Murderers and Other Friends (7 page)

As defenders, we naturally found ourselves on the side of books and films which the prosecution was trying to ban. That didn't mean that we found these works particularly attractive; it's not necessary, when defending an alleged murderer, to believe that the best way to end an unhappy marriage is with a kitchen knife in the stomach. Prosecutors who seek to keep the purity of our national life unsullied can be similarly detached. Geoff and I did a long case about some questioned publication or other against a particularly jovial prosecutor who would push his way past my middle-aged knees every morning and chirrup, ‘Give us a kiss, darling,' as I sat gloomily preparing my work for the day. I used to write in a number of notebooks which had dark circles printed on their covers. In his final speech to the jury this prosecutor was saying, ‘And if this sort of publication is allowed, youth will be corrupted, authority will be undermined, family life will be in peril and civilization, as we know it, will grind to a halt.' Then, glancing down at my notebook, he muttered, ‘Arseholes all over your notebook, darling!', and went on with his peroration. The truth is that the defenders of public morality are not always all that they seem to be.

Geoff has gone on to enjoy an extremely successful practice, forcing the government to disgorge ‘secret' documents in a case which revealed official connivance at the sale of material which might be used for making arms in Iraq, and saving the lives of a large number of prisoners kept in horrible conditions on death row in Caribbean countries. Few defenders can have had such triumphant results.

When I was a barrister we used to spend weeks discovering if those accused were guilty, something which often became perfectly obvious in the first half hour, and about twenty minutes deciding what to do with them. Prison was the usual solution, and one which required the least thought. No one had any faith in prison. The judges didn't believe they reformed anyone and, though it would keep offenders out of circulation for a while, they would be shovelled back into the community more hardened, brutalized and dangerous than ever. Politicians are fond of saying no one commits crimes in prison, but of course they do: daily offences ranging from murder and rape to drug-dealing and aggravated assault. The problem is that the British public is extraordinarily penal-minded. We once stood second to Turkey in the league of those European countries who gaoled the highest proportion of their citizens. Now we have done even better: Britain is top of the imprisonment stakes. Thinking that it's what is expected of them, some judges and most vote-hungry politicians are anxious to oblige, and young and old, serious or petty criminals, and a large proportion of those who haven't been convicted of anything at all, are banged up in stinking and dangerous Victorian slums. Recently a mother of young children was given a custodial sentence for failing to pay her television licence. One hundred and fifty years after the publication of
A Christmas Carol
, we need a Dickens to open our eyes to poverty, homelessness and the building of prisons in which children and young people, to whom no other future is being offered, may be locked away to take more advanced courses at universities of crime.

I have been working lately with the Howard League for Penal Reform which became concerned about the number of fifteen-year-old boys, children by anyone's standard, who had hanged themselves in custody and while awaiting trial. We accordingly went, as a small delegation, to the then Home Secretary, a smiling man, whose slicked-down hair was known in parliamentary circles as ‘self-basting'. He received us with great affability as he sat surrounded by his parliamentary secretary and his civil servants. He greeted me by asking if I'd seen any good operas lately. I did my best to explain that we hadn't come about operas but about boys hanging themselves.

‘Of course you have!' Then came a chorus from the politicians assembled which went something like this: ‘And we think you're doing a grand job!', ‘We've got the greatest possible admiration for your campaign', ‘You and the Howard League, you just keep up the good work.' The Home Office, it seemed, was right behind us, so I made bold to ask why it didn't do something about it.

‘Well, there it is. We're really helpless. The sentencing classes, that is the judges, keep sending these chaps to prison and the local authorities won't spend any money on homes for them. So what can we do? Something, perhaps, in two or three years' time. Meanwhile, you carry on protesting. We think you're doing absolutely splendidly.'

The problem was, they explained, that it costs such a terrible lot of money, about £20,000, to make a secure place in a council home for a boy. I then suggested a tariff be put up in all magistrates courts: £20,000 for a secure place, so much less a week for community service, so much less for bail. ‘Then,' I said, ‘you could reform the prisons on strict monetarist principles.' This suggestion caused delighted laughter all round. ‘
You
honestly think that? Well, that is
quite
hilarious, coming from you! Are you becoming a Thatcherite, John?' The meeting ended in great merriment. As we left, I thought I'd rather have heard them say, ‘Good luck to them. We'd love all the little buggers to hang themselves.' That might, at least, have been honest. As it was, I felt an extreme frustration which was only slightly alleviated when I put a version of the incident into a Rumpole. Later we called on an Opposition spokesman who wondered how many votes there were in preventing children hanging themselves.

Things have not improved since then. The present Home Secretary, in order to put even more distance between us and the field in the Euro Penal Cup, has ordered six new prisons and declines any sort of conversation at all with the Howard League for Penal Reform.

Of course there are dangerous criminals who shouldn't ever be let out of prison, but there are also many people who should never have been sent there in the first place, and many others who are there to have their criminal tendencies confirmed and perpetuated. Experience in other countries has shown that reducing the prison population may mean reducing the crime rate. It's hard to persuade the British public of this.

Watching what the Home Office called the sentencing classes, and discussing the treatment of offenders, it seems to me that what we fear most are the criminal tendencies in ourselves. We are terrified, no doubt with good cause, of our baser instincts. Fear leads to a passionate belief in the righteousness of punishment. Shakespeare, who understood most things, understood this when, in
King Lear,
he wrote of the beadle flogging the whore: ‘Strip thine own back. Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind For which thou whip'st her' and of the judge railing at the simple thief: ‘Hark in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which the thief?' How much, I wonder, are our bursting prisons due to our own irremovable feelings of guilt?

