Murderers and Other Friends

by John Mortimer

  For a long time he was reluctant to start each new series because he didn’t want to be ‘just thought of as Rumpole’, and, perhaps, over the last eighteen years, he should have found time for Falstaff and Lear. Lately, he seems to have become reconciled to the part, but I sometimes feel I have had to take on the burden of being Rumpole in reality. Quite recently, after I had had a painful argument with a marble bathroom floor and a treacherous Jacuzzi in Australia, and I was being pushed, lamed, through airports in a wheelchair apparently constructed for a child, the passers-by waved and called out, ‘G’day, Rumpole!’ I have to protest that I am not he; I lack his courage, his stoicism and the essential nobleness of his character. I am not sufficiently Spartan to support life in Froxbury Mansions with ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’. I am no more he than any of the fat middle-aged barristers you can find sitting in El Vino’s in Fleet Street (known in the stories as Pommeroy’s Wine Bar), drinking claret and dropping cigar ash down their waistcoats, claiming to be the original Rumpole. He may have echoes of my father, and of Jeremy Hutchinson and James Burge, he may say something about the law and the state of England with which I happen to agree, but I hope, if you watch him or read about him, you will discover, he is nobody but himself.

  Conan Doyle is said to have grown tired of Sherlock Holmes, pushed him off the Reichenbach Falls, and only brought him back to life at the urgent request of the readers of the Strand Magazine. I haven’t tired of the old barrister, and I think this is because you can take today’s events – social workers snatching children for suspected devil worship, the Court of Appeal having to eat the words of previous judges, the suggested reforms of the legal profession or the slender difference between actors and barristers – and write a Rumpole story about them. Any matrimonial dispute fits easily in the Rumpole marriage and Penny says that when we have an argument she can see me remembering her lines in order to give them to Hilda.

  I don’t know if it’s because he’s so irredeemably English that Rumpole has become something of a cult figure in America. The Rumpole Society started in California and grew rapidly. The first meeting I went to took place in San Francisco’s huge gas and electricity building. A mock-up of Pommeroy’s had been built there and judges in ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ T-shirts were serving behind the bar. There is a minor character in Rumpole called Dodo Macintosh, who makes ‘cheesy bits’ for the Chambers’ parties and the evening began with a blind tasting of Dodo Macintosh’s ‘cheesy bits’. Some time later there was a Hilda look-alike contest, and much discussion of Rumpole’s address. As I write the books quite rapidly, I am always forgetting exactly where he lives.

  Actors like Peter Bowles, Jonathan Coy, Patricia Hodge and Julian Curry have always been a joy to write for, continually demonstrating that British light-comedy acting is the best in the world. Then there was an argument between Thames Television and Irene Shubik, the original producer of Rumpole, who cast them. She wanted the next series postponed until it was resolved and I didn’t. Later Jacqueline Davis came into my life, stayed there, and together we have produced over fifty hours of television, working together at times of excitement, satisfaction, frustration and despair, but never really wanting to work with anyone else.

  We met at lunch in the early Rumpole days and Jacquie came into the restaurant, a beautiful woman in a white dress, with huge dark eyes and a gentle voice. She is inclined to lose things, drop her notebook, files and glasses and run her red Alpha-Romeo into walls, while thinking of the elegance of such a motor car. She’s as prone to despair as I am, but often with me it’s a device to achieve a result, and with her, a genuine emotion. Her kindness and generosity are endless and her charm can win the hearts of that most brutal and intractable of bodies, a film unit on location. She remembers everyone’s birthdays, gets them cards and presents, and, given the slightest excuse for any sort of celebration, bakes an enormous cake. She’s the most expert wrapper-up of gifts and, when she comes laden with them, it seems an act of vandalism to undo the paper.

  She lives in a small house with two cats and there we have gone through crises in casting, rows with directors and all the usual television traumas without any serious disputes. At our first lunch she told me her strange family history.

