PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Paradise Postponed
‘One of Britain’s best-loved writers … [A] special blend of wit, humanity and nostalgic English melancholy’ Charles Spencer, The Times
‘A writer with a Dickensian gift for character and rich, robust humour’ Daily Mail
‘There are an enormous number of people whose lives he made happier and better by his writing’ Melvyn Bragg, Guardian
‘A great storyteller’ Robert McCrum, Observer
‘Only Shakespeare or Dickens could have done him justice in print; only they could have unsentimentally invoked his strain of English kindness and ebullient good nature’ Sebastian Faulks
‘One of Britain’s greatest life-enhancers … a superb example to us all’ Daily Telegraph
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1923, John Mortimer was a barrister, dramatist and novelist. After working in the Crown Film Unit during the Second World War, he wrote a number of novels before simultaneously following two highly successful careers as a criminal barrister and as a playwright. His most famous play, A Voyage Round My Father, has been filmed and is frequently revived. In the 1970s he invented Horace Rumpole, a character who, ‘like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal’ (P. D. James). In the 1980s he returned to novel-writing with Paradise Postponed. He also wrote four volumes of memoir, including the bestselling Clinging to the Wreckage. John Mortimer was knighted in 1998 for his services to the arts. For many years he lived in a house in the Chilterns which had been built by his father, also a barrister. Sir John died in 2009, aged eighty-five.
Jeremy Paxman is a journalist and author who was a good friend of John Mortimer.
JOHN MORTIMER
Paradise Postponed
with an Introduction by Jeremy Paxman
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First published by Viking 1985
This edition first published in Penguin Books 2010
Published in Penguin Classics 2010
Copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 1985
Introduction copyright © Jeremy Paxman, 2010
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978–0–14–195984–9
Contents
Introduction
Author’s Note
Part One
1 Death of a Saint
2 Children at the Rectory
3 Knuckleberries and After
4 A Game of Murder
5 The Will
Part Two
6 The Deserter
7 The Informer
8 The Pastoral Visit
9 A Formal Occasion
10 The Temptation of Henry Simcox
11 Borrowers and Lenders
Part Three
12 Chez Titmuss
13 Putting Up a Tent
14 The Coast
15 Living in the Past
16 Getting Out the Voters
17 The Wrongs of Man
18 The Partnership
Part Four
19 Leslie’s Long Weekend
20 The Lost Leader
21 The Candidate
22 That Christmas
23 And a Happy New Year to You, Too
24 The Myth of Happiness
25 The Party
26 Collecting the Evidence
Part Five
27 The Best for Nicky
28 Just Like Old Times
29 Worsfield Heath
30 Visiting
31 Neverest
32 Faith Unfaithful
33 The Simcox Inheritance
Acknowledgements
Introduction
You are about to take a warm bath. The bath itself is an odd shade of green – they call it ‘avocado’ in the DIY showrooms which are part of the transformation of high streets across the land. Later, you may, perhaps, have dinner. It will probably start with a wine glass filled with ‘prawn cocktail’; this contains a few small crustaceans, a great deal of shredded lettuce and is swimming in a pink sauce. The main course is likely to be steak, and it will certainly be overcooked. You may choose a bottle of Chianti to drink; it comes in a straw cradle. After that, a chocolate pudding – Black Forest gateau, perhaps. The meal ends with bad, bitter coffee, which has been stewing on a side table for a couple of hours. But the bath is the thing. To read Paradise Postponed again is to luxuriate in a world which is simultaneously familiar, yet curiously different, like a tune you know even though it’s played slightly off-key.
John Mortimer wrote this book in the house on the top of the Chilterns in which he had been born, and in which, in early 2009, he died. The beech trees, flinty fields and local market-town of the novel are all immediately recognizable, as indeed is the local poacher, Tom Nowt (the grandson of the model for this character still makes famed squirrel and pheasant sausages). But he is an exception. The Chiltern hills lie only forty miles or so north-west of London, and remained the last unsuburbanized part of the immediate Home Counties until after the Second World War. By then, members of the middle classes with portable professions – Mortimer’s own father among them – had discovered their beauty and begun the migration which transformed the area. Once upon a time the vast beech woods had nourished the furniture industry in nearby High Wycombe and were alive with bodgers who lived among the trees making chair legs and stretchers. Now the bodgers’ bothies are alive with the hum of word processors from would-be Booker Prize nominees. The most recent influx has been a small wave of furniture warehouse magnates anxious to pass themselves off as country squires. The piles they have built themselves resemble nothing so much as Asda out-of-town shopping centres.
