Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  When he was almost sixty John Stuart Mill, apparently to his surprise, was elected to Parliament as a ‘working man's candidate’ for Westminster. He made himself unpopular by campaigning for women's suffrage and writing an essay on The Subjugation of Women. He also became a secular godfather to the Earl of Amberley's second son, whose name was Bertrand Russell. Eight years later he followed his beloved wife to their grave in Avignon. The memory of Mill, and what he wrote, should be handed on in the wills of every generation.

  Leave Country Sports Alone, an organization of Labour supporters in favour of foxhunting, is a cause which has the great advantage of flouting the domino theory and defying the social and legal diktats of New Labour thinking. The many decent and reasonable people who enjoy foxhunting – and the many more who dislike the idea of it intensely – will never agree. What is important is that one side shouldn't enforce its views by the use of the criminal law. Dragging the many middle-aged women and pony-club girls who hunt off to our overcrowded prisons would be an absurdity. Hunting would seem to fall within Mill's definition of an area in which the law should not interfere with the way in which you or I wish to lead our lives. It does no harm to other persons – unless you wish to count a fox as a person, which leads you into anthropomorphic arguments or the world according to Disney.

  Mainly, it seems, to placate its backbenchers, denied any power and restless at its conservative behaviour, the government is threatening to introduce a bill to ban hunting. Four hundred thousand assorted country dwellers marched through London to protest at this, and what they feel is a general neglect of farming and the countryside. Not much good at marching, I was invited to lead the wheelchair battalion.

  I was given an electric wheelchair, a sort of battery-operated scooter with a seat, in which I was supposed to lead the small army of the handicapped. They were lined up on the Embankment and we were found a space to join the long column of marchers.

  I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to find that the occupants of motorized wheelchairs are intensely competitive. As soon as we got going, they speeded up and challenged me for the lead. A very large lady in a bright red and powerful wheelchair drew up alongside. She was driving a Rambler, she said, which could cross country and in which she had ascended Mount Snowdon. There was room for eight bottles of wine under the bonnet of this remarkable vehicle and during the Jubilee celebrations the police had attempted to arrest her on the suspicion that she was drunk in charge of her wheelchair. They invited her to get out of it and join them in the station, but when she told them that it would take at least eight strong officers to lift her out of the Rambler they decided, wisely, to let her go on her way.

  So we sped along the Embankment, under the bridges where the crowds waved at us and the police clapped; and the mounted police, who are often seen on the hunting field, were also approving. There have been left-wing hunters, Trotsky and Engels and, in my youth, Reggie Paget, a well-known Labour MP who rode to hounds. Trollope and Siegfried Sassoon, no right-wing bigots, wrote glowingly of the sport. But the large woman in the Rambler, who could never clear a fence or draw a covert, once cheerfully tipsy in charge of her wheelchair, turning out to protest against a ban on hunting, seemed to me an excellent example of someone who refuses to be submerged in the values of the majority. Whatever you might think of her, you could never have predicted her views like a row of dominoes.

  7. Outdoor Sex

  ‘She crawled with a rustle of grass towards me, quick and superbly assured. Her hand in mine was like a small wet flame which I could neither hold nor throw away. Then Rosie, with remorseless, reedy strength, pulled me… down, down into her wide green smile and into the deep subaqueous grass.’

  I should include in my will a strong recommendation of the joys of alfresco sex, as described by Laurie Lee when he tasted kisses and cider. Recently our New Labour government introduced a comical bill into Parliament which would ensure that in future Laurie and his Rosie would end up in the nick for making love in a public place.

  ‘The first of May, the first of May, outdoor fucking starts today,’ went an old American rhyme. Not if the New Puritans in power had their way it wouldn't, not on the first of May or any other time this spring. The lovers and their lasses were about to be cracked down on.

  Mr Blunkett, the Home Secretary, is not a man unfamiliar with poetry. He must surely have read Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee's sun-filled bucolic memoir. He even took part in Laurie's memorial service and spoke highly of that poet and great celebrator of love in the cornfields. He must remember, too, Shakespeare's lover and his lass

  That o'er the green corn-field did pass,

  In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,

  When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;

  Sweet lovers love the spring.

  Why on earth should Mr Blunkett, or Hilary Benn, son of Tony Benn, the great firebrand of the left, who is the Home Secretary's junior minister, seek to confine the sweet lovers to Wormwood Scrubs, where very few birds can be heard singing?

  There can be few people who, looking back on happy moments of their lives, can't remember love in the open air. It wasn't a cornfield perhaps, but the edge of a wood, or a warm beach at night with the gentle sound of waves retreating.

  My own, long-ago introduction to sex was late at night, in the bracken on the common, after we had collected glow-worms in our handkerchiefs. After all these years I find myself waiting the arrival of the police.

  The countryside in summer has always been the place for love:

  Someone stole my heart away,

  Riding in a load of hay…

  Heather beds are soft –

  And silken sheets are bonny,

  But I would give it all

  To go with my man Johnny.