The Christian religion, which has otherwise brought us many blessings, has also taught us that we are born guilty; we are the stained products of the fall of man, corrupted by the fatal taste of the apple of knowledge, only to be freed by the gift of redemption. Will time redeem us? As our hair falls out and our fingernails are renewed, do we not become different people, innocent of the crimes of our youth? The last novel I wrote was called
Dunster.
I made an amalgamation of all the most decent and honourable men I knew and suggested that such a character might, in the faraway past, have been guilty of a war crime. The conflict between the two younger men in the book is whether such guilt has to be dragged out into the light of day for the purposes of punishment, or whether old sins, committed in the heat of battle, might be allowed to sleep in the shadows. I didn't provide an answer to this dilemma; it's the purpose of the novelist, as it is of the defending barrister, to go on asking awkward questions.

My father used to take us each year to what was then called the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. There I saw the actors I most admired: Randle Ayrton, now an unknown name but an unforgettable Lear for me, and Donald Wolfit, gone down in history as an irredeemable ham, who was the actor who most easily, in those days, made me cry. In London, during the holidays, we also went regularly to the theatre, after prolonged dinners at the Trocadero. Perhaps it was my father's fault that I longed to be an actor, and then a dramatist, and finally caused his character to become submerged by a sea of leading players.

Ten years after my father's death I wrote a play about him and much of him departed into fiction. In
A Voyage Round My Father
I made up new dialogue for him and began to forget which words he had spoken in his lifetime and which I had given to his subsequent shadows. Most people keep their memories, and their fathers, mothers, husbands, wives and lovers, safely within them. For writers, such characters are redrawn, reconstructed and given away in books and plays; they leave and go for a while into the public domain, until they and their authors are forgotten. My father's spirit drifted into strange company.

He was excellently acted by Mark Dignam at the Greenwich Theatre. At the Haymarket he was performed by Alec Guinness, an actor of great subtlety who was extremely moving but perhaps not sufficiently aggressive to encompass my father's rages. When Michael Codron, who put the play on in the West End, plucked up his courage to mention this, Guinness protested that he did, indeed, hit his egg very hard in the breakfast scene. After Alec Guinness left, my father was taken over by Michael Redgrave, then coming to the end of a distinguished career. He had difficulty in remembering his lines and wore a sort of hearing-aid into which they were repeated, together with stage directions, from the prompt corner. I was told that one night the hearing-aid picked up messages from radio taxis. Redgrave sat down on a sofa beside the actress who was playing my mother and said loudly, impressively and to her complete astonishment, ‘I must now proceed immediately to Number Four Flask Walk.' I hope that this story is true.

Then there was, as they say, some film interest and a character, about as far removed from my father as my father was from Don Giovanni, was about to take up his clouded malacca walking stick and put on his hat. Rex Harrison was, undoubtedly, one of the best light comedy actors the world has seen. He had impeccable timing and a sort of highly charged, nervous and rapid delivery handed down from Seymour Hicks and Gerald Du Maurier, the stars of the Edwardian theatre. He also had, on the stage or in films, a quizzical and baffled charm which most people, and particularly women, found irresistible. He had once flirted with an earlier play of mine, but as he always avoided meeting me and the producer in restaurants I wasn't sure of his intentions and he ended up by turning us down. However, I thought his comedy well suited to the way I write and I lived in hope. Then an American producer announced that he was anxious to make a film of
A Voyage Round My Father
in which Rex Harrison had agreed to act.

Some actors of the old school fall into the error of thinking that the characters they play must be sympathetic. Actors of genius, such as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, know better and realize that the plum roles are given by writers to complete bastards, or at least to persons who are a considerable pain in the neck. Richard III comes on to the stage, seduces a grief-stricken widow over the coffin of the husband he has murdered, and then goes on to do in practically everyone in sight, including the Duke of Clarence and the little Princes in the Tower. But there was never a better part for an actor. Henry Irving did very well out of a murderer in
The Bells
and Charles Laughton can never be entirely separated from a sadistic sea captain. Rex Harrison, however, seemed not only anxious to appear, in drama as in life, as charming and sexy, he set out to minimize any characteristics which his many fans might find unacceptable in their adored Rex. In the early days of our acquaintance he was playing a homosexual but he was careful, he said, to make it clear that his character wasn't ‘really gay'. In a Feydeau play I translated, the entire plot turns on the fact that a wife finds her husband incapable of making love and so jumps to the conclusion that he has exhausted himself with other women. When he played the character in a disastrous film version of
A Flea in Her Ear
Rex Harrison spent hours at the Boulogne studios explaining to me that his fans would not, of course, accept the absurd suggestion that their much-loved star was impotent and Monsieur Chandebise's incapacity was, at worst, a momentary hiccup.

When I was told that Rex was to play my father, in a film which opens with his being struck blind, I knew exactly what to expect. I visited him in his London house and he stood, dressed with his usual elegance, rubbing his forehead, his voice rising to that high note of comic petulance which was so effective in the song ‘Why Can't a Woman be More Like a Man?' He made it clear that his public wouldn't accept the tragic fact that their hero was totally blind. ‘I'm quite sure,' he told me, ‘that he can see
shapes'
It was in vain that I told him that my father couldn't lift the food to his mouth and my mother had to do it for him, that he couldn't cross a room without his hands outstretched and his knees knocking into the furniture, that after the retinas left the backs of his eyes, and despite his best efforts to deny his own helplessness, he had no idea of the size of his grandchildren unless he felt them carefully with his hands. Rex's mind was made up; he wasn't going to play a character who couldn't see shapes.

So filming began, for the first time, in the house, which became, not a home for my new family, but a set, a place where the walls were repainted, bookcases walled over and the garden, unable to act springtime in late autumn, filled with artificial flowers and that uncheckable growth of paper cups which shows that a film unit, with its incessant demands for meals, has been in occupation.