Murderers and Other Friends Read online

  ‘Officer, please tell the jury, is that the badge of the Westminster Bank Rowing Club (let’s say)?’ ‘Yes, it is.’ ‘And is that the insignia of the Swansea Ramblers’ Association?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And on that shoulder, the Bowling Club Supporters badge?’ ‘It would seem to be.' ‘And that, the Cardiff Choral Group?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And what about that little golliwog on the right arm, is that a badge for those who have collected enough labels from jars of marmalade?’ ‘It might well be.’ ‘Then tell the jury, officer, why do you call it a Free Wales Army jacket? Why not call it a golliwog marmalade jacket?’ I won a little laughter in court, and it seemed to have been one of my more successful cross-examinations. But when the case was over, a number of dubious characters were seen coming from the public gallery and all of them were wearing golliwog badges. To this day I don’t know if the politically incorrect device had any sinister significance.

  At the end of the trial I stayed away from the Welsh lawyers’ singsong to compose a final speech. It seemed that the essence of the charge was that the public had been put in fear by the Free Wales Army’s activity. I was prepared to argue that no sane person could have been in the least alarmed by the military manoeuvres of the little handful of men in the dock. I relied on the fact that they all had high-sounding titles; in fact, they were all commanding officers with no men to command.

  ‘“There lived a king, as I’ve ‘been told,”’ I quoted from The Gondoliers,

  ‘In the wonder-working days of old,

  To the top of every tree

  Promoted everybody . . .

  When everyone is somebodee,

  Then no one’s anybody!’

  Therefore, there was no one of any real importance in the Free Wales Army. This argument, frail as it may look now in print, seemed to appeal greatly to the jury and the judge, who might have starred as Tessa or Fiametta at some distant prep school, and clearly enjoyed the Gilbertian joke. However, I was interrupted by violent protests from the dock. Our clients were outraged by my suggestion that the Free Wales Army was not a formidable and alarming fighting-force, and I was instructed to abandon this line of argument. After I had done so, they received quite modest sentences and the dreaded helicopter never flew over Caernarvon Castle. I had discovered that the object of the accused in political trials was not acquittal but martyrdom, and my failure seemed to be a matter of all-round satisfaction.

  Among the barristers who also became friends during my legal life was Jeremy Hutchinson. He is tall and apparently languid, although he was ferociously hard-working at the bar. His father had married into the Bloomsbury Group and Jeremy would address the juries from Dagenham or Brent Cross in the high and plaintive tones which might be heard in any drawing-room where Lytton Strachey or Virginia Woolf were holding forth on the pathos in Shakespeare’s sonnets or the vulgarity of Arnold Bennett. ‘Can you imagine, members of the jury,’ he would say, ‘this poor, poor man? Taken to the police station. And asked questions. Over and over again. For simply hours! Can’t you understand why this poor, poor man, treated like that, would say simply anything. Just to get home. Away from the boredom of it all!’ Curiously enough, the jury were entranced with this mandarin eloquence and Jeremy had a high degree of success. He was junior counsel to Gerald Gardiner in the Lady Chatterley case, the prosecution of the publisher of D.H. Lawrence’s novel in which words, used by many people in their daily lives, caused a great stir when they were first seen between the covers of a book. Later Jeremy successfully defended a book called The Mouth and Oral Sex. He was much helped in this case by the judge, who, after Margaret Drabble had given evidence as to the merits of the work in question, unwisely asked her, ‘Why is it important to read about oral sex now? We’ve managed to get on for a couple of thousand years without it.’ When Miss Drabble appeared taken aback by this thought, he said, ‘Witness! Answer the question.’ To which she replied, ‘I’m sorry, your Lordship. I was just trying to remember the relevant lines in Ovid.’ After this, it was said someone in court was heard to murmur, not altogether inaudibly, ‘Poor, poor his Lordship. Gone without oral sex for two thousand years.’

  Jeremy had a habit of referring to the judge, or the prosecutor, as ‘the poor old darling’ if they did anything particularly unpleasant, and this was a figure of speech I never forgot. He came from the strange old days and had been one of the marshals to the judge who indulged in baby-talk. Now we meet occasionally, have lunch and tell each other what a joy it is not to be barristers any longer. He was a great defender and, as a one-time husband of Peggy Ashcroft and former vice-chairman of the Arts Council, brought a much-needed breath of civilization to the Old Bailey.

  I first met Ann Mallalieu when she had just left Cambridge, where she was the first woman President of the Union. She’s blonde and beautiful and, when she was called to the bar, I led her in a number of trials. I believe the jury thought that if a nice girl like her was on my side my case couldn’t be all that bad. We went to Birmingham together and spent some time defending the seller of a work unattractively entitled The Return of the Enema Bag Rapist. Ann’s father and uncle were both Labour ministers, and she added this dubious book to the presents in her father’s Christmas stocking.

