Time to Be in Earnest (48 page)

Tonight to a party at the Ritz given by George Carman, QC. I knew only about four people there of a mixed company of senior lawyers and judges spiced with well-known faces from television and the media. Robin Day was being his usual rumbustious and argumentative self. He and I engaged in a conversation with Lord Alexander about the recent decision of the Appeal Court to quash the conviction of Derek Bentley. Bob supported it, Robin stoutly defended Judge Goddard.

I’m not sure how valid it is virtually to retry cases so long after the event and to apply contemporary standards of justice, morality and compassion to those operating some forty-seven years earlier, and I have an uncomfortable feeling that, had I been a member of the jury, I too would have found Bentley guilty. He was certainly engaged with Craig on a joint criminal enterprise. The knuckle-duster with which he was armed, as Lord Goddard had great satisfaction in pointing out to the jury, was a formidable weapon and I find it hard to believe that he didn’t know his accomplice was armed. But I would certainly have made a very strong recommendation for mercy as I believe the jury did. The central injustice of this case surely rests on the fact that Bentley was hanged while Craig, who actually fired the shot, could not, because of his age, receive the death sentence. Had Bentley also been sent to prison and later released to live, as Craig has done, an unmomentous life, we should hardly have heard of this case. The carrying out of the death sentence, not the verdict, was the abomination, and for that the Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, and not the trial judge, was responsible. Lord Goddard and the jury expected Bentley to be reprieved. But if one is criticizing Lord Goddard, what of the three Appeal Judges who heard Bentley’s appeal? If it is the verdict not the sentence which is the essential injustice, surely they bear a considerable part of the responsibility.

But this can’t be the only case in which a judge’s summing-up has been seen as prejudicial to the accused. A far more grievous case in my opinion is that of Edith Thompson, who was half-carried in a state of
insensibility to the scaffold in 1923 and hanged for her alleged participation in the murder of her husband. Edith Thompson was a fantasist, almost the prototype of that dangerous species. She was married to a dull, worthy husband, Percy Thompson, and lived an equally dull and worthy life in the eastern suburb of Ilford. She took a lover, a P&O liner steward, Frederick Bywaters, eight years younger than herself and, in an obvious and somewhat desperate attempt to keep him, wrote him passionate letters in which she described her attempts to kill her husband by grinding up light bulbs and putting the pieces of glass in his food. There was absolutely no evidence that this had ever happened, as pathologist Bernard Spilsbury attested at her trial. The murder took place on 3rd October 1922 when Edith Thompson and her husband were walking home after an evening at the theatre in London. Bywaters sprang out and stabbed Thompson to death while Edith Thompson perpetually cried, “Don’t! Oh don’t!”

Bywaters had kept her letters and, had these been destroyed or not admitted in evidence, it is probable that Edith Thompson would have lived to an old age. As it was, they were damning and the judge made the most of them. Edith Thompson was effectively hanged for adultery not for murder. But although the case has always left an unpleasant stain on British justice, no relation ever campaigned for a pardon or for the conviction to be quashed.

And what about Ruth Ellis, the last woman in England to be hanged? She was executed on 13th July 1955 for shooting her lover David Blakely shortly after she had suffered a miscarriage. A verdict of manslaughter would surely have been more just. If we are to retry the past, how shall we select the cases? By the apparent injustice of the original sentence or by family and public pressure? And at what year do we stop?

The judge in the case of Major Armstrong of Hay-on-Wye was also biased to some extent against the prisoner. As he was leaving the box after cross-examination, the judge, Mr. Justice Darling, intervened and began to question him closely about the way the arsenic found in his possession had been divided up into twenty small packets. Armstrong was claiming that the arsenic was to kill dandelions in the lawn. Why then did he not merely sprinkle the weedkiller directly round each root? Armstrong was unable to give a convincing explanation and merely said feebly that it seemed the most convenient way of doing it at the time. It is possible, though not probable, that without this intervention Armstrong might have gone free.

On the other hand there are instances of judges being sympathetic to the defendant and yet not influencing the jury towards an acquittal. William Herbert Wallace, sentenced to death on 25th April 1931 for the murder of his wife, is an example. This time Mr. Justice Wright summed up favourably to Wallace, pointing out what he described as “the loops and doubts” of evidence that was entirely circumstantial. But after only an hour’s absence the jury returned a verdict of guilty. The Court of Criminal Appeal subsequently quashed the verdict on the grounds that it was unsafe having regard to the evidence. This has remained one of the most fascinating cases in English law and still remains a mystery. My own view is that Wallace was innocent.

