CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

by John Mortimer

  The prosecution case was that the Premier had taped the broadcast and at 7.15 the acting head of programmes, a Mr Oshin, together with his engineer, were in the sound cubicle at Ibadan radio station ready to play back the words of the leader. Mr Oshin said that an intruder entered the cubicle, produced a gun and made him remove the Premier’s tape and substitute his own rousing message to the nation. There was, however, some friendly chat before the gun was produced, because Mr Oshin had recognized his visitor as Wole Soyinka and had briefly discussed with him such matters as the Commonwealth Arts Festival and the success of The Road at Stratford East. So arose the charge of robbery with violence, and the officials of Amnesty feared that there would be a rigged and politically activated trial and that the distinguished dramatist was being kept in solitary confinement and possibly subjected to torture.

  I travelled to the continent that had been denied to me when Mr Moxer’s film studio vanished. It was all new to me, the dry musty smell of Africa, the extraordinary cheerfulness in the most appalling situations, the politicians whose oratory was as flamboyantly effective as that of Nye Bevan, and the barristers who retired, shining with sweat in their stiff collars and bands, to eat bacon and eggs and drink 7-Up during the midday adjournment. I stayed with an English writer and his wife in Lagos and we drove up the long road to Ibadan. It was the sort of road Wole Soyinka wrote about, a line of life through the dripping rain forest, always thronged with people walking huge distances, loaded bicycles and overflowing trucks. Along the sides of such a road the dramas of life, death and politics, war and witchcraft were endlessly enacted. As we drove we saw burnt-out, riot-wrecked cars. The day before a Judge had been found decapitated in a ditch. Many people had been killed as the police fired on women in open markets. When we got to Ibadan I met a young Nigerian publisher. ‘I could have run you up here in my Jag,’ he said, ‘but some fools have gone and thrown their assegais through the rear window.’ In his opinion those responsible were the Muslim Hausa tribesmen from the north.

  I found Wole Soyinka entertaining his family and friends in the local CID office. He was smoking a Gauloise and pouring out Algerian wine. He was surrounded by books for his university degree and was then reading a Penguin edition of P. G. Wodehouse. The Nigerian playwright discussed the political situation with great equanimity and sent his best wishes to Joan Littlewood. When he made jokes the CID officer, who seemed to be wearing a Westminster Bank rowing-club blazer, laughed appreciatively. The next morning, in the modern courtroom, the Prosecuting Counsel applied to have the prisoner more strictly confined, whereupon the young Judge, acting with more humanity than many of his English counterparts, said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to take him home with you. You could keep a pretty close eye on him there!’

  At the end of the long road through the rain forest, the barristers were greeting their opponents with the soft badinage of the Middle Temple and saying, ‘If your Lordship pleases’, and ‘If your Lordship would bear with me for a moment’, in the age-old legal circumlocutions we all use when we mean to say, ‘For God’s sake shut up and listen’. They were patiently quoting House of Lords decisions to erect elaborate arguments as to the admissibility of evidence and the Judge was outraged when he discovered that the prosecution hadn’t served their witnesses’ statements on the defence.

  ‘When I saw the gun coming out,’ said Mr Oshin, tall, bowing and softly spoken, ‘I thought I was in a kind of dream.’ The barristers laughed discreetly and one of them, passing the witness box, gave Wole Soyinka a gentle and reassuring pat on the arm.

  That night I drove with my publisher friend out to a village. We could hear the distant cries of rioting gangs through the shattered back window of the car. He whistled into the darkness and some girls with bright cloths wound round their heads joined us and we went back to the hotel, where the girls drank Guinness and shivered in the air conditioning. One told me that her work lay on the ‘Publicity and Exploitation side of Lever Brothers Limited’.