  When I first met Tim Cassel he was a prosecutor whom I found full of charm. He dropped his case against the projectionist in a blue movie cinema I was defending when I told him of my client’s excellent war record. Tim’s father was an elegant barrister and judge who tended to speak in Victorian upper-class Cockney, saying things like, ‘Me poor old eyes ain’t strong enough to read the document what you gave me.’ He was once trying a burglar who had handcuffed a householder before robbing him. Judge Cassel insisted on demonstrating the way these handcuffs worked by putting them on his own wrists, and he brushed aside the prosecuting counsel’s frequent attempts to dissuade him. When he was helplessly manacled, the judge allowed the prosecutor to explain that the police never recovered the key to the handcuffs. Tim’s father had to be led off the bench and the local ironmonger was sent for.

  Ann was made a Labour peeress by Neil Kinnock and Tim’s political views make Mrs Thatcher look like a member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. Fierce political arguments seem to add excitement and passion to their marriage. Ann gets up at around four in the morning in their house across the hills from us, delivers a few lambs, drives to London, and after a day in court makes for the House of Lords, where the sight of her cheers the elderly Conservative peers enormously.

  Geoff Robertson is a more radical barrister. He is an Australian and was a Rhodes Scholar with Bill Clinton, which shouldn’t, however, be held against him. When he was at Oxford he came to help in the Oz trial because he had known Richard Neville at university. He looked up the law, worked tirelessly and had many good ideas, although perhaps his judgement left him when he decided we ought to call Marty Feldman. The fact that we won the Oz appeal was, in a large part, due to Geoff’s industry. He was soon called to the bar, came into my chambers and acted, for years, as my junior in a number of curious and sometimes sensational cases. He was always cheerful, looked boyish and sat behind me, shouting brilliant ideas at my back while the judge fired destructive comments at my face. Often I felt like slipping out from between them and putting them in direct touch with each other. Geoff is a much better lawyer than I could ever be and he supplied the legal arguments. In return I think I handed on to him my father’s secret of the art of cross-examination which must, he used to say, never be confused with examining crossly. It should be used to lead the witness, gently and with courtesy, through a number of propositions with which he has to agree until he has no alternative but to say yes to the final and, you hope, the fatal question.

  I have been accused, mostly by women, of having few men friends, and it’s true that my idea of hell would be an eternal, black tie, all male dinner of chartered accountants. An English middle-class education has made me allergic to sport and my only interest, when forced to take part in any sort of game, is t
o lose it as quickly as possible in order that it may be over. I have a fear, implanted in my childhood, of locker-rooms and the smell of sweaty gym shoes and I believe that exercise is a serious health risk. I am therefore cut off from many masculine preserves and my men friends are often people I work with: directors, actors and a very few lawyers, of whom Geoff is the one with whom I went through most triumphs and disasters.

  We went down to Brixton Prison together when we acted for John Stonehouse, a Labour minister who staged a fairly convincing death by drowning, leaving his clothes in a pile on a Florida beach in order to defraud an insurance company. He was arrested in Australia because he was suspected of being Lord Lucan, the vanished aristocrat wanted for murder. We got Mr Stonehouse bail and then he decided to conduct his own case, with disastrous results.

  Geoff and I had some gruelling, as well as hilarious, times together. I was known to vomit in the lavatory before arguing cases in the Court of Appeal or the House of Lords, and Geoffrey, for all his legal brilliance, would suffer prolonged bouts of nervous indigestion.

  Once we defended a large, mournful man who was accused of issuing death threats to a rich South African. He did this by ordering a succession of funeral cortèges to call at the South African’s house. Nothing could have been more unnerving than having a black-clad undertaker knock at the door in the dawn mist and announce that the hearse was waiting. Our client advertised in Time Out for a number of helpers and a young girl student, among others, applied. She was also in the dock. Many years later I was handing out bursaries to young playwrights in the committee room of a television company. A woman appeared who had written an excellent play about life in prison. I looked at her for a long time and then I remembered where I had last seen her: it was in the dock at the Old Bailey where she was sitting next to my lugubrious client, the sender of funerals.

  As defenders, we naturally found ourselves on the side of books and films which the prosecution was trying to ban. That didn’t mean that we found these works particularly attractive; it’s not necessary, when defending an alleged murderer, to believe that the best way to end an unhappy marriage is with a kitchen knife in the stomach. Prosecutors who seek to keep the purity of our national life unsullied can be similarly detached. Geoff and I did a long case about some questioned publication or other against a particularly jovial prosecutor who would push his way past my middle-aged knees every morning and chirrup, ‘Give us a kiss, darling,’ as I sat gloomily preparing my work for the day. I used to write in a number of notebooks which had dark circles printed on their covers. In his final speech to the jury this prosecutor was saying, ‘And if this sort of publication is allowed, youth will be corrupted, authority will be undermined, family life will be in peril and civilization, as we know it, will grind to a halt.’ Then, glancing down at my notebook, he muttered, ‘Arseholes all over your notebook, darling!’, and went on with his peroration. The truth is that the defenders of public morality are not always all that they seem to be.

  Geoff has gone on to enjoy an extremely successful practice, forcing the government to disgorge ‘secret’ documents in a case which revealed official connivance at the sale of material which might be used for making arms in Iraq, and saving the lives of a large number of prisoners kept in horrible conditions on death row in Caribbean countries. Few defenders can have had such triumphant results.

