CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

by John Mortimer

  ‘Dear Mummy,’ I wrote. ‘I still don’t like it here. Would you please send me a new pair of braces as soon as you can? I cast mine aside and now I can’t find them. And now I have to cast aside my belt …’

  Noah was also tremendously keen on iodine lockets. These were small china bottles, full of iodine, tied to a tape which, if worn round the neck at all times would, he was persuaded, prevent any known disease from bunions to botulism. We were all issued with these charms, which we used to fight with like conkers.

  ‘I have noticed that some boys,’ Noah looked sadly around him at assembly and sounded puzzled, ‘have taken to wearing small pieces of broken china slung about their necks on a ribbon. I take this to be a primitive superstition, and calculated to ward off the evil eye. “Ham” will be giving us a talk with lantern-slides on African tribes who still cling to such irrational beliefs. This school is a Christian community. Cast aside the amulets, resist the mumbo-jumbo, or behold I will strike ye with my rod and terrible will be the striking thereof!’

  I can’t remember Noah taking a great part in our education. He bought a little carillon of bells which he hung outside the dining-room and he used to summon us in to Sunday supper by playing tunes on them. He enjoyed this exercise and long after supper was over, indeed long after lights had been turned out, he would stand in the passage in his dark suit and highly-polished boots, delicately picking out tune after tune with a small hammer, smiling benevolently.

  For its period the prep school was progressive. As I have said, we knew the staff by their nicknames. ‘Shem’ was the headmaster’s son, ‘Ham’ taught Latin and Greek to the top class, ‘Japhet’ played expertly on the banjolele and sang songs such as Here We Sit Like Birds in the Wilderness and We Left Your Baby on the Shore. He also taught us ballroom dancing and I spent a good deal of time being pushed steadily backwards by ‘Japhet’ to the tune of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes as he shouted, ‘Chassé, boy! Chassé, damn you!’ Ham had shrapnel stuck in his head, which caused him to go periodically out of his mind and strafe us with textbooks and blackboard rubbers, attacks for which he was profoundly apologetic when he came to himself and the armistice was signed.

  We were allowed many liberties: we could bicycle round the town and take boats out on the river. I early developed a pronounced allergy to any sort of organized sport which has been with me ever since. Perhaps it’s because I was an only child, but I never have felt any sort of team spirit. Loyalty to the school to which your parents pay to send you seemed to me like feeling loyal to Selfridges: consequently I never cared in the least which team won, but only prayed for the game to be over without the ball ever coming my way. In the cricket season I learned there was a safe and faraway place on the field called ‘deep’ which I always chose. When ‘Over’ was called I simply went more and more ‘deep’ until I was sitting on the steps of the pavilion reading the plays of Noël Coward, whom I had got on to after Bulldog Drummond. All I wanted then was to be a star of musical comedy and come tap-dancing down a huge staircase in white tie and tails. I got a theatrical costumier’s catalogue and wrote up for a silver-topped ebony cane and a monocle.

  Future experience was to show me that my early distrust of sport was well founded. I was told of a public school where the lascivious butler used to change into games clothes and crouch behind a bush from which he would leap during the muddy confusion of a ‘scrum down’ and covertly join in the game for the purpose of fondling the boys in an intimate manner. Sport, as I have discovered, fosters international hostility and leads the audience, no doubt from boredom, to assault and do grievous bodily harm while watching it. The fact that audiences at the National Theatre rarely break bottles over one another’s heads, and that opera fans seldom knee one another in the groin during the long intervals at Covent Garden, convinces me that the theatre is safer than sport. In my case the masters at my prep school agreed to the extent of sending me to the local repertory theatre with a bar of Fry’s Mint Chocolate. In this way I saw most of the plays of Bernard Shaw, which must have been better than playing cricket.

