CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

by John Mortimer

  When my father died I hoped that, liberated from her extraordinary bondage, my mother would find a new life and perhaps draw and paint again. She never did, but devoted her years to living as though my father were still alive, to keeping the house and garden exactly as they had been, doing the Times crossword puzzle when he had done it and following the Law Reports.

  She kept on writing the diary, which continues in her handwriting after the brief entry, ‘On September 29th Clifford was very ill and on September 30th at 3.30 a.m. he died. Oct 3rd. Clifford’s funeral.’ The next day she went shopping and was called on by a local architect who talked to her until she ‘felt frozen with boredom’. A few days later Gerald called and said that he had not bothered to come and mow the lawn during the last two weeks as he thought my mother and father ‘had been on holiday’.

  My mother continued to battle with the weeds and occasional gardeners, to plant flowers in the places my father had planned for them and record the performance of the flowers he had planted. But just after my father died she walked round the enormous garden and then came indoors to write, ‘I was very lonely and sad and nothing could quench my regrets.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  My father had been spared the sixties, which were held to be, for those few people who met regularly among the low-hanging lights and lavatory tiles of the Italian restaurants in the King’s Road, Chelsea, an era of gaiety and swinging delight. It was probably the last period in which England and English matters were of much interest to the rest of the world but, as has been said, when history repeats itself it usually ends up as farce. My father had been a child of the Empire. He had survived a couple of world wars, in the second of which England might, without injustice, have been thought to have saved Europe. What he missed was the new decade when to be English meant to have a Union Jack shopping bag from Carnaby Street and to know the words of all the Beatles’ numbers. The sixties were meant to be the decade in which young people enjoyed going to bed together, although in this I don’t think it differed noticeably from the forties or the fifties or the swinging 1410s. It was a time when the theatre and movies discovered that there was an enchanting, new, uncharted area somewhere to the north of Watford, and when RADA-trained actors did their best to flatten their vowels and scowl a good deal. Girls who had never been far east of Sloane Square started to say ‘innit?’ and ‘didni?’ In the old-fashioned forties, when the West End was ruled by glossy revivals and homosexual managers, a young actor was asked at an audition if he wasn’t, perhaps, heterosexual. ‘Well yes,’ he admitted and added eagerly, ‘but it doesn’t show from the front.’ Among writers during the sixties, matters like having been born in the Home Counties or having gone to a public school were kept as similarly embarrassing secrets.

  Nothing could have been more superficial than these changes. English class divisions survived the sixties to become more deeply entrenched than ever, and the gulf between the two nations of the north and south grew even wider. I suppose most people came to maturity anxiously looking for jobs and took out mortgages without realizing that they were part of a swinging generation which had never had it so good. Only middle-aged men, and headmasters in particular, seemed affected by the myth of swinging London. Perhaps they had an uneasy suspicion that the young people of the day were having a better time than they had ever experienced and the thought made them exceedingly bitter.

  The fact that England became thought of as fashionable in America, however, brought money for British movies and we had a film industry, a vital part of any nation’s culture. In the early sixties, when Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top had liberated our cinema in the way that Look Back in Anger gave a new life to the theatre, a large number of British films became possible, which would be unthinkable today. Seemingly unlikely subjects were chosen, and Peter Sellers even agreed to make a film of The Dock Brief, a project sportingly produced by Anatole de Grunwald’s brother, Dimitri.

  I found Mr Sellers to be a gentle man who, in his private life, appeared sad and even desperate. He once said that he couldn’t play himself because ‘to see me in the cinema would be one of the dullest experiences anyone could imagine’. He was a man who couldn’t come truly to life until he had found someone to imitate, with an inch or two of moustache perhaps, or a walk, or an odd movement of the shoulders, and always with a voice. He used to say that he was no more than a medium for the character and the writer, and he used his innumerable voices as a shield against, I suppose, the dread of some hollowness within. When he wasn’t acting he spent most of his time buying things which might help him to establish an identity: motor cars he quickly tired of, more and more elaborate cameras and, one morning when we were working together, a large electric organ which no one he knew could play. He seemed to have to acquire his innumerable possessions quickly, as he collected houses and companies and even wives, being in daily dread that his world as a successful film actor would vanish and he would be back where he started, doing split weeks in Aldershot or appearing, plump and shock-headed, as the Director of Entertainment at a Jersey holiday camp, putting on a succession of caps and funny accents and topping the evening with a ukelele and an imitation of George Formby. In his way, Peter Sellers was like the late Sir Edward Marshall Hall, a man who stood empty, waiting to be inhabited by other people.

  The voices would come to him unexpectedly, out of the most obscure associations and once there they proved extremely difficult to exorcize. We were sitting in the restaurant at Shepperton Studios just before he started to play Morgenhall, the unsuccessful barrister in The Dock Brief, and Mr Sellers unfortunately ordered a plate of cockles. He had been desperately uncertain as to how to play the part, but the shellfish came to him with a whiff of the sea and the memory of Morecambe. They brought a faded north-country accent and the suggestion of a scrappy moustache. He felt he had been thrown the lifeline of a voice and work could begin. It took a great deal of patience and tact by the director, James Hill, to undo the effect of the cockles, to find another sort of voice and return poor old Wilfred Morgenhall to what I felt were undoubtedly his southern origins.

