CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE Read online

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  Clinging to the Wreckage

  ‘One of Britain’s best-loved writers … [A] special blend of wit, humanity and nostalgic English melancholy’

  Charles Spencer, The Times

  ‘A writer with a Dickensian gift for character and rich, robust humour’ Daily Mail

  ‘There are an enormous number of people whose lives he made happier and better by his writing’ Melvyn Bragg, Guardian

  ‘A great storyteller’ Robert McCrum, Observer

  ‘Only Shakespeare or Dickens could have done him justice in print; only they could have unsentimentally invoked his strain of English kindness and ebullient good nature’ Sebastian Faulks

  ‘One of Britain’s greatest life-enhancers … a superb example to us all’ Daily Telegraph

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born in 1923, John Mortimer was a barrister, dramatist and novelist. After working in the Crown Film Unit during the Second World War, he wrote a number of novels before simultaneously following two highly successful careers as a criminal barrister and as a playwright. His most famous play, A Voyage Round My Father, has been filmed and is frequently revived. In the 1970s he invented Horace Rumpole, a character who, ‘like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal’ (P. D. James). In the 1980s he returned to novel-writing with Paradise Postponed. He also wrote four volumes of memoir, including the bestselling Clinging to the Wreckage. John Mortimer was knighted in 1998 for his services to the arts. For many years he lived in a house in the Chilterns which had been built by his father, also a barrister. Sir John died in 2009, aged eighty-five.

  Valerie Grove writes for The Times. She is the author of four highly acclaimed biographies, of the writers Dodie Smith and Laurie Lee, the children’s publisher Kaye Webb, and John Mortimer. Her book A Voyage Round John Mortimer is published by Penguin.

  JOHN MORTIMER

  Clinging to the Wreckage

  A Part of Life

  with an Introduction by Valerie Grove

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  For Penny and Sally, Jeremy and

  Emily Mortimer, the Survivors

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1982

  First published in the USA by Ticknor & Fields 1982

  Published in Penguin Books 1983

  Published in Penguin Classics 2010

  Copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 1998

  Introduction copyright © Valerie Grove, 2010

  All rights reserved

  The words from ‘It’s Foolish But It’s Fun’ reproduced on page 46 are © United Artists Music; the words from ‘St James’s Infirmary’ on page 134 are © 1930 Mills Music Inc., New York, reproduced by kind permission of Belwin-Mills Music Ltd, 250 Purley Way, Croydon, Surrey, England.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195983-2

  Contents

  Introduction

  Illustrations

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Introduction

  ‘Love, the law, writing … I don’t know which has occupied more of my time. Sometimes the three seem to have become inexplicably intertwined.’ John Mortimer spoke these words in 1978, in a With Great Pleasure programme, recorded for Radio 4 with a live audience at the little Kenton Theatre in Henley, his home town. The favourite poems and anecdotes in that programme soon became the basis for ‘An Evening with John Mortimer’, or ‘Mortimer’s Miscellany’, a show he performed for the rest of his life, in venues ranging from village halls to the Sydney Opera House. His talent to amuse – in plays, novels and in the law courts – found its outlet in anecdotes. He was a natural raconteur with a perfect sense of comic timing. The mélange of material embraced stories about his blind father (a distinguished divorce barrister) and his own tales from the courtroom, laced with his favourite poems recited by a rota of elegant actresses. Even after hundreds of performances (up to his eighty-second year when he packed the King’s Head in Islington, from a wheelchair, eight times a week), audiences never tired of hearing his stories, just as he never tired of telling them.

  So when he embarked on his memoirs, he already knew he could deploy the anecdotal approach, combining a prodigious memory with a cavalier attitude to inconvenient facts. Reneging on earlier promises to write his autobiography, in 1979 he accepted the blandishments of George Weidenfeld to look back on his crowded life as his sixtieth birthday approached.

  This was already a busy year. He had reached a pinnacle of productivity and professional repute, still able to style himself the only practising QC who was also a successful playwright, novelist and screenwriter. He was married to a much younger second wife, ‘Penny Two’, with an adored nine-year-old daughter, Emily, and living in Turville Heath Cottage, the house his father had built, with its vast and beautiful garden, an ideal scene for their family gatherings and show business parties. He had created his most enduringly memorable character for a 1975 BBC Play for Today: Horace Rumpole, the lovable, literary defence barrister who could sum up all John felt about the law. Rumpole instantly captured the affection of the public, and became, like Sherlock Holmes for Conan Doyle or Maigret for Georges Simenon, John Mortimer’s nest-egg: a character who would keep him in his old age.

