CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

by John Mortimer

  Penelope’s father was a Rector in the Cotswolds. It was in his grey-stone Rectory that I watched her dish out the huge lunches, the great roasts and mounds of vegetables, which her children consumed with wide-eyed determination. My future father-in-law was small and stout. He grew depressed after services, when he was troubled by the thought that he could no longer bring himself to believe any one of the Thirty-nine Articles. In time he gave up preaching sermons and took to showing short religious films in his church instead. I remember him stumping off wearing Wellington boots under his surplice to insulate himself against any electric shock provided by the projector. He ruined his health by smoking and eating too many heavy puddings, but I was always fond of the Rector and got on well with him. He told me that I should be hopelessly lost in my future marriage to Penelope unless I could ‘keep a firm hand on her tiller’. Each of our fathers seemed to have hit on the same expedient, to play up the hopeless deficiencies in their own children’s characters.

  In a very short time my father grew fond of his family of ready-made grandchildren, and they had an easy access to him which I had never claimed at their ages. They climbed over him, felt in the waistcoat pocket where he kept mints and wine-gums for them, and blew on his gold watch causing it to fly miraculously open. They took at once to the garden I had seen built and then slowly discovered, and they cantered up to their knees in daffodils or rolled down into the copses. They showed no patience with the hunt for earwigs. My father’s entry for 28 January 1948 ran: ‘Today is mild and sunny. Smith has finished planting the rhododendrons and camellias against the hedge. John was called to the bar on Jan. 26th.’

  There was no possibility of my marrying Penelope until she could get divorced, for which we had to supply evidence. We went, at ruinous expense, to several Brighton hotels but, on being questioned later, the staff quite failed to remember us. We went to even more expensive hotels and did our best, by burning holes in the sheets or screaming during the night, to make our visits memorable. We had no success, our appearance and personalities were clearly such that we created no impression. Finally we suggested a private detective. One afternoon we looked from the windows of the cottage we had then rented and saw a respectable-looking person in a bowler hat walking slowly up the front garden. He introduced himself as Mr Gilpin and we showed him up to our bedroom where he was delighted to find male and female clothing scattered.

  In my first days at the bar I often saw Mr Gilpin in the Divorce Courts. He greeted me respectfully, but made no reference to his afternoon visit. Many years later he was engaged in an entirely justified action against the police, who had wrongfully and frivolously arrested him when he didn’t get out of the way of a Panda car on a zebra crossing. Mr Gilpin needed a character witness for the purpose of these proceedings, and I was glad to be able to say that I had known the ‘Private Eye’ for many years and always had found him a person of the greatest respectability whose evidence had been, when I had occasion to test it, totally reliable.

  Thanks to Mr Gilpin the divorce at last went through. ‘August 27th, 1949,’ my father dictated for the record. ‘John and Penelope’s wedding for which we cut all available flowers which Penelope arranged with great effect.’ I had fled from the loneliness of my childhood into a large and welcoming family, but I was back where I began, in a flat in the Temple, playing with the children in Temple Gardens, and being looked after by my father’s clerk.

  Chapter Twelve

  The similarities between the bar and the stage have been frequently noticed, and if there has never been a more authoritative-looking judge than the actor, Felix Aylmer, there has never been a greater performer on his day and in the right part than the criminal defender, Sir Edward Marshall Hall. My father remembered Marshall Hall and it was not his classic profile that he described to me, nor his flamboyant oratory (‘Look at her!’ Sir Edward once said to a Jury, pointing to his trembling client in the dock, a young prostitute accused of murder. ‘God never gave her a chance. Will you?’). It was Marshall Hall’s dramatic entry into a courtroom that impressed my father. His head clerk would come in carrying the brief and a pile of white linen handkerchiefs, then came a second clerk with the water carafe and an air-cushion (lawyers and pilots, as a result of sitting for long hours, are martyrs to piles). Sir Edward himself would then burst through the swing-doors to be installed in his place by a flurry of solicitors and learned juniors. He would subside on to the inflated rubber circle and listen to the case for the prosecution. If the evidence against Marshall Hall’s client looked black he would, so my father assured me, slowly unfold the top handkerchief and blow, a clarion call to battle. When the situation became desperate he would remove the air-cushion and reinflate it, a process which always commanded the Jury’s undivided attention.