  Before the last war a beautiful girl (I have no doubt she was beautiful and Jacquie has a photograph which proves it) came to stay in a Clapham lodging-house. She departed suddenly, leaving behind her a small baby. The landlady, who had children of her own, behaved in a noble fashion, brought the child up, saw her educated until she found a job in advertising and then in television. The baby became Jacquie Davis. Although she called the landlady her mother, and still visits her grave, she was always, and understandably, anxious to find out who her real mother was. In this long quest she has found a half-brother, and three half-sisters living in Cornwall, the result of her mother’s marriage to a Cornish policeman who worked in Soho. Given the fact that many people devote their time and energy to avoiding their relations, it’s a great tribute to Jacquie’s persistence that she has found so many. I don’t know if she will discover more about her mother, but I can imagine how important it is to her to know. Meanwhile, those she works with, her friends and her friends’ children, are her extended family.

  I began this chapter sitting in a garden, writing about death. A few years ago I was at some book fair or other when up came the author who is now Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, bubbling with excitement. ‘I’ve got a great idea for you,’ he said. ‘Kill Rumpole! It’ll make a terrific story.’ I don’t know when Rumpole will die, but all good things come to an end. And I’ll always remember the tattooed companion, the gentle Tony and the life which began with cigars on the beach at Dunkirk and ended after the last lobster had been ordered from Agadir.

  Chapter 8

  I am driving my daughter Emily up to London to go to school on a Monday morning. She’s wearing a red beret and blazer. As soon as we get on to the motorway she invites me to play Twenty Questions, and she says, ‘It’s animal.’ ‘Can you eat it?’ ‘No.’ ‘Has it got four legs?’ ‘Mo.’ I ask many questions to all of which she answers, ‘No.’ We play many games but I never win. Then I discover the secret of her success. She isn’t thinking of anything at all. I am expending great ingenuity asking questions to which there is absolutely no answer.

  Although I was not brought up to be religious, and was neither christened nor confirmed (an unholy state which I kept quiet about at school, together with other secret sins), I have always had the greatest respect for a religion which asserted the importance of the individual soul. Believer or unbeliever, I am part of a Christian civilization, with a Christian ethic, a faith in the possibility of redemption and the forgiveness of sins. It also seems to me that total materialism is unbearably drab and that a faith that recognizes the importance of mystery is essential. I envy the Catholic novelists, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and Muriel Spark, whose religion adds shape and weight to their stories; they start with an advantage over the writer who is merely a well-meaning member of the Atheists for Christ Society. I have a great affection for the Church of England, in spite of its insane act of self-destruction in emasculating the language of the Bible. I can’t imagine England without cathedrals and village churches, and I’m perfectly happy sitting in the garden arguing with the vicar. My difficulties come with the idea of an all-powerful, all-loving God who not only allows the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing but permits children to die of leukaemia. When Macduff hears of his wife and children’s murder, he asks, ‘Did heaven look on / And would not take their part?’ It’s a question to which neither he nor I have received a satisfactory answer.

  Of course the theologian, and the vicar in the garden, will say that God has given us free will, and won’t interfere with our evil decisions. This is understandable as far as Macbeth’s hired assassins, or the guards at the gas chamber are concerned, but their victims can’t be said to have exercised their free will or had much choice in the matter. The agonized
question becomes harder to answer when a sick child dies and there is no element of free will at all. The amount of help religious leaders gave me on these points was small. The Cardinal said, ‘In this world I can’t understand it. But that doesn’t affect my belief ... I can’t put it to God at my level. Full understanding is never possible.’ The Archbishop said, ‘Jeremiah shook his fist at God and asked Him what He was about. I don’t believe prayer is necessarily peaceful. It may mean arguing with God.’ Malcolm Muggeridge, I think before he was received into the Catholic Church, said he thought of God as the Supreme Dramatist, the Great Shakespeare of the Skies, so naturally He wanted to write tragedies as well as comedies, to create villains as well as heroes. This seemed to me to be the most convincing explanation. A moving and significant illustration of this dilemma is the story of those rabbis who, in their hut in Belsen, put God on trial. After a prolonged hearing they found Him guilty and, this done, they went to prayer.

