Murderers and Other Friends

by John Mortimer

  It was never suggested that Ben Jeyaretnam used money given to the party to line his own pockets. What was alleged was that they kept it out of the general fund because that had an order against it for old costs. It was also said that he and Mr Wong had made a false statutory declaration in relation to their accounts. I began to understand the danger for Ben. If he lost badly he could not only go to prison for a long time, he would forfeit his proudest possession, his hard-won seat in parliament. He would also be stripped of his solicitor’s practice and his only way of earning a living.

  So, after a sleepless and jet-lagged night’s work on the case, I stumbled into the robing room of the subordinate court in Singapore. It looked very much like all the robing rooms I had known, from the Old Bailey to Manchester, from Reading to Ibadan. It was a shabby, unswept environment, the floor littered with old law reports and bits of newspaper, the armchairs full of barristers trying to sleep off their hangovers, with other barristers ringing up their wives in a vain attempt to explain where they were the night before. The place was presided over by an elderly Chinese lady who was brewing up Nescafe and pouring out Chinese cough mixture for barristers with sore throats. She took one look at me and called out, ‘There you are, Lumpore of the Bairey!’ In a dreadful moment I saw myself spending my declining years slogging round the Far East being called Lumpore. This alarming prospect may have had much to do with my final decision.

  We went into court and Ben stood in the dock, looking up at the bench where he had once sat as a judge. Beside him was Mr Wong, whose perpetual smile I felt expressed neither happiness nor hope. The prosecutor seemed highly strung. During one of our differences of opinion he was so appalled by my criticism of his case that he asked for a short adjournment; this request the Chinese judge treated with disdain. If my second trial in Singapore was more pleasant, and seemed more likely to end happily, than the first it was because of Judge Michael Khoo. He was much younger and more talkative than the enigmatic figure who had presided over the libel action. I heard that he and his brother performed to the guitar and were known as the Singing Khoos. He behaved with great fairness and patience, so my last case was as well tried as any I had done at the Old Bailey.

  In this trial, my junior was a plump, cheerful, fatalistic Indian lawyer who didn’t mind appearing in cases which might annoy the government. After a hard day he asked if I would like to visit his club. ‘The learned leader will find it most relaxing,’ he told me. I thought the place would be a relic of the British Raj with peeling leather armchairs, ancient copies of Punch and afternoon tea. Instead he took me to the luxurious basement of a high-rise building, divided into small and discreet rooms, where Singaporean girls in thirties Hollywood-style evening-gowns knelt before the guests to serve them gin and tonics. ‘You are English?’ one of them asked me. ‘Do you often bump into the Princess of Wales in London? She seems to us a very cheerful sort of person.’ Her name was Tracy and during the daytime, she told me, she ‘slept like a pig. I have no boyfriend, you see. I live only for my work.’ Living only for my own work, I left her and spent another evening alone in my hotel bedroom with the accounts of the Workers Party.

  One cheque had apparently been intended to pay the costs of an election petitioner, and we could argue that it didn’t have to go through the party’s account. There were other explanations of other cheques. One of the charges was that of making a false statutory declaration but there was a technical defence to that. There was no doubt that the financial affairs of the Workers Party were in confusion, but Ben had been unaware of the details and certainly had no intention of misappropriating the money. So we chased accounts and examined party supporters, and his Honour Judge Khoo, a Confucius come to judgment, found the prosecutor, who asked for a number of amendments, irritating. Halfway through the trial he dismissed one of the charges, but three remained. I escaped and had lunch with The Times correspondent in Singapore. I was tired, not looking forward to another afternoon in the steamy courtroom, and said I had a good mind to finish with the law when the case was over. The next day there was a story in The Times which announced that I was leaving the bar. I read it and felt that if it was in The Times it was probably true. Years before, when we drowned earwigs and I told my father I wanted to be a writer, he had asked me to consider my unfortunate wife, who would have me about the house all day ‘wearing a dressing-gown, brewing tea and stumped for words’. He told me to pick a job which would get me out of the house and suggested I start by divorcing a few people. So my father decided that I was to become a barrister, and a newspaper told me when to stop.