  None of the witnesses identified Wole Soyinka satisfactorily and he was acquitted. Eventually there was another political upheaval and he disappeared. But as I drove away from Ibadan I thought of the law as something other than a maze of absurdities from which people had to be rescued. We had been stopped for a long time at a level crossing the night before and seen the flash of knives and machetes in the bush, and heard the cries of the wounded; and yet, wearing their absurd version of English eighteenth-century legal costume, barristers had been arguing reasonably and a Judge had been determined to convict no one unless he was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt. Perhaps you have to go a great distance to appreciate the virtues of our legal system, up the long road into a rain forest, or even to South Africa where, with the politicians daily violating natural justice, a fearless barrister can still set an example by asking all the wrong questions at the inquest on a political prisoner unaccountably dead in the alleged safety of a cell. Since then I have stood in a Far-Eastern country and cross-examined its Prime Minister according to our procedure, before the inscrutable figure of a wigged and gowned Chinese Judge. In the countries which have received our law it often proves a most durable commodity, keeping a flicker of freedom alive when all else has broken down. Driving away from Ibadan I had the unoriginal thought that British law might, together with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Lord Byron and the herbaceous border, be one of our great contributions to the world. I decided not to abandon the law, but to try and practise it more interestingly in the future.

  And then I saw a girl up a high ladder pasting a huge poster, depicting a bar of ‘Lifebuoy’ soap, on to the side of a building. She smiled and waved her brush at me as I called to her, for I had recognized her as my friend from the ‘Publicity and Exploitation department of Lever Brothers’.

  We got back to Lagos where I was staying with the English writer and his wife. The house was reassuring as it presented the usual North London scene of drying nappies, plastic knickers, chewed bikkipegs swinging from the sides of cots, crumpled copies of the Manchester Guardian and paperback Hemingways ripped from the shelves and stamped on by an apparently intoxicated three-year-old. One night I wanted to go out to the Post Office to wire an article I had written to London. My hostess agreed to drive me. She was a flamboyant driver and we screeched through the curiously deserted streets of Lagos, still subject to rioting and sudden death, until we were stopped by an enormous policeman, a Hausa, perhaps, from the north, hung with every conceivable armament and brandishing a riot stick. He asked for my hostess’s driver’s licence and, when it was clear it had run out six months previously, he told us both to follow him to the station. I saw my return to England postponed indefinitely whilst I sat in an airless cell deprived even of Algerian wine and P. G. Wodehouse. However, instead of docilely accompanying the huge officer, my hostess leapt from the driving seat and attacked him with her dangerously sharp fingernails, brilliantly coloured by chipped varnish. After one swift claw from the roused lady Guardian-reader, the police officer turned tail and ran into the darkness, his revolver thudding against his side, wailing with uncontrollable fear as though pursued by evil spirits. We heard no more of the matter and so I left Nigeria with increased respect for our legal system and a new awareness of the almost invincible power of the middle-class housewife.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The cracks spread across the ceiling in our north London house like ever-widening rivers on a map, and the plaster powdered the stair-carpets. Step-daughters, who had been lurking with lovers in the shadowy upper storeys, left home. In spite of the simplicities of the law I used to practise, there is no one cause you can write on the death certificate of a marriage; the patient is at the mercy of a multiplicity of sicknesses, and when two writers in one house are involved resistance may be seriously weakened. I knew how my clients felt at the end of a long and familiar life and their fear at the prospect of unaccustomed freedom. For a long time every effort is made to keep the true facts from the family. Meanwhile there is a
constant and increasingly hopeless search for a cure.

  At one period of history we might have put our affairs in the hands of priests or vicars. Nowadays the dissolution of marriage seems to be attended by grave and sympathetic chartered accountants. The affluent sixties brought, I’m sure, a great increase in the number of psychoanalysts. Such doctors, a red-faced Scot with a breezy commonsense manner, or a pale and uncommunicative Central European who sat by the gas fire in the house he never left, while his family listened uneasily to the opening of the front door and the tentative footstep on the stair, become the third parties in our lives. They were the rivals, granted the long private hours of self-examination, whose enigmatic advice could be repeated and, perhaps, improved upon. Bred to a scepticism which found the Book of Genesis, the Oedipus Complex and the Collective Unconscious merely myths of varying usefulness, I found my visits to these doctors puzzling. The breezy Scotsman, for instance, suggested that the situation might improve were I to take up golf. It seemed, at a time of advancing despair, an extreme but probably fruitless remedy.