  He had recently completed a second Rumpole series, and a dramatized six-part life of Shakespeare for ITV. He was about to start writing a monthly interview for the Sunday Times, a formula at which he proved a master. He would spend an agreeable hour or two with Graham Greene, Malcolm Muggeridge, Enoch Powell, David Hockney, Laurence Olivier or Mic
k Jagger – without the tiresome aids of tape-recorder or shorthand notes – and present a perfect summation of each life, mostly in dialogue. Lord Denning, the aged judge, told him he had once thought of standing for Parliament. Labour or Conservative? John asked. ‘Oh, I never got round to thinking about that,’ replied Denning.

  He had also written, at speed, a screenplay of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, for Granada TV. The producers asked him to rewrite the six episodes. This was a professional blow. His rewrites, in the spring of 1979, were cursory. Then an eleven-week technicians’ strike delayed the whole production. When work resumed, Brideshead had become a much bigger beast, a thirteen-part series: a new script was crafted by another writer, directly from the dialogue in Waugh’s novel. Although his script was jettisoned, John’s name remained on the credits as sole writer, for contractual reasons with the Waugh estate. In 1981, Brideshead Revisited was watched by 11 million viewers. It became the most revered screen adaptation of the era, garnering every award and accolade. John went through the publicity interviews, unable to acknowledge that the script was not in fact his work. Publicly he was feted and lauded; privately he knew that the adulation was, in this instance, misplaced.

  So when he started on this, the first (and best) of his five autobiographical books, he was liberated. Here was a story he could tell in his own voice: he could forget about producers, directors, actors, technicians; he could embellish, exaggerate, make everything sharper and funnier. There is a school of English memoir in which the protagonist portrays himself as a hapless and often bewildered onlooker, to whom stuff happens. Clinging to the Wreckage conforms to that tradition. Being an only child, born in Hampstead in 1923, packed off to an eccentric prep school, then an inappropriate public school, followed by wartime Oxford, first fumblings of romance, and the mysterious world of work, marriage and family life: all is recounted with an engaging air of bafflement. There would be gaps in the narrative: John would never write about the small scandal that ended his Oxford days, when he was ‘shaking off the carapace of schoolboy homosexuality’. Clinging to the Wreckage would carry the subtitle A Part of Life, indicating an incomplete and partial account, ending at the age of fifty.

  He could skim lightly through his first marriage, for instance. At the age of twenty-four he had fallen in love with a sharp, clever, captivatingly beautiful fellow novelist, Penelope Dimont, five years his senior, who already had three daughters – two by her husband, one by a lover – and was now pregnant with a fourth daughter by another lover. Penelope’s divorce – after going through the charade of providing evidence of adultery, colluding with a private detective – was bound to embarrass Mortimer senior, doyen of the divorce courts. But it made a very good story for John and he later wrote a play about it. They married in 1949, shortly after John had been called to the Bar, and also published his first novel, while Penelope published her second. Their lively domestic life in Swiss Cottage, eventually with six children (their own daughter Sally was born in 1950, their son Jeremy in 1955) when John rose at dawn to produce a novel a year, and struggled to get to court on time daily, all proved excellent memoir fodder. By 1958 ‘the Writing Mortimers’ were on a high plane of celebrity, writing books, radio plays, screenplays, short stories. By 1961 the marriage was severely tested by John’s affair with the actress Wendy Craig (star of ‘The Wrong Side of the Park’, his first full-length West End play), who gave birth to John’s son – in the same year as Penelope, pregnant with her eighth child, underwent a termination and sterilization. This provided Penelope with the subject of her finest novel, the entirely autobiographical The Pumpkin Eater, which was later filmed.

  But that was one of those inconvenient episodes. John would mention only the cracks that spread across the ceiling of their house, mirroring the fissures in the marriage. It was much more amusing to write of taking silk in 1966, of hilarious encounters in Hollywood, of arguments at the National Theatre, and of victories over the Lord Chamberlain and the anti-obscenity laws, in the Last Exit to Brooklyn appeal of 1968, the Oz trial of 1971, and the Gay News trial of 1977. Towards the end of the book he writes about his most famous play, A Voyage Round My Father, which had just been filmed by Thames TV at Turville Heath Cottage, with Laurence Olivier playing Clifford Mortimer, Jane Asher as Penelope and the handsome Alan Bates as John himself.

  He could no longer be certain, John writes, which lines of dialogue his father had actually said, and which he had invented for him. ‘The writer’s gluttony for material, his habit of eating his life as a caterpillar consumes the leaf it sits on … may not only be an embarrassment to his immediate family. Writing down events is the writer’s great protection, his defence and his safety-valve. Anger and misery, defeat, humiliation and self-disgust can be changed and used to fulfil a sense of achievement as he fills his pages. And yet the catharsis is often too complete, the life he has led vanishes into his work and leaves him empty.’

