'It was because you're a woman. I mean, I know I'm not a woman, but it's a bit hard being discriminated against all the time for reasons of sex. I know what the Lord Chancellor thinks: just because I'm a man I go about with my head in the clouds dreaming. But I'm perfectly capable of coming to firm decisions. Now then, what do you think I'd like best?
The organic apple juice or the mixed-berry health drink?' 'I can't help you there, Claude.' Phillida could be merciless.
'You make up your mind on that one, old chap.' When he arrived at the Old Bailey for his day's work Claude's hopes received a severe setback. He went for a cup of coffee in the canteen and there saw Soapy Sam Ballard, the alleged Head of our Chambers, relaxing over a cup of tea and the Yorkie bar he indulged in when his wife, the ex-Old Bailey Matron, was not in view. Claude took a seat beside him and his attention was riveted when Ballard told him that his name 'cropped up when I was talking to old Keith from the Lord Chancellor's office'.
'Did it, Ballard? Did it really?' 'He naturally wanted to hear my views, as Head of Chambers, on your application for Silk.' 'Oh, Ballard, was he really interested?' Claude must have been overcome with emotion. 'I mean, they're taking my application seriously?' 'Naturally they're taking it seriously. Keith was saying it has become a sort of annual event, like Christmas.' 'You mean they look forward to it?' 'Let's say they give it serious consideration. I was able to let Keith have my views, fairly fully.' 'Oh, thank you, Ballard. Thank you very much.' 'I said we'd worked closely together over the years.' 'Yes, we have, haven't we, Ballard? Worked extremely closely.' 'And that, on the whole, you'd matured considerably.' 'Well, none of us is getting any younger.' 'I meant,' Ballard was unkind enough to explain, 'that I didn't think there would be any repetition of the incidents in which you'd been involved in the past.' 'Incidents?' Claude felt outraged and innocent. 'What incidents?' 'Incidents such as the complaint I had to deal with lodged by our new typist. Miss Clapham.' 'Clapton.' 'Yes, of course. Dorothy Clapton.' 'Dot.' 'Is that what you call her?' Ballard looked suspiciously at the ever-hopeful Claude. 'That's what you call her, do you?' 'You told Keith from the Lord Chancellor's department about Dot?' Claude was deeply shocked.
'I felt it was my duty. It was some evidence, which the Lord Chancellor would have to consider, of your lack ofgravitas.' 'My lack of what?' 'Bottom,' Ballard explained. 'It might be some indication that you are not fundamentally sound.' 'Thank you, Ballard! That was extremely kind of you!' The Erskine-Brown heavy sarcasm was quite lost on Soapy Sam.
'I also pointed out that your elevation would mean we had three Silks in Chambers. In my opinion, too many cowboys and not enough Indians.' 'Indians!' Now Claude was losing whatever coolness he had possessed. 'I'm not an Indian, Ballard, unfortunately. If only I were an Indian, and a woman, I'd get Silk at the drop of a hat.' 'And there wouldn't be enough really important work for three leaders. You are far better off in the second eleven, Claude. One of the backroom boys we can always rely on.' 'You said that to Keith from the Lord Chancellor's office?' 'I did so in your own best interests.' 'You pompous prick!' In my opinion Claude put the matter extremely well, and with unusual brevity. It was a phrase Bollard would long remember, particularly as a party consisting of two or three solicitors, a client and an elderly lady barrister at the next table looked up with interest.
'I don't think I heard that, Erskine-Brown.' Ballard did his best to appear unmoved, but the charge was repeated. 'I said you are a pompous prick. And if you don't know what that means, I suggest you ask Dot Clapton. It's a view of your character quite commonly held in 3 Equity Court!' So Claude left Ballard to what was left of his Yorkie bar and went off to suffer in a long post-office fraud, seeing his silk gown still eluding him.
Sixteen-year-old Joby Jonson was in custody. He was on remand, awaiting trial, a person still presumed to be innocent, and he was banged up with adult offenders in a place which, through no particular fault of the prison staff, had become a university of crime. It's overcrowded, unsanitary and prisoners on remand enjoy worse conditions than they did in the last century. As we sat in the interview room awaiting his arrival, a well-fed screw on the point of retirement told Mr Bernard and me that Joby wasn't exactly a happy boy. It seemed he was in a cell with a couple of lads only a little older than him, there had been some disagreement and a burning fag end had been stubbed out under Joby's eye.
