The Collected Stories of Rumpole

by John Mortimer

  There is no point in writing your memoirs unless you are prepared to be completely candid, and I must confess that, in the course of a long life, I have been in love on several occasions. I am sure that I loved Miss Porter, the shy and nervous, but at times liberated daughter of Septimus Porter, my Oxford tutor in Roman Law. In fact we were engaged to be married, but the engagement had to be broken off because of Miss Porter’s early death. I often think about her, and of the different course my home life might have taken, for Miss Porter was in no way a girl born to command, or expect, implicit obedience. During my service with the ground staff of the RAF. I undoubtedly became helplessly smitten with the charms of an extremely warmhearted and gallant officer in the WAAFs by the name of Miss Bobby O’Keefe, but I was no match for the wings of a Pilot Officer, as appeared on the chest of a certain Sam ‘Three-Fingers’ Dogherty. During my conduct of a case, which I shall describe in a later chapter which I have called ‘Rumpole and the Alternative Society’, I once again felt a hopeless and almost feverish stirring of passion for a young woman who was determined to talk her way into Holloway Prison. My relationship with Hilda Wystan was rather different.

  To begin with, she seemed part of life in Chambers. She was always interested in the law and ambitious, first for her widowed father, and then, when he proved himself unlikely Lord Chancellor material, for me. She often dropped in for tea on her way home from shopping, and Wystan used to invite me in for a cup. One year I was detailed off to be her partner at an Inns of Court ball. There it became clear to me that I was expected to marry Hilda; it seemed a step in my career like getting a brief in the Court of Appeal, or doing a murder. When she proposed to me, as she did over a glass of claret cup after an energetic waltz, Hilda made it clear that, when old Wystan finally retired, she expected to see me Head of Chambers. I, who have never felt at a loss for a word in Court, found absolutely nothing to say. In that silence the matter was concluded.

  So now you must picture Hilda and me twenty-five years later, with a son at that same east coast public school which I just managed to afford from the fruits of crime, in our matrimonial home at 25B Froxbury Court, Gloucester Road. (A mansion flat is a misleading description of that cavernous and underheated area which Hilda devotes so much of her energy to keeping shipshape, not to say Bristol fashion.) We were having breakfast, and, between bites of toast, I was reading my brief for that day, an Old Bailey trial of the sixteen-year-old Jim Timson charged with robbery with violence, he having allegedly taken part in a wage snatch on a couple of elderly butchers: an escapade planned in the playground of the local comprehensive. As so often happens, the poet Wordsworth, that old sheep of the Lake District, sprang immediately to mind, and I gave tongue to his lines, well knowing that they must only serve to irritate She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  ‘Trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home;/Heaven lies about us in our infancy!’

  I looked at Hilda. She was impassively demolishing a boiled egg. I also noticed that she was wearing a hat, as if prepared to set out upon some expedition. I decided to give her a little more Wordsworth, prompted by my reading the story of the boy Timson.

  ‘Shades of the prison house begin to close/Upon the growing boy.’

  Hilda spoke at last.

  ‘Rumpole, you’re not talking about your son, I hope. You’re never referring to Nick …’

  ‘Shades of the prison house begin to close? Not round our son, of course. Not round Nick. Shades of the public school have grown round him, the thousand-quid-a-year remand home.’

  Hilda always thought it indelicate to refer to the subject of school fees, as if being at Mulstead were a kind of unsolicited honour for Nick. She became increasingly businesslike.

  ‘He’s breaking up this morning.’

  ‘Shades of the prison house begin to open up for the holidays.’

  ‘Nick has to be met at 11.15 at Liverpool Street and given lunch. When he went back to school you promised him a show. You haven’t forgotten?’

  Hilda was clearing away the plates rapidly. To tell the truth I had forgotten the date of Nick’s holidays; but I let her assume I had a long planned treat laid on for him.

  ‘Of course I haven’t forgotten. The only show I can offer him is a robbery with violence in Number 2 Court at the Old Bailey. I wish I could lay on a murder. Nick’s always so enjoyed my murders.’

  It was true. On one distant half term Nick had sat in on the ‘Peckham Billiard Hall Stabbing’, and enjoyed it a great deal more than Treasure Island.