  Mr Sellers’ anxieties (one was that he was being pursued by the Mafia because of his undoubted affection for Sophia Loren), his frequent despair and as frequent love affairs sometimes seemed to me to exist only in his imagination. The real world came to him in the fragments he borrowed, other people’s hats and walks and voices, because he was certainly a mimic of genius. I don’t think it common for actors to provide such a degree of blankness for others to write on, indeed many actors have huge and extravagant personalities. The Peter Sellers character may be more common, however, in everyday life than it is comfortable to realize. How many people are there who feel they scarcely exist until they can get to their props, the headmaster’s gown, the doctor’s stethoscope or what Henry Winter once called my ‘barrister’s set’? Do they as desperately grasp the sergeant-major’s voice, the trades union leader’s jargon, the politician’s ingratiating fireside manner, as articles of make-up stripped of which they feel naked and non-existent, liable to be sent back, at any moment, to the bottom of the bill on the pier at Weston-super-Mare?

  An actor who never runs out of his own positive personality and who has no need of a stick of make-up or an inch of false hair is Trevor Howard. I had met him, when he was doing a remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, in a bar just outside the teetotal desert of the studio where we were both working. I had made an exceedingly pretentious remark about Hollywood being the ‘suburbia of the soul’ which he had somehow appreciated and he agreed to be in a play I had written called Two Stars for Comfort. He gave a performance which combined great strength with vulnerability, influenced a good deal by the brilliant but wayward actor Wilfred Lawson, whom he greatly admired.

  Two Stars for Comfort had its origins in an old, unpublished novel and had to do with Henley, our local town, and in particular with the river. The river at Henley seemed entirely devoted to pleasure, with its fleet of skiffs with wrought
-iron seats and slow-moving punts and ancient steamers for day trips from Reading and Oxford. There was the island with a small white folly, a classical temple, and another island on which a long-deserted wooden building with faded numbers on the bedroom doors might once have been a small hotel for illicit weekends, taking the overspill from Maidenhead. The best days of my school holidays were always spent on the river, paddling rocking canoes into secret places under overhanging branches, and tossing bread to the swans until they became uncontrollably greedy and pursued the boat, flapping their strong wings which I had been told could break a leg. Penelope and I had spent an early holiday on an island in the river and we had each written books in the soggy garden and gone to ‘Flannel Dances’ in the Town Hall for a treat on Saturday nights. At the time of the Regatta old men came out in white trousers, which were yellowing to match their nicotine-stained moustaches, worn with button-bursting blazers, pink socks and schoolboy caps. The rowers flashed past in skiffs as fragile as the insects which skimmed the water for one day and died the next morning. On Saturday there was a fair and, in the evening, a display in which the winner of the Diamond Sculls was picked out in hissing fireworks which were reflected in the water. When I was young we used to swim in the river, feeling the reeds wrap around our legs and the mud ooze between our toes. Most of all we enjoyed going through the locks, hanging on to the slimy green chains as the punts sank into an apparently bottomless cavern, or rising on a swirling tide to jump out and buy chocolate at the lock-keeper’s cottage before the sluice-gates opened.

  The play I wrote was about a man who always told people what he thought they wanted to hear, an extension of the pleasure principle which only works in the extremely short term. It was about the harsh inequalities caused by beauty. We could, if we had any real intention of doing so, narrow the wage differential, we could make education, spectacles, false teeth and rides on the Underground open to all, regardless of the accident of birth. No power on earth, however, can abolish the merciless class distinction between those who are physically desirable and the lonely, pallid, spotted, silent, unfancied majority. It is this class envy, I suppose, which makes many men behave with particular boorishness to the prettiest girls; it is what causes the sigh of relief when you have been following a back with admiration and then find a face which is unchallengingly plain. It is why the best news that an envious world often hears about a beautiful woman is that she has ‘gone off’.

  So a play about the river was one that went back a long way into my life, to days when a punt seemed the height of pleasure and the summer was hotter and lasted longer than it ever has since.

  Chapter Twenty

  After my father died I had slept for two days without interruption. I wrote, at the end of a play: ‘I’d been told of all the things you’re meant to feel. Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than you and you’re in no one’s shadow. I know what I felt. Lonely.’

  It also seemed to me that I was now the sole custodian of some private language, the single guardian of a secret we had once shared. Later I realized how widely the seeds of his personality had been scattered. My father had left a part of himself to my children and step-children, to everyone who had heard his stories and laughed at his jokes. After a while I took my son for walks and started to tell him the Sherlock Holmes stories. In the end, at first nervously but then with increasing confidence, I should take over his garden and try to make it look something like the place I remembered. That, however, was in the distant future.

