Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  The urge to ban words which might possibly cause offence has now become surreal. The sublime works of P. G. Wodehouse describe many decent and dependable characters, some being members of the Drones Club, as ‘good eggs’. You would think this would be praise everyone would value. I remember doing an interview with Raquel Welch, whom I found, rather to my surprise, to be an ‘excellent egg’. When I wrote that, there were no cries of protest, the beautiful actress in question appeared to regard it as a compliment, and I was not aware of having caused offence to anyone.

  Now, however, it appears that a police officer calling anyone a good or indeed any sort of egg would be strictly reprimanded. Why on earth should that be? You may well ask. Of course, the answer is extremely simple. ‘Egg and spoon’ is cockney rhyming slang for ‘coon’ and so ‘egg’ is a word of racial abuse, isn't it? Or is it? Partridge's dictionary of slang gives no authority for the egg and spoon theory, and there must be many to whom this involved connection would never occur. However, in the world we live in, this is no doubt an excellent reason for keeping P. G. Wodehouse's face off the euro note.

  Sensitive police officers were also deeply concerned when a Home Office minister urged them to get down to the ‘nitty-gritty’ of a certain problem. You will have realized at once why this is a term of racist abuse and likely to give terrible offence. The Home Office minister, it seems, was ignorant of what every trainee constable knows: the bilges at the bottom of slave ships were where the dirty water sloshed around the grit from the ballast. Any reference to this area, where slaves were once kept in chains, would naturally be deeply offensive to a law student from Ghana or a young doctor from Sierra Leone. Or would it? Referring once more to the great Partridge, you will find that the expression ‘nitty-gritty’ has its origins among the black musicians in New York in the 1930s, a time when very few slave ships were crossing the Atlantic. And even if it did have to do with the ghastly trade in human beings, what's wrong with using the words to describe the unpleasant basic reality of a problem?

  But the desperate need to find words which might, just possibly, offend someone requires no logic or even a working knowledge of the language. The university teacher in America who used the word ‘niggardly’ knew that it had absolutely nothing to do with the colour of anyone's skin, but apparently his audience and the university authorities didn't. So he lost his job.

  If you are English and say you don't mind at all being called a ‘whingeing Pom’ in Australia, if you are Scots and are not in the least offended by jokes about your being careful with your money, you are told that it's perfectly all right for those who are so secure, so complacent, so self-satisfied that they can even take a bit of offence without serious danger. But the idea that there are other, weaker, more easily offended people who may go into a decline if told that they are, after all, good eggs seems to me intolerably patronizing.

  The fact that words are held in such awe is no doubt flattering to writers. We are dealing in goods which are thought of as being as deadly as bullets, as destructive as Exocet missiles. In the beginning was the word. This is one of the comparatively rare moments when I find myself in complete agreement with God. In fact the word, in the Old Testament, is God. Words can be used for some of His most terrible purposes, for starting wars, for pronouncing death sentences on criminals and cancer sufferers, for inciting rebellions and ordering hideous reprisals, for announcing great and poetic truths and for lying and deceit. No one can deny their power and, with all respect to Dr Dolittle, they are what separate us from the animals. But how far should the use of words be a criminal offence? Threats to kill, conspiracies to murder or to rob, incitements to violence, even, under more sensible libel laws than those we have in England at present, perhaps untrue or unjustified accusations of bad behaviour that cause financial loss must be against the law. But, for heaven's sake, words that give offence, as indeed the word of God has down the ages to many people, are an essential part of life.

  ‘Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in't?’ the guilty King asks Hamlet as the Players start to re-enact his crime. ‘No offence i' the world,’ Hamlet lies, and it's as well that he does. A play with no offence in it would make a dull evening in any theatre. Indeed, it might be said that the arts advanced on a tide of offence. The Puritans in the times of Cromwell, true ancestors of the politically correct, found the glory of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists so offensive that they closed the theatres and acting was made a criminal offence punishable by flogging. Satirists from Juvenal to Pope and onwards handed out strong doses of offence, often in exquisite couplets. Shelley's Queen Mab was considered so offensive that its printer was put on trial for blasphemy. Byron, writing ‘God Save the King/It is a small economy’ on the death of George III, was as offensive about the monarch, and such popular heroes as the Duke of Wellington, as Private Eye manages to be today. Madame Bovary was thought so offensive that Flaubert was put on trial for it, as was Baudelaire for Les Fleurs du Mal. Ibsen's Ghosts offended by dealing with hereditary syphilis, and in my lifetime Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Well of Loneliness were all banned. Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, in which men kissed, and John Osborne's A Patriot for Me couldn't be played unless the theatres were, for some archaic legal reason, turned into clubs. It was feared that they might offend the public at large. In painting, Whistler's river views deeply offended Ruskin. Practically everyone was hugely offended by the first Impressionist exhibition and the Surrealists caused even more offence than pickled cows or Tracey Emin's bed.

