We returned to Sydney for his birth, to be with friends and family in the November sunshine. We were lunching at the art gallery when Kathy’s waters broke, and drove excitedly to our date with my old schoolmate Dr Robert Lyneham. It was a long, long labour: every so often I would repair to the television room next door to bring the news back to Kathy. The Steve Vizard show was on, and I hit on a segment when he was interviewing his own writers. I called out, ‘Can you believe it? Vizard actually has writers!’ At this moment, as if to share our amazement, Julius decided to poke his head out. I cradled my son, and sang him Buddy Holly songs – I am not sure why, but at least I knew the words.
Julius was a beautiful baby – ‘Baby Jesus must have looked like that,’ exclaimed Jill Neville. He passed all his milestones with ease and at fifteen months had many words, until suddenly he shut down and lost them all. It was an anxious time – I could make him smile, at least, by singing Bob Dylan as badly as Bob Dylan – until after his third birthday when he pointed at a shoe-rack in my old room in Longueville and said ‘shoe’. But he could not recapture that early quick spirit, and we went to doctors all over Britain and Australia for a diagnosis, eventually of Asperger’s syndrome, somewhere (no one is very sure) on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. He was not an FLK (social worker jargon for ‘funny-looking kid’) and was loving to his parents and charming to our friends, but there was something unusual about him – a crossed wire in the brain. He could do amazing things – like memorise Hamlet – but could not add up or read a book.
It’s hard on parents raising an autistic child – the divorce rate is extremely high. My only advice would be to have another as quickly as possible. Our daughter, Georgie, was born in London two years later and delivered by no less than the royal gynaecologist. (I will spare readers my wife’s jokes about where his hands had been.) She was a great kid – I can remember her at about age three advancing on children twice her size and age who were picking on her brother and beating them up. She had something of her mother’s wit and her father’s love of history. By age fifteen she was brilliant and beautiful, but her political beliefs had not crystallised, so she went along with her mother’s tongue-in-chic arrangement through a friend at Hello! magazine to make her debut in Paris at the le Bal (also known as the Crillon Ball, after the hotel where it is held). This is a famous event, where the daughters of the crowned heads of Europe traditionally ‘come out’, although by 2009 the blue-blood test for aristocracy had changed. As well as Lady Kitty Spencer and the daughters of long-overthrown European royals, we had Hong Kong royalty (the daughter of a billionaire) and Hollywood royalty (the daughters of Forest Whitaker and Clint Eastwood). How did Georgie qualify as Australian royalty? Kathy claimed it was because of her own pure convict blood, dating back to the First Fleet, but maybe the organisers had been told of my relationship to the Kaiser. To dance with my daughter without trampling her I needed a refresher course – the June Winter Academy days were long past. I booked some lessons at London’s Pineapple Studios but my footwork had not improved. Georgie was stunning, in a dress made without charge by our friend Collette Dinnigan, and money was raised for charity. I took Georgie outside to show her the place where the aristocrats had been guillotined, and noticed the glint that came into her eyes.
I watched with fascination thereafter my daughter’s ideological progress. Later at school, under the influence of an inspiring politics teacher, she began to reckon that all should have access to the opportunities provided to her. At London University she achieved first-class honours in English and History and looked back on le Bal with irritation as an arcane survival of an elitist marriage market. She followed in my footsteps to the extent of being elected as a student president, at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, although there were differences: she campaigned for justice for the cleaning staff, who did not cross our minds at the SRC in the Vietnam-dominated sixties. After a stint with Amnesty, she now works to bring about political change as an official in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. This excites the Daily Mail, which got hold of pictures of her at the le Bal, and when she was selected as a Labour candidate for a local council it could not wait to publish them (four times in four weeks!), falsely reporting that her dress cost $9000, and implying that Labour’s war on privilege cannot be waged other than by the underprivileged. It shows the vacuity of some journalists, but it also served to show off the talent of Collette.