'What can we do about it, Mr Rumpole? We've got no time, quite honestly. I'd like to give those lads a bit of G. and S., if time allowed.' 'Gin and soda?' I wasn't following the man's drift.
'Gilbert and Sullivan, sir. We did a great Mikado years ago when I was in the Canterbury nick.' 'Get Joby into a kimono and that'd be the answer to all his problems?' 'Absolutely certain of it, Mr Rumpole. G. and S. worked wonders for all of us when we had the time for it. I was the possessor of a reasonable bass baritone when the prisons was still a bit civilized. I can't do it now.' All the same, he went off with a gentle rendering of the one about making the punishment fit the crime, having ushered in a sullen and scarred Joby Jonson. Our client was a short, stubby, ginger-haired youth who sat with his arms crossed and an unfriendly expression on his face. When he spoke he pointed a stubby finger in my direction and called me 'yo', a word I was eventually to translate as 'you'.
The events which led up to our meeting can be summarized as follows. One morning in the previous October a Mrs Louisa Parsons, aged seventy-five, living at 1 Pondicherry Avenue, somewhere behind Euston Station, answered a ring at her front door on the morning of i9th October. The youth who was there said, 'You still living here, Mrs Parsons?' and ran off. Later that day a person she identified as the same youth, although his face was partially covered, again rang her doorbell and, when she answered it, forced his way in, attacked her, punched her in the face and stomach, tied her up with some cloths from the kitchen, kicked her and, having broken up most of the crockery and some of the furniture in the house, left with Mrs Parsons's post-office savings book, in which there was a balance of £5.79. She later identified Joby at an identification parade in the Euston nick. 'First time I ever see the old bat,' my client told me when I had outlined the case against him, 'was at the I.D. parade.' 'It might be as well, when you come to give your evidence, if you could resist the temptation to call the victim an "old bat".' I gave him a word of warning. 'It might not endear you to the Jury.' And then I asked the attendant Bernard for a copy of our client's statement, the document which had mysteriously walked out of Proxbury Mansions in the middle of the night. Our defence, if you could call it that, was an alibi. The statement started, in a fairly unpromising way, with, 'So far as I can remember, at the time Mrs Parsons was attacked I was hanging out near the Superloo in Euston Station with three girls down from Manchester I found singing and dancing a bit. I think one of their names might have been Tina. I am unable to supply the full names and addresses of any of these persons.' 'Not exactly what I'd call a cast-iron alibi.' I had to be honest about it.
'Mr Bernard says as yo was a brilliant brief like. Can't yo get me off on that?' "I may well be a brilliant brief, Joby, but I can't perform miracles. I am unable to walk on water or turn base metal into gold. And I can't make much use of a so-called alibi which fails to explain the most important piece of evidence in this case.' 'What's that meant to be then?' 'Your palm print,' I had to tell him. 'On the inside of Mrs Parsons's front door. How did that get there?' 'How would I know?' 'Think about it,' I advised him. 'It's a question you'll have to answer some time. By the way, what happened to your face? Looks as though you've been using it as an ashtray.' 'Something like that.' 'Shall we help you complain to the Governor?' 'Leave it out, Mr Rumpole. Yo want to get me killed?' 'No. As a matter of fact I want to get you off. So think about that palm print, why don't you?' 'Yo think about it.' 'Mr Rumpole's going to do his very best for you.' Mr Bernard was always reassuring, although I had clearly not impressed our client as a legal wizard. 'You just listen to him, Joby.' 'And yo listen to me.' Joby's finger stabbed the air
in my direction. 'I'm not putting my hands up in Court. I don't care what anyone says. Yo get that into your heads. Both of yo!' As we were waiting to be sprung from the prison gates, Mr Bernard, who rarely expresses an opinion on a client, went so far as to say that he hadn't found our latest customer a particularly likeable lad. It was, I thought, the understatement of the year. The characters of young offenders have clearly deteriorated since the good old days. Where have all the Artful Dodgers, the cheerful Cockney pickpockets sticking their thumbs in their waistcoat pockets and saying 'Watcher me old cock sparrer' gone? It was a sad day for England when John Dawkins turned into Joby Jonson.
