Murderers and Other Friends (11 page)

‘But aren't you afraid of dying?' Penny, who was furthest from death, asked at the end of this story.

‘Not really.' Tony was still smiling. ‘I'm so looking forward to meeting Mummy again.'

Two or three weeks after we got home I had a letter from Tony telling me more about his experiences at Dunkirk. A month later we read his obituary in
The Times.

Thoughts of death are always a diversion from life and, as the years pass, there is less and less time for them. What I meant to write about, sitting somewhere south of the Atlas Mountains, was the arrival of Rumpole in my life, almost twenty years ago.

I'd wanted to write about a detective, a Sherlock Holmes or a Maigret, to keep me alive in my old age. Then I thought of making him a criminal defender, in honour of the Old Bailey hacks I'd known and admired. I thought of giving him my father's uniform: a black jacket and waistcoat, striped trousers and cigar ash on the watch-chain, although I left out my father's spats. I added my father's habit of quoting poetry at inappropriate moments and I am proud, at least, to have brought snatches of Wordsworth to a large audience. I thought of giving him Jeremy Hutchinson's habit of calling impossible judges ‘old darling', although he resembles Jeremy in no other way. Then, because I wanted Rumpole to have as hard a time at home as he had in court, I gave him a powerful wife whom he wouldn't call ‘old darling'. I began by writing some odd speeches for him and found that as soon as he stepped on to the page, he began to speak in his own voice, which is undoubtedly the greatest favour a character can do for you.

Rumpole was also indebted to James Burge, another admirable advocate who freely applied the word ‘darling' to the judiciary. He had defended Stephen Ward, who was offered up as a sacrificial victim during one of the British public's periodic and absurd fits of morality at the time of the Profumo affair. Ward had been Christine Keeler's friend and was accused, on inadequate evidence, of living on immoral earnings. He committed suicide during the trial, but James Burge, who was also badly treated by the judge, soldiered on and, some years later, we sat together defending some murderous football hooligans. Searching for an Arsenal supporter to stab and being unable to find one, they had killed a stranger on Charing Cross Station, who was, so far as anyone could discover, totally uninterested in the game and supported nobody. Looking at the sullen and threatening faces in the dock, James Burge whispered to me, ‘I'm really an anarchist at heart but I don't think even my darling old Prince Peter Kropotkin would have approved of this lot!' So I called the first Rumpole play
My Darling Old Prince Peter Kropotkin.
Of course someone wondered whether the television audience would be familiar with Kropotkin's works and I changed it to
My Darling Old Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
a name which also failed to ring a bell in the world of television. Finally the director suggested
Rumpole of the Bailey
on the lines of
Trelawny of the ‘Wells'
and so it has remained. However, I am grateful to James Burge for a line I'll never forget and I'm sure Rumpole, although he would have disapproved entirely of Stephen Ward and his way of life, would have defended him with equal energy and courage.

When I wrote that first story in the mid seventies, I didn't know who would play Rumpole. I thought Alastair Sim would be excellent in the part, but sadly Mr Sim was dead and unable to take it on. On a happy day for me, the producer, then Irene Shubik, and John Gorrie, the director, suggested Leo McKern. He liked the part and was the first to suggest that we should do more stories. Now, when Rumpole speaks in his own voice, it is always Leo's voice also.