  There is no art more transient than that of the advocate, and no life more curious. During his working days the advocate must drain away his own personality and become the attractive receptacle for the spirits of the various murderers, discontented wives or greedy litigants for whom he appears. His is the fine-drawn profile, the greying side-pieces, the richly educated voice and knife-edged pin-striped trousers which everyone accused of crime allegedly wishes to possess. The advocate must acquire the art of being passionate with detachment and persuasive without belief. He must be most convincing when he is unconvinced. The advocate has this much in common with the religious mystic, he can only operate successfully when he is able to suspend his disbelief. Indeed belief, for the advocate, is something which is best kept in a permanent state of suspension. There is no lawyer so ineffectual as one who is passionately convinced of his client’s innocence.

  So, in growing into a way of life as a barrister who wrote, or, as I wanted to think of it, as a writer who did barristering, I was stretched between two opposite extremes. The writer cannot help exposing himself, however indecently. Every performance he gives, although cloaked in fiction, reveals his secret identity. And yet in the biography of Sir Edward Marshall Hall the great advocate’s ‘self’ seems to have vanished. The props are there, the collection of revolvers and precious gems and the taste for rare claret; but the voices are those of the prisoners in the dock, such people as Robert Wood, the artist accused of the Camden Town Murder, and Madame Fahmy, who shot her husband in the Savoy Hotel. They borrowed his personality to escape death and left him, as perhaps he always was, hollow. His life is merely their lives and nothing is left of Sir Edward but a list of ‘Notable Trials’ and a few anecdotes about his outrageous way with an air-cushion.

  I suppose most barristers, even those condemned to a life in the Chancery Division, were once infected with a slight case of the ‘Marshall Halls’, just as the actor who has settled into an unambitious round of voice-overs for breakfast cereals once yearned to play Hamlet. I have never been able to go into a court-room without that twinge of excitement and dread which actors feel as they wait for their entrances and, although I have never owned an air-cushion, I was once accused of cracking Polo Mints loudly between my teeth to the distraction of the Jury. All advocates have their acting mannerisms. When I started off my career in defended divorce cases I greatly admired the smooth and elegant advocacy of Lord Salmon, who seemed to me to win his cases with all the noise and bluster of a perfectly tuned Rolls-Royce coasting downhill. Cyril Salmon would take out his more valuable possessions, his gold watch and chain, his heavy gold key-ring and cigarette-lighter and place them on the bench in front of him. Then he would plunge his hands deep into his trouser pockets and stroll negligently up and down the front bench lobbing faultlessly accurate questions over his shoulder at the witness-box. Here, I thought, was a style to imitate. For my early cross-examinations I would take off my battered Timex watch, lug out my bundle of keys held together with a piece of frayed string and pace up and down, firing off what I hoped were appropriate questions backwards. I continued with this technique until an unsympathetic Judge said, ‘Do try and keep still, Mr Mortimer. It’s like watching ping-pong.�
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  Despite this early discouragement, my methods of advocacy remain distressingly flamboyant. Years later, when I had taken up a life of crime, I was representing a highly talented lady singer accused of passing dubious cigarettes through the Customs at London Airport. The case took place, as do most airport offences, in the Uxbridge Magistrates Court, not a notoriously soft-hearted or easily swayed tribunal. The lady, who had arrived at Court in a purple Rolls-Royce, stood in the dock wearing a simple black frock, a model of contrition. I stood addressing the Bench and listened to myself with considerable surprise, not to say distaste. ‘Give her justice!’ I heard myself say. ‘Justice is what she has been waiting for and praying for during these long months of suspense. Yes, give her justice. But let it be justice tempered with that mercy which is the hallmark of the Uxbridge and Hillingdon District Magistrates Court!’

  The tone was unmistakable. The ghost of Sir Edward rode again. How long would it be before I too vanished into oblivion, becoming nothing but a string of improbable anecdotes?

