In a sense she simply wasn’t touched. There was nothing remotely criminal about her; she was simply an under-privileged little girl and what she wanted to do most was to get on with school and get on with her needlework. So this was one of those times when I kept on deferring the case until we had found exactly the right place for her, which was a rather nice ordinary school run by nuns. I remember how aghast we were at the time of this case but now, looking back, I honestly feel that it left no scar at all on the child. Her sexual experiences fitted into the lowness and crudity of everything else about her, her mother having babies all over the place, the dreadful eating arrangements, the bedrooms like stalls and her stepfather as instinctive, rough and direct as an animal. Really, what had happened to that girl was little worse—in the context of her existence—than having to eat off a dirty plate. One is so anxious when these things come to court that they won’t suddenly present something previously simply “accepted” in the most awful light to the child. “They are saying that what has been happening to me is vile—absolutely terrible. . . .” But it was plain in this instance that while it was going on it wasn’t terrible to the girl at all. It has got to be stopped, of course, but one has to take care that, in the stopping it, the real damage isn’t done.
A thing we used to get so often but which we never get now is the Peeping Toms. Scores of Peeping Toms! This was a real old village thing. You never really hear of it now. It was all part of the old frustrated, cooped-up feeling, I suppose. It usually happened when the culprit had had a few drinks on a Saturday. What a fuss there used to be!
Only once in my experience have we dealt with shop-lifting—and that was when two ladies from Ipswich turned up for the church fête and pinched something off a stall! But the subject fascinates me and I have just returned from a week-end conference examining this very thing. Women usually do it, of course. I remember a very well-to-do woman who stole a leg of mutton and a fruit pie. It turned out that she was separated from her husband for some time, that they were going to meet but he didn’t arrive—so she stole these strange things. A month or two later she stole something else. Then she had a breakdown. Most shoplifters steal what they don’t want. Magistrates like to put it down to the change of life when it concerns respectable middle-aged women and to loneliness when it concerns old men. But it could have something to do with the way the shops thrust their goods at one nowadays.
We have high spirits. A boy dressed up for Saturday night and a few beers inside him shouting, “Fuck off!,” to the local policeman. It honestly does seem to me too unnecessary and boring to bring a case for this kind of thing. Admittedly, the last boy who carried on like this shouted “Fuck off!” three times. It was all very silly. The trouble is, the village boys do like to congregate in their hundreds at a certain place on Saturday nights so the Bench is bound to support the dignity of the police. This is something altogether new in our quiet little set-up. These are the same naughty young men who “Commit a Nuisance”—they always look pretty nonplussed when the case comes up, I can tell you! One pound and their name in the local paper. Furious parents. Big blushes. Or it could be some old rustic twelve-pinter who is past caring.
I think that the relationship between the police and the Bench is very good, although they get a bit fed-up with us because we are so lenient. The police are, on the whole, straightforward and trying to do their best. Now and then you get a bad ’un, a type who must go too far. But when you consider how they are provoked, they are marvellous people. I think that the provocation of the police is too cruel for words. And the village policeman has a wretched time really. His loneliness is rarely understood. He is advised not to make too many friends when he arrives in the village and the loneliness of his wife is a very real and sad thing. She mustn’t chum-up with people. They are both advised to keep themselves to themselves. People change the conversation when they come into a room. The village policeman is a man in a corner and they have to be pretty strong characters to endure such a life. The gamekeepers used to have to live something like this—as men apart. I really don’t know why any young countryman should choose the police force as a profession. It is a tedious, trying, unnaturally isolated job—and poorly paid.
We deal with a good many marriage troubles of one kind or another. All very much the same as those that fill the papers everywhere. A sad normal thing which happens is the financial problem of a youngish husband who leaves his wife to live with another woman and finds that he can’t pay for keeping up two establishments. The deserted wife takes him to court because she can’t manage on the allocation. We then feel frightfully sorry for the wife, who has usually been left several children, so we increase the allocation. But the man may only be earning £10 a week and he has to keep his second “wife” and his children by her out of this as well, so one never really knows what to do. In nearly every case the man is with the woman he loves, and the cold facts simply aren’t the real facts. Great lists of hire-purchase debts going back years and years emerge—from both sets of families. What has happened is this—a commonplace thing. A young couple have made love and “got caught,” as they say, and are pushed into marriage by their parents. But they don’t love each other and nerves get frayed as more babies arrive. Then the husband really does fall in love and he simply runs away from a situation he finds unendurable. It is easy to moralize but what do you do with a farm-worker’s wage, two houses and two families?
