This Mortal Boy

by Fiona Kidman

  On the morning of August the fifth, he had received a letter from the New Zealand High Commissioner in London, Clifton Webb. It was an urgent communication, in which Webb outlined an approach he had just received from a Mr Woods, the secretary of the office of the Government of Northern Ireland’s agent in London. He had come expressly at the request of Mr Warnock, the Attorney-General in Belfast, asking about legal assistance for Albert Lawrence Black, accused of a murder in Auckland. It seemed that Black’s parents lived in his constituency. The mother was clearly in an agitated state.

  The telegram had come late in the day when Kathleen was returning home from work at the Jennymount Mill. In the distance, she saw the telegram boy lean his bike against the fence, and for a moment she thought, perhaps Albert is about to spring a surprise on us and come home. But the instant the boy turned around she guessed from the look on his face that it was something awful. Her hand flew to her mouth. It was from a government official on the far side of the world. Regret to advise. Like people got when men died at war.

  At first she thought, as she read it, it must be some sort of mistake, that his name had got mixed up with that of someone else. The boy on the bike pedalled away as fast as he could, not wanting to be caught up in the drama, knowing when people broke down and wailed and cried. She wasn’t going to do that, not here in the street where people knew that a telegram meant something momentous had happened. But her hand had flown to her mouth in an exclamation of horror.

  She let herself into the house and re-read the pencilled message. Someone was dead all right. But not her son. Albert was in prison. There was a number to ring, only she didn’t have a phone. Soon the post office would be closed. She had to wait for Bert to come home. Oh, she didn’t know what to do. The front room was full of late-summer afternoon light, shadows of evening poking themselves through the window. Like cobwebs. Like some strange dust settling in the air. She could hardly breathe. She clung to the table to stop herself falling in a faint.

  When Bert finally did arrive it was too late to make the call that night. Her husband had been full of rage, striding around the house. ‘The crazy little shite, what’s he done?’ he shouted, and slammed his fist beside his plate so that his dinner fell off. Not that they wanted to eat. And there was Daniel to consider. He had been sent upstairs. Because Kathleen had said, when she had time to draw breath, that as it surely could not be true, they should keep it to themselves and not go upsetting everybody with this news, not even Daniel. As for her and Bert, they would hear more about it in the morning when they got to phone the authorities in New Zealand. Bert had gone off out, cursing under his breath, just when she needed him most, and she knew that when he came in it would be late, and he would have taken drink.

  It would be down to her, she thought. She had yet to work out a plan for what to do, but straight away she decided that if there was a shred of truth in the contents of the telegram she would fly to her boy’s side, she must be there with him, make the authorities understand what a good son he was, and a sweet-natured brother, and, oh, that there was no better young man than Albert.

  Very early in the morning she and Bert made their way to the police station, where they explained their plight and got permission to make a phone call. They couldn’t think of anywhere else to go where there might be a telephone they could use at that hour. The post office didn’t open until later, too late in the day to ring a government department in New Zealand. Day and night were back to front on opposite sides of the world. It took a long time to find someone to talk to in New Zealand, where people were packing up to go home from their jobs. Kathleen was put from one department to another and at last she got to speak to the superintendent of the jail where they were holding Albert, and it became clear that the telegram’s truth was there in its words. Albert was arrested on the charge of murder.

  ‘It can’t be right,’ Kathleen said to the man on the other end. ‘He wouldn’t do a thing like that. He must have been provoked something terrible. Or he was in danger. That must have been it.’

  ‘I can’t say, Mrs Black. I’m sorry. It will be up to the courts to decide how it happened. Have you got a message you’d like passed on to your son?’ The man, who said his name was Horace Haywood, sounded kind, even sympathetic in an odd sort of way. That was a start.

  ‘Just tell him, oh, I’m sorry, I’m having a few tears here and all, you understand. Just tell him that I love him and that I’m planning to fly to New Zealand.’ A grand plan, indeed, but she could be there in less than a week, not a month.

  ‘And how do you plan to get the money for a trip away to New Zealand?’ Bert said, back outside on the street. All of the housekeeping money for the week had been handed over to pay for the phone calls. There wasn’t a penny left, and here she was talking a hundred pounds or more.

  ‘Perhaps you could ask that mother of yours,’ Kathleen said. She saw his hands begin to tremble. Time to back off. His mother had never been keen on her, and as for his father, who had wanted to turn their son into a British gentleman, they hardly spoke from the day she met him until he died. He couldn’t forgive his son for marrying one of the girls off his factory floor, not even when his factory was bombed out in the Blitz and he wasn’t an owner anymore.

  ‘There’s no money left, you know that. He left my mother skint.’ Perhaps his sister got some of the money, he had no idea. Kathleen had heard all this before. In some obscure way, he saw her to blame for this state of affairs.

  ‘I’m going straight to Parliament to see Mr Warnock,’ Kathleen said. ‘Are you coming with me or not?’ The Right Honourable Edmond Warnock had been a member of St Anne’s, the cathedral church where they had married.