  I had, I suppose, reached that moment when well-settled people set out for a second visit to their youth. Mine was a place I had never seen before, having been too involved with children, ‘undefendeds’, overdrafts and getting on in the law. Gauguin gave up his bourgeois life and set sail for Tahiti. Many men, I imagine, travel the same route, and if their South Sea island is only the adolescence they never enjoyed, it is subject to the same disadvantages, heat, disease, disillusion, loneliness and the slow disintegration of life in the tropics. I suppose it’s possible that Gauguin might have painted his pictures of the South Seas while still living with his Danish wife and during his spare time from the bank. Such considerations never dissuade anyone from attempting the journey, however much they may regret arriving at their destination.

  These thoughts, confused and hardly understood, were half exhilarating and half paralysing to the will. It became an enormous effort to open letters, still more to do an ‘undefended’, and much time seemed to be spent in watching the cracks trace their slow way across the ceiling. Some sort of new start was clearly necessary, but I had no idea where to begin.

  It seems, looking back on it, to have been a period of doctors’ waiting-rooms, of days when men with soft voices wrote down our history and did their best not to show surprise and disbelief at the birth of so many children. I remember climbing up the staircase in a Golders Green house in the wake of a beautiful woman who was wearing a white motor cycling outfit and carrying a crash helmet like a huge goldfish bowl. I was not on my way to see her, to my regret, but her small stockily-built husband, a Mr Durst, who was a lapsed Jungian with, so it was said, a deft way of disposing of writers’ problems.

  It was the Kleenex that ruined my relationship with Mr Durst. As soon as I came into the room he would emerge from behind his desk, carefully abstract one tissue from a cardboard carton and lay it neatly and reverently on the headpiece of his couch. If only I would put my head to the Kleenex, it seemed, a marvellous relaxation would come over me and Mr Durst would be able to dive down into the secret caverns of my soul and release the timid and inhibited impulses there imprisoned. Somehow I couldn’t lie down. Did my fear of self-revelation prevent me, or could I not bear the thought of becoming just another transient stain on Mr Durst’s pillow. Did I detect something over-cautious in the gesture with the Kleenex which made me deny Mr Durst my full confidence? Whatever it was, my refusal to lie down in his presence made him testy.

  ‘You won’t trust me,’ he said in his severe accent. ‘You are so very, very English and you think I am a bloody foreigner. Is this not so?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said truthfully. ‘It’s nothing to do with you being German. It’s just the Kleenex.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘It’s just that I’d feel ridiculous, with my head on a bit of Kleenex.’

  ‘What are you trying to hide, that you attack me for simply taking reasonable precautions with my sofa?’

  ‘I am trying to hide nothing.’

  ‘You have some strange secrets?’

  ‘None that I can remember.’

  ‘Then why do you waste my time coming here at all, once a week and at considerable expense to yourself?’

  I thought of telling him that it was in part due to the pleasure I derived from seeing his wife mount the staircase, but I hesitated, wondering if my relationship with Mr Durst could bear the weight of so much truth.

  ‘I am finding it almost impossible to open envelopes and extremely difficult to do “undefendeds”.’

  ‘Undefendeds?’ Mr Durst looked puzzled.

  ‘Yes. They are part of my work as a barrister. Rather a dull part, as a matter of fact. I’d rather like a change. I even thought I might take silk.’ And then I explained, ‘That’s what we call applying to become a Queen’s Counsel.’

  ‘I know what taking silk is,’ Mr Durst almost snarled at me. ‘Oh, you have to treat me, don’t you, in this terribly English fashion! You think I am the poor bloody foreigner who is so ignorant he doesn’t know what it means “taking silk”.’

  ‘I was only trying to explain …’

  ‘This is your secret that you are keeping from me. That you are within reach of “silk”.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been hacking away at the law for a long time now.’