And then one event occurred which took our Chambers at Equity Court completely by surprise and caused as much consternation as rights of audience in the higher courts being given to lay preachers and disc jockeys, or the abolition of the wig and judges listening to arguments from Counsel in Tshirts and jeans. It was something neither their legal training, 171 nor their admittedly limited knowledge of the world about them, had equipped the learned friends to deal with. Miss Dot Clapton appeared at work with a diamond in her nose.
Her appearance wasn't entirely oriental. Otherwise she was dressed as usual in black tights, an abbreviated black skirt and some sort of reasonable jacket. I dare say the diamond had never seen Amsterdam, no doubt it was a serviceable imitation, but, fixed in some way which the members of Chambers preferred not to think about, it flashed and glittered in Miss Clapton's delicately moulded nostril like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear and its presence could not be disregarded. Two issues of fundamental importance and great difficulty were immediately raised by this ornament. The first was whether it is proper or professional for a barristers' Chambers to employ persons who bedeck their noses in this particular way, and the second was how the matter was to be put delicately to Miss Clapton. I happened to be loitering around the clerk's room when the diamond made its first impact and Henry tried, with no particular success, an indirect approach to the subject.
'A senior clerk couldn't want for more efficient staff than you, Dot,' he started off with some embarrassment, 'or more pleasant. I have done my very best to make you feel at home here, I'm sure. But a barristers' Chambers is, well, a barristers' Chambers.' 'You got some criticism of my typing. Henry?' Dot Clapton was giving him no sort of encouragement.
'Quite frankly. Dot, your typing has been little short of perfection,' Henry had to admit.
'Or the speed at which I gets the fee notes out?' 'You get the fee notes out. Dot, at the speed of light. But what I wanted to say is... Well, some of our barristers are what I suppose you'd call old-fashioned.' 'Old-fashioned? I'd call them museum pieces, still in Yfronts and braces, if anyone cared to look. Now why don't you be a good boy and let me get on with my work?' At this Dot clattered away on her typewriter and only spoke again when Claude came in, looked for a brief, failed to find one, had his eye caught by the sparkle in our typist's nose and gave a convincing imitation of a bottle of fizzy lemonade exploding on a school picnic. 'Something amusing you, Mr Erskine-Brown?' Dot asked coldly.
'No, certainly not. Nothing in particular.' And Claude did his best to explain. 'It's just that I haven't had much to laugh at lately.' Happily for him this speech was cut short by the arrival of Mizz Liz Probert, who took one look at Dot and congratulated her. 'It's what Chambers needs,' she told us.
'Someone who's not afraid to make a statement! We're not male clones, are we, Dot? We're not imitation men in pinstripes.
We're the great sisterhood of free spirits.' During this stirring political address. Miss Clapton's fingers were dancing on the typewriter, and my attention was diverted by Henry telling me, with his hand over the telephone receiver, that he had the Home Office on the line and the Under-Secretary would greatly appreciate it if I managed to drop in for a brief chat. It's not often that I'm called in to discuss affairs of state, and we were arranging a convenient time when young David Inchcape blew in, went straight up to Dot and asked her to type out his particulars of negligence.
Although she turned her face up to him, smiled and gave him a full view of its landscape, he seemed to notice nothing unusual at all.
The same could not be said for the Head of our Chambers.
When Soapy Sam Ballard came in he stood transfixed, as though he had caught us lounging around smoking hookahs and watching the semi-finals of the Inns of Court bellydancing contest. He stared at Dot and then did his best to say, in calm and confidential tones, to our clerk, 'I shall have to call a Chambers meeting on the serious situation which has just arisen. Henry. I sincerely hope all members will make it their business to attend, as a matter of urgency. I shall rely on you, Rumpole,' he avoided another glance at Dot and noticed my existence, 'as a senior member to see everyone gets the message.' 'Oh, don't rely on me,' I had to warn him. 'I'm rather overworked at the moment. Government business.' I had never been inside the Home Office before. I knew it only as a threatening institution which had managed, whether by ill-luck or bad judgement, to turn prisons into slums and raise us to the proud position of number one of the European league for incarcerating our fellow citizens. I discovered a daunting concrete erection near St James's Park tube station.
Inside this Lubyanka I was courteously met by a young lady civil servant and sat on a sofa in an anteroom with several back numbers of the Illustrated London News and the Police Gazette.