  At the beginning, when I was away at school, I was extremely lonely. Loneliness, however, the birthright of the only child, held no particular terrors for me. In the holidays, having built his new house near to our old country cottage, my father devoted almost all his spare time to a large garden, and as his eyes failed and the flowers and vegetables faded from his view, his gardening became more dedicated, until, when he could no longer see the results of his labours, but had to rely on my mother or me to describe the health of a dahlia or the wilt of a clematis, he spent every possible hour pricking out, or potting on, or groping for dead heads and trying to get a correct aim with his secateurs. He never welcomed visitors and would often ask my mother to lead him away into the undergrowth if they appeared at the gate, so a month or so would pass without our seeing anyone at all. My segregated education seemed to have driven some sort of wedge between me and Iris and the Mullard boys, so holidays were a solitary pleasure which I tried to carry on at school.

  Being alone was easier, I had long ago discovered, if you became two people, the actor and the observer. The observer was always the same, the actor played many parts: an officer in the Foreign Legion, for instance, or a ruthless private detective with rooms in Half Moon Street, or a Brigadier in Napoleon’s army. ‘There he goes,’ I was able to say about myself, even in the deeply unhappy days when I lolloped about a frozen football field, keeping as far as possible from the ball, ‘cantering across the burning sands with his crack platoon of Spahis (ex-murderers, robbers and at least one Duke disappointed in love, but whoever asked questions of a Legionnaire?) in search of the tents of Mahmoud Bey, and a levelling of the score after the disgrace of Sidi Ben Oud.’ Later my character became more sophisticated, as I came more under the influence of Noël Coward and Dornford Yates.

  ‘Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes. Translate, Mortimer.’

  ‘Thus you don’t make honey for yourselves, you apes, sir.’ Mortimer drew a flat gold cigarette-case from the breast pocket of his immaculate grey, double-breasted jacket. He was bubbling with suppressed laughter: the answer had been deliberately misleading. With a tap the heavy case sprang open and he offered it to the bewildered little man at the blackboard. ‘Turkish this side,’ he said, ‘and Virginian the other.’

  Later still, when I made a friend, we inflicted our lies on each other. Childhood is a great time for lying. Later in life you may be able to boast of some real achievement or some extraordinary adventure, in childhood all must be supplied from the imagination. So I told my friend that I was the son of a Russian aristocrat, smuggled out of Moscow during the revolution, and had been kindly taken in by the simple English lawyer with whom I happened to live. I had a long story, a rare sporting fantasy, about walking along the towpath at Hammersmith when the cox of the Oxford crew had a heart attack and, being then of the appropriate weight, steering the eight to victory in the Boat Race. More consistently, I pretended that my parents never stopped going to cocktail parties, bickering, throwing ‘White Ladies’ and ‘Manhattans’ into each other’s faces and would soon be getting a divorce. If I had one clear ambition during those years it was to be the child of a broken home.

  My friend was Bill Mann. I can’t remember exactly how we met and when we found each other. Recently, standing side by side in the Gents of a London hotel, we at first failed to recognize each other, yet our relationship was very close. We were in business together and our business was the theatre. At first we merely talked about the plays we had seen. My father went to the theatre, usually after consuming a leisurely four-course dinner at the ‘Trocadero’, which would mean his being led into the entertainment followed by me in a state of acute embarrassment and an Eton suit, somewhere about the middle of the first act. We always occupied seats in the front row of the stalls, so our arrival never passed unnoticed, either from the stage or the audience. Failing vision and a late start made the plots of new plays extremely hard
for my father to follow and the show would be punctuated by deafening whispers of, ‘What’s happening now, Kath? Go on, paint me the picture!’ With Shakespeare of course he had no problem and could remember all the quotations and say lines aloud and with great relish seconds before the actors. Once a year we would go to Stratford and see all the productions. We stayed at an hotel in which the bedrooms were called after plays and decorated with ancient engravings of blood-curdling scenes from the major tragedies. One night I was kept awake by a violent quarrel coming from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ next door. On another I was frozen with fear at a curiously ghoulish engraving of the witches in Macbeth. I turned my eyes from the picture to the wardrobe mirror only to be stricken to a more permanent immobility by the sight of a frightful phantom, product, no doubt, of the witches’ cauldron, consisting only of two pale spindly legs and white hooded blur. I had been standing for a long while before I realized that I was looking at the reflection of myself taking off my shirt.

  So I had a good many theatrical experiences to discuss with Bill Mann. I could tell him much about the plays I had seen and even more about those I hadn’t. As a future music critic of The Times, he could tell me about concerts and operas which were then, and remained for many years, a subject of total mystery to me, my father’s idea of a musical experience being to repeat Shakespearean quotations or sing several verses of Pretty Little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green.