  ‘I must fly! Daddy gets so crotchety if anyone’s late. And he does love his visits.’

  Hilda removed my half-empty coffee cup.

  ‘Our father which art in Horsham. Give my respects to the old sweetheart.’

  It had also slipped my mind that old C. H. Wystan was laid up with a dicky ticker in Horsham General Hospital. The hat was, no doubt, a clue I should have followed. Hilda usually goes shopping in a headscarf. By now she was at the door, and looking disapproving.

  ‘ “Old sweetheart” is hardly how you used to talk of the Head of your Chambers.’

  ‘Somehow I can never remember to call the Head of my Chambers “Daddy”.’

  The door was open. Hilda was making a slow and effective exit.

  ‘Tell Nick I’ll be back in good time to get his supper.’

  ‘Your wish is my command!’ I muttered in my best imitation of a slave out of Chu Chin Chow. She chose to ignore it.

  ‘And try not to leave the kitchen looking as though it’s been hit by a bomb.’

  ‘I hear, oh Master of the Blue Horizons.’ I said this with a little more confidence, as she had by now started off on her errand of mercy, and I added, for good measure, ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’.

  I had finished my breakfast, and was already thinking how much easier life with the Old Bailey judge was than marriage.

  Soon after I finished my breakfast with Hilda, and made plans to meet my son at the start of his holidays from school, Fred Timson, star of a dozen Court appearances, was seeing his son in the cells under the Old Bailey as the result of a specially arranged visit. I know he brought the boy his best jacket, which his mother had taken specially to the cleaners, and insisted on his putting on a tie. I imagine he told him that they had the best ‘brief’ in the business to defend him, Mr Rumpole having always done wonders for the Timson family. I know that Fred told young Jim to stand up straight in the witness-box and remember to call the Judge ‘my Lord’ and not show his ignorance by coming out with any gaffe such as ‘your Honour’, or ‘Sir’. The world, that day, was full of fathers showing appropriate and paternal concern.

  The robbery with which Jim Timson was charged was an exceedingly simple one. At about 7 p.m. one Friday evening, the date being 16 September, the two elderly Brixton butchers, Mr Cadwallader and Mr Lewis Stein, closed their shop in Bombay Road and walked with their week’s takings round the corner to a narrow alley-way known as Green’s Passage, where their grey Austin van was parked. When they got to the van they found that the front tyres had been deflated. They stooped to inspect the wheels and, as they did so, they were attacked by a number of boys, some armed with knives and one flourishing a cricket stump. Luckily, neither of the butchers was hurt, but the attaché case containing their money was snatched.

  Chief Inspector ‘Persil’ White, the old darling in whose territory this outrage had been committed, arrested Jim Timson. All the other boys got clean away, but no doubt because he came from a family well known, indeed almost embarrassingly familiar, to the Chief Inspector, and because of certain rumours in the school playground, he was charged and put on an identity parade. The butchers totally failed to identify him; but, when he was in the Remand Centre, young Jim, according to the evidence, had boasted to another boy of having ‘done the butchers’.

  As I thought about this case on my way to the Temple that morning, it occured to me that Jim Timson was a year younger than my son, but that he had got a step furthe
r than Nick in following his father’s profession. I had always hoped Nick would go into the law, and, as I say, he seemed to thoroughly enjoy my murders.

  In the clerk’s room in Chambers Albert was handing out the work for the day: rather as a trainer sends his string of horses out on the gallops. I looked round the familiar faces, my friend George Frobisher, who is an old sweetheart but an absolutely hopeless advocate (he can’t ask for costs without writing down what he’s going to say), was being fobbed off with a nuisance at Kingston County Court. Young Erskine-Brown, who wears striped shirts and what I believe are known as ‘Chelsea Boots’, was turning up his well-bred nose at an indecent assault at Lambeth (a job I’d have bought Albert a double claret in Pommeroy’s for at his age) and saying he would prefer a little civil work, adding that he was sick to death of crime.

  I have very little patience with Erskine-Brown.

  ‘A person who is tired of crime,’ I told him quite candidly, ‘is tired of life.’