  The choices we make are few and the freedom of our will exaggerated. If I hadn’t been born the son of a divorce lawyer and raised, educated and clothed almost entirely on the proceeds of cruelty, adultery and wilful neglect to provide reasonable maintenance, I would never have gone near a law court and would have chosen almost any other day job. I might have been a waiter or an unsuccessful actor; I should have hated to have been a schoolmaster. I think it is important for a writer to have done other work and have come to know a world which has nothing to do with writing. He’s greatly privileged if it is work where he meets people at crises in their lives, as doctors and priests and defending barristers do. It is also a relief, in the loneliness of a writer’s life, to be part of an enterprise in which a number of people are working together to a single end: the production of a film or a play or the defence of a client in a long trial. If I hadn’t been a barrister I should never have written Rumpole, and that would have been a subject of regret, at least to me. I am glad I went into the law, and very glad I came out of it. Perhaps, as is its great and often fatal weakness, it delayed me for too long.

  Judge Khoo reserved his judgment in what was also to turn out to be a case which had a lasting effect on his legal career, and the Workers Party gave me a dinner in a downtown hotel. The Workers, who were not young, ate through numerous courses and were entertained by three singers: two girls who wore spangled tights, leg-warmers and crownless hats, and a Cliff Richard look-alike. They sang ‘My Way’ very loudly in Chinese and the Workers seemed full of hope and happiness, looking forward to a golden age to equal Britain in the sixties.

  So I left the bar and went on my way, first of all on a flight to Los Angeles. Crossing innumerable frontiers of time I arrived at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ancient men sat round the pool with their girlfriends, starlets, secretaries or manicurists and, it was said, writers and actors would ask their agents to ring them. The tannoy by the pool then called out their names and gave the impression that they were greatly in demand. Herb Schmerz, who as vice-president of Mobil Oil was a patron of British television (through Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery), used to bribe the telephone operator to announce calls for dead people. At the amplified announcement ‘There’s a call for Mr Clark Gable’ or, ‘Miss Carole Lombard to the telephone, please’, the old men would look deeply worried and mutter, ‘Carole Lombard? Isn’t she dead or something?’ Mr Schmerz had played this trick and was there to greet me by the Beverly Hills pool as I arrived, by way of Tokyo, at the end of my long flight from the law. He offered me a drink whereupon I collapsed, overcome with exhaustion, apprehension and relief, like a prisoner who has escaped. And, like an old lag, I had become institutionalized. I had stayed until I was a little arthritic and had to be helped over the wall by a Times journalist and a Chinese lady brewing up coffee in a Far-Eastern robing room.

  My double life was over. Was I going to miss the variety: breakfast with a fraudster, down the cells to see a murderer, lunch with the judges and off to rehearsals at the end of the day? What wouldn’t I miss? The fancy dress, the hours spent listening to other people’s speeches (it’s difficult to be completely bored by your own), and above all I wasn’t going to miss the increasing responsibility for so many other people’s lives.

  When Judge Khoo delivered his judgment he acquitted Ben of all but one charge involving £100 and he fined him the equivalent of some £300. He didn’t los
e his liberty, or his livelihood, or his seat in parliament. The government of Singapore started a legal juggernaut rolling. Judge Khoo was removed from the bench. The prosecution appealed and a superior judge, who hadn’t seen the witnesses, convicted Ben on two charges and ordered a retrial of the serious charge which Judge Khoo had thrown out at half time. At the retrial he was given a prison sentence that would still have allowed him to stay on as an MP. Ben appealed and his prison sentence was reduced to a month, but the fine was increased to a sum which meant he lost his parliamentary seat. Publications which showed themselves sympathetic to Ben in reporting these events – Time magazine and the Asian Wall Street Journal – were penalized. Later the Singapore court made an order striking Ben off the roll of solicitors. Happily this was an order that could be taken up to the Privy Council sitting in London. Ben could not take his criminal convictions to the Privy Council. His appeal was heard by a committee of five judges presided over by Lord Bridge, whose judgment contains the following passage:

  Their Lordships have to record their deep disquiet that by a series of misjudgments the appellant and his co-accused Wong have suffered a grievous injustice. They have been fined, imprisoned and publicly disgraced for offences of which they were not guilty. The appellant, in addition, has been deprived of his seat in parliament and disqualified for a year from practising his profession. Their Lordships’ order restores him to the roll of advocates and solicitors of the Supreme Court of Singapore, but because of the course taken by the criminal proceedings, their Lordships have no power to right the other wrongs which the appellant and Wong have suffered. Their only prospect of redress, their Lordships understand, will be by way of petition for pardon to the President of the Republic of Singapore.

  The Singapore government’s response to this blast from London was to abolish appeals to the Privy Council in professional disciplinary proceedings. Ben’s petition to the President to restore him to his seat in parliament was refused on the ground that he had ‘failed to show contrition’. However, after about a year, he was restored to his practice. I last met him in a hotel in London where he sat, smiling as always, stroking his side whiskers and trying to face the fact that he now owes almost a million Singapore dollars as the result of another libel action by Mr Lee.

  Not long ago, I was talking to some law students from Singapore. They were a group of girls, small, pretty, birdlike with wide eyes and gentle voices, who asked if I could recommend the practice of criminal law in their country. I thought of them in a world of brutal punishment and inscrutable judges and wished them luck. We have every reason to be proud of the fact that our judicial system has been adopted in so many distant parts of the world. At the heart of it is fairness to everyone who holds views with which the government doesn’t agree, and judicial independence. Without these ingredients, the wearing of wigs, the humble submissions and the quoting of House of Lords authorities become a meaningless parade of archaic customs and costumes.

  Chapter 16

  My youngest daughter Rosie and I are in the bath together; she is six years old but I should presumably keep quiet about this fact or we’re both in grave danger of being taken into custody by social workers. We are telling each other jokes, such as ‘Who wrote Where’s My Sock?’ ‘Sonia Foot!’ Or, ‘Who wrote Cutting It Fine?’ None other, of course, than Moses Lawn. We both find these titles wonderfully amusing. Then she says, I don’t love you, Dad.'

  ‘Don’t you, Rosie? That’s very sad.’

  ‘Yes, it’s sad. But it is interesting.’

  I look at her in dismay, having the uneasy feeling that we have given birth to a novelist.

  When I fled from the law, and collapsed among the elderly brown bodies and sunbeds, heard the sound of wind in the palm trees and smelled coconut oil mixed with Givenchy perfume, I didn’t think of myself as a novelist. It’s true that I’d published my first novel when I was twenty-four, and gone on to write four more over the next decade. I had started early in the tall, silent house in Swiss Cottage and written my five pages before the children got up for school and I dressed as a dependable lawyer and went off to the divorce court; but for the past thirty years I had written nothing but drama, films and plays for the theatre and for television. Apart from the first, Charade, which seems to me to be original and caused very little trouble, these early novels are haunted by other voices: an echo of Graham Greene, a whisper of Waugh, a shot at Raymond Chandler. It wasn’t until I wrote my first play, and heard actors say lines I had written, that I thought I had found a voice which, for better or worse, was entirely my own. The business of writing novels is long, lonely, and you get extremely cold. Plays have far fewer words and, as my father said of the divorce courts, they get you out of the house. I thought I would probably never write another novel.

