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  My father’s repeated question, ‘Is execution done on Cawdor?’, boomed out across the garden in my childhood, echoed down the years. It became a password. I was sent to stay with George Clune, a distant connection of my father’s, who had been converted to Rome and played the organ in a Catholic church in Eastbourne. He used to weave such tunes as ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ and ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’ into the music when the congregation assembled and dispersed. My father had told me to ask if Cawdor had been executed and when I did so George Clune folded me in his arms and welcomed me as though we were members of some secret society. So the words of Shakespeare became passwords or incantations. ‘Who’s the silent Irishman in Hamlet?’ my father would ask me. Long usage had taught me the answer: ‘He’s the one the Prince of Denmark’s talking to when he says, “Now could I do it, Pat. Now he is praying.” ’

  So the plays were part of our daily lives, like the evidence in divorce cases and drowning earwigs and ITMA being switched on during dinner when my father was bored. I thought hardly at all about the man who wrote them, whose coloured effigy seemed unreal and doll-like over his tomb in the church at Stratford. But then, towards the end of the seventies, I got a strange invitation from Associated Television, the fiefdom of Lew Grade, whose agile little feet had once been planted in the variety show and the summer season. I was asked to write six television plays about the life of Shakespeare.

  The first professor I asked said that everything known about the life of Shakespeare could be written on a postcard and you would still have room for the stamp. It seems he adopted no public personality, in which he was wise. Other great writers have not been so well advised. Dickens took on the role of a warm-hearted, devoted family man and, when it was discovered that he was cruel to his wife, secretive with his mistress and sometimes hard-hearted to his children, the perpetual pleasures of his books may, for some, have been diminished. Philip Larkin took on the part of a racist, male chauvinist bigot, thus disillusioning the many Guardian readers who had written dissertations on his excellent poetry. Evelyn Waugh entertained himself by acting a curmudgeonly country squire with an ear trumpet, and then the wind changed and he was stuck with it. John Osborne and Kingsley Amis, having been called, in some distant dawn of the world, angry young men, have opted to become cross old blimps and have performed their roles with considerable success. But Shakespeare, engaged full-time in writing parts for other people, was apparently unable to think up one for himself.

  If he had committed a murder, like his friend Ben Jonson, we should have known a great deal more about him. If he had been a double agent, in trouble with the Privy Council, and a noted atheist who died with a dagger in his eye like Marlowe, we might have had a good deal more to go on. As it is, Shakespeare, who transcended all other writers, beat them all in keeping potential biographers guessing. In fact we know a great deal about him, quite enough to cover a whole packet of postcards, but it’s mercifully dull. We have details of his law-suits, his property-buying, his will; the unsensational moments of a life spent keeping out of trouble. He was kind enough to give us some blank years, between leaving Stratford and turning up in the London theatre, during which time you can create your own Shakespeare: a lawyer’s clerk, a soldier, a traveller to Italy, a tutor in an aristocratic household – what you will. It is clear that he was born the son of a semi-literate glovemaker, went to London to act, wrote plays with considerable success, was admired by Ben Jonson, known and revered by his fellow actors, Hemmings and Condell, and returned to New Place in Stratford to enjoy his money and die, perhaps on his birthday. He was either William Shakespeare or someone else with exactly the same name. What is perfectly obvious is that he wasn’t Francis Bacon; he had nothing whatever in common with that cold-hearted, urbane, secretly corrupt judge whose scientific interests led him to die stuffing a goose with snow; and yet the penalty of writing anything at all about Shakespeare is to receive weekly propaganda from the Francis Bacon Society. Somewhere, in some dusty office, some dullard spends his life collecting evidence that there never was a Shakespeare. If a writer keeps out of trouble he can be denied all existence.