  These were honest words. He could, at this stage of his life, be afflicted by melancholy. But underlying anxieties about his work, and about whether he was appreciated and liked (‘My career is over!’ was a habitual cry) were certainly alleviated in 1982 when Clinging to the Wreckage was published. It topped the bestseller lists in Britain and America. The easy languor of his tone – amused, tolerant, modest, witty, ironical, vaguely patrician – disarmed and charmed critics, even if they were not duped into swallowing his yarns as the whole truth. ‘I do not believe a word of it,’ wrote Auberon Waugh, ‘but thought it a jolly good read.’ ‘A cagey memoirist’, Prof John Carey called him. ‘Ironic and discreet, it is the kind of life you would expect from an unusually astute Cheshire Cat.’ Victoria Glendinning agreed: ‘Mr Mortimer is, intellectually and emotionally, very well defended.’ To interviewers who challenged him, John admitted that it was not a confessional book. ‘I don’t do much confessing.’ But it has been a perennial seller ever since, distilling the essence of a much loved national figure. Almost three decades on, Clinging to the Wreckage remains one of those memoirs that repay many further readings, yielding up further riches each time.

  Valerie Grove, 2010

  Illustrations

  My father about to avoid doing anything too heroic

  My mother as a young woman

  The Sloane Square Wolf Cubs

  Duelling with The Times music critic

  Turville Heath when my father built it

  Doing battle in the Probate Court

  My father, when he could see, ready to do battle in the Divorce Court

  About to be deposed in the prep school production of Richard II

  One-man band

  Leaving Harrow

  At Oxford, simulated study of law

  Wedding group, 1949

  Having caught Arthur Jeffries’ gondola

  An extended family, 1958 (photo: Michael McKeown, Daily Express)

  ‘Into the New Wave as the tube doors were closing’ (Mander & Mitchenson)

  Jeremy as a Roman soldier in discussion with my father

  Reading aloud, stories of cruelty, adultery and wilful neglect to maintain

  Keeping down the mutiny in the garden

  In my ‘barrister’s set’ (Ron McTrusty cartoon, Evening Standard)

  An encounter with Rumpole (John Ireland cartoon, Sunday Times)

  Turville Heath today (Thames Television)

  Working at Turville Heath today with my daughter Emily (Daily Mirror)

  ‘For the absurd man it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.’

  — Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, translated by Justin O’Brien

  A man with a bristling grey beard came and sat next to me at lunch. He had very pale blue eyes and an aggressive way of speaking.

  ‘What do you do,’ he said, at once and without any preliminary introduction, ‘when your boat hits a Force 10 gale in the Channel? What do you do with your female crew?’

  ‘I do
n’t know,’ I said, suspecting some kind of joke. ‘What do you do with your female crew?’

  But he answered seriously, ‘Double your fist, hit her on the head and stun her. That way she’s far less likely to be swept overboard. I stunned my female crew last Saturday. When she came round she said, “Shall we send up a flare?” “Don’t be so bloody stupid,” I told her, “make a cup of tea.” ’

  ‘But isn’t it very dangerous, your sport of yachting?’

  ‘Not dangerous at all, provided you don’t learn to swim. I made up my mind, when I bought my first boat, never to learn to swim.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘When you’re in a spot of trouble, if you can swim you try to strike out for the shore. You invariably drown. As I can’t swim I cling to the wreckage and they send a helicopter out for me. That’s my tip, if you ever find yourself in trouble, cling to the wreckage!’

  It was advice that I thought I’d been taking for most of my life.

  Chapter One

  The distant past, when I was acting my solo version of Hamlet before the blind eyes of my father, duelling with myself and drinking my own poisoned chalice or, further back, when I was starting an English education, with huge balloons of boxing-gloves lashed to the end of white, matchstick arms, grunting, stifled with the sour smell of hot plimsolls which is, to me, always the smell of fear, seems clear as yesterday. What are lost in the mists of a vanishing memory are the events of ten years ago.

  The end of the sixties, Flower Power and Children’s Lib, the Underground Press and the Alternative Society seem as remote as the Middle Ages, ‘Make Love Not War’ as dusty an apophthegm as some saying of the Early Fathers of the Church. Childhood requires no effort of memory, but it is hard work to recapture the feeling of 1971, a year when Richard Neville, a young Australian writer, asked some vaguely liberated children to help him produce a ‘Schoolkids’ number of his magazine Oz, thereby promoting an obscenity trial which lasted for six hot weeks of that summer at the Old Bailey. As the trial started the children demonstrated in the street, carrying, as I remember it, banners bearing the legend ‘An Orgasm a Day Keeps the Doctor Away’. The front row of the public gallery contained girls whose T-shirts were decorated with a portrait of the Inspector in Charge of the case. He stared up from his position of power in the well of the Court at a repeated view of his own flushed features strained between the small breasts of teenaged girls. The adult editors of Oz, Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis, wore, for their first day in the dock, gym-slips and long blonde wigs, treating the proceedings with an apparent levity far removed from the respectful stance and deferential silence of the more acceptable prisoners at the bar. Among the witnesses called was the comedian Marty Feldman, and I remember him whispering to me, on his way to the witness-box, ‘Great to be working with you at last.’