  Bert, frowsy and unshaven, looked at her and shook his head. ‘You can do better than me, lass,’ he said. The way he said it, she knew he was still holding on to his anger, that there was shame ahead for them, and no knowing what was going to happen.

  Things would go on like that, back and forth over the next weeks, Bert exasperated and bitter that they had been put in this position, then remorseful that she was shouldering the burden while he stood by helpless. What was a man to do?

  Warnock had received her kindly in his office. He sat her down and had his secretary make her a cup of tea while her tears spilled down over her handbag. This was a grave matter and he would do the best for her he could. There, there, Mrs Black, they get things wrong out there in the colonies, he had murmured. Well, not a colony exactly, but certainly it was a place with a different culture to their own, from all he had heard. Indeed, and he would be getting in touch with the High Commission in London that very day. My people will talk to their people, and who knows but by the end of the week they might have it all sorted out. Money to go to New Zealand, well, that was another matter. Perhaps if she and Mr Black had friends that could help out? No? Well, perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary.

  A letter arrived for her within days. ‘Dear Mrs Black, I’m afraid I don’t have very good news for you. I’m advised that the Attorney-General in New Zealand, Mr Marshall, has asked what money you might be able to raise for your son’s defence. I know from our conversation that it is unlikely that you will be able to raise the necessary sum, which I anticipate will be several hundred pounds.’

  ‘Several hundred pounds?’ Kathleen said. ‘They want us to pay for his defence?’ Her face was bleak. ‘Bert,’ she said, ‘they want our money and we haven’t got even enough to fly to New Zealand.’

  ‘We need to think on it,’ was all he said.

  Their trouble was supposed to be a secret, but mysterious envelopes of money appeared, poked through the letter slot in the door. She supposed that Bert had talked about it while in his cups. Ninety pounds.

  ‘You see,’ Bert said, ‘we have friends after all.’

  ‘You have done this for me?’

  ‘I’ve placed a curse on our children,’ he said, beginning to weep. ‘We’ve lost one child, not another.’

  ‘That’s no
nsense,’ she said, brisk as she could.

  ‘You need to be with our son. That’s still not enough to get you there, but I’m working on it.’

  ‘I’ll let Mr Warnock know that we’re making progress,’ Kathleen said, folding the money, the precious pounds, into a neat bundle and putting a rubber band around them. She would put them in her jewel box, she said. They would be the only thing in the musty little box her mother had given her for her sixteenth birthday. The jewels, a necklace made of amber beads that had been her grannie’s, and a pair of pearl drop earrings she had saved for when she first went to work at the mill, had stayed in the pawn shop for a long time now. Perhaps they had been sold. ‘When I can talk to Albert, and to his lawyers, God bless them, they will see that there has to be some explanation for all this.’

  Though they observe the ritual courtesies and sit at the same Cabinet table of the National Party that governs New Zealand, it could never be said that Ralph Hanan and the Attorney-General are friends. Hanan, from the deep south, the Minister of Health, is a small man with panda-like circles around his eyes and breathing that rasps slightly when he is under stress, the result, it is believed, of his war service in North Africa: at the battle of Minqar Qaim he had had a near-death experience. His other portfolio is that of Minister of Immigration, and it is on account of this responsibility that he arrives at Jack Marshall’s door.

  ‘I’ve been hearing about this boy, Black,’ he says, ‘the one that’s been involved in a stabbing. He’s from Northern Ireland.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Hanan, that’s correct.’

  ‘I’ve heard on the grapevine that the judge says he should never have come to this country, that we don’t want people like him. Is it true?’

  ‘Mr Hanan, you do yourself a disservice. That’s pure conjecture.’

  ‘Jack, don’t Mr Hanan me, is it true, or not?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘This boy stands to go the way of Foster and the others,’ Hanan says. Frederick Foster, an Englishman, had been hanged the previous month for shooting his girlfriend in an Auckland milk bar. He had gone to his death protesting his innocence. His mother had come to New Zealand to plead his case, and her desperate pleas had been all over the newspapers. So, too, was an account of her visit to see Jack Marshall.

  ‘Murderers, all of them. And, frankly, if you want my opinion, we could do without these deplorable migrants. You might think about how we could more effectively screen their arrival in New Zealand. The youth who was killed didn’t get the benefit of a trial. At least Black gets that. This appears to be a premeditated murder.’

  ‘You don’t know the history or circumstance of this incident. You can’t pre-judge it.’

  ‘Sometimes I think you chose the wrong party, Ralph. All these liberal left-wing views of yours.’

  ‘You reintroduced the death penalty. I opposed the legislation.’

  ‘I’ve no wish to re-litigate the matter now, Ralph.’ Marshall picks up a file and tidies the papers into a neat pile, placing a blue glass paperweight on top of them. It catches a shaft of light and turns into a burning blue orb. ‘We’ll get to the truth in due course. The trial is set down for the eighteenth of October.’

  ‘The mother is worried about his defence. They’re poor people, they have nothing to send him.’

  ‘Oh yes, I gather from Cliff Webb that they’re crying poverty. Warnock’s been on his back about getting aid for them.’