When they were younger we kept the children in touch with their grandparents and their increasing number of cousins through regular visits to Sydney. Every Boxing Day we took a large room at a beachside restaurant in Balmoral, where Jules would make a speech toasting his grandfather (whose birthday it was) for his efforts in combating old age (one feature of autism is unremitting truth-telling). The gathering of clan Robertson came together in all shapes, sizes and races. My international businessman brother Graeme’s first marriage was to an Indonesian, his second to a Chinese woman; one of his daughters is an accountant married to a Mauritian businessman. My other brother, Tim – by then a Senior Counsel (New South Wales barristers disdain to be called Queen’s Counsel, unlike the forelock-tugging Victorians) – has a daughter, Venetia, who took the Sydney University medal with a first in theology and then a PhD: she’s a doctor of divinity. It was a family reunion that continued for forty years, and helped to make up for the loss of family time we have endured for the sake of our international aspirations.
Our clan includes Katrina (a doctor) and Andrew (an engineer), the children of my Uncle Lance, the youngest of the wartime Robertson airmen. He went on to live their dream of becoming a bank manager – inspired by that kindly manager who did not foreclose on the Drummoyne home during the Depression. Lance was manager for many years of the Commonwealth Bank at Byron Bay. There he was the first to extend loans to hippies (repaid when they became film producers or drug dealers) and went down in local legend for his innovative solution to the state-wide problem of the ‘six o’clock swill’. The Byron Bay fleet would come in of an evening, and the fishermen had nowhere to go to drink and tell their stories of the day’s haul. Lance – perhaps through a legal gene that lurked in the family – found an obscure subsection in the NSW Government Railways Act, which exempted buffet cars from all restrictions on serving alcohol when on the tracks. He persuaded the station master to position a buffet car permanently on a siding, sponsored by the bank, and it became a famous after-hours hostelry – the one that got away.
There were friends to see as well – Julian Disney, Jim and Alice Spigelman, David and Kristin Williamson, and Joe Skrzynski and Ros Horin, to name but a few, and other Christmas blow-ins, like Jane Perlez and Gael Boglione (née McKay). How could we go back to the London winter was the annual and aching question.
Jules’s schooling proceeded, with difficulty, although it was heartening to sit in meetings in his state school with five or six different experts concentrating on his problems. This was the mark of a caring state. In time, however, he had to go to special schools – well, he was special – and then we heard from our friends Tina Brown and Harry Evans of a college in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which could help those with his challenges. He attended for two years, and I crossed the pond to be with him every month or so, but it could not conquer the devastating loneliness of a boy who was craving friends his own age yet was too racked with anxiety ever to cultivate them. Those with experience of the condition will know the problems – as one friend said to me when I mentioned that our son was autistic, ‘I thought you and Kathy had the most marvellous life, from reading about you in the social pages. Now I realise the heartache …’ Precisely.
I taught Jules tennis, which he loved and excelled at – he was at one point a possible for a Davis Cup squad (the English Davis Cup squad, however, pre-Andy Murray). I took him to be coached at the Bollettieri tennis ranch in Sarasota, Florida, where the CIA once had me sleeping with Pee-Wee Herman. Jules was given to writing pages of what we thought were random n
umbers, but when they were fed through a computer it was discovered they were the exact scores of every quarter, semi and final played at Wimbledon. Our son is a genius receptor of useless knowledge, although it did startle the famous tennis players we met when he reeled off the scores in matches they had long forgotten. I was quartered, for those Sarasota weeks, in the crummy hotel attached to the tennis ranch, reading my papers from the court in Sierra Leone I was overseeing at the time, a dismal business until Jules called with the message ‘Sharapova on court’, which brought me running, a relief from war crimes.