  ‘Modesty! Modesty!’ Mr Durst threw up his hands in disgust. ‘That is your English way of showing off.’ He was silent for a while and then he picked the Kleenex off the couch, rolled it into a ball and threw it into the waste-paper basket. Then he said, with a sort of reluctant approval, ‘Within reach of “silk”, eh? No longer a “stuff”, is that the expression? The silk gown is almost in your grasp?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, feeling that the whole plan was becoming more and more ridiculous. ‘You know how it is …’

  ‘And you know what you are, don’t you?’ Mr Durst looked at me triumphantly. ‘You are an amiable English Guy Fawkes who seeks to enter the House of Lords in order to blow it up!’

  Mr Durst’s destruction of the Kleenex made me feel that either my cure was complete or that I was too far gone and it was past his power to help me. I never saw him again, but I often think of his description of myself and feel ashamed that it’s not more accurate.

  Once when Mr Durst asked me what I was writing I told him that I had an idea for a play about a Judge.

  ‘Ah good!’ he said with a rare show of pleasure. ‘A Judge will be very resonant for you, and entirely archetypal.’

  No doubt that was the problem with the play I managed to finish at last, after I had gone to the South Seas around Maida Vale. The central character remained entirely in the resonant and archetypal stage; it was a play that appeared, I noticed to my embarrassment when I saw it, with its symbols showing.

  The figure of the Judge was, in fact, resonant enough, pursuing a line which stretched back to the Bloody Assizes and down to the alarming Judges who used to try crime and who, from the safe distance of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division, I only knew by hearsay.

  The older type of port-swilling, bawdy, joke-telling, privately foul-mouthed and publicly righteous Judge was in part legend, in part something as dull as an archetype. But there was still some truth in the character. A human and extremely civilized Judge told me that, when at the bar, he had prosecuted one murderer and defended the next two capital cases at a West Country Assize. When he went, after his labours, to a bar dinner he was greeted jovially by the presiding Judge who said, with a large pink gin in his hand, ‘I hope to God they’re not going to run out of rope in Cornwall!’

  In those days Judges, travelling the country on Assize, always went with a Marshal, a young unfledged barrister whose heavy duties were to live in the Judge’s lodgings, listen to the Judge’s jokes, tee up his golf ball and, when in Court, keep the Judge’s papers from getting lost and sharpen his pencils. No doubt in many cases the Marshal’s lot could be interesting and even enjoyable
, but sometimes it was extremely alarming. When I wrote my play I remembered the horrifying story of the Judge’s threepenny bit. It seems that an extremely ferocious and sullen old Judge was sitting with his Marshal during a long evening in the lodgings. They were listening to a Palm Court orchestra on the wireless and the Judge was playing with a handful of small coins which he had taken out of his pocket. As he counted his change for the thirteenth time during a Hungarian Rhapsody he uttered a cry of, ‘Marshal! Marshal, I’ve lost a threepenny bit!’ Without a moment’s delay a search was instituted. The Marshal was down on his hands and knees. At the Judge’s alarmed ring he was joined by the clerk and the butler. The three of them crawled over every inch of carpet whilst the Judge sat glowering at them.

  After an hour’s fruitless quest the young Marshal’s nerves could stand the strain no longer. He crawled behind the sofa, took a threepenny bit from his pocket, dropped it furtively on to the floor and then held it up with a shout of triumph. The clerk and the butler tottered arthritically to their feet, considerably relieved. The contented Judge was escorted up to bed having graciously thanked his Marshal and promised to keep his eye on him during what might well prove, after such an auspicious beginning, to be a brilliant career at the bar.

  By the morning, however, the atmosphere had changed. The Marshal came down to breakfast, in a reasonably cheerful mood, to find the Judge frowning at him over the kedgeree and saying, in a voice which called for a black cap, ‘Marshal! You will take the next train back to London. You are not to stay one more hour in these lodgings and I hope I shall never be troubled by your presence again. I cannot tolerate a lying Marshal.’

  ‘But, Judge …’

  ‘The case is proved, beyond reasonable doubt,’ and the Judge held up a small coin. ‘I found my threepenny bit last night. It had fallen, Marshal, into the turn-up of my trousers!’