by P. D. James
We enjoyed a freedom unknown to most children today, freedom of the streets, the walks round the castle, the river. Some of the lessons we learned in the streets would have horrified our parents but the two worlds didn’t communicate. With few toys, we constructed a richly imaginative world. Our parents could turn us loose, apparently without anxiety. I can remember only one untoward incident. We were playing in the shallow cave off one of the castle walks when a young man carrying a cane invited us to follow him to a more secluded place and spank his bottom. To children who spent some ingenuity in avoiding having our bottoms spanked the request was bizarre. When we declined he walked away without pressing us.
Children must have been sexually abused when I was a child; they always have been. But because the fear of sexual abuse hadn’t become a national obsession we were never taught to be afraid of strangers. The criminal statistics for England and Wales show that seven to eight children are murdered each year by strangers and this figure has not greatly altered over the years. The figures are insignificant compared with the dangers to children on the roads, but they can never be comparatively insignificant in the minds of parents. The possible abduction, rape or murder of a child is the horror which we hardly dare allow into our thoughts. Because of those seven to eight tragic deaths children today, particularly middle-class children, live under a form of house arrest.
And for our external fantasy life we had the cinema. I am not sure whether the price of admission to the Saturday afternoon matinee at Ludlow was one penny or twopence, I rather think the former. I can remember joining the long queue of children, pressing our backs against the staircase wall, waiting for the doors to the auditorium to open. I suppose there must have been some form of censorship of films, but the ones which remain in memory certainly weren’t made for children. Perhaps I saw some of them with my parents. I can remember the silent films, particularly Birth of a Nation, remember, too, the first talkie, Broadway Melody of 1929. The arrival of the talkies aroused immense interest and the manager of the cinema announced that, in contrast to the inferior sound systems in the picture palaces of Shrewsbury or London, Ludlow was to have “the talkies not the squawkies.” As we had no baby-sitter the whole family went together to participate in this modern miracle. The auditorium darkened, the screen glowed, music swelled out in glorious bursts of melody and—almost unbelievably—the gods and goddesses spoke.
On Sunday afternoons there was usually the family walk. It can’t have been much pleasure for my parents since I remember that we trailed after them, bored, tired and oblivious to everything but the need for this compulsory exercise to end. But paradoxically it left me with a love of walking which has remained all my life, and childhood walks through the Shropshire meadows return every time I smell clover or the pungent scent of Queen Anne’s lace or feel wet grass against my ankles.
And then came the day of the scholarship examination, the equivalent of the later Eleven Plus. I can’t recall that we were given any particular coaching for this, but we did all realize its supreme importance. If I passed I would go to the high school, an almost unimaginable privilege. I would learn French and Latin, the school would have a library, there would be all the less academic excitement of the stories in the Schoolgirls’ Own which were my weekly reading. Those of us who passed the first written part of the examination then went to the high school for the oral, and I can remember waiting to be called into the interview room, sitting on a very low chair in the kindergarten classroom. I had no problem with the first part of the interview but mental arithmetic, as always, was sheer horror as the metal grille of incomprehension clanged down. And then some four weeks later came the letter to say that I had been successful and was to take the enclosed form with me to the medical centre for my physical examination. I can remember walking round the castle to the familiar office where we used to go to have cuts bound up, chests listened to and minor injuries treated by the school nurse. I was dizzy with happiness, an iridescence of joy which embraced not only me, but all the world around me. The stones on the path gleamed with a supernatural light, the grasses shivered and silvered, the Teme ran sparkling under a clear sky, even the ramparts of the castle reared over me like some celestial city. Alas, the triumph and the joy were both premature. Apparently the money didn’t run to the number of pupils offered places and the last on the list fell off. I was undone by that dreaded mental arithmetic.
So I went instead to the National School, previously one of the charitable institutions established by the National School Society between 1808 and 1811, dedicated to the propagation of the doctrine of the Church of England. Here every week a local parish priest would arrive to teach us the Collect for the week and to instruct us in the faith. So those memorable prayers, so short and yet so pregnant with meaning, entered early into my consciousness at school as well as in church and became part of my literary inheritance.
But I wasn’t long at the National School. My father, who worked in the local Income Tax office, had applied again for a transfer and, at the age of eleven, I moved with my family to Cambridge and began the last and happiest stage of my formal education at the Cambridge County High School for Girls. There was no scholarship entitlement to be transferred but my father found the £4 which was the termly fee. For this I shall always be grateful.
TUESDAY, 12TH AUGUST
Last night was the hottest yet, and I again awoke to find myself lying damply in a layer of sweat between skin and nightdress.