  After long theatrical discussions, during which we drew out the seating plans for most of the London theatres, we decided to put on plays at my home during weekend visits. This excitingly entailed writing off for review sketches and printed paper scenery from Samuel French Limited, but there were several dangers in inviting my friend home. He would inevitably be exposed to certain disgraceful facts about my family which I had been at pains to conceal, such as the immovable solidity of my parents’ marriage, the glaring absence of a cocktail-shaker and my father’s growing blindness. These things must have been obvious to Bill Mann, but he was too polite to mention any of them. However I noticed him staring at my mother’s fingernails, which I had described to him as very long and painted green, and taking in the fact that they were rather blunt and chipped from a good deal of potting up.

  We put on a review we had written called Champagne Cocktail and one we bought from Samuel French called Airy Nothings. We stood on the dining-room stairs in bedspreads and pink paper shakos and sang selections from Ivor Novello. We did a play I wrote where we acted the ghosts of two young subalterns killed on the Somme. Whenever she heard that we were going to do what my father called ‘An entertainment’ my mother would give a little cry of horror at the thought of all the clearing up. When we played the two ghostly officers we laughed so much that we felt compelled to run into the kitchen to eat cold roast potatoes smeared with honey, a dish we thought would be disgusting enough to bring us to our senses.

  Back at school the theatrical productions were better regulated and very well done. Each year we did a Shakespeare play and a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, and by a process of extreme democracy, of which the left wing of Equity would approve, the plays were cast by popular vote. In our last year Bill Mann was elected to play Bunthorne and I won Richard II. By that time the school had become, for me, a place of glorious excitement. I lay awake at night repeating:

  For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

  And tell sad stories of the death of kings

  and hardly slept. The masters either attacked us savagely or put on concerts for us, evenings when we drank cider-cup and they sang, to the unaccompanied banjolele, Olga Pulloffski the Beautiful Spy, Abdul the Bulbul Ameer and Gertie the Girl with the Gong. I fell violently in love with a tow-haired small boy called Jenks who reminded me of the signed photograph of Annabella I had written up for. He promised to be faithful to me forever, but when I last saw him he was with his wife and four children at London Airport. No time in my life was ever as exciting or triumphant as the term I put up for Richard II and won the election.

  Through all this excitement Noah moved in a mysterious way. He had to deal with a major problem. A boy called Ramsden, who never said much in class, put a tin chamber-pot on his head and no one could get it off. To avoid public derision Ramsden was moved from the dormitory to the sanatorium. The doctor was sent for and the school carpenter, but no solution was found. In order to subdue public disquiet Noah would issue a bulletin at almost every meal about the progress of the crisis.

  ‘Ramsden may think he has done something extremely clever,’ Noah boomed sadly. ‘He may think he has drawn attention to himself in some unusual and original manner. Oh ye of little judgement, would you laugh at Ramsden? What he has done is just very silly and dangerous. He is missing lessons, which will put him well behind for the School Cert. He is causing the unhappy couple who gave birth to him needless anxiety. So I say unto you, go about your daily business, work hard and do your best in the classroom and at school sports. Do not pay Ramsden the compliment of whispering about him in corridors. His exploits are best forgotten.’

  In fact Ramsden, when we peered at him through a crack in the sanatorium door, presented an unforgettable spectacle. He was sitting bolt upright in bed, wearing striped flannel pyjamas, his ears flattened by a huge chamber-pot of chipped enamel, his face decorated by a grin that was at once sheepish and proud. At a subsequent meal Noah reassured us. ‘A man has been sent for,’ he announced. ‘Expert in these matters. It is to be hoped that in due course Ramsden will be released. Every boy to remember, this is no subject for laughter!’ That afternoon a man in dungarees with a bag of tools drove up in a van, and later on an uncrowned Ramsden rejoined the class and resumed his habitual ‘low profile’.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Mr Justice Cunningham gave custody of the two children to the father. It was proved to his satisfaction that the mother went out to tea dances.’

  ‘That’s terrible!’