  Hearts were broken ‘coming through the rye’. Hayricks and long grass were thought of as just as romantic and far more suited to the occasion than silken sheets and soft mattresses, and were no doubt a great deal healthier than dubious lunchtime hotels, places which were not available to most country lovers and their lasses.

  Now it has been suggested that not only cornfields and commons should be out of bounds. You wouldn't even have been able to make love in your own garden if the Sexual Offences Bill had become law. Frustrated couples would have had to confine themselves to weeding in a sexy way, or mowing the lawn with smothered eroticism. Love on the lawn was to be made a criminal offence. ‘Come into the garden, Maud’, even if the ‘black bat, night, has flown’, could only be an invitation to admire the dahlias. Not only had the government decided to tell us how to behave in our own gardens, but love in cars, the subject of many happy teenage memories, was to be added to the ever-growing list of New Labour crimes.

  I remember my father, a prominent and successful divorce lawyer, coming home to me in my nursery and telling me that he had had a great success in proving adultery when ‘really the only evidence we had was a pair of footprints upside down on the dashboard of an Austin Seven motor car parked in Hampstead Garden Suburb'. Such adultery, no doubt calling for a good deal of athletic skill, was not only to be grounds for divorce but the subject of a criminal conviction. Sex in any place that could possibly be described as ‘public’ was to be banned outright.

  A difficult question arose with regard to the mile-high club. There is something about air travel, a rush of adrenalin caused by a mixture of fear, business-class champagne and the excitement of foreign travel, which so turns people on that they are tempted, once they have struck up an acquaintance with a person of the opposite sex in the next seat, to suggest a joint visit to the lavatory not too long after the safety belt sign has been switched off.

  This might, after long legal argument, be held to be a private act. What about the couple in a well-known London club whose eyes met across the dining room so lovingly that the man suggested they repair to the facilities downstairs? When the lady replied, ‘Your place or mine?’ and he went for hers, they would have been comm
itting no crime, because the newly suggested law, according to the young Benn, would have determined that sex in lavatories might be all right if the door is kept closed. What is there left to say about a government bill which suggests that love in the loo is OK, but do it in a cornfield and you've committed a serious crime?

  So the car parks and the lay-bys in which some vehicles may be gently rocking would have been subject to police raids. I remember when our car broke down, late at night, on our way home to our house in the country. Knocking politely on the window of a Volvo parked on the edge of a wood where a couple were preparing to make love, I asked them for a lift. With extraordinary kindness they drove us home. When they had done so I offered them the hospitality of a spare bedroom. They said no, they preferred their own car and the dark corner of the wood. They were, of course, hardened criminals.

  The thinking behind these proposals, if they could be dignified with such a word, was that the great British public must be spared the sight of anyone making love. It's true that, while making love is extremely enjoyable, watching other people doing it is not such a great treat. But are we to assume that the public is incapable of averting its eyes or passing quickly by? Are we bound to peer into every parked car or gaze into every garden, hoping for a shock?

  When we won the last war, when VE Day was declared, Hyde Park was covered with ecstatic couples having sex. It would have been a night of celebration for New Labour's police. But now you would have to take a good deal of trouble, and perhaps a detour, to see an act of love. In a long life, I can't say I remember many occasions when I have stumbled on a couple locked in an intimate embrace. If I had, I don't see why it should have caused me any particular distress.

  The vast majority of films and a great deal of television today portray acts of simulated sex, so the British public must, by now, at least know what it looks like. It wouldn't come as a great shock to anyone even if they happened upon it in the cornfields or noticed it, as I believe you sometimes can, in the showers attached to the Houses of Parliament.

  We live, as I'm writing this, in the most extraordinary times. Our prisons are so overcrowded that there is no room in them, apparently, for burglars. The courts are overworked, the Crown Prosecution Service is near to breakdown and yet the lover and his lass, arrested in the cornfield, might have been sent to jail.

  So I leave you the memories and possibilities of woods and fields, the corners of churchyards or the back seats of Toyotas. In his wise and beautiful book, Laurie Lee writes of country life when he got to know Rosie: ‘It is not crime that has increased, but its definition. The modern city, for youth, is a police-trap. Our village was clearly no pagan paradise, neither were we conscious of showing tolerance… The village neither approved nor disapproved, but neither did it complain to authority.’

  The government's proposals to ban outdoor sex provoked such hostility and derision among the saner members of the House of Lords, where the bill was introduced, that they will have to be dropped. Other strange provisions of the Sexual Offences Bill, however, remain. It will, from now on, be a serious crime to have sex with anyone with learning difficulties. You should therefore prepare a short examination paper for your partner as part of the foreplay. If he or she fails to pass, the gig will have to be off. Even if your girlfriend can find her way easily through Proust in French, you will have to satisfy the court that she hadn't a speech defect which might prevent her from saying, ‘No.’ It will also be a sad day for those with learning difficulties, who won't be allowed to have sex with anyone else, including other people with learning difficulties.

  Finally, the bill contains a new offence of oral rape. This led one peeress, during the debate, to ask plaintively, ‘Have women no longer teeth?’

  Enough of sexual offences. Let's all go out into the garden.