  ‘Your Dangerous and Careless at Clerkenwell is on the mantelpiece, Mr Hoskins,’ Albert said.

  Hoskins is a gloomy fellow with four daughters; he’s always lurking about our clerk’s room looking for cheques. As I’ve told him often enough crime doesn’t pay, or at any rate not for a very long time.

  When a young man called MacLay had asked in vain for a brief I invited him to take a note for me down at the Old Bailey. At least he’d get a wig on and not spend a miserable day unemployed in Chambers. Our oldest member, Uncle Tom (very few of us remember that his name is T. C. Rowley) also asked Albert if there were any briefs for him, not in the least expecting to find one. To my certain knowledge, Uncle Tom hasn’t appeared in Court for fifteen years, when he managed to lose an undefended divorce case, but, as he lives with a widowed sister, a lady of such reputed ferocity that she makes She Who Must Be Obeyed sound like Mrs Tiggywinkle, he spends most of his time in Chambers. He looks remarkably well for 78.

  ‘You aren’t actually expecting a brief, Uncle Tom, are you?’ Erskine-Brown asked. I can’t like Erskine-Brown.

  ‘Time was,’ Uncle Tom started one of his reminiscences of life in our Chambers. ‘Time was when I had more briefs in my corner of the mantelpiece, Erskine-Brown, than you’ve seen in the whole of your short career at the Bar. Now,’ he was opening a brown envelope, ‘I only get invitations to insure my life. It’s a little late for that.’

  Albert told me that the robbery was not before 11.30 before Mr Justice Everglade in Number 1 Court. He also told me who was prosecuting, none other than the tall, elegant figure with the silk handkerchief and gold wristwatch, leaning against the mantelpiece and negligently reading a large cheque from the Director of Public Prosecutions, Guthrie Featherstone, MP. He removed the silk handkerchief, dabbed the end of his nose and his small moustache and asked in that voice which comes over so charmingly, saying nothing much about any important topic of the day in ‘World at One’.

  ‘Agin me, Rumpole? Are you agin me?’ He covered a slight yawn with the handkerchief before returning it to his breast pocket. ‘Just come from an all-night sitting down at the House. I don’t suppose your robbery’ll be much of a worry.’

  ‘Only, possibly, to young Jim Timson,’ I told him, and then gave Albert his orders for the day. ‘Mrs Rumpole’s gone down to see her father in Horsham.’

  ‘How is Wystan? No better, is he?’ Uncle Tom sounded as gently pleased as all old men do when they hear news of illness in others.

  ‘Much the same, Uncle Tom, thank you. And Young Nick. My son …’

  ‘Master Nick?’ Albert had always been fond of Nick, and looked forward to putting him through his paces when the time came for him to join our stable in Chambers.

  ‘He’s breaking up today. So he’ll need meeting at Liverpool Street. Then he can watch a bit of the robbery.’

  ‘We’re going to have your son in the audience? I’d better be brilliant.’ Guthrie Featherstone now moved from the fireplace.

  ‘You needn’t bother, old darling. It’s his Dad he comes to see.’

  ‘Oh, touché, Rumpole! Distinctement touché!’

  Featherstone talks like that. Then he invited me to walk down to the Bailey with him. Apparently he was still capable of movement and didn’t need a stretcher, even after a sleepless night with the Gas Mains Enabling Bill, or whatever it was.

  We walked together down Fleet Street and into Ludgate Circus, Featherstone wearing his overcoat with the velvet collar and little round bowler hat, I puffing a small cigar and with my old mac flapping in the wind; I discovered that the gentleman beside me was quietly quizzing me about my career at the Bar.

  ‘You’ve been at this game a long while, Rumpole,’ Featherstone announced. I didn’t disagree with him, and then he went on.

  ‘You never thought of taking silk?’

  ‘Rumpole, QC?’ I almost burst out laughing. ‘Not on your Nelly. Rumpole “Queer Customer”. That’s what they’d be bound to call me.’

  ‘I’m sure you could, with your seniority.’ I had no idea then, of exactly what this Featherstone was after. I gave him my view of QCs in general.