I think that in a village it still matters absolutely, appallingly, if you are “respectable.” One ghastly day—I shall never forget it—we all sat waiting for a man to appear who had got himself in some kind of fix—nothing remotely criminal—about the stamps and things in his little sub-3post office. The police had been to make enquiries and he had been called to come to the court. We waited and waited but he didn’t turn up. We asked, “Had the summons been served?” Yes, it had. He’d mistaken the time, perhaps? Well, we allowed him that. At last we sent a police car to fetch him, and there he was, hanging in the back of the shop. Terrible! We looked at the charge—something to do with these few stamps. Nothing really to worry about. We all knew him; he was a nice little man. We couldn’t speak. Very respectable people—good people—will often go all to pieces—crash—at the mere hint of an enquiry.
The young people in Akenfield seem hardly to be touched by things like television. Not yet, anyway. Those who appear in court seem little different to the youngster I dealt with twenty years ago. We used to be put out if a young man turned up with long hair but now that it has become universal we never think about it. But we’re all still put out when they come in chewing gum or with their hands in their pockets. “Take that gum out of your mouth,” I’ll say, but I’d never make a remark about anybody’s clothes or appearance. Most certainly not. On the whole, our Bench is very against making “little god” speeches. I might say to some young man, “Now look here, Jones, we’ve discussed this extremely carefully and we all feel very worried about what you have done, and we are going to put you on probation rather than send you to prison, which you must realize we could do, and you must see that you’ve got to mend your ways or, next time, you will be sent to prison. You’ve got all your life before you. Please, please stop doing-whatever-it-is. And pull your socks up and don’t
do it again.” But the truth is, of course, that in more cases than not the guilty person is in such a state of confusion that he simply cannot take in a single word you are saying. So if you must say something to him, you must say it baldly in hard, ordinary sentences. I also use words like “shut up.” I don’t say, “Bloody well stop it” but I might say, “Cut it out!” Basic words.
Again, when we are dealing with children—in the back room because they’re not allowed to appear in the ordinary court, of course—I talk very very slowly and quietly as I would to any child. Not necessarily severely but clearly. I press everything now and then by a “Do you understand?” But on the whole we get no response at all and I often wonder if there is any point in it. If tears spring to the eyes I know that I have got through, as it were. I don’t want this to happen but in nine cases out of ten it is the only sign that what I am saying is registering. I always make a tremendous point of talking to the parents and there is a place for making a speech here. I make them feel that there is plenty of time. Sometimes it is very rewarding.
An average day at our court isn’t very spectacular. Four licensing extensions, three motor-car slight accidents with written-in pleas of Guilty—£5—£10—£20—£30 each and licence endorsed. Then, the police having had their radar stationed at various points, you will have about ten cars doing between thirty and forty miles an hour. There is an automatic scale of fines for these offences. Then five bicycles with insufficient brakes or something. Then the young man who got drunk on Saturday and shouted you-know-what, or perhaps he hit somebody with a brick. Then you might have a defended case of dangerous driving, which will take time, or a bit of breaking-and-entering. We never have any of these dear young modern protesters—they don’t come our way. We have to pass plans for all the pub alterations. No murders—I have never had a murder case in twenty-five years—and no poachers now. No lead-stealing from the church roof—that was the most popular crime in Suffolk just after the war. But there has been a great increase in stealing valuable things from inside the churches, and the thieves are rarely ever caught.
We also get occasional animal cruelty cases but never cases of child cruelty. The animal cruelty cases are nearly always in connection with dogs which have suffered through the ignorance rather than the viciousness of their owners. I see cruelties which never get anywhere near the courts. Markets—they’re nobody’s business! I have seen some disgusting cruelty to animals in the markets round here. I remember passing a slaughter-house in Ipswich where some pigs were running in the yard and seeing them being caught by having a hook jabbed into them and being dragged off. This is quite a regular thing. Imagine the uproar if somebody was caught doing this to a dog! Then we have American servicemen who buy Alsatians to guard their wives and families who are living in rented cottages—all so unnecessary in Suffolk, where do they think they are?—and who keep these dogs so tied-up and fierce that at the first opportunity they bite the postman, so it has to be shot.
When we need a new magistrate on our Bench we ask for a specific person by name. A special committee chaired by the Lord Lieutenant considers our choice. This committee is made up of magistrates from all the Benches in the area but the actual membership is kept very secret. It meets twice a year, when various names are brought forward and approved. It is getting more and more political, that is the trouble. In the big cities it is almost entirely political, but in Suffolk it is probably less political than anywhere else. We all feel very strongly about these political considerations and pressures and do our utmost to get a true cross-section of the social element in the local villages. We aren’t succeeding but it remains our aim and object. It is still difficult to have a really working-class person because they can’t get off work and also because one really does need to be fairly well educated to do the work. Of course, you get a lot of so-called educated middle-class folk who are frightfully stupid, so one can’t generalize. One of the best magistrates in Suffolk is a railway porter. He is now on the administrative committee of Blundeston Prison.