  The best I could do was to invent six patently fictional stories about Shakespeare’s life. This subject allows a wide degree of speculation because of the form of his art. The novelist is for ever present in his work, sometimes addressing us directly like Dickens, Trollope or Thackeray, sometimes causing every scene to vibrate with his peculiar sensitivity like Henry James or, following Flaubert’s precept and being like God in his universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible. The playwright is only on stage when he is pretending to be someone else, lost in his characters, whose views shouldn’t be too readily mistaken for his. So you can prove that Shakespeare was a liberal anarchist – ‘handy-dandy, which is the justice, which the thief?’, or a conservative devoted to law and order and the class structure – ‘Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark! what discord follows’, a pre-Christian stoic – ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport’, or a man with a touching belief in Christian mercy – ‘Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took, Found out the remedy’. You can also spell a great variety of plots out of the sonnets, no doubt the nearest he came to autobiography. Did he love an aristocratic patron called Henry Wriothesley or, as Oscar Wilde thought, a boy actor called Willie Hughes? Did his fair, male lover sleep with his dark girl-friend or were there other causes for his bitterness and burning sense of ingratitude? Such historical questions are best approached by way of fiction.

  Writing the Shakespeare stories was an enormous pleasure. It was interesting to see the great female roles acted by boys before all male Shakespeare became fashionable. And I worked with Peter Wood, a director of truly Elizabethan flamboyance. He would sit in the control room surrounded by his props: silver jugs of coffee, bay rum after-shave, and an assortment of pills, admiring the beauty of his shot and congratulating himself. One day he looked at the screen and said, ‘Peter, Peter, that’s really sensational! You combine the eye of a Rembrandt with a magnificent narrative drive. But silly, silly, Peter, you forgot to cue the actors!’ We built the Globe Theatre on the lot at Elstree and filled it with groundlings. One very hot day they were alarmed when the director appeared on the stage wearing little but a pair of Y-fronts and a Mexican hat. ‘You may think I’m a bastard now, but you’ll learn what a bastard I really am before the day is out!’ he bellowed at them through a bull horn. They took fright and began to trickle away to the town, where numerous customers in doublet and hose were spotted pushing trolleys through Tesco’s. I have the greatest admiration for Peter Wood who taught me something of great value: an hour’s drama on television, which might be thought of as a one-act play or a long short story, is greatly enriched if it has not one plot but two or, better still, three. I have always found plots hard to come by; all the same I stuck to Peter Wood’s rule when I came to tell stories about my own character, not the Swan of Avon, but Rumpole of the Bailey.

  Chapter 7

  I’m writing in a Moroccan hotel. It’s February and in England the skies are grey, the ground frozen, the daffodils have poked up before their time but dare not open. Here, all sorts of flowers are out at the same time: roses, carnations, geraniums, hibiscus, arum lilies and bougainvillaea. The sun is shining, the trees are heavy in the orange groves and there are lemons clinging to the wall. The sky is bright blue and far away you can see snow on the Atlas Mountains. There are a number of elderly English people in this hotel; it’s very quiet and a good place to work.

  Last year Penny and I were here, watching the other guests, trying to work out their relationships, or speculate on their lives, which is the chief pleasure to be got from staying in hotels. There was an Englishman, frail and birdlike, wearing elderly but expensive clothes and a brown trilby hat. He was in the company of a thickset, crop-haired, moustached and tattooed man with a North Country accent, per
haps half his age, who might have been a bouncer or a PE instructor. We thought he was the old man’s bodyguard. At dinner, we noticed, they did themselves extraordinarily well, ordering lobsters specially brought from Agadir and pink, French champagne. After a while they invited us to join them for dimer and we found out more. The older man was called Tony. Mike, who had the tattoos, was his cook, housekeeper, gardener, driver, companion and friend.

  ‘Tony’s only got about a month to live,’ Mike said, as all four of us sat at dinner. ‘It was just a little while ago I sent him in roast pheasant with all the trimmings: bread sauce, gravy, sprouts and game chips. Though I say it myself, it was done perfect. Not at all dry, nice and moist, really appetizing. And Tony took one mouthful and he couldn’t eat it. So I told him then, straight out, “Cancer of the oesophagus. That’s you.” He’s not got long to go now. Of course, I suppose he could be kept alive a bit longer with all sorts of drugs and that. But we’d both much rather he went as he is now. I want to always think of him as he is. At his best.’ And to this, Tony, who had heard the entire speech, nodded a gentle and smiling approval.