Changes to the countryside itself, though, have been minimal: no one is more committed to keeping a place as it is than those who have recently discovered it. What interested John Mortimer were the huge changes in behaviour which overtook Britain between about 1960 and 1985 – the year of publication of Paradise Postponed. There have, of course, been other periods in British history in which there have been bigger social upheavals. But there can have been few – or none – when attitudes shifted as far and as fast. Before it began, people talked of an ‘Establishment’ which ran the country – a loose association of people (almost all of them men, of course) who might be found everywhere from the Houses of Parliament to corporate boardrooms and bishops’ palaces. There was a hi
gh proportion of Etonians among them, and the ballast of the Conservative back benches in the Commons comprised chaps ‘on their way from the Brigade of Guards to the House of Lords’.
The 1980s swept all that away. After the election following the publication of Paradise Postponed there were only eleven Conservative MPs left who had served in the Guards. As the Labour politician Denis Healey acidly put it, the party passed ‘from the estate owners to the estate agents’. England’s libel laws prevent too explicit a statement of who, precisely, was the model for Leslie Titmuss, the odious Conservative cabinet minister who stands for the new generation of Tories. Sufficient to say that he was a prominent figure in the ‘Thatcher revolution’, which saw such swathes of Britain utterly changed, with uneconomic businesses shut down and the inhabitants of great tracts of the industrial heartlands left to a life of benefits and videos. The Blair government which finally ended the Conservative years eased their pain by legalizing all-day boozing, loosening the gambling laws and making it easier to open strip clubs.
The clever thing about Titmuss as a character is that he isn’t purely repellent: he’s just a man who sees the way that Britain has changed, and realizes that, with a little drive, the world – or this particular corner of it, at least – is his oyster. He belongs to a generation created by the 1944 Education Act, the great reform of state schooling brought about by the Conservative politician R. A. Butler (‘Rab’). For the first time, children from poor families could now get free secondary schooling and emerge more than able to challenge the products of Eton and her sisters. The reform transformed British intellectual life, and enabled humbly born characters such as Titmuss to believe there was nothing they could not do.
Titmuss’s path to wealth as a property developer is typical of the age, too. The civic vandalism of the sixties laid the foundations of many a country estate and peerage. (John Mortimer’s prophecy of the fate which would befall the local brewery did not occur until long after the novel was completed. It was turned into an expensive hotel, and the boring business of making a ‘local’ beer contracted out to a factory miles away.)
The mystery at the heart of the novel – why the local vicar and scion of the brewing dynasty should have left most of his worldly goods to this meritocrat on the make – affords more than enough space for asides about the other ways in which Britain’s victory in the Second World War so terribly damaged the country. In Simeon Simcox’s valour for the oppressed, just as in Leslie Titmuss’s determination to beggar his neighbour, we see how the templates on which British society had previously been built proved inadequate to the task.
But I begin to make Paradise Postponed sound like tract. It is not, any more than it is a roman-à-clef. If I had to use one expression to describe the tone of the book, I would choose ‘good-natured’. John Mortimer professed to loathe the Thatcher government (as he was later to express disdain for her great admirer, Tony Blair), but there is no fury in Paradise Postponed. The author’s affection for England constantly undermines his anger at the fatuous ambitions of her rulers. The developers and their money-men eat away at the fabric of the country he loves, but they cannot quite wreck it and he cannot quite get angry enough with them to let it drive out his amusement.
Jeremy Paxman
For Penny, Emily and Rosamond
Author’s Note
It was about three years ago that I was having lunch with Bryan Cowgill at Thames Television and he suggested that I might write a story covering the period in England since the war. I was, at first, daunted by the prospect but later I thought I saw a way of approaching such a theme. I embarked on the strange operation of writing two versions of Paradise Postponed; one was a novel and the other a series of one hour plays to be filmed for television.
I would like to take this opportunity of thanking Mr Cowgill for his original suggestion, Thames Television for backing what was then a very sketchy idea and Jacqueline Davis, who has been endlessly encouraging in the writing of both works.
January 1986
Part One
In the houses
The little pianos are closed, and a clock strikes.
And all sway forward on the dangerous flood
Of history, that never sleeps or dies,
And, held one moment, burns the hand.
from Look Stranger, XXX
W. H. Auden
I
Death of a Saint
‘I had a disagreeable dream,’ the old man said.
‘What?’
‘I thought we’d grown out of all that in first-year theology.’ He looked bewildered. ‘God on a cloud, a sort of pink electric light bulb behind his head. He was actually busying himself’ – he clearly found the conduct he had to describe unsympathetic – ‘judging people! Parting the sheep from the goats. That sort of thing.’
‘Don’t worry.’
‘He was surrounded with cherubim. Your mother would find them dreadfully vulgar. She wouldn’t give them shelf room in porcelain.’
‘It’s not true,’ the younger man said.