  It is true to say that Mrs Radclyffe Hall's story of lesbian love, The Well of Loneliness, having been clearly found unfit for human consumption by a London Police Court magistrate in the 1930s, was a few years ago read aloud on BBC Radio as the ‘Book at Bedtime’. Fashions in what is or is not offensive change over the years and it might even be said that the present standards of sensitivity are sillier than ever. You can understand, even if you don't agree with, public discomfort about an open discussion of hereditary syphilis or lesbian love. It's harder to believe that any sane person could be seriously concerned about good eggs or getting down to the nitty-gritty.

  The most serious offence, it once was thought, would be caused if free speech were to be allowed on the subject of religious beliefs. Living in a country where we assumed speech to be free, it was something of a shock to discover that we still had a blasphemy law that, in true medieval fashion, made offensive remarks about religion a crime. In the 1930s a Mr Gough was sent to prison for suggesting that Christ looked like a clown when he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. In the 1970s James Kirkup wrote a poem describing the Roman centurion's physical desire for the dead body of Christ when He was taken down from the cross. This poem was published in the magazine Gay News. The editor of that paper was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to a term of imprisonment. Although the prison sentence was quashed on appeal, the surprising fact remained that we had a blasphemy law which protects only the Church of England (you can say what you like about the Pope) and no other religion. The inevitable result of this was that other religious groups wanted one too and a Labour Home Secretary, who is to civil liberties what terriers are to rats, was on the point of making it a crime to cause offence to anyone's religious belief, until good sense and the House of Lords spared us, for the moment, any such legislation. Another result was that those who defended the fatwah, the death sentence passed in Iran against Salman Rushdie because of what he had written about the prophet Mohammed, were able to tell us that we have a law against blasphemy so how could we criticize Islamic fundamentalists?

  It is surely absurd to believe that Christians, who have survived persecution, martyrdom and generations of religious wars, would crumble at a few words of mockery, criticism or even abuse. It seems to me to be an insult to the religious beliefs, as well as to those who hold them, to say that they need the special protection of a law which makes it a criminal offence to hurt people's feelings.

  When
the jury was out in the Gay News trial, Mrs Whitehouse, the litigious leader of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, prayed with her supporters in the corridors of the Old Bailey for a guilty verdict. In his autobiography the judge revealed that he felt the hand of God writing his summing-up. If this were so, God has defined our blasphemy law as one having no requirement of intent (you needn't mean to upset any one) and one without any defence of literary merit. The Almighty has clearly changed his mind since the more liberal days when On the Origin of Species was published and ‘intent’ was said to be a vital part of the offence. No one wanted to put Darwin in the nick.

  Writers and artists must learn to withstand mockery, abuse and misunderstanding as an essential part of their careers. Men and women of various political beliefs, however sincerely held, must expect derision. It seems very strange that the Church of England, often seen as among the gentler religions, should wish to be protected by a censor or find it necessary to combine its beliefs with the threat of imprisonment.

  In fact being caused offence not only stimulates debate but confirms belief and strengthens it. Milton, no enemy of religion, had it right when he wrote ‘if we have free speech truth will look after itself’. And if we have a censorship which stops us offending anyone, the truth may be concealed in the surrounding blur.

  14. Living with Children

  When I think of my childhood it smells of bracken. The common near which we lived was covered with the stuff-crisp, brown and crackling in the winter, green and sticky with sap in the summer. In this bracken Sam Rockall, Iris and I would build houses, rescue broken plates and cups from the nearest rubbish dump, drink Tizer the Appetizer and consume jam sandwiches, gob-stoppers and bags of crisps that always contained, in those days, a little blue bag of salt. Sam Rockall's father was a bodger, a person who cut down the beech trees, turned them into chair legs on a foot lathe and then sold them, for a few pounds a gross, to the furniture makers in High Wycombe.

  So every day during my school holidays, we played together, often staying out until the sun went down and the glow-worms shone on the common. Then we went home to what Sam and Iris called tea and my parents called dinner. Although, from time to time, Iris would volunteer to show me her knickers and I occasionally presented her with a Woolworth's necklace, our activities were entirely innocent.

  Often I bicycled seven miles to the river at Henley and swam in the dark, brackish waters where your feet tangled in the rushes or sank into the riverbed so that the mud oozed between your toes. No one swims in the river now – a pity, because in spite of its being the receptacle into which the lavatories of pleasure boats are emptied, it had a good deal more interest than a chlorinated swimming pool.

  So I bicycled, and talked to strangers – a slightly mad monk and an artist I found doing a painting of Henley Bridge. I don't think my parents worried very much, or wondered where I was. Perhaps they were relieved at my absence. When I was at home, I would perform scenes from my favourite musical films and, having no brother or sister, I had to be both Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Having a child in those days didn't seem to be a matter of perpetual anxiety.

  Even at my prep school we were allowed to bicycle round Oxford to buy fruit and materials to assemble model aeroplanes or, in my case, copies of Theatre World. My parents used to treat me with mild amusement and I don't remember being put under any pressure to pass exams. The freedom, some people nowadays might even call it the neglect, of a 1930s childhood was a good preparation for an uncertain future. When I was sixteen war broke out and from the heights of Harrow churchyard we could see the sky coloured red as London burned. There could be no further guarantee of safety.