  Not, of course, that the High Court of Justice, Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division (Divorce) gave great scope for forensic fireworks of the Marshall Hall variety, at least not during my early days of practice. Our staple diet, our legal bread and butter, was the uncontested divorce case known simply as the ‘undefended’. The ‘undefended’ was the way in which consenting married couples, anxious to be free of each other’s company as expeditiously as possible, obtained their ‘Decree Nisi’ or order for release. Such people, it might be thought, should be allowed to go their separate ways in peace. Fortunately for those who earned their living by doing ‘undefendeds’, this was not so. Freedom was only possible if the complexities of an unhappy life could be fitted into the neat pattern of a divorce law still founded, to a large extent, upon the morality of the medieval Bishops. Furthermore the so-called ‘innocent party’ had to perform in the witness-box to the satisfaction of what seemed to us then a collection of excessively irritable old Judges, some of whom apparently satisfied a wry sense of humour by keeping intolerable marriages alive on some obscure legal pretext. When some of these Judges granted divorces they were often so moved by imagination at the alleged offences of the ‘guilty party’ that they would utter resounding and alliterative judgments; so suburban housewives would find themselves stigmatized in the evening papers as ‘A Mitcham Messalina who treated her husband without mercy or remorse’ or ‘A Catford Cleopatra, careless of her marriage vows, who sinned shamelessly’.

  Those barristers who practised outside the Divorce Division tended to think that doing ‘undefendeds’ was an easy option, like shooting foxes or playing cricket with a tennis-ball. As a matter of fact an ‘undefended’ could be extremely tricky, although it bore the same relation to a legal contest as a ten-minute review sketch does to a three-act play. Years of dissension, decades of matrimonial disharmony had to be reduced to such pithy one-liners as, ‘The Fish-Slice Incident’ or ‘The Matter of the Hairgrips in the Waistcoat Pocket’ or ‘The Day She Pawned my Masonic Regalia’. There was no time for character development, only for a quick punchline, Decree Nisi and Black Out.

  Moreover the client in the ‘undefended’ had to be rehearsed, in a brief meeting outside the Court, to put on the desired performance and make a complex saga of human relations legally acceptable and comprehensible to the Judge. As time went by and my practice went up the social scale this task became easier. Divorcing doctors, politicians or West End actresses could at least be understood by the judicial handers-out of Decrees. When I set out on the ‘undefended’ trail, the clients seemed to be all stone-deaf monoglot Poles and the difficulties were enormous. Even the hard-done-by working-class housewife shared no common language, in those days, with the learned Judge. After he had pronounced upon her case she would look confused, uncertain as to whether she had been awarded damages or divorced or sentenced to a term of imprisonment. It was often a painful task to explain that she was, after all the embarrassing questions and legal argument, still inextricably married to her husband.

  The advocate in the ‘undefended’, I found, was most useful as an interpreter between the Judges, who tended to form one class, and the clients who fell into another. In a reasonably short time I became bilingual and able to speak both ‘Judge’ and ‘Client’ and I formed a sort of glossary of useful phrases with their translations. This is an extract:

  The Judge’s ‘sitting-room’ is the client’s ‘lounge’.

  The Judge’s ‘dinner’ is the client’s ‘tea’.

  The Judge’s ‘lunch’ is the client’s ‘dinner’.

  The Judge’s ‘magazine’ is the client’s ‘book’.

  The Judge’s ‘furniture’ is the client’s ‘home’.

  Thus the phrase ‘My husband ran off with the home’, if untranslated, might leave the Judge with a nightmare vision of an entire semi-detached being removed by articulated lorry, when all that was meant was that the ruthless spouse had made off with the G-Plan suite when his wife was out shopping.

  ‘Falling for a baby’ always meant becoming pregnant and never described, as some of the more rarefied Judges might have thought, an act of tumbling to amuse an infant.

