Murderers and Other Friends Read online

A Christmas Carol must be, outside the New Testament, the best-known Christmas story in the world and it asks us to believe, not so much in God as in ghosts. It is also a text of nineteenth-century humanism. The Dickens who wrote it was not the man at prayer but the committee man, the visitor to Samuel Starey’s Field Lane Ragged School, and the chairman of a meeting of the Manchester Athenaeum, founded to bring culture and education to the ‘labouring classes’. His concern wasn’t with the stable birth centuries before but with the cry from the streets from the children of his day, who were ‘condemned to tread, not what our great poet called “the primrose path to the eternal bonfire”, but one of jagged flints and stones laid down by brute ignorance’. He contemplated writing a pamphlet called ‘An Appeal to the People of England on Behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’. Happily for us he changed his mind and wrote a fictional story. Does it really matter if the founders of the Christian religion did the same?

  You could say Dickens’s conception of Christmas was highly commercial, with the sale of huge birds, great puddings and plenty of port and brandy; but what’s wrong with lights in Regent Street and people giving each other presents even if (and Christmas has to be a festival of tolerance) such presents consist of computer games and Lady Thatcher’s memoirs? John Betjeman said that:

  No loving lingers lying strings

  Around those tissued fripperies,

  The sweet and silly Christmas things

  Bath salts and inexpensive scent

  And hideous tie so kindly meant,

  No Love that in a family dwells,

  No Carolling in frosty air

  Nor all the steeple-shaking hells

  Can with this simple Truth compare

  That God was Man in Palestine

  And lives today in Bread and Wine.

  Perhaps they can’t, but it’s no bad thing to have a day in the year when family life, an institution much idealized by politicians who are too busy sleeping with their researchers and attending all-night sittings to have much time for it, consists of often warring, jealous, quarrelling and closely related people doing their best to give each other pleasure.

  It’s also important to have festivals, and their enhancement of life doesn’t depend at all on literal beliefs. The Roman centurion, posted to Britain after the birth of Christ, may have started to doubt the powers of the old gods, but he still paid his dues to Vulcan and Mars, or wrote a curse to those who’d carried off his girlfriend and recited it by the sacred spring of Minerva at Bath. There could be nothing more depressing than modern or politically correct festivals if we had to invent them, and there are already signs of danger. There have been objections to an exhibition of Women in Art because it contains paintings of the Virgin Mary and the abduction of Helen to Troy. Women, it seems, must no longer be seen as madonnas, or virgins, or the beauty who launched a thousand ships and was hatched out from one of the eggs her mother Leda laid after she had been seduced by Jupiter disguised as a swan. These are not seen as suitable role models for women.

  More sinister news comes from Australia, where some dotty government commission has banned the singing of Christmas carols in kindergartens as they are ‘culturally irrelevant’ (regardless of the fact that Christianity is the basis of one of the world’s greatest cultures). An equally dotty London borough has followed suit and banned nativity plays. The brave new world is threatening us in all its greyness, and its hideous attempt to impose a dictatorship on thought. The great advantage of the old gods, and the old religions, is that they sprang from life and cared nothing for political correctness.

  The service is over, Paul Nicolson is shaking hands with everyone at the church door. The bells are ringing and the cold in the graveyard slaps us across the face. We go home to set out mince pies and glasses of wine to be consumed by a mythical figure even the youngest children can scarcely believe in.

  All fiction, all plays, all detective stories, all parables, all fairy stories, myths and religions, are our attempt to provide an explanation for the haphazard events of our lives, or at least impose some order on them. We long for the logical patterns which poets and story-tellers provide so easily. So, depending on the time and place of our birth, we may decide that this cruel world is some sort of obstacle course on the way to heaven, or that quarrels among the gods are responsible for wars and shipwrecks, or that God was born of a virgin and executed to redeem our sins; or that, far from being merciful, God has decreed the death sentence for blaspheming against Him and His holy works.

  ‘Literature is a luxury;’ said Chesterton, ‘fiction is a necessity.’ Fiction is our excuse to play God, to create characters and set them in motion, to make them act out, at our command, what we hope, or believe, is the truth about existence. If only I were now writing a novel I could tie up all the loose ends of this book so that they pointed to a theme. I could explain these random encounters by some analysis of my character which would turn me into a credible and consistent work of fiction.

  I have not been writing a novel, although once you decide what to leave out, or how you feel about an event that happened, or how you would like the reader to see it, you are on your way to inventing a myth. Politicians describing the economy, lawyers and judges describing a crime, every one of us re-inventing our pasts, are myth-makers to a greater or lesser degree. Fiction is what comes naturally to us.

  All the writer, deprived of fiction’s true freedom, can do is to try to remember, quite honestly, how things seemed at the time. This is how I felt then about the murderers and friends; the murderers who might have been momentary friends, and the friends, one friend at least, who became a murderer. It was not my business to reach a verdict on them and so there need be no summing-up. Summing-ups in court are, in any event, thinly disguised attempts to persuade twelve honest citizens to agree with you.

  I have started having the dream again. I am running down the cold, marble corridors of the Law Courts to do some case I haven’t prepared; in fact I know nothing whatever about it. Not only have I no idea what to say, I am inappropriately dressed. I am wearing a bright blue shirt, bought some years before for a summer holiday, and shorts, or I am in pyjamas. I turn up the collar of the shirt so that it may look as though it were of the stiff and stand-up variety. Someone I pass gives me a pair of crumpled white bands, which I try to tie round my neck, but I can’t undo, or do up, the knot. I borrow a wig which I perch on my head. I haven’t shaved for several days. When I get to the glass-panelled door of the courtroom it’s locked and I rattle it uselessly. Inside I can see nothing but darkness.

  One day, however, it will open and, I am assured, there will be a bright and blinding light. By that time will I have completely mastered my brief, or understood my instructions? Will I ever?