Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Jon Canter
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Foreword
Preface
Author’s Note
Author’s Further Note
1. Who’s Who (1964)
2. A Short Gentleman (1968)
3. Mike Bell (1974)
4. I am a Heterosexual (1979)
5. My Mistake (1983)
6. Ridgeon v. Kelly (1989)
7. Elizabeth (1989)
8. The Wedding (1990)
9. Contentment (1991–2001)
10. The Night of My Life (2001)
11. Mike Bell (1993–2002)
12. Unforeseen Events (2002)
13. The Investment (2002)
14. A Man Alone (2002)
15. My Mother’s Funeral (2002)
16. The Concert (2002)
17. The Return (2002)
18. Andros (2003)
19. The Queen (2003)
20. 29th September (2003)
Postscript by Mike Bell (2011)
Dog Index (2006)
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Robert Purcell knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life from the moment he read his father’s entry in Who’s Who. He too would get a First in Law, enjoy a distinguished career as a barrister and a judge and marry well. At first, all seems to go to plan—so how did this perfect specimen of the British Establishment end up in prison?
An intellectual giant but an emotional pygmy, Robert is a man struggling to come to terms with the forces that have brought him down from the wife who wanted him to change to the ex-girlfriend who came back to haunt him and the childhood bully who turned into an adult bully. Despite everything, Robert remains determined to carry on being the same magnificently self-righteous man he always was, utterly resistant to therapy, change and the emotional demands of the opposite sex.
Jon Canter is the author of Seeds of Greatness and a scriptwriter for many of Britain’s most prominent comedians. He lives in Suffolk with his wife and daughter.
ALSO BY JON CANTER
Seeds of Greatness
For the barristers: Simon Levene, Gerard Pounder,
Clive Anderson, Jane Belson and Jonny Brock
And the Aldeburgh Dawn Chorus: Helen and Janine Pole,
Angela Bumby
To Elizabeth, who looked so radiant on our Wedding Day, 21st September 1990, St Michael’s Church, Aldeburgh,1 Suffolk
And Sir Michael Purcell (1919–2003), my father
1 Pronounced not Awld-uh-bruh nor Awld-uh-borough but always and only: Awld-bruh.
‘One is the master of what one doesn’t say and the slave of what one does.’
– Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo
Teódulo Franco y Bahamonde
(General Franco) (1892–1975)1
1 There’ll be those who assume that if I quote General Franco, I support dictators. Oh well. That only goes to prove the truth of his remark.
‘Not every crime’s committed by a criminal.’1
1 You’ll note that I’ve not attributed this remark. It’s not, I assure you, another of Franco’s. It was, in fact, said by me. I said it shortly after I committed my crime.
I’VE NEVER SPOKEN publicly on any private matter, except to utter ‘Guilty’. Yet I’ve seen ‘myself’ on television, heard about ‘me’ on radio, read in the papers about ‘my’ personality. I’ve seen the search engine references to my name multiply and rampage like worldwide weeds. Who are these 113,000 ‘Robert Purcells’?1 Some are sixteenth-century bishops. Some are Canadian basketball players. They’re manifestly someone else. Yet I no more recognise those ‘Robert Purcells’ who are (supposedly) me. They’re cartoons, grotesques scratched on the wall of a cave.
My father, as a judge, prized his anonymity. I too, as a barrister, saw it as my mission to keep my name out of the papers, with the prized exception of the Law Report in The Times. I have not changed my view. But Elizabeth, the woman I married, the mother of my children, has urged me to speak out. She has told me to write an account of who I am and why I am who I am.
Elizabeth is not proposing I ‘set the record straight’ for the instruction and edification of others. She believes, in no uncertain terms – for Elizabeth, now, where I am concerned, has no uncertain terms – I must reveal myself for my own benefit. The benefit, however, cannot accrue unless I share my ‘revealed’ self with others. To discover myself is to uncover myself. Only by cutting myself open can I hope to heal.
‘Open up or die.’ Those were her exact words2. She implied that, if I did open up, I would, in fact, not die. I would walk the streets of England for eternity. ‘Look!’ the little children would say. ‘There’s the Opened-Up Man! How slowly but happily he moves! He has lived for many thousands of years, because he shares his feelings. Let us ask him how he is and spend the day hearing his answer!’
Forgive me, Elizabeth. Forgive my lapse into sarcasm. You are right, of course. I must reveal myself – to myself, to you, to the world. Everyone agrees. My daughter, my sister, my colleagues. I’m sure the cashiers in the Co-op would concur, if asked.
‘Yes, love,’ they’d say. ‘Get it all out. It’s better out than in.’
We’re all open books now.
1 Source: Google, 28th March 2006, 22.49. And again at 23.47.
2 All reported speech in this work is verbatim. I recall precisely what is said in my presence. Or, rather, I recall what matters. The retention of everything said in my presence would constitute a mental illness. Doubtless, they’d call it Purcell’s disease. There’d be a documentary. I’d visit ten Tescos and repeat every word I’d heard within their walls. The producer would tell me the documentary’s aim was educational, though you and I know the aim would be entertainment, impure and simple. A sombre narrator would lend the words ‘ten Tescos’ a bogus gravitas. Jeremy Irons? Sir Jeremy Irons? Does he have a knighthood yet? If not, he can have mine, which I fear is no longer forthcoming.
MOST BOOKS START with a fundamental disadvantage. They’re written by writers. Writers are the last people one should entrust with the writing of a book. They are prone to poetic paragraphs evoking the passage of seasons. They believe that sexual acts should take longer to describe than perform. Their characteristic weaknesses make them uniquely unsuited to their chosen profession. Egocentricity, procrastination, irrationality, hysteria, self-pity, self-delusion, pretension, prolixity, alcoholism – these are handicaps in most professions. For writers, they’re qualifications.
It’s the egocentricity that’s the worst offence. A writer experiences panic when trying to convey simple information. ‘The dentist unlocked the door of her surgery and went inside.’ A writer would spit on such a sentence. What can the writer write about the dentist, the lock, the door and the surgery that will draw attention to the writer’s extraordinary (in his or her view) talent? The dentist is nominally the subject of the sentence; but it’s the writer, lording it and larding it over the dentist, who’s the subject of every sentence in the book. The dentist can’t live or die without the writer – this is what the writer won’t allow us to forget, when all we want is for the dentist to enter the surgery and get on with the bloody story. Is there a patient in the surgery – with a gun? How did they get in the surgery when the door was locked?
Fear not. I’m not a writer. I’m a barrister and shall write like a barrister, dedicating myself to the ruthless pursuit of clarity. If a portico is ornate, I shall write ‘ornate’, not concoct a series of phrases that aspire to the condition of ornateness. Where the context demands Latin or footnotes, I shall write Latin or footnotes. Nothing superfluous, nothing fancy. Cadit quaestio: let that be an end to the matter. I’m not seeking, for the back of this book, those rococo puffs writers invent, as they lie in their dank (and often borrowed) beds: richly evocative … hugely accomplished … sensitive and vibrant. No. I’d be happy with contains no ornate descriptions of porticos.
I’m no longer a practising barrister, with a thriving practice in taxation and trusts. That doesn’t mean I’m no longer a barrister. Sebastian Coe will always be an athlete, though no one expects him, in middle age, to run to the House of Lords.
‘You are a man who has dedicated your life to the legal profession.’ That is what Mr Justice Ableman said, in his preamble to sentencing. ‘It is nothing short of a tragedy,’ he continued, ‘that a person of your distinguished provenance has destroyed years of scholarship and attainment with one egregious act.