  ‘Surely Mr Warnock’s recommendation must carry some weight?’

  ‘Oh, Warnock. Well, you know he makes mistakes. They say he could have prevented the Blitz. He didn’t believe the Germans could strike that far — he was secretary to the Home Secretary at the time. No precautions taken to provide safe shelter. The Germans toasted them.’

  ‘Jack, that is not the issue now.’

  ‘Look, Black’s got lawyers. Buchanan, the chap Black asked for from the duty list roster, and Mr Pearson, will act as senior counsel. I’m told they’re prepared to rely on being granted a détente certificate under the Poor Prisoners Defence Regulations of 1934. Both Buchanan and Pearson are content to carry on.’

  ‘His mother is planning to come out to New Zealand.’

  ‘I’ve heard that, too. And they’re crying poor. A little ironic, don’t you think? Don’t let it worry you, Ralph. You won’t have to deal with her and neither will I. Cliff has already seen to it.’ He extracts a handwritten note from the file, shifting the paperweight back and forth so that its dazzling light reflects off the surfaces in the room, dancing this way and that, and hands the paper across the desk.

  Hanan sits looking at it for much longer than it takes to read. ‘I have done my best to protect you from a second interview with a mother of a murderer and hope my efforts will be successful. I hope that I have not gone too far. Beautiful summer weather here. Best regards, Cliff.’ His voice is stunned when he speaks. ‘You have told her she can’t come to New Zealand?’

  Marshall shuffles through his papers again. ‘Cliff and I have talked it over. I’ve told him to let Warnock know there’ll be no difficulty in finding a prima facie case. This is my last word on the matter. I’ve written this to him.’ He reads aloud from a letter copied in carbon: ‘In these circumstances I can only endorse the view which you have taken about the advisability of Mrs Black, the mother of the accused, coming to New Zealand. One cannot, of course, say that she should not come — that is a decision she’s free to make for herself. But one can say that the assistance Black will receive from counsel, and the consideration which will be given to this case in the event of his being found guilty, will not be increased or reduced by Mrs Black coming to New Zealand. She may wish to come for personal reasons, but she would have no grounds for feeling that if she didn’t come she may have failed to do anything she could have to assist her son so far as his trial is concerned.’

  ‘You bastard.’

  ‘Mr Hanan. Language. Not in my presence.’ That is a difference between them — Hanan says what he thinks, and for the most part he is liked the better for it. But Marshall has guile on his side, and an authority that he likes to command.

  ‘In other words, it has been spelled out to her that she is not welcome in this country?’

  ‘I’m not privy to the exact conversation that has taken place between Mr Warnock and Mrs Black.’

  ‘She knows you won’t see her.’

  ‘As Mr Webb suggests, one murderer’s mother is enough.’

  ‘So there’s no point in me going to Auckland,’ Kathleen says. ‘They won’t give me an audience. There’s no guarantee I’ll even get to see our Albert.’ It is close to midnight. The letter from the New Zealand High Commissioner lies in front of her. She has read it twenty times since Warnock handed it to her in his office earlier in the day. He was sorry, he’d said, he had done all he could.

  ‘The superintendent of the prison sounded a decent man when we spoke to him,’ Bert says. ‘You said that yourself.’ Up until now he has sat quietly watching her, his face closed so that she doesn’t know what he is thinking.

  ‘But he has to take orders from his superiors. Mr Warnock made it quite clear, they’re going to do everything they can to stop me. He told me the Attorney-General in New Zealand said he’d had too many murderers’ mothers coming pleading for their sons’ lives. They don’t know that Albert is a murderer. I said to Mr Warnock, could Albert swing for this? And he said yes, yes, he could. They’re a very moral country, he says.’

  ‘Moral? Moral, they say? They still have savages running round.’

  ‘The ninety pounds, Bert. That money doesn’t belong to us.’

  ‘It was donated fair and square,’ Bert says. ‘For our cause. For Albert. We can give the money for his defence. Perhaps that will make them take notice of us.’

  She nods then. ‘We should go up to bed,’ she says.

  Drawing a long breath as they stand, she begins to sing against his ear. They are a couple who sing often to each other, as others
speak, a running dialogue in song that has been silenced since the day they first heard the news.

  Now the summer is in prime,

  Wi’ the flow’rs richly blooming,

  An’ the wild mountain thyme

  A’ the moorlands perfuming.

  To our dear native scenes

  Let us journey together,

  Where glad innocence reigns

  Let us go, Lassie, go.

  A melody they have sung a hundred times together, one her Scottish father used to sing to her mother and that she taught to Bert when they were courting, a song he took up readily, as if he already knew that love and grief went hand in hand. Kathleen has sung this to the children at nights as she put them to bed, and it’s the one she sang the night their little sweet William died in her arms, though he was a boy. She had been surprised that Bert was a man who sang the way he did, because he came from such a strait-laced family who had little music in their hearts, but he had been in a choir at school in England and it seemed like melody just stuck to him. As for her, she comes from a family of singers, it’s as natural as breathing.

  They stand swaying backwards and forwards.

  Let us journey together,

  Where glad innocence reigns