  8. Shakespeare's Favourites

  Shakespeare, like Richard II, talked of wills and famously left his second-best bed to his wife. He left no advice, however, rightly believing that it's a dramatist's business to ask questions and not provide answers. His characters speak their own thoughts and not his, but perhaps we get closest to him when we hear the voices of those that he loved the most. They were not the kings and queens or even the princes, the great heroes and heroines, the giants with a fatal flaw or the star-crossed lovers, who had, he said, a great deal in common with poets and lunatics. No, the characters he loved were the men and women of common sense, clear heads, loyal, stoical, able to see through the mists of self-delusion and deceit out of which great tragedies come.

  They don't have starring roles, but they are the best friends of the heroes or heroines and if only they were listened to much trouble might be avoided. One such character, clearly loved by the author, is Kent, true to King Lear as he lives through his master's reign from arrogance to madness and gentle resignation. ‘I do profess to be no less than I seem;’ says Kent in his creed. To ‘serve him truly that will put me in trust; to love him that is honest; to converse with him that is wise, and says little; to fear judgement; to fight when I cannot choose; and to eat no fish.’

  Another embodiment of the loyal and truthful man of common sense is, of course, Horatio, of whom Hamlet said:

  … thou hast been

  As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,

  A man that fortune's buffets and rewards

  Hast ta'en with equal thanks…

  Give me that man

  That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him

  In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,

  As I do thee.

  After which Hamlet, thinking he has expressed himself too emotionally to be the stoical character he so much admires, says, ‘Something too much of this…’ Perhaps our problem today is that we have too many Hamlets and not enough Horatios.

  Kent, Horatio, the favoured character turns up again and again in more complex forms as, for instance, Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra or the more cynical Lennox in Macbeth. When Owen Glendower, the Welsh wizard, says ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep’ and Hotspur replies ‘Why, so can I, or so can any man;/But will they come when you do call for them?’ the dashing young hero becomes one with the common-sensible enemy of pomposity and pretension. Emilia, Iago's clear-sighted wife, can berate the murderously jealous Othello, ‘O gull! O dolt! As ignorant as dirt!’ and express the common sense of the audience, cutting the heroic, poetic, easily deceived Moor of Venice down to size so that we can be allowed to feel some sympathy for him at the end of the play. There is a great deal of this straight-talking spirit in Rosalind, and Juliet's loquacious and boring old nurse has more good sense in her little finger than the Franciscan confessor Friar Laurence has, with his dotty plans calculated to cause a tragedy, in his entire body.

  This stoical character, who can survey the vagaries of the world with a smile of tolerant amusement, until some mindless horror makes him or her call out, ‘O dolt! As ignorant as dirt!’, comes close to that adopted by Michel, Lord of Montaigne, another writer with a tower, his shelves crammed with books and his walls covered with quotations from Greek and Roman philosophers. He did his best to incorporate the stoical attributes of the great past civilizations into the Christianity of the Renaissance and to discover ‘a sane and decent manner of life’. John Florio, who translated Montaigne, was undoubtedly a friend of Shakespeare and there is, in the British Museum, a copy of Florio's Montaigne with Shakespeare's name, some say in his handwriting, written in it. Whether The Essays influenced the later plays, or confirmed Shakespeare's feeling for his favourite characters, the views of the glovemaker's son from Stratford and the heir to the country round the vineyards of Château Eyquem echo each other, and add their valuable bequests to succeeding generations.

  Montaigne wrote little about the afterlife but he was concerned to reconcile the humanist to the process of dying. ‘I want death to find me,’ he wrote, ‘planting my cabbages – caring little for it and even less about the imperfections of my garden.’
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br />   9. Listening

  The world's full of talkers, with not nearly enough listeners. This leads to many lonely people wandering from room to room in their quiet empty houses, asking and answering questions from and to themselves. Too many of us rabbit on about ourselves, repeating what we know already, and fail to discover anything about the curious lives and the unopened histories of the passenger in the corner seat, the sad-eyed, lonely drinker at the end of the bar or the apparently ill-assorted couples in the holiday hotel.

  The art of listening is one that has to be learned by lawyers. You may think of Rumpole's life as one of incessant chatter, forever up on his hind legs making speeches or asking questions. Yet a good half of a barrister's life is spent listening in silence in his chambers room or during a prison visit.

  It was as a divorce barrister that I learned of the hotelier husband who fixed up a lengthy trough from his bedroom window to the vegetable garden, so that he could urinate in comfort and water the runner beans at the same time. This device caused embarrassment to the hotel's visitors who were taking tea in the garden. His wife, not unnaturally, wanted to end the marriage. At the trial the husband asked if he might give evidence standing on his head. This request was curtly refused. I heard from the lady who joined a wife-swapping club in Croydon, ‘mainly to give my husband some sort of interest in life’, and fell deeply in love with her swap. I learned more than perhaps I needed to know about the husband who armed his children with lavatory brushes and put them through small-arms drill with these implements every morning before sending them off to school. I also heard much of the husband who would write letters to his wife's furniture which he then pinned to it, such as, ‘You are a cheap and vulgar little sideboard. Please return to whatever bargain basement you came from! You are certainly not wanted in this establishment.’