Jules has an obsession with movies – he can also amaze our actor friends by recalling their lines (including voice-overs) as a party trick. He wanted to be an actor, but we doubted that he could put the artistic into autistic. He did an acting course, which he enjoyed, and then won a scholarship to an intensive course for differently abled actors. The catch was that it started in the first week of January, so he had to forgo his time on the beach in Sydney with his family. So did I – the lot fell to me to take him back to England after Christmas. In the middle of Sydney airport he decided to run away, and I had to sprint to catch him. I thought my life had reached its nadir: here I was, at age sixty-eight, chasing my twenty-four-year-old autistic boy.
I am glad I caught him, because although it could be hell getting him to the course, later in the year a tiny miracle happened. He was invited to an audition for a role in Holby City – the BBC’s weekly hour-long medical drama with a viewing audience of around five million. He got the part of Jason Haynes, and he thrived as the first autistic actor cast to play a character with autism. Soon people would stop him in the street and ask him for selfies and autographs. I almost cried with joy the first day I went with him to Elstree Studios, seeing how transformed he was: playing his character, he was happy at last – genuinely happy. I was happy too – and proud. Once, you had to use an actor as good as Dustin Hoffman to play the Rain Man – now, an autistic actor will play the part authentically if they ever make Rain Man II. Jules wants eventually to play Hamlet, who is obviously autistic (all that anxious equivocation, paternal obsession and misreading of social situations) and we are planning the movie – Hugh Jackman has been cast as Claudius, Jemma Redgrave (Jules’s co-star on Holby) as Gertrude and Stephen Fry has volunteered to be the First Gravedigger (‘Alas, poor Yorick!’). We are still looking for an Ophelia (and so is Jules). I, of course, shall be the ghost.
For the past two decades, our family has inhabited an open-plan Australian-style home in Swiss Cottage, a half-mile north of St John’s Wood (where it would be worth twice as much) and a half-mile south of Hampstead (where its price would triple). It’s a quiet, middle-class suburb, full of psychiatrists and mistresses of faded rock stars, with some high-rise council housing – a genial place, which did not vote for Brexit. We have Hampstead Heath to walk on and Regent’s Park to row boats and smell the effulgent roses. We are near Lord’s Cricket Ground, where the Ashes are displayed in an egg-cup, although I prefer to watch my cricket from a couch in front of a television screen with beer in hand. (The last time I was invited to a box at Lord’s, I had Jeffrey Archer with his bad breath on one side and George Pell with his bad conscience – he was meant to be at the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse – on the other.) Just down the street and round the corner are the Abbey Road studios, with a traffic jam of tourists photographing each other on the crossing where the Fab Four once posed for the eponymous album. Over in Richmond, my old friend Gael Boglione is chatelaine of London’s historic Petersham House, and lures us to lunches at its restaurant (made famous by Skye Gyngell) and to postprandial walks along the river than leads to Runneymede.
I have had no relatives living in Britain since the William Nicol sailed in 1837. But after the Oz trial I was adopted into the large and loving family of John Mortimer, which centred on a small house with a large garden in the Chiltern Hills, the setting for his play A Voyage Round My Father. At weekends it was the most joyous place of laughter and gossip and gumboots and children – eventually our children as well – enjoying lazy Sunday lunches warmed by a roaring fire in winter and bluebell picnics in spring. It was a privilege (though John and Penny never made us feel privileged) to be part of this quintessentially English family. In summer the Mortimer clan moved to a Tuscan villa outside Siena. With friends Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, Neil Kinnock and his wife, Glenys, and others we would spend days in the pool overlooking olive trees, and nights at the opera – Verdi, invariably, with passionate Italian singers. One night, in the interval of La Traviata in Siena, Georgie (a little girl at the time) rushed back from the unisex toilet to report ‘Jerry Springer doesn’t wash his hands.’ (‘Well, darling, that’s his job.’) John would usually become bored with sleep in the early hours, spend the morning writing another ‘Rumpole’ adventure, then join us in the afternoon. He was forever genial and generous – non-judgmental but sharp in observing the vanities of the world through the blur of diminishing eyesight. As his junior he taught me the barrister’s trade, and enjoyed retirement sitting by the fire in his slippers listening to the news I brought back from the Old Bailey.