  My father was gone and I was alone in his room in chambers. In time I began to wonder what on earth I was doing there. I had a play on, a film of another being made and I was working with Jack Clayton on the script of The Innocents, the film of Henry James’s story The Turn of the Screw. A whole chapter seemed closed, the relentless pursuit of the ‘undefended’ seemed no longer necessary. Why should I continue to lead tormented wives or deceived husbands through the maze of the old divorce law? Other guides could be found who were not forever slipping off to Hollywood. Why should I still be harrowed by cases about the custody of children? These great issues were then tried by the Judge reading unilluminating affidavits drafted by lawyers; he rarely saw the parents and hardly ever met the children. The time had come, I thought, to let others comfort weeping mothers outside the summons room. In any case, I fell out of love with the law after sitting in the Court of Appeal listening to a dispute over an eight-year-old girl. The parents were Welsh and the father wanted custody because he said the mother had allowed the child to become backward in reading. Unusually the presiding Judge had the subject of this litigation brought into Court and handed down to her the huge volume of the Rules of the Supreme Court, known with awe to the legal profession simply as ‘The White Book’. The child staggered slightly under the weight of the open book and the Judge, looking down on her from a great height, said, ‘All right. Now let’s see if you can read Order 58 Rule 3(1).’

  There was a terrible moment of silence and suspense. The father looked piously triumphant. The mother stared in terror at the child she seemed about to lose. And then, quite suddenly, a small but perfectly clear Welsh voice rang out. ‘An appeal to the Court of Appeal,’ it piped, ‘shall be by way of rehearing and shall be brought by Notice of Motion…’ The case was won, but I had begun to grow impatient with a world in which a child’s future might depend on whether or not she could read the White Book.

  Why did I need all that? For the first time it became quite clear to me what I should do for a living. Of course I would write, at my leisure. Perhaps I could live abroad. I would sit in the sunshine by some Italian lake and never have to think of the White Book again, never choke back my fury at what seemed to me some peculiarly heartless order and bow and say, ‘If your Lordship pleases.’ Leonard had left to become a Judge’s clerk shortly before my father died. We had a new clerk who, breaking with tradition, I actually called by his real name which was ‘Charlie’. I told Charlie I was going to leave the bar. I sat in my father’s room and made arrangements for selling off his books, his huge dusty volumes of Moore’s Privy Council Cases and Haggard’s Ecclesiastical Reports which traced the tortured history of Wills and marriages back to the Middle Ages.

  It was sometime during this period of limbo, when I had gradually made up my mind to divorce myself from the law, that I was asked by Amnesty International to go to a criminal trial in Nigeria for the purpose, I suppose, of seeing that no manifest injustice was done. I think I was chosen for the task, ironically, less for my legal expertise than because the man in the dock was a playwright.

  I suppose that Jack Clayton, the film director who taught me how to make the end of one scene fit on to the start of the next by the use of similar or contrasting pictures, might have suggested that we cut from my white face in a white wig in London to a black face in a similar white wig in the Court of Ibadan. Perhaps he would have panned down to a spectacle, which one Nigerian lawyer assured me that he had actually seen in some remote criminal trial, of a wigged and gowned barrister with bare feet under the desk at the end of his pinstripes wiggling his toes at the Judge in the traditional sign of the evil eye. In fact, I found the Nigerian court procedure extremely orderly, well regulated and rather more fair than in some cases at the Old Bailey. This, however, was not exactly what I was led to expect when I was briefed, in the basement of an Italian restaurant near to Holborn Tube Station, by the officers of Amnesty International.

  The British, who seem to have carelessly created African countries by simply drawing lines on the map regardless of the warring and disparate tribes ensnared in their arbitrary boundaries (a practice we also adopted in Northern Ireland), had left Nigeria a certain place for tribal conflict. There was a further cause for discontent after an election in the western region when the voters were asked to decide between a notoriously self-seeking government under Chief Akintola and the United Progressive Party led by Awolowa who had been imprisoned for
ten years. Although not all dedicated Guardian readers, the Progressive Party was, it was explained to me in the Italian restaurant, not only opposed to Akintola, but to the more reactionary Hausa tribe in the north. They claimed the allegiance of the few Ibos who lived in that region, including the brilliant writer, Wole Soyinka, whose play The Road had been performed in London. He it was who was to stand trial, charged with robbery with violence in that he entered the local broadcasting station and took two tapes, value two pounds twelve and sixpence.

  What had happened might be regarded as a serious political crime or a hilarious practical joke. Nigerians apparently expected their elections to be attended by a moderate degree of cheerful chicanery, but the rigging of this particular democratic exercise was so ridiculous as to be an affront. Extra ballot papers were allegedly smuggled into voting booths in hats, ladies’ corsets and loaves of bread, voting lists were manipulated so that Progressive Party supporters had to travel many miles to vote and a curfew was imposed so that their officials couldn’t supervise the count. For a month the Returning Officer refused to count the Progressive Party votes. In spite of all this the opposition claimed to have won 68 out of 94 seats in the western region. However Chief Akintola declared that his government had been returned and announced his intention of broadcasting his thanks to the loyal electorate after the 7 p.m. news.

  As the eager listeners tuned in they heard, not the victorious Chief Akintola, but a voice which said, ‘This is Free Nigeria’, and went on, in uncomplimentary terms, to advise him to leave the country with his ‘crew of renegades’. The rebel broadcast was then untimely ripped from the air.