After a prolonged study of these publications, I was admitted into a large room, full of sunlight and abstract paintings, and into the presence of a plump, pinkish, aggressively healthy-looking person who introduced himself as 'Tom Mottram, Under-Secretary for Home Affairs, with special responsibility for prisons. I'm the fellow who tries to keep your clients in.' 'Horace Rumpole,' I told him. 'I'm the fellow who tries to keep them out.' 'Oh, good. Very good!' Mr Mottram seemed to be easily amused and he called on a pale, neat little man with outsized spectacles to join in the fun. 'Isn't that good, Gladwyn? This is Gladwyn Dodds, Parliamentary Private Secretary. I say, Rumpole, sit yourself down. You may have wondered why I asked you to drop in.' I was shown to another sofa and Tom Mottram plumped himself down beside me. 'It's about a young man called...' He paused as though to search his memory for the name and then came out with 'Joby Jonson'. 'Really?' 'I'm a constituency M.P. I hope a good one,' Tom Mottram told me. 'You can be more use on your own patch than in some great unwieldy place like the Home Office. Well, I've had Joby Jonson's mother round at my surgery, week in, week out, poor woman. She's really quite distracted.' 'I expect she is.' 'I told the old girl I'd make sure he was properly defended.
Of course, I was delighted to hear you were appearing for him. So I can tell my constituent he's being looked after?' 'He's having the time of his young life. Banged up twentythree hours a day in a seven-foot cell with a couple of sworn enemies and their chamber pots. They pass the time by stubbing cigarettes out in his face. And he's entirely innocent.' 'Innocent?' The Under-Secretary looked startled. 'Is that your view of the matter?' 'Innocent as we all are,' I reminded him, 'until twelve fellow citizens come back into court and find us guilty.' 'Oh. You're giving us your courtroom performance.' Mottram smiled. 'It's very good, isn't it, Gladwyn?' 'Very good indeed.' The little man behind the desk was less than enthusiastic.
'I was just trying to point out the condition of prisoners on remand.' 'Worse than they were a hundred years ago! We know that, don't we, Gladwyn?' Mottram agreed with an unexpected enthusiasm.
'Only too well, I'm afraid, Mr Rumpole. And our Minister would be the first to agree with you,' Gladwyn chimed in.
'So why doesn't your Minister do something about it?' I made so bold as to ask.
'The great British voter.' The Under-Secretary sounded weary. 'Terribly keen on seeing people banged up and terribly against them being let out. You know our prisons are bursting at the seams. You know they don't do anyone the slightest good. Halve the prison population and you might halve crime.
Gladwyn and I know it. Our Minister knows it. U
nfortunately we live in a democracy and we have to obey the instructions of our masters with votes. So we find it better to leave these things to the private sector. People like you, of course, and Seb Pilgrim.' 'And who?' The name meant nothing to me.
'You don't know Seb? He runs Y.E.R.T.' 'I beg your pardon?' 'Youth Enterprise Reform Trust,' Gladwyn explained. 'You must have heard of Sir Sebastian Pilgrim!' 'An absolutely splendid, super chap!' Tom Mottram was almost breathless with admiration. 'He carried his bat for 175 England and does wonderful things for hopeless cases like Joby Jonson. He teaches young lads cricket, gives them a bit of pride in themselves, reforms their characters. You two should get together.' 'Do you really think so?' I was doubtful. 'I never carried my bat for anywhere.' 'Never you mind, Mr Rumpole. You and Seb Pilgrim have your hearts in the right place.' Then the telephone rang on Gladwyn's desk and he said the Minister would like a word with his UnderSecretary.
'Excuse us, won't you?' Tom Mottram moved to the instrument.
'Our Master's Voice. Many thanks for dropping in. I'm sure you'll see young Jonson doesn't do anything stupid in court.' 'Stupid?' I asked as I heaved myself up from the sofa.
'Make things even worse for himself putting up some sort of idiotic defence. I've told his poor old mother you've got enormous experience in these sorts of cases. And please, keep hammering on about our ghastly prisons.' 'While you keep up your masterly inactivity?' I asked, but the Under-Secretary was now murmuring respectfully down the telephone and the audience was over.
John Mortimer - Rumpole On Trial Page 18