Sometimes, a writer finds an actor who not only becomes the character he's invented, but adds to and enriches it. This happened with Michael Hordern in
Dock Brief
and David Threlfall when he became a snakelike Conservative cabinet minister in
Paradise Postponed
and
Titmuss Regained.
It happened at once and then always with Leo McKern in Rumpole. Leo comes from Sydney, and Australians are born with one great advantage: they have almost no respect for authority. Rumpole's disdain for pomposity, self-regard, and the soulless application of the letter of the law without regard for human values, came naturally to him. There is a story I heard in Australia about a barrister who carried on his practice in one of the states where they still wear wigs and gowns, and have also taken over our myth that a barrister who gets up to address the court not in fancy dress is invisible. This Australian advocate got up, wigless, without a gown, in front of a judge he particularly disliked and said, ‘Your Honour, I wish to make an application.' ‘I can't see you, Mr Bleaks,' said the judge, no doubt enjoying what he regarded as the great tradition of the old country's bar. ‘But, your Honour, in my humble submission . . ‘It's no good, I simply can't see you.' ‘Am I quite invisible, your Honour?' ‘Utterly invisible to me, Mr Bleaks.' ‘Are you quite sure, your Honour?' ‘Absolutely sure, Mr Bleaks.' ‘Then if you're quite sure, this is something I've been meaning to do for years.' Whereupon Mr Bleaks put his fingers to his nose and stuck out his tongue at the judge. I'm not suggesting that Rumpole would ever do this; his insults are, I hope, a little more subtle, but that fine spirit of disrespect is still somewhere deep inside him.

Leo has Rumpole's hatred of pretension. During the filming of Ryan's Daughter, while everyone was kept waiting for the perfectly composed shot, with the seagulls all flying in the right direction, he grew so disillusioned with show business that he decided to give it all up, went back to Australia and bought a rain forest. Luckily for me, he changed his mind and left again. He's forever uncertain as to which country he wants to live or die in. As he has a perfectly reasonable dislike of flying, he spends a great part of his life on small cargo ships, his motor car stored in the hold, chugging across the Indian Ocean. Sometimes, it seems, he's changed his mind before he's arrived at his destination. In his youth he fell in love with a young Australian actress whom he saw swinging on a wire as Peter Pan and he followed her to England. They are still married; she is still thin and beautiful and can rarely be seen eating or drinking. Here, he lost his Australian accent and played Shakespeare, proving beyond all doubt he could play anything. His Iago was so good that the theatre at Stratford grew nervous of him and offered him Friar Laurence, the daftest part in the entire canon, so he wisely walked out. He was memorable in
The Alchemist
and acted at the Old Vic with Donald Wolfit, who desperately tried to put him off by shouting at him in the wings.

Leo McKern arrives in the rehearsal room long before anyone else and can finish
The Times
crossword puzzle before the coffee is ready. He likes simple jokes and has been known to put his glass eye (he lost his real one in an industrial accident) in the middle of the Bolognese sauce on a plate of spaghetti so that it glowers up and alarms the waiter. He loves boats; he fell off his most recent one in the dark and spent a long time floating in a marina, calling out mayday to diners who took no notice, until he was rescued at last by two tearaways who had been racing stolen cars. He acts with his entire body, and, like many fairly bulky men, is extremely light on his feet, dives expertly from the highest board and dances in the most sprightly fashion. I know about his dancing because, when we were on location on a Mediterranean cruise ship, he sometimes led me out on to the dance floor in the Dolphin Saloon and performed the difficult feat of waltzing me around. He learns his many lines during rehearsal and only changes them minutely, often for the better and after careful consultation. He can turn in an instant from comedy to pathos or play both of them at the same time. His acting exists where I always hope my writing will be: about two feet above the ground, a little larger than life, but always taking off from reality. As an actor he is to be compared with the great screen giants, Laughton and Raimu, the old French movie star, who was shapeless, lovable and could make you laugh and cry. He's a very private man who avoids speeches, dinners and public appearances. Once he starts work, he is entirely professional, an inspiring leader of a company.

For a long time he was reluctant to start each new series because he didn't want to be ‘just thought of as Rumpole', and, perhaps, over the last eighteen years, he should have found time for Falstaff and Lear. Lately, he seems to have become reconciled to the part, but I sometimes feel I have had to take on the burden of being Rumpole in reality. Quite recently, after I had had a painful argument with a marble bathroom floor and a treacherous Jacuzzi in Australia, and I was being pushed, lamed, through airports in a wheelchair apparently constructed for a child, the passers-by waved and called out, ‘G'day, Rumpole!' I have to protest that I am not he; I lack his courage, his stoicism and the essential nobleness of his character. I am not sufficiently Spartan to support life in Froxbury Mansions with ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed'. I am no more he than any of the fat middle-aged barristers you can find sitting in El Vino's in Fleet Street (known in the stories as Pommeroy's Wine Bar), drinking claret and dropping cigar ash down their waistcoats, claiming to be the original Rumpole. He may have echoes of my father, and of Jeremy Hutchinson and James Burge, he may say something about the law and the state of England with which I happen to agree, but I hope, if you watch him or read about him, you will discover, he is nobody but himself.