  Armed with these and similar equivalents it was possible to build a career in ‘undefendeds’ and avoid any major disaster, provided you could learn to fit each and every marriage into the three immutable categories of adultery, cruelty and desertion. As one or other of these elements appeared to be present in most homes, the legal side of the work was not hugely demanding, particularly as ‘cruelty’ became extended to cover almost any activity in which even the best-intentioned husband might engage. If a man made frequent love to his wife he could be accused of ‘unreasonable and exorbitant sexual demands’ and if he didn’t he was ‘denying her sexual intercourse and causing her deep humiliation and distress’. If he chattered to her he could be guilty of ‘nagging’, if he didn’t you could allege ‘long periods of sullen silence’. Sex, in anything but the missionary position, could be described as ‘perverse and unnatural demands’ causing, of course ‘humiliation and distress’. So remote and long-forgotten acts of love were re-enacted in the witness-box to bring tired marriages to their legal termination.

  The strangest element in the then current matrimonial law was the ‘Discretion Statement’. All cases had to have an ‘innocent party’ but some parties, of course, were more innocent than others. If a divorcing husband or wife had ever been unfaithful this fact, in an act of contrition which must have derived from the confessional, had to be revealed in a sealed document which was torn open for the Judge who could then, in his discretion, refuse a decree of divorce. One lover could usually be explained away, but when the numbers rose to two or three the atmosphere in court became grave and disapproving. However, Judges always received the sealed documents with an air of interest and expectancy, perhaps hoping to find in them the names of old friends or prominent members of the bar. Between the Decrees Nisi and Absolute, a period of six months, the innocent and successful party in a divorce case was required not to commit adultery, otherwise the ‘King’s Proctor’ might intervene and send everyone back to square one.

  ‘What happens,’ I asked my father before I started in the divorce business, ‘if the innocent party’s living with someone else? Do they have to separate?’

  ‘No. But you must advise them to stop sleeping together.’

  ‘For six months?’

  ‘Why ever not?’ My father seemed to find this perfectly acceptable.

  ‘How do you put it exactly? To the client?’

  ‘You tell them to exercise a self-denying ordinance.’

  So I saw my father, the doyen of the divorce bar, in a rare role, that of the confessor, imposing a few Hail Marys and a period of abstinence. This was the sort of law I was engaged in during the first years of my married life.

  After paying the costs of the divorce, Penelope and I had £11 left to spend on our honeymoon. We went to Brittany
, sat in the rain, ate lobster at dinner and quarrelled out of financial anxiety. When we came back to London, considerably earlier than we had planned, we set about living within our means which were then £5 a week which my father gave me for drafting his less sensational divorce petitions. ‘Five pounds should be just about all right for you,’ he said vaguely. ‘Any more than that and you’re liable to have problems about income tax and so on.’ I knew that an incautious expenditure on rare shrubs, Japanese cherry trees, gardeners, sacks full of daffodil bulbs, cigars and barrels of oysters had left him with an overdraft which was the subject of frequent, carefully-phrased letters to his bank manager in Bristol. ‘Who steals my purse steals trash’ was a quotation which figured often in this correspondence, together with promises that all would be well if only he could be paid for ‘“Merrydew v. Merrydew and Simpkins”, a long dogfight over adultery and a good money brief during which I managed to clock up twelve refreshers!’ Although the distant manager of the West Country bank was usually mollified by this correspondence, I knew that any request for a rise on the £5 would cause my father to change the subject and criticize the latest opinion I’d done for him on the law of domicile, or invite me down to the country for the weekend to ‘help out’ with the earwigs. ‘You’ll get more briefs of your own eventually,’ he reassured me. ‘Once solicitors get to like the cut of your jib.’

  Solicitors, however, seemed slow to appreciate any breezy and nautical way I might have with a Decree Nisi. I would look out, from our reasonably expensive flat in the Temple, over a sleeping city and think of the innumerable homes in which adultery, desertion without cause and conduct causing deep humiliation and distress were no doubt occurring with monotonous regularity and wonder when just a little of it all might be expected to land on my mantelpiece, neatly tied up in that pink ribbon which signalled the longed-for ‘undefended’. The children I had taken on (‘You’re like a railway train,’ my father had said with relish. ‘Pause at the next stop to take on children.’) would, I knew, be awake in the morning to renew their extraordinary demands for Farex, Ribena, Johnson’s Baby Shampoo and knicker-linings, luxuries which, in the far-off days when I shared a room at the World’s End with Angela Bedwell, I had been quite able to do without.