  I have always felt proud of the fact that my father, in his blindness, didn’t change his mind and turn to God. He found his consolations in himself, in his anger and laughter, in the huge anthology of poetry he had in his head, in avoiding visitors and occasionally mocking his son. But there’s no doubt that it’s in moments of personal agony that these questions about God fall to be decided, as well as in vicarage gardens and archbishops’ palaces. The worst place to discuss them is probably down the Old Bailey, but that was where we had to debate matters of religion in the summer of 1977 when Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, was put on trial for blasphemy, a proceeding which most people thought had ended with the Inquisition.

  Mr Lemon, a handsome, intense and rather mournful young man, published a poem by Professor James Kirkup, who had held important posts in the English departments of many universities, and won a number of awards for his poetry. The poem, which was short, spoke of the physical love of a Roman centurion for the body of Christ on the Cross. It also spoke of Christ as a practising homosexual. The circulation of Gay News was not large, nor did it seem likely to be read by an audience who would have been profoundly disturbed by it. An Anglican bishop had recently suggested that Jesus, who was what discreet obituarists refer to as ‘unmarried’, might have been a homosexual of the non-practising variety. Long before, in D.H. Lawrence’s story, ‘The Man Who Died’, Christ was described as having survived the Crucifixion and making love to a girl for the first time. Much metaphysical poetry expresses love for Jesus in physical, even erotic, terms. In spite of all this, the poem didn’t escape the eagle eye of Mrs Mary Whitehouse, who was ever on the lookout for material likely to cause her offence. A private prosecution was launched and Mr Lemon and his company, Gay News Ltd, were accused of blasphemous libel contrary to the Common Law of England. I was briefed to appear for Denis Lemon while my friend Geoff Robertson represented the company. Mrs Whitehouse was in daily attendance with a number of her supporters.

  This was the first blasphemy case to be heard for over half a century and many lawyers took the view that the blasphemy laws no longer existed. No less an authority than Lord Denning had said in 1949: ‘The offence of blasphemy is now a dead letter.’

  The common law of blasphemy seems to have been born, after a prolonged period of gestation, at the end of the seventeenth century when a madman named Jeremy Taylor, who claimed to be Christ’s younger brother, announced that religion was a cheat. The then Lord Chief Justice said that these words tended to the destruction of both religion and the state and Taylor, who had been committed to Bedlam, was also ordered to be set in the pillory with a card tied round his neck bearing the legend FOR BLASPHEMOUS WORDS AND THE SUBVERSION OF ALL GOVERNMENT. When the Anglican Church was established by the state, an attack on its beliefs, but on those of no other religious denomination, was held to be criminal. Trying a case in 1838 the judge said: ‘If this is only a libel on the whole Roman Catholic Church, the defendant is entitled to be acquitted. A person may, without being liable to prosecution for it, attack Judaism or Mahometanism, or even any sect of the Christian religion, save the established religion of the country.’ So Professor Kirkup could have written, and Mr Lemon could have published, whatever they liked concerning the Pope or Buddha. It was only the Church of England’s Jesus who had to be protected.

  In the early nineteenth century, the era of atheist French revolutionaries and Chartist riots, the political nature of the blasphemy laws became obvious. The publisher of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was prosecuted for blasphemy, as was the bookseller who sold Queen Mab, Shelley being a passionate enemy of the government.