Conan Doyle is said to have grown tired of Sherlock Holmes, pushed him off the Reichenbach Falls, and only brought him back to life at the urgent request of the readers of the
Strand Magazine.
I haven't tired of the old barrister, and I think this is because you can take today's events – social workers snatching children for suspected devil worship, the Court of Appeal having to eat the words of previous judges, the suggested reforms of the legal profession or the slender difference between actors and barristers – and write a Rumpole story about them. Any matrimonial dispute fits easily in the Rumpole marriage and Penny says that when we have an argument she can see me remembering her lines in order to give them to Hilda.

I don't know if it's because he's so irredeemably English that Rumpole has become something of a cult figure in America. The Rumpole Society started in California and grew rapidly. The first meeting I went to took place in San Francisco's huge gas and electricity building. A mock-up of Pommeroy's had been built there and judges in ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed' T-shirts were serving behind the bar. There is a minor character in
Rumpole
called Dodo Macintosh, who makes ‘cheesy bits' for the Chambers' parties and the evening began with a blind tasting of Dodo Macintosh's ‘cheesy bits'. Some time later there was a Hilda look-alike contest, and much discussion of Rumpole's address. As I write the books quite rapidly, I am always forgetting exactly where he lives.

Actors like Peter Bowles, Jonathan Coy, Patricia Hodge and Julian Curry have always been a joy to write for, continually demonstrating that British light-comedy acting is the best in the world. Then there was an argument between Thames Television and Irene Shubik, the original producer of
Rumpole,
who cast them. She wanted the next series postponed until it was resolved and I didn't. Later Jacqueline Davis came into my life, stayed there, and together we have produced over fifty hours of television, working together at times of excitement, satisfaction, frustration and despair, but never really wanting to work with anyone else.

We met at lunch in the early Rumpole days and Jacquie came into the restaurant, a beautiful woman in a white dress, with huge dark eyes and a gentle voice. She is inclined to lose things, drop her notebook, files and glasses and run her red Alpha-Romeo into walls, while thinking of the elegance of such a motor car. She's as prone to despair as I am, but often with me it's a device to achieve a result, and with her, a genuine emotion. Her kindness and generosity are endless and her charm can win the hearts of that most brutal and intractable of bodies, a film unit on location. She remembers everyone's birthdays, gets them cards and presents, and, given the slightest excuse for any sort of celebration, bakes an enormous cake. She's the most expert wrapper-up of gifts and, when she comes laden with them, it seems an act of vandalism to undo the paper.

She lives in a small house with two cats and there we have gone through crises in casting, rows with directors and all the usual television traumas without any serious disputes. At our first lunch she told me her strange family history.

Before the last war a beautiful girl (I have no doubt she was beautiful and Jacquie has a photograph which proves it) came to stay in a Clapham lodging-house. She departed suddenly, leaving behind her a small baby. The landlady, who had children of her own, behaved in a noble fashion, brought the child up, saw her educated until she found a job in advertising and then in television. The baby became Jacquie Davis. Although she called the landlady her mother, and still visits her grave, she was always, and understandably, anxious to find out who her real mother was. In this long quest she has found a half-brother, and three half-sisters living in Cornwall, the result of her mother's marriage to a Cornish policeman who worked in Soho. Given the fact that many people devote their time and energy to avoiding their relations, it's a great tribute to Jacquie's persistence that she has found so many. I don't know if she will discover more about her mother, but I can imagine how important it is to her to know. Meanwhile, those she works with, her friends and her friends' children, are her extended family.