‘I suppose not. I shan’t have to wait very long to find out.’
The old man was wearing striped flannel pyjamas and lying on a bed on which sunlight was falling. He was tall and thin, looks which gave him, in the course of his lifetime, the appearance of a rather bothered eagle. Now, white-haired and thinner than ever at the age of eighty, he was almost beautiful. His name was Simeon Simcox, and he was Rector of the village of Rapstone Fanner.
There was nothing ecclesiastical, however, about the Rectory bedroom. There was no crucifix or prayer-book by the bed. Like the rest of the house it was furnished in austere taste, betraying a nervous embarrassment at the idea of ornament or ostentation, with only a few discreet china objects, a William Morris chest and a Paul Nash landscape by way of decoration. There was about the room rather more comfort than might be bought on the stipend of a Church of England clergyman.
On the dressing-table, beside the Rector’s silver-backed hair-brushes, were some framed family photographs: his two boys in long shorts and short haircuts in the Rectory garden; Simeon Simcox and his wife, Dorothy, at the time of their wedding, standing outside Rapstone village church, he in a dog-collar and tweed suit, she in a silk dress that was deliberately unbridal, looking gently amused and vaguely ‘artistic’. There was also a yellowing Victorian group showing members of his family and a selection of loyal workers standing outside the Brewery in the local town, over the gate of which, an entrance for dray horses and loads of barrels, the gilded sign read ‘Simcox Ales’.
The other occupant of the room was in his late forties, a doctor who was there as a son. Fred Simcox lived alone in a flat above his surgery, played the drums and listened to old jazz records in much of his spare time. Looking at his father he felt a wave of affection for the old man, who seemed to be approaching death, like most of the other events in his long life, with a puzzled good will under which lay a certain dogged persistence. He thought, almost for the first time, that he could understand what his father was saying and it made him smile. But the joke, if it were a joke, came too late, like something shouted from a train window, after the last awkward and prolonged goodbyes have been said and after, to everyone’s relief, the guard has blown his whistle. All the same, he sat now, by his father’s bed, and showed an interest.
‘The ridiculous thing was…’ Perhaps it wasn’t a joke. Simeon seemed genuinely perturbed. ‘He bore a remarkable resemblance to Dr Salter. Salter’s an unbeliever, of course, and he hasn’t even got a beard. You’d think he’d be nothing whatever like God but the resemblance was quite striking.’
‘You say he was parting the sheep and the goats?’
‘There was some sort of judgement going on.’ Simeon Simcox frowned unhappily.
‘You shouldn’t worry about that.’
‘Shouldn’t I?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Judgement!’ The Rector turned his head to look at his younger son and spoke with
a fading urgency. ‘I should like you to know that it hasn’t been so simple.’ And then his voice came from further away, as though the train were already drawing out of the station. ‘Not half so straightforward as it might have looked.’
The Rapstone Valley is only some two hours’ drive to the west of London but its inhabitants have been spared, no doubt for longer than they deserve, the slow but inexorable march of civilization. At the head of the valley the road divides, one way leading south to Rapstone Fanner, the other north to the villages of Skurfield and Picton Principal. Standing by the signpost and looking down at the landscape spread out below you can see beech woods, thick hedgerows and fields of corn, with an occasional tiled roof over a flint and brick building, a group of barns and the distant tower of Rapstone Church. After a deeper acquaintance with the place you may realize that the flint cottages have been converted to house a pop star or a couple in advertising and the roof of what looks like a farm-building now covers an indoor swimming-pool with sauna attached in which guests flop like woozy porpoises after Sunday lunch. Such matters are discreetly arranged. The first sight of the Rapstone Valley is of something unexpectedly isolated and uninterruptedly rural; a solitary jogger is the only outward sign of urban pollution.
As with the countryside the changes in Rapstone village are behind the walls, which have been carefully preserved to placate the planners. It is true that what was once a shop has been turned, skilfully and expensively, into a weekend cottage with a B.M.W. parked in front of the aubretia-covered garden wall. What was once the school, which still has a bell in a little turret on top of it, has been taken over by two ladies with grey hair and booming voices who illustrate children’s books. In fact the only institutional buildings left unchanged are the church, with its Norman tower, its ornate seventeenth-century tomb and Victorian additions, and the Rectory, approached through an open gateway, past the dark and dusty laurels of a short driveway and entered, under a pointed, neo-Gothic porch, through a front door which is never locked. There were an unusual number of cars parked in front of the Rectory and round the churchyard, and there was a small clutch of reporters and a couple of press photographers on the day of the Rector’s funeral, for Simeon Simcox had, in his lifetime, achieved a fame, some would say a notoriety, which stretched far beyond the boundaries of his parish.
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