  When I was a barrister we used to spend weeks discovering if those accused were guilty, something which often became perfectly obvious in the first half hour, and about twenty minutes deciding what to do with them. Prison was the usual solution, and one which required the least thought. No one had any faith in prison. The judges didn’t believe they reformed anyone and, though it would keep offenders out of circulation for a while, they would be shovelled back into the community more hardened, brutalized and dangerous than ever. Politicians are fond of saying no one commits crimes in prison, but of course they do: daily offences ranging from murder and rape to drug-dealing and aggravated assault. The problem is that the British public is extraordinarily penal-minded. We once stood second to Turkey in the league of those European countries who gaoled the highest proportion of their citizens. Now we have done even better: Britain is top of the imprisonment stakes. Thinking that it’s what is expected of them, some judges and most vote-hungry politicians are anxious to oblige, and young and old, serious or petty criminals, and a large proportion of those who haven’t been convicted of anything at all, are banged up in stinking and dangerous Victorian slums. Recently a mother of young children was given a custodial sentence for failing to pay her television licence. One hundred and fifty years after the publication of A Christmas Carol, we need a Dickens to open our eyes to poverty, homelessness and the building of prisons in which children and young people, to whom no other future is being offered, may be locked away to take more advanced courses at universities of crime.

  I have been working lately with the Howard League for Penal Reform which became concerned about the number of fifteen-year-old boys, children by anyone’s standard, who had hanged themselves in custody and while awaiting trial. We accordingly went, as a small delegation, to the then Home Secretary, a smiling man, whose slicked-down hair was known in parliamentary circles as ‘self-basting’. He received us with great affability as he sat surrounded by his parliamentary secretary and his civil servants. He greeted me by asking if I’d seen any good operas lately. I did my best to explain that we hadn’t come about operas but about boys hanging themselves.

  ‘Of course you have!’ Then came a chorus from the politicians assembled which went something like this: ‘And we think you’re doing a grand job!’, ‘We’ve got the greatest possible admiration for your campaign’, ‘You and the Howard League, you just keep up the good work.’ The Home Office, it seemed, was right behind us, so I made bold to ask why it didn’t do something about it.

  ‘Well, there it is. We’re really helpless. The sentencing classes, that is the judges, keep sending these chaps to prison and the local authorities won’t spend any money on homes for them. So what can we do? Something, perhaps, in two or three years’ time. Meanwhile, you carry on protesting. We think you’re doing absolutely splendidly.’

  The problem was, they explained, that it costs such a terrible lot of money, about £20,000, to make a secure place in a council home for a boy. I then suggested a tariff be put up in all magistrates courts: £20,000 for a secure place, so much less a week for community service, so much less for bail. ‘Then,’ I said, ‘you could reform the prisons on strict monetarist principles.’ This suggestion caused delighted laughter all round. ‘You honestly think that? Well, that is quite hilarious, coming from you! Are you becoming a Thatcherite, John?’ The meeting ended in great merriment. As we left, I thought I’d rather have heard them say, ‘Good luck to them. We’d love all the little buggers to hang themselves.’ That might, at least, have been honest. As it was, I felt an extreme frustration which was only slightly alleviated when I put a version of the incident into a Rumpole. Later we called on an Opposition spokesman who wondered how many votes there were in preventing children hanging themselves.

  Things have not improved since then. The present Home Secretary, in order to put even more distance between us and the field in the Euro Penal Cup, has ordered six new prisons and declines any sort of conversation at all with the Howard League for Penal Reform.

  Of course there are dangerous criminals who shouldn’t ever be let out of prison, but there are also many people who should never have been sent there in the first place, and many others who are there to have their criminal tendencies confirmed and perpetuated. Experience in other countries has shown that reducing the prison population may mean reducing the crime rate. It’s hard to persuade the British public of this.

  Watching what the Home Office called the sentencing classes, and discussing the treatment of offenders, it seems to me that what we fear most are the criminal tendencies in ourselves. We are terrified, no doubt with good cause,
of our baser instincts. Fear leads to a passionate belief in the righteousness of punishment. Shakespeare, who understood most things, understood this when, in King Lear, he wrote of the beadle flogging the whore: ‘Strip thine own back. Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind For which thou whip’st her’ and of the judge railing at the simple thief: ‘Hark in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which the thief?’ How much, I wonder, are our bursting prisons due to our own irremovable feelings of guilt?

  The Christian religion, which has otherwise brought us many blessings, has also taught us that we are born guilty; we are the stained products of the fall of man, corrupted by the fatal taste of the apple of knowledge, only to be freed by the gift of redemption. Will time redeem us? As our hair falls out and our fingernails are renewed, do we not become different people, innocent of the crimes of our youth? The last novel I wrote was called Dunster. I made an amalgamation of all the most decent and honourable men I knew and suggested that such a character might, in the faraway past, have been guilty of a war crime. The conflict between the two younger men in the book is whether such guilt has to be dragged out into the light of day for the purposes of punishment, or whether old sins, committed in the heat of battle, might be allowed to sleep in the shadows. I didn’t provide an answer to this dilemma; it’s the purpose of the novelist, as it is of the defending barrister, to go on asking awkward questions.