What do I miss about Australia? Well, swimming for a start – there are plenty of pools at gyms in London, full of what Kathy describes as ‘chlorinated phlegm’, but oh for the beach at Balmoral or the swim to the shark nets at Nielsen Park to watch the waves sparkle in the wake of the ferries to Manly. Although we have a garden that comes alive with colour in spring, and urban foxes that devour squirrels, which give blood-curdling death yelps in the middle of the night, how I miss the wildflowers in my parents’ garden at Longueville and the flash on the veranda of lorikeets in the evening, and the tinkling of the masts on the bay.
My mother always said that I was not cut out for marriage. In Los Angeles once, a celebrated soothsayer inspected my palms and other visible parts of my body and declared with certitude that in a previous life I had been a monk. This kind of rang true. But mischief-making with someone you love is a good way of spending much of your allotted span. Kathy occasionally tried the Christina Stead lament (leaving home and hearth for a man, etc.) but in truth she has not left the Australian persona which she inhabits and in which she writes, and I deserve some sort of award (although Sir Humphrey would veto it) for unleashing her on Britain to add to the gaiety of the nation. Gossip columns have found it funny to juxtapose her comments on men and sex with the fact that she is married to a ‘serious-minded QC’. The joke wears thin. In London, Kathy became a noted writer. She popularised in Girls’ Night Out the perfect revenge on the two-timing male – prawns left in the curtain rails by his departing lover – which soon became an urban legend. In rapid succession, her chick-lit classics, including Foetal Attraction, Mad Cows and How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints), were all listed in the top ten of the bestseller charts. Some film rights were sold to Hollywood and we waited anxiously for the cameras to start rolling, but they never did, except in the case of Mad Cows, which was sold to a UK company and made into a movie, in which I played a scene with Anna Friel on a bus – I am appropriately listed in the credits as ‘Man on the Clapham Omnibus’. (Lawyers will get the joke.) It is occasionally entered in competitions for the worst film ever made. Sometimes, it wins.
Kathy and I were an unusual combination – Douglas Adams joked that my reputation for jurisprudential depth came to the surface after meeting my wife. My old friends were first to extend her a welcome to Britain – John and Penny Mortimer befriended her, and Jeremy Hutchinson and Michael Foot bonded with her immediately. Of my own generation, the late Bernard Simons, the wonderful solicitor who helped to found the first HIV/AIDS charity (the Terrence Higgins Trust) was first to give his seal of approval – he owned a large house in Highgate which was shared, in various combinations, by Christopher Hitchens, Alan Rusbridger, Jeananne Crowley and other creative achievers. I would be there late on some Saturday nights, in Bernie’s kitchen-cum-lounge room, comforting MPs whose depr
edations had just been disclosed in the early edition of News of the World. After Bernie’s early death his role was taken by Mark Stephens, the mercurial litigator who shared my sense of mischief (although never at his clients’ expense). As with Bernie, I entrusted American and Australian clients to him, in the belief they would be better (and less expensively) served than by stuffed-shirt solicitors in the big City firms.
Kathy and I were, nonetheless, regarded as an odd couple, at least by the gossip columnists, and news of our dinner parties was routinely telegraphed. I suppose the ultimate North London gathering was one we held at our first house in Islington for Tony and Cherie Blair for Labour’s new leader to meet some of our friends – John Mortimer, Salman Rushdie, Billy Connolly, Pamela Stephenson and Ronnie Dworkin, the Oxford professor of jurisprudence, whose wife, Betsy (a lecturer in social policy) was the only one who knew how to make a hollandaise sauce for the salmon. When we moved to Swiss Cottage, at dinners I played the role of wine waiter, despite my experience at a party thrown by Nicole Kidman of taking a glass of champagne proffered by a small chap whom I assumed was a hired waiter – I just did not recognise Tom Cruise.
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