  I came back from Los Angeles, where we had been showing a new Rumpole series to the press, with no very clear idea of what to do with my life. I thought I might dramatize another novel like Brideshead, then decided I didn’t want to do that with anyone else’s novel and I would write my own. Brian Cowgill was running Thames Television and we met when I took part in the pleasant job of handing out slices of Thames’s money to aspiring dramatists. On one of these occasions, he asked me when I was going to write a series about England since the war. At first I resisted the idea entirely, and then, thinking back over the years I had known, from the roaring forties to the awful eighties, I decided it was what I most wanted to do. This was the long novel I would write and then dramatize. I also had the insane idea that I would perform both tasks at the same time.

  In thirty years I had forgotten the great gulf that lies between writing drama and prose fiction. In drama everything happens in action and dialogue scenes: people disclosing or, more interestingly, failing to disclose, their thoughts and feelings in direct speech. But most of the important things in life don’t happen when we’re talking to each other. They go on in silence and in solitude, while we’re in the bath or on a bus, or waiting in the doctor’s surgery. These are the memories, decisions and indecisions, unspoken love and unspeakable guilt, to which the novelist has the best access.

  Both in the writing and in its effect a novel is far slower work than a drama. A theatre play has to hold the audience in a vice-like grip from the first line to the final curtain. A moment’s lack of tension and the customers return to their usual occupations of unwrapping sweets or dying of bronchitis. A television play has to keep the audience from chattering, reading the paper, straying from the room, making love or making tea. In either case it’s an event which fills a required time and must capture and hold captive its customers.

  A novel is quite different. It can be tasted a few drops at a time or swallowed in a sitting. It can afford to relax, to take detours, to describe Exmoor or the Battle of Waterloo. It can change pace as often as life itself, and it’s the reader’s companion for as long as it takes him or her to finish it. Auden, comparing this painstaking work to that of the poets who can ‘dash forward like huzzars’, says that the novelist

  Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn

  How to be plain and awkward, how to be

  One after whom none think it worth to turn.

  For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must

  Become the whole of boredom, subject to

  Vulgar complaints like, love, among the Just

  Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,

  And in his own weak person, if he can,

  Dully put up with all the wrongs of Man.

  There is another difference between the novel and drama: the reader has far more to do, and has a greater contribution to make, than the spectator. A great deal of the novel takes place in the reader’s mind; if the writer describes a beautiful girl on the page of a book, it’s for the reader to imagine her and supply his or her idea of beauty. If he is watching a performance, the spectator has an actress supplied and may not find her beautiful at all. The novel is an act of collaboration between the author an
d the single reader, whom he has to think of, during the act of writing, as himself.

  Forgetting all these things, when I started to write the novel Paradise Postponed, it looked just like a television script with far too much dialogue and far too little thought. I had to think back to those early mornings in Swiss Cottage, before I had written a single line for actors, and come to my senses.

  A politician, perhaps Denis Healey, said it was easy to keep Tories happy as they only believe in money and power, things which can be readily achieved. The left’s belief in social justice is a paradise which almost certainly cannot be reached. The Labour Party, therefore, has to be kept going on a bright vision of the future which is unavoidably postponed. So I thought of a title, Paradise Postponed, and kept to it, as I did to the Elgar Cello Concerto as the music of a vanishing England, despite all anxious questions from the television company.

  In 1945, the year when the war ended, paradise might have seemed just around the corner. There was going to be a welfare state, no great gulf between rich and poor, a free health service and a better education for all. Bliss was it, in those halcyon days, to be alive when the Labour Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross (eventually to become known as Sir Shortly Floorcross) said, ‘We are the masters now.’ Later, Churchill and Macmillan didn’t forget what the voters had told them when the war ended. They had, as sensitive and intelligent Conservatives, been shocked by the poverty and social injustice of the thirties. They also remembered the soldiers who had fought and died in two wars, and had a paternalistic care for the workers. The idea of paradise was kept going by common consent; it would, of course, be postponed but, in the good times, no one seemed to doubt that it was worth hoping for.