  ‘Well, I was extremely angry at first. You never like to go down in a case, but you’ll find this when you’re at the bar. You’ll have forgotten all about it by the time you slide the tape off your next brief.’

  ‘I mean, it’s terrible to lose your children, just for going to tea dances.’

  ‘She went on her own, you see. I suppose the implication was, she danced with gigolos.’

  ‘What’s a gigolo?’

  ‘I don’t think,’ my mother said, ‘that’s very suitable.’

  ‘Mr Justice Cunningham didn’t think it was suitable either.’ My father shook his head sadly.

  ‘That Judge sounds an absolute swine. He ought to be locked up. Taking away people’s children. Just for dancing!’

  ‘Mr Justice Cunningham is a hard man, old boy,’ my father agreed. ‘But it’s just part of the rough and tumble in the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division. No real fun in winning if it’s all too easy. You’ll find that.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to. Go to the bar, I mean.’

  ‘How is the viburnum fragrans, Kath? Paint me the picture.’

  How many choices do we make in a lifetime? Even the selection of a wife or a lover is severely limited by the number of people of a vaguely appropriate age, sex and physical appearance you happen to meet at a given moment who may possibly fancy you, a field, as far as most marriages are concerned, of three or four possible candidates. If I had been born into one of those solidly conservative criminal families of London burglars I was later to defend, my career would have been mapped out for me by a father when he was home from the Nick. He would have planned an apprenticeship in Takings and Drivings Away, a little minor Warehouse Breaking and finally the responsibility of Look-out Man for a firm of bank robbers. Was my life decided when I was a child, bathed and put to bed by the wife of a lawyer’s clerk, given bedtime stories from the Divorce Court? I could have chosen not to be a barrister, but every time my father changed the subject I remained on my predetermined path. If I’m still an agnostic on the subject of Free Will, it operates,
I am sure, within the narrowest of limits. We spend our time punishing criminals or rewarding heroes, not for the great decisions they have taken for good or evil but for proceeding, with more or less dedication, in the direction in which they were pointed. At the time my father told me about the custody case and the thé dansants my cards had no doubt been dealt, a mixed hand adding up to a bid as a barrister and a writer. Flat-footed and tone deaf, the choice of becoming a second Jack Buchanan, deftly tip-tapping up to the footlights with a silver-topped cane twirling under my arm and a silk hat on the side of my head, was never mine.

  ‘I think I’d like to be an actor.’

  But my father had turned away, to examine the shrubs in my uncle’s Sussex garden, a place full of ornamental ponds and stone walls and wrought-iron gates. Past the rhododendron walks stood the acres of woodland my uncle owned. My Uncle Harold, married to my mother’s sister Daisy, was a manufacturer of beds. He was considerably richer than my father and his garden was consequently larger, equipped with waterfalls and even rarer shrubs.

  ‘Not got any lilies out, Harold, have you?’ my father asked, knowing that my uncle was deeply superstitious and dreaded the sight of a lily as a symbol of death. When he had his sight my father would try and steer my uncle under ladders or lure black cats across his path. In fact my father treated Uncle Harold with some condescension because he was so superstitious and had so much money.

  We usually spent Christmas with Harold and Daisy. My mother drove the Morris Oxford away from our hills and clay soil and beech woods down to the flat, sandy, coniferous country with the ground covered with pine-needles and cones, to the bungalows filled with retired military men and the distant prospect of the sea. When I was young I was regularly sick at Guildford. My Uncle Harold’s house was furnished with his expensive thirties’ artefacts, white walls and a lot of blue and plum-coloured glass, chromium and mahogany. Bullrushes stood about in tall glass jars, and Lalique swans held the chocolates on the polished dinner-table. The house, always referred to by my father as the ‘North Pole’, was not overheated and my aunt had a sort of tweed overcoat made to match her dress for indoor wear. My Uncle Harold designed all his own clothes as he designed his furniture, with a slide-rule and to his own specifications. He wore wide-brimmed sombreros and had invented a sort of padded flap which hung down at the back of his waistcoat to keep his bottom warm. He was a meticulous man and appreciated conformity. At one breakfast he measured his rasher of bacon with his slide-rule and sent it back to the kitchen when he found it too long.