  Later in the last century society became more tolerant and, with the arrival of Darwin and Huxley (Darwin, in my father’s Bible, was much like Jesus and Huxley his John the Baptist), reasoned criticism of biblical infallibility had to be tolerated. In 1883 Lord Chief Justice Coleridge said that a mere denial of the truth of Christianity wasn’t blasphemous, there must be a wilful intention to ‘pervert, mislead others by means of licentious and contumelious abuse’. These words seemed to offer us a defence, and we could argue that if the prosecution couldn’t prove Denis Lemon and the magazine had such fell intentions they were entitled to be acquitted.

  So we assembled, one summer day, in one of the more modern courts in the Old Bailey. I was there, Geoff was there, as was Mr Smyth, the intensely serious prosecutor. Mrs Whitehouse was there. The solicitor who went out and bought Gay News was there. Professor Kirkup, alas, was not there. He was far away, it was rumoured, standing in a sunbeam somewhere East of Suez, because the Professor was a distinguished orientalist and had a Chair in Tokyo. The jury were ready and willing to decide all the necessary questions of theology, religious sensitivity and poetic truth; no doubt they were expecting a fascinating and sensational case, something which would make a nice change from a theft in Tesco’s or an indecent assault in the local cinema.

  Sadly, the jury were to be disappointed. The normal excitement of an Old Bailey trial – the procession of unusual, unlikely or self-consciously normal people who parade as witnesses; the evidence which seems to favour now one side, now the other; the cut and thrust of cross-examination; the effort of the imagination needed to understand human passions or inhuman evil – all these were missing. The jury spent almost the whole trial in their room while we engaged in days of legal argument. We were trying to decide whether the law of blasphemy was alive or dead; if it might be contrary to the European Convention of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of religion to its signatories; whether, as in all other cases of alleged obscene publication, literary merit was a defence and expert evidence could be called on the excellence or otherwise of Professor Kirkup’s poem; and whether, as Lord Coleridge had said, the prosecutor had to prove an intention to pervert, insult and mislead others. For the sake, I suppose, of impartiality a Jewish judge had been selected. He was small, neat, invariably courteous and he smiled a good deal. He couldn’t, in view of my client’s name, resist the temptation of saying, during argument, that ‘the answer was a lemon’. However, he wrote in his autobiography that he had been ‘shocked and horrified’ when he read the poem and wondered if, in these circumstances, he should try the case. Any doubts he may have had on this subject were manfully overcome and he described the Gay News case as the most irresistibly absorbing he ever tried. Whether it was an equally fascinating experience for Denis Lemon is another question entirely.

  After many days when the jury sat in their room, knitting, filling in their pools or doing the crossword, the judge gently but firmly closed the door on all our possible defences. He found that the literary merit of the poem was quite immaterial, so the Professor might stand peacefully in his shaft of sunlight and no other poets or professors would be allowed to give evidence. And the intention of the poet or the editor mattered, said the judge, not at all, so there was no point in troubling the jury with their evidence. Bernard Levin and Margaret Drabble, lone and courageous, briefly gave evidence as to the character of Gay News. Otherwise all Geoff and I, an
d indeed the prosecutor, could do was to let the jury read the poem and then make speeches.

  I think Geoff made the best speech and Mrs Whitehouse agreed. I made a long speech in which I ventured to suggest that the real attack on the magazine and the poem was against homosexuality, and I reminded the jury, probably ineffectively, of the sad day when Oscar Wilde was destroyed at the Old Bailey and the prostitutes danced in the streets for joy. I think it was somewhere around this point that the judge said, ‘It may come as a relief to you during this rather sordid case, members of the jury, to know that England is two hundred and ten for three wickets in the Test Match’ – or whatever the score was. I was so amazed by this gambit that I put the words in the mouth of his Honour Judge Bullingham, Rumpole’s old opponent. When the judge later protested to me about this, I asked him how he could possibly think that he, so quiet and courteous, bore the slightest resemblance to the savage old Bullingham. At his request I wrote a letter to the newspapers denying that Bullingham was in any way based on the judge in the Gay News trial, a move which gave rise to much incorrect speculation that he was.