  Childhood now seems a far more sheltered, even claustrophobic, period of life. Television and the Internet are mechanical devices that have taken the place of imaginary adventures, when you could be a captain in the French Foreign Legion galloping to relieve a fortress in the desert, or an outlaw desperate to reach his hideout in the woods.

  There was no television in my childhood, of course, but we had radio, with ITMA, In Town Tonight and Dick Barton, Special Agent. But radio is a form that does call for an act of the imagination; the world is not presented to you in small, bright pictures or in flickering letters on a screen.

  All these mechanical aids mean staying indoors. You can lie in the long grass or on a beach with a book but the telly has to be plugged in, in a room. And children today get driven to school (if middle class and living in London in large and inappropriate four-wheel drives) and back. If the children were out leading imaginary charges, or hiding in the bracken for fear of arrest by the King's officers, today's parents would be consumed with anxiety.

  To some extent this is understandable. We live, it seems, in the age of paedophilia. The onset of this undoubted danger is a mystery to me. At boarding school we had the odd errant butler and some over-affectionate masters, but no one thought of the danger of being dragged into a strange car and ending up, perhaps dead, in the bracken.

  In the 1950s and 1960s I did a large number of divorce cases. Warring wives would make the most terrible allegations against their husbands, but I can't remember any charge of paedophilia. Now practically every case in the Family Division contains such accusations. They are, of course, easy to make and are apparently included as a matter of course in American matrimonial cases. Should we believe that this horror emerged, like sex, at the time of the Beatles’ first LP and grew with the encouragement of the Internet? Whatever the answer to these questions, parents have the right to be nervous. But we can't let the worst cases, however horrible, overshadow our children's lives.

  Childhood, after all, has to be an age of discovery. These are days you'll remember vividly all your life, even when you're old and forget why you came into a room. It must never be allowed to become the age of anxiety.

  The anxiety has been greatly increased by this government's multiplication of exams and emphasis on starting training as a middle manager in a computer company from the age of six. Parents have made things worse by worrying unduly about exam results and seeing that their children work a great deal harder than most middle managers in computer companies. During a career as a barrister, and as a writer in a number of different forms, I have to say that no one has ever asked me how I did in any school exams, or what kind of degree I got.

  Our present Minister of Education has said, in a phrase that proclaims his total unsuitability for the post, that no one should study classics or medieval history and that education unconnected with qualifications for a job is ‘dodgy’. This is dangerous rubbish. Childhood is the time when you should enrich your life, learn poetry, be thrilled by history, do plays, go to the cinema and look at pictures. The qualifications for a job, such as, for example, Minister of Education, can be picked up quite easily later in life.

  Childhood, you should remember, is a pretty tough time to be alive. You reach, at first, only as high as grown-up people's knees and then to their crotches. For this reason, you are not often referred to or included in the conversation. Sometimes you are spoken of as though you weren't there, or, if there, incapable of speaking for yourself. Strange, hairy people with patronizing smiles and penetrating voices will ask each other, ‘Does he like his school?’ or ‘Is he enjoying his cricket? All boys like cricket.’ Down at crotch level you know it's not worth saying you hate your bloody school and cricket is about as interesting an occupation as watching paint dry. You were a boy and although you were only truly excited by the plays of Noël Coward, the lyrics of Cole Porter and Jerome Kern, the seemingly casual, elegant, incredibly skilled tap-dancing of Fred Astaire, cricket is what boys like.

  This, anyway, was my experience of childhood. But my parents, although they may have laughed gently at my eccentricities, didn't patronize me. When they went out to dinner or to the theatre they took me with them and there was very little talk of cricket. All the same, I was sent away to schools ruled, as much as anything, by fear. Some of the masters t
reated us with undisguised contempt. ‘Revolting boy,’ a pallid and supercilious French teacher would snort. ‘Convey my sympathy to your unfortunate parents.’ The masters we loved were Mr Retty (Rats), who taught us to foxtrot and, taking the woman's position on the parquet, would issue such gentle commands as, ‘Chassé, boy! Please do chassé.’ And Mr Jacques, who would sing to us, accompanying himself on a banjo, such songs as ‘The Captain's name was Captain Brown and he played his ukulele as the ship went down’ and ‘Your baby has gone down the plughole’.

  Children are extremely resilient and can somehow brave the fear-ridden schools of the past and the overprotection, overtesting exam mania and paedophilia obsession of today (Mr Rats would be instantly dismissed for taking the woman's part when fox-trotting with us, his arm around our waists). The only advice I can give to my heirs and assigns is to beseech them to treat children as equals: don't patronize them or ignore them or behave as though they were in some way disabled and not entirely sane.

  It is also advisable to arrange your life so that you always have a young child living with you. If this, as the years go by, becomes increasingly difficult, borrow as many children as possible from the neighbours and try as hard as you can not to earn their contempt. Children can spot pomposity, insincerity and self-regard a mile off and are the best possible antidote to such diseases. They should always be heard, but they may not be seen. Let's hope they are up a tree somewhere, reading a book that has nothing to do with getting a job.