  ‘Perhaps, if I played golf with the right judges, or put up for Parliament, they might make me an artificial silk, or, at any rate, a nylon.’ It was at that point I realized I had put up a bit of a black. ‘Sorry. I forgot. You did put up for Parliament.’

  ‘Yes. You never thought of Rumpole, QC?’ Featherstone had apparently taken no offence.

  ‘Never,’ I told him. ‘I have the honour to be an Old Bailey Hack! That’s quite enough for me.’

  At which point we turned up into Newgate Street and there it was in all its glory, touched by a hint of early spring sunshine, the Old Bailey, a stately Law Court, decreed by the City Fathers, an Edwardian palace, with an extensive modern extension to deal with the increase in human fallibility. There was the Dome and the Blindfold Lady. Well, it’s much better she doesn’t see all that’s going on. That, in fact, was our English version of the Palais de Justice, complete with murals, marble statues and underground accommodation for some of the choicest villains in London.

  Terrible things go on down the Bailey – horrifying things. Why is it I never go in the revolving door without a thrill of pleasure, a slight tremble of excitement? Why does it seem a much jollier place than my flat in Gloucester Road under the strict rule of She Who Must Be Obeyed? These are questions which may only be partly answered in the course of these memoirs.

  At the time when I was waving a cheerful umbrella at Harry, the policeman in the revolving door of the Old Bailey extension, my wife Hilda was at her Daddy’s bedside at the Horsham General arranging her dozen early daffs and gently probing, so she told me that evening, on the subject of his future, and mine.

  ‘I’ll have to give up, you know. I can’t go on forever. Crocked up, I’m afraid,’ said Wystan.

  ‘Nonsense, Daddy. You’ll go on for years.’

  I imagine Hilda did her best to sound bracing, whilst putting the daffs firmly in their place.

  ‘No, Hilda. No. They’ll have to start looking for another Head of Chambers.’

  This gave Hilda her opportunity. ‘Rumpole’s the senior man. Apart from Uncle Tom and he doesn’t really practise nowadays.’

  ‘Your husband the senior man.’ Wystan looked back on a singularly uneventful life. ‘How time flies! I recall when he was the junior man. My pupil.’

  ‘You said he was the best youngster on bloodstains you’d ever known.’ Hilda was doing her best for me.

  ‘Rumpole! Yes, your husband was pretty good on bloodstains. Shaky, though, on the law of landlord and tenant. What sort of practice has Rumpole now?’

  ‘I believe … Today it’s the Old Bailey.’ Hilda was plumping pillows, doing her best to sound casual. And her father showed no particular enthusiasm for my place of work.

  ‘It’s always the Old Bailey, isn’t it?’

  ‘Most of the time. Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘Not a frightfully good
address, the Old Bailey. Not exactly the SW1 of the legal profession.’

  Sensing that Daddy would have thought better of me if I’d been in the Court of Appeal or the Chancery Division, Hilda told me she thought of a masterstroke.

  ‘Oh, Rumpole only went down to the Bailey because it’s a family he knows. It seems they’ve got a young boy in trouble.’

  This appealed to Daddy, he gave one of his bleak smiles which amount to no more than a brief withdrawal of lips from the dentures.

  ‘Son gone wrong?’ he said. ‘Very sad that. Especially if he comes of a really good family.’

  That really good family, the Timsons, was out in force and waiting outside Number 1 Court by the time I had got on the fancy dress, yellowing horsehair wig, gown become more than a trifle tattered over the years and bands round the neck that Albert ought to have sent to the laundry after last week’s death by dangerous driving. As I looked at the Timson clan assembled, I thought the best thing about them was the amount of work of a criminal nature they had brought into Chambers. They were all dressed for the occasion, the men in dark blazers, suede shoes and grey flannels; the ladies in tight-fitting suits, high heels and elaborately piled hairdos. I had never seen so many ex-clients together at one time.

  ‘Mr Rumpole.’

  ‘Ah, Bernard! You’re instructing me.’

  Mr Bernard, the solicitor, was a thirtyish, perpetually smiling man in a pinstriped suit. He regarded criminals with something of the naive fervour with which young girls think of popular entertainers. Had I known the expression at the time, I would have called him a grafters’ ‘groupie’.