It is getting harder and harder to get lay magistrates, especially now that they are wanting younger and younger people. Few young men can afford the time and young women have no one they can leave their children with for two or more whole days a month. And although travelling expenses are allowed, there are still a great number of people who simply couldn’t afford to be a J.P. So the trend is towards more stipendiaries. All the same, people still like being magistrates—love it!
All of us worry about sentencing. It is our chief worry. We attend all kinds of courses and conferences to discuss it and how to achieve uniformity or something approaching it. When I first started, the basic rule was to find out a person’s means and fine him accordingly. Was he married? What was his rent? How many children? We even did this with the bicycle-lamp cases! But now, with affluence, the whole picture has changed. When you can afford a car you can afford a uniform fine, this is what it amounts to. But disparity occurs all over Suffolk still, so justice certainly doesn’t appear to have been done. I think that one can say that the problem is almost entirely confined to motoring offences. People remain puzzled by the seeming haphazards of sentencing, one Bench in the west obviously fierce, our Bench notoriously soft . . . And now we’ve all got to get used to a new thing altogether—the suspended sentence.
We sit every fortnight but it is soon going to have to be every week. We used to get everything finished by lunch-time but now it takes all day, and yet we are a little backwater so far as Benches go. We know everybody and it can be a bit embarrassing when a personal friend comes up! Then you can either pretend it’s all a great joke or you can sit back. Any magistrate can push his chair back if he doesn’t want to sit on a case. We’re rather a dull Bench really but people come to watch us and everything we say is lavishly reported in the local press. I must say that these reports are not very good. In fact, not at all good. They often get it all wrong and the cases, to my mind, are still too much part of amusement and entertainment. The Boy-in-the-Suitcase murder has been front-page news on one of our local papers for the best part of a year and even The East Anglian Daily Times, which is a superior provincial newspaper, is full of rather trivial court cases. I do wish they wouldn’t do it to such a needless extent. I suppose it is puritan country and that puritans will want to read where they won’t want to do.
None of us women magistrates wear hats—we’re unique, I think! I won’t wear one. I get confused in a hat. My head gets hot and I get hopeless. The Magistrates Association offers us little words of advice—Never come into court laughing and smiling between yourselves! Wear hats and plain dark, sensible clothes! We are very strict among ourselves about something more important than this—we refuse to be those awful whispering magistrates who go into a huddle before the defendant and the court. We always retire for our considerations. This means that not only do you take greater trouble over your decision but that you look as though you do. This is a very important thing.
After all these years I’m beginning to feel that I shan’t be sorry to give it up, because there are so many things for which there is no answer. There are so many ways in which you know you’re doing the wrong thing—because there is no right thing to do. You know at heart where prison is no answer, yet the man will be sent to prison. The prisons—I visit so many of them—are still way behind everything. And then there is this conflict of reform versus punishment. And I’m really honestly and truly, having been liberal and “psychological” for all my life, coming to the conclusion that punishment is a good thing. That punishment really gets it off the chest of a great many people. They think, “Well, I’ve paid!” If people can accept the fact that they have paid they can either go on being a happy criminal or they can stop being a criminal. So I don’t think that punishment is a bad thing. I used to think it was, but I don’t now. There now, after all my years as a reformer! It is rather a cleansing thing. Certain people are destroyed—killed—by the present method. Justice is not done to thes
e people. A very wrong result comes out. . . .
And then there are the risks you take with human beings. There’s a boy and you think, yes, he’s exactly the right sort to send to a detention centre. Well, he may not be. It may do him good, it may leave him quite untouched, but—and this is more likely—it may do him great harm. You, sitting there on the country Bench, may in a word send this boy whom you have never seen before to complete destruction. This is what weighs on one’s mind. I always come home frightfully worried and wretched if I’ve sent somebody to prison or to a detention centre. I am so moved by the plight of many of the people who come up, but I’m harder than I used to be. The truth of the matter is that most of the people who come up at a court like ours don’t come from “bad backgrounds.” Most of the boys in borstals are from bad backgrounds—town and city backgrounds usually. Only two per cent of the borstal inmates are village boys. This fact tells one something.
Persis Ede · aged forty-eight · odd-job man
Persis has been committed. The whole village is talking about it and, as usual when he has been in front of the magistrates—“Morning, m’lady, Major, Mr. Philips . . .”—Persis is out in the bright day of his council-house garden demonstrating to the world that he has not got a forked tail or hooves. This time it is serious: he has been sleeping with his “niece,” who is no relation but the daughter of his mate, dirty old Malyon up at the Tye. The “niece” is fourteen and the magistrates were informed that Persis has been “assaulting” her for just over two years. For the village it is a case of rapid translation from the inverted commas. There is one aspect of the affair which is plain enough. It was Mrs. Persis Ede who reported it to the police. “Linda is a grut grown-up girl now and she’d get into a muddle. It’s got to stop.”
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