The Prime Minister and Cherie Blair were at the party and said how much they enjoy my books, which is, of course, always disarming to a writer. He looked much younger than he does on television, and modestly vulnerable—an impression which is surely fifty per cent misleading. In our group around him was a woman professor of Law from America who used the opportunity to badger him about the defects of the proposed no-win, no-pay rule in cases which would previously have attracted legal aid. She said she would submit a paper and he promised to read it. I was told that the Lord Chancellor was expected but did not arrive; he would have been a more suitable candidate for her arguments.

I continue to find Tony Blair puzzling. The problem is that I still have no idea what drives him and his government. What are the principles, if any, on which he operates? What aim has he beyond the strong intention of winning a second term? Beneath the charm and conviviality, and apparent vulnerability and the humour, what has he of force, intelligence and commitment? I believe he has conscience and sensitivity, qualities which, in a politician, are not always helpful in a crisis. I was left wondering whether he has the emotional and physical resilience to meet disaster if and when it comes. But the likeability will prove a great asset and not only in Britain. It is a rare enough quality in a politician. Admittedly it didn’t help John Major; but no country is governable with a majority of one.

Tomorrow I shall be seventy-eight and, by the time this fragment of autobiography is published, I shall be within sight of my eightieth birthday. If seventy-seven is a time to be in earnest, eighty is a time to recognize old age, accepting with such fortitude as one can muster its inevitable pains, inconvenience and indignities and rejoicing in its few compensations.

Looking back at what I’ve written in the last twelve months has reinforced my conviction that I could never have sustained the daily chore of writing a diary. The one I’ve produced is incomplete, with more omitted than has been recorded. I still find scraps of writing which were obviously scribbled at the end of the day and intended for the diary. These notes of books read, people met, family occasions, talks and lectures given are now indecipherable and I can’t pretend that it matters. But at least I have an imperfect record of one year and of the life of which it was part.

Youth is the time for certainties. In old age we realize how little we can be sure of, how little we have learned, how little—perhaps—we have changed. But looking back on my life I do know myself to be greatly blessed. I have met with little malice and much encouragement and kindness. I am sustained by the magnificent irrationality of faith. I have two daughters who have been a joy to me since the days of their birth, sons-in-law whom I respect and greatly love, and five grandchildren whose doings are a source of continued interest and amazement. I go into old age with the companionship of loving friends even though we all know that we can’t expect to travel the whole way together. And I have my work. I shall continue to write detective stories as long as I can write well, and I hope I shall recognize when it is time to stop. It gives
pleasure to me and to thousands of readers. No other justification is needed.

The cells of my body must have renewed themselves countless times since that eleven-year-old walked round Ludlow Castle carrying so carefully the letter which would open to her the delights and opportunities of a high-school education. I inhabit a different body, but I can reach back over nearly seventy years and recognize her as myself. Then I walked in hope—and I do so still.

It is both a privilege and a pleasure to give this talk at the Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society, although I accepted the invitation with some trepidation; there is nothing I can say about Jane Austen which will, I feel, be new to this audience of her devotees. I shall crave your indulgence before I begin. It is also a particular pleasure to be speaking at Chawton, where in Chawton Cottage Jane Austen lived for the last eight years of her tragically short life. The five years preceding the move to Chawton were unsettled with constant changes of residence and were artistically unproductive with her writing virtually at a stop. It could be argued, therefore, that, without this unpretentious final home in which she found that mixture of rural peace, ordered domestic routine and mild stimulation which best suited her character and her art, we might never have been given the greatest of her novels.

My title this afternoon is
“Emma
Considered as a Detective Story.” It may seem presumptuous as well as a little eccentric to consider one of the greatest novels written in the English language with reference to the conventions of popular genre fiction. Apart from this presumption, the detective story is, after all, usually concerned with murder and there is no crime in
Emma
if we except the despoiling of Mrs. Weston’s turkey houses; few orthodox detective novels are so rural, so peaceable, so remote in spirit from the crime and violence of Jane Austen’s own age or of ours. But the detective story does not require murder; Dorothy L. Sayers’s
Gaudy Night
is an example. What it does require is a mystery, facts which are hidden from the reader but which he or she should be able to discover by logical deduction from clues inserted in the novel
with deceptive cunning but essential fairness. It is about evaluating evidence, whether of events or of character. It is concerned with bringing order out of disorder and restoring peace and tranquillity to a world temporarily disrupted by the intrusion of alien influences.