My secretary Joyce McLennan arrived very hot after her journey. When her number 94 bus (which was following close behind another number 94 which she had just missed) reached Holland Park and she tried to get off, the conductor shouted angrily to the passengers, “Jesus Christ! You see what it’s like? Every time you try to overtake the bus in front, someone wants to get off or on at a bus stop.” Joyce has worked for me part-time since the publication of my seventh novel. Intelligent, efficient, kind and unfailingly good-tempered, she is high among the small group of friends on whom I can rely to keep me sane.
An interesting item in today’s post. A lady living in Lincoln’s Inn, knowing of my interest in old diaries, sent me one from her collection, a W. Straker pocket diary for 1914. There is no mention of the original owner and all the entries are in pencil. I think from the handwriting that it was probably written by a man, and he begins every day with a note of the temperature, the weather and the wind. And then, on 30th January, he notes that “Ethel retired as usual about 10 o’clock and must have hung herself soon afterwards,” followed by the note, “Ethel’s last kiss and last goodnight.” There is no clue as to who Ethel was: she could have been wife, sister or daughter, no grief is expressed, no explanation given.
WEDNESDAY, 13TH AUGUST
A rather dull morning catching up with outstanding bills and the duller kind of post. Clare and her husband Lyn arrived in the afternoon, Lyn bearing my birthday present of a camera. It seems to me odd that I have lived for seventy-seven years without ever having owned a camera. It is, perhaps, a little late to begin photography. Lyn, patient as ever, spent some time explaining the camera’s sophistications and then we went outside and, among all the dust and rubble, found a relatively clean corner and I took my first photograph of Clare. Later, after Lyn had left to have a haircut, Clare and I walked in the park and I photographed her again in the Japanese garden.
In the afternoon I completed and sent to The Independent a review of The Doctor, The Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, Martin Booth’s biography of the writer. He was a far more complex, indeed enigmatic and in some respects contradictory, character than a recital of his qualities would suggest. But those qualities were formidable. He fought vigorously against injustice, whether in the Belgian Congo or at home, advocated reform of the divorce laws which he saw as prejudiced in favour of men, and campaigned vigorously and successfully on behalf of prisoners who he considered had been wrongly convicted. But he was surprisingly naïve, even gullible. Admittedly he came to his belief in
spiritualism after careful weighing of the evidence, but that didn’t prevent him from being the victim of charlatans, and at the end of his life he forfeited money, goodwill and admiration by his belief in fairies, being taken in by a photograph which was a very obvious childish hoax.
But neither virtue nor eccentricity would have justified this or his previous biographies if he hadn’t created Sherlock Holmes, the best-known of all fictional detectives. The world appeal of the stories is extraordinary. I remember some years ago being in Tokyo to open an exhibition of crime writing. I was visited in my hotel by members of the Tokyo chapter of the Sherlock Holmes Society. They came in beaming, all wearing deerstalker hats and shooting jackets and smoking meerschaum pipes. What, I wondered, could they possibly have in common with this fictional Victorian archetypal hero. Martin Booth points out that the plots of the Sherlock Holmes stories may be ingenious, but they are hardly credible. Conan Doyle didn’t care very much about details. The dog that didn’t bark in the night is less mysterious than Dr. Watson’s dog, which disappeared completely. The chronology is sometimes confused, parts of London are inaccurately described and the writing is occasionally slapdash. None of this worried either Conan Doyle or his readers. A modern crime writer could wish that readers today were so accommodating. As the author himself wrote: “Accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matters is that I hold my readers.” He certainly did hold them, and he does so still.
The readers of detective fiction in the so-called Golden Age seemed equally unconcerned about accuracy, particularly scientific or forensic accuracy. The methods of murder were ingenious indeed. Webster tells us that death has ten thousand doors to let out life, and the detective story has made use of most of them. It was not sufficient in the 1930s that the victim was murdered; he or she must be mysteriously, ingeniously, bizarrely murdered. Realism in the setting, psychological subtlety in characterization, social concern, credibility; only too often all were subjugated to the dominant need of the plot.
The writers of the thirties had very little knowledge and even less apparent interest in forensic medicine or legal procedure. Many of the most eminent—some would say the best: Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham—were women with no scientific training, and their interest was far more in character, motive and plot than it was in forensic realism. Police methods were less well organized, less sophisticated and less scientific than they are today, and readers far less knowledgeable. Even so, we re-read some of these books with a mixture of amusement and incredulity. Postmortems were invariably carried out by the local general practitioner, presumably on the surgery couch after the evening surgery, following which he would invariably be able to provide the brilliant amateur detective with more information about precisely how the victim died than a modern forensic pathologist would be able to provide in a fortnight. The policemen, honest if ineffectual, were frequently mere foils to the talented amateur, or a species of country bumpkin, cycling to the scene of crime while deferentially tugging their forelocks to the gentry.