  Tony told us more about himself. He’d been very rich: ‘born with a silver spoon in my mouth’. Disgusted by the poverty in his part of England he stood, on a couple of occasions and unsuccessfully, as a Labour candidate. He’d been in the Army and took part in the retreat from France. He sat with his sergeant on the beach at Dunkirk while the Germans shelled them and the British did their best to leave in every available craft to cross the Channel. Tony and his sergeant ate the ham, drank the four-star brandy and smoked the Havana cigars which his mother had sent him for his twenty-first birthday. When they’d finished their picnic, the sergeant suggested that they’d better try and get back to England. They swam out and found that the small boats had been ordered not to take more than thirteen passengers. When an officer tried to pull rank and climb on board a motor boat which already had its full complement, an NCO shot him. Tony decided that they wouldn’t chance their luck. He and his sergeant swam on until they came to a leaky Polish ship on which they eventually escaped. Later in the war, the sergeant died of wounds, leaving his young wife pregnant with Mike. Tony had helped support her and the child, kept in touch with Mike when he was employed as a sports organizer, and they were now inseparable companions. Tony knew that he hadn’t long to go which is why they ordered lobster and pink champagne.

  ‘But aren’t you afraid of dying?’ Penny, who was furthest from death, asked at the end of this story.

  ‘Not really.’ Tony was still smiling. ‘I'm so looking forward to meeting Mummy again.’

  Two or three weeks after we got home I had a letter from Tony telling me more about his experiences at Dunkirk. A month later we read his obituary in The Times.

  Thoughts of death are always a diversion from life and, as the years pass, there is less and less time for them. What I meant to write about, sitting somewhere south of the Atlas Mountains, was the arrival of Rumpole in my life, almost twenty years ago.

  I’d wanted to write about a detective, a Sherlock Holmes or a Maigret, to keep me alive in my old age. Then I thought of making him a criminal defender, in honour of the Old Bailey hacks I’d known and admired. I thought of giving him my father’s uniform: a black jacket and waistcoat, striped trousers and cigar ash on the watch-chain, although I left out my father’s spats. I added my father’s habit of quoting poetry at inappropriate moments and I am proud, at least, to have brought snatches of Wordsworth to a large audience. I thought of giving him Jeremy Hutchinson’s habit of calling impossible judges ‘old darling’, although he resembles Jeremy in no other way. Then, because I wanted Rumpole to have as hard a time at home as he had in court, I gave him a powerful wife whom he wouldn’t call ‘old darling’. I began by writing some odd speeches for him and found that as soon as he stepped on to the page, he began to speak in his own voice, which is undoubtedly the greatest favour a character can do for you.

  Rumpole was also indebted to James Burge, another admirable advocate who freely applied the word ‘darling’ to the judiciary. He had defended Stephen Ward, who was offered up as a sacrificial victim during one of the British public’s periodic and absurd fits of morality at the time of the Profumo affair. Ward had been Christine Keeler’s friend and was accused, on inadequate evidence, of living on immoral earnings. He committed suicide during the trial, but James Burge, who was also badly treated by the judge, soldiered on and, some years later, we sat together defending some murderous football hooligans. Searching for an Arsenal supporter to stab and being unable to find one, they had killed a stranger on Charing Cross Station, who was, so far as anyone could discover, totally uninterested in the game and supported nobody. Looking at the sullen and threatening faces in the dock, James Burge whispered to me, ‘I’m really an anarchist at heart but I don’t think even my darling old Prince Peter Kropotkin would have approved of this lot!’ So I called the first Rumpole play My Darling Old Prince Peter Kropotkin. Of course someone wondered whether the television audience would be familiar with Kropotkin’s works and I changed it to My Darling Old Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a name which also failed to ring a bell in the world of television. Finally the director suggested Rumpole of the Bailey on the lines of Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ and so it has remained. However, I am grateful to James Burge for a line I’ll never forget and I’m sure Rumpole, although he would have disapproved entirely of Stephen Ward and his way of life, would have defended him with equal energy and courage.

  When I wrote that first story in the mid seventies, I didn’t know who would play Rumpole. I thought Alastair Sim would be excellent in the part, but sadly Mr Sim was dead and unable to take it on. On a happy day for me, the producer, then Irene Shubik, and John Gorrie, the director, suggested Leo McKern. He liked the part and was the first to suggest that we should do more stories. Now, when Rumpole speaks in his own voice, it is always Leo’s voice also.

  Sometimes, a writer finds an actor who not only becomes the character he’s invented, but adds to and enriches it. This happened with Michael Hordern in Dock Brief and David Threlfall when he became a snakelike Conservative cabinet minister in Paradise Postponed and Titmuss Regained. It happened at once and then always with Leo McKern in Rumpole. Leo comes from Sydney, and Australians are born with one great advantage: they have almost no respect for authority. Rumpole’s disdain for pomposity, self-regard, and the soulless application of the letter of the law without regard for human values, came naturally to him. There is a story I heard in Australia about a barrister who carried on his practice in one of the states where they still wear wigs and gowns, and have also taken over our myth that a barrister who gets up to address the court not in fancy dress is invisible. This Australian advocate got up, wigless, without a gown, in front of a judge he particularly disliked and said, ‘Your Honour, I wish to make an application.’ ‘I can’t see you, Mr Bleaks,’ said the judge, no doubt enjoying what he regarded as the great tradition of the old country’s bar. ‘But, your Honour, in my humble submission . . ‘It’s no good, I simply can’t see you.’ ‘Am I quite invisible, your Honour?’ ‘Utterly invisible to me, Mr Bleaks.’ ‘Are you quite sure, your Honour?’ ‘Absolutely sure, Mr Bleaks.’ ‘Then if you’re quite sure, this is something I’ve been meaning to do for years.’ Whereupon Mr Bleaks put his fingers to his nose and stuck out his tongue at the judge. I’m not suggesting that Rumpole would ever do this; his insults are, I hope, a little more subtle, but that fine spirit of disrespect is still somewhere deep inside him.

  Leo has Rumpole’s hatred of pretension. During the filming of Ryan’s Daughter, while everyone was kept waiting for the perfectly composed shot, with the seagulls all flying in the right direction, he grew so disillusioned with show business that he decided to give it all up, went back to Australia and bought a rain forest. Luckily for me, he changed his mind and left again. He’s forever uncertain as to which country he wants to live or die in. As he has a perfectly reasonable dislike of fly
ing, he spends a great part of his life on small cargo ships, his motor car stored in the hold, chugging across the Indian Ocean. Sometimes, it seems, he’s changed his mind before he’s arrived at his destination. In his youth he fell in love with a young Australian actress whom he saw swinging on a wire as Peter Pan and he followed her to England. They are still married; she is still thin and beautiful and can rarely be seen eating or drinking. Here, he lost his Australian accent and played Shakespeare, proving beyond all doubt he could play anything. His Iago was so good that the theatre at Stratford grew nervous of him and offered him Friar Laurence, the daftest part in the entire canon, so he wisely walked out. He was memorable in The Alchemist and acted at the Old Vic with Donald Wolfit, who desperately tried to put him off by shouting at him in the wings.

  Leo McKern arrives in the rehearsal room long before anyone else and can finish The Times crossword puzzle before the coffee is ready. He likes simple jokes and has been known to put his glass eye (he lost his real one in an industrial accident) in the middle of the Bolognese sauce on a plate of spaghetti so that it glowers up and alarms the waiter. He loves boats; he fell off his most recent one in the dark and spent a long time floating in a marina, calling out mayday to diners who took no notice, until he was rescued at last by two tearaways who had been racing stolen cars. He acts with his entire body, and, like many fairly bulky men, is extremely light on his feet, dives expertly from the highest board and dances in the most sprightly fashion. I know about his dancing because, when we were on location on a Mediterranean cruise ship, he sometimes led me out on to the dance floor in the Dolphin Saloon and performed the difficult feat of waltzing me around. He learns his many lines during rehearsal and only changes them minutely, often for the better and after careful consultation. He can turn in an instant from comedy to pathos or play both of them at the same time. His acting exists where I always hope my writing will be: about two feet above the ground, a little larger than life, but always taking off from reality. As an actor he is to be compared with the great screen giants, Laughton and Raimu, the old French movie star, who was shapeless, lovable and could make you laugh and cry. He’s a very private man who avoids speeches, dinners and public appearances. Once he starts work, he is entirely professional, an inspiring leader of a company.