Murderers and Other Friends by John Mortimer Read Free Book Online

earth-closet by the vegetable patch and stub my toe against the stone hot-water bottle in the cold bed. I know exactly how it felt to be sitting alone on a radiator, unwrapping the blue bag of salt and shaking it into a packet of crisps, my eyes pricking with tears, apparently abandoned by my parents in the first week at prep school. I can see the pages of the books I read then – Beau Geste and Beau Sabreur – and smell the floor polish and the blankets as I knelt beside my bed singing an old Fred Astaire number under my breath: ‘I’m putting all my eggs in one basket, I’m betting everything I’ve got on you,’ because I didn’t know what to pray for. This heightened perception occurs in childhood and old age; in one because it’s all happening for the first time and in the other because you may soon have to say goodbye. Like childhood, old age is irresponsible, reckless and foolhardy. Children and old people have everything to gain and nothing much to lose. It’s middle-age which is cursed by the desperate need to cling to some finger-hold halfway up the mountain, to conform, not to cause trouble, to behave well, and it is, perhaps mercifully, the period which becomes blurred in the memory, the time when you did nothing more difficult than survive.
    When I’d started in the schizoid business of being a writer who had barristering as a day job, and was never entirely certain what to do when I grew up, the Inns of Court were run like a rather backward public school, with barristers calling each other by their surnames, only stopping short of referring to their younger brothers as Elkins Minor. When my first plays were on, and my photograph appeared in the Daily Express, I was fined a dozen bottles of champagne for receiving such vulgar and unprofessional publicity. Judges had that licence to be bad-tempered, which my father claimed in shops, restaurants or on Paddington Station. Police evidence, however improbably the verbals were phrased, was received like Holy Writ and any suggestion that policemen might not be telling the truth was treated as blasphemy. I remember one judge, who had served for a long time in the colonies, telling an Old Bailey jury that they had heard the evidence of a ‘white policeman’, which they would surely have to accept in every detail. In those days homosexuals over twenty-one were imprisoned, robbers flogged and murderers hanged. I was told of one judge who apparently enjoyed passing such sentences. He would whisper in baby-talk to his marshal (the young barrister appointed to listen to his jokes, sharpen his pencils and look up his law) about the prisoner during the course of the trial, using such phrases as, ‘Is oo a naughty little liar, is oo then?’ or ‘I’se going to give oo something which will teach oo a lesson!’ From this period of our legal history, things could only get better.
    It’s fashionable to look back on the sixties and seventies with ferocious disapproval; this was the period surely when youth took to drugs, when the decent values of family life were destroyed and teachers stopped making children learn to spell and set them to modelling new towns out of yoghurt pots and cotton wool. In fact, the sixties saw a move towards a slightly more humane society. The death penalty finally went, adult homosexual men weren’t answerable for what they did in private, and literary merit had become a defence to a charge of obscenity in Roy Jenkins’s Act, a piece of legislation which caused us all a good deal of gentle amusement. No doubt many mistakes were made during those years, but it was a time when we became more tolerant of each other’s peculiarities and judges, for the most part, cut out the rages and the baby-talk.
    Emily, the first child of the second chance, was born just after the Oz trial. I was defending a publication called the Little Red School Book , which described Marxism and