Typical of the books of the time is Dorothy L. Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon, where the newly married Lord Peter Wimsey and his wife find a corpse with a smashed skull in the cellar of their honeymoon farmhouse. Needless to say, no equivalent of the present-day scene-of-crime officer arrives to inspect the scene, no photographs are thought necessary, no one in the household suffers the indignity of having fingerprints taken, and we are told that the table-top in the kitchen is scrubbed ready to receive the corpse, although I am not sure whether this implies that the police surgeon, Dr. Craven, proposed to carry out the autopsy on the kitchen table. He certainly wrote a report for the coroner before leaving the house, which seems quick work. Meanwhile the detective settles down to enlist the help of Lord Peter while exchanging appropriate quotations from The Oxford Book of English Verse.
In some of Dorothy L. Sayers’s novels specimens are indeed placed in jars and sent to Sir James Lubbock, at the Home Office. Sir James seems to be a general-purpose forensic scientist, biologist, chemist, document examiner and pathologist. I picture him in his room at the Home Office undertaking postmortems and examining specimens from all over the country; a Napoleon of crime investigation.
Many of the books of the Golden Age are still being read with pleasure today, an indulgence, perhaps, in nostalgia, fascination with the ingenuity of the puzzle, or a hankering for Mayhem Parva, for a more homogeneous and peaceable world, a more assured and confident morality. But they are not being written today. The modern crime writer cannot afford to ignore forensic medicine, nor does he or she wish to. One reason for this change is, of course, the popularity of television police and crime series. Readers today know the difference between the uniformed branch and the CID and are well aware of the function and the importance of the forensic science service, if only because characters in these series so frequently ask “Heard anything yet from Forensic, Sarge?” Realism, including scientific realism, has also been encouraged by the modern fashion for professional detectives as opposed to the old reliance on the omni-talented, eccentric and romanticized amateur.
And those of us who aspire to create a credible professional detective must take trouble over our research, not only into police procedure but into modern scientific methods of investigating crime, including forensic medicine. The crime novel, like its readers, has changed fundamentally since the last war. Today the detective story is more realistic about murder, more violent, more sexually explicit, less assured in its affirmation of official law and order, moving ever closer to the sensibilities and moral ambiguities of the so-called “straight” novel. Crime writers today know only too well that corruption can lie at the very heart of law, that not all policemen are invariably honest, that murder is a contaminating crime which changes all those who come into touch with it, in fiction as in real life, and that although there may be—indeed must be—a solution at the end of the detective novel and a kind of justice, it can only be the fallible justice of men.
I enjoy doing my own research and am lucky in that my experience at the Home Office and the friends I made at New Scotland Yard and in the Forensic Science Service mean that expert advice is always available to me, and I am grateful. That doesn’t mean the books are without error. I am most likely to make mistakes where I don’t check because I am confident that I already know. An example is in A Taste for Death where the bodies are discovered in the vestry of a church by Miss Wharton, a gentle spinster who arrives early to dust the church and arrange fresh flowers, accompanied by Darren, the young truant she has befriended. The discovery of the bodies is so horrific (an example of the power of contrast in detective fiction) that the parish priest sends her to take a recuperative holiday with his predecessor and his wife in Nottingham.
I can’t think why I chose Nottingham; Brighton, Bournemouth or Scarborough would seem more appropriate. Worse, I made her travel from King’s Cross, not St. Pancras. I received two letters, both from women readers. The first asked rather plaintively why Miss Wharton had chosen to travel from King’s Cross when she would have had to change twice and the journey would have taken an extra hour. The second wrote that she fully understood Miss Wharton’s dislike of St. Pancras Station and would never travel from it if she could avoid it.
Tonight I had dinner with Valerie Eliot in the Grill Room of the Café Royal. I love this room, which I think is one of the most beautiful dining-rooms in London. There were few people there, partly because it’s August, partly, I suspect, because of the heat. Valerie talked about T. S. Eliot and their life together and I listened, ate and felt relaxed and cool. Valerie dropped me home at about eleven.
THURSDAY, 14TH AUGUST
I woke at six with a feeling of vague unease, as if my mind were struggling free from the last clinging threads of a bad dream. It was another very hot night and I had slept fitfully. Perhaps there had been a bad dream, but I had no conscious memory of it.
I can’t remember how long I stayed at Ely—no more than eighteen months, I think, before I resigned—but it seems in memory a time of misery. I began by finding a room in a boarding house where the cost, although reasonable, left me nothing over but my weekly fare home. There was one other new entrant, a boy with whom I had nothing in common. Even if we had liked each other, the friendship wouldn’t have been helped by the head of the office, who continually held him up to me as an example. The rest of the staff seemed to be old men, although they couldn’t have been much older than my father. The Cathedral was my one solace, but the little town seemed dreary and depressing. Finally I left the boarding house and started travelling from Cambridge to Ely each day. This necessitated a very early start, a long cycle ride to the station, the half-hour train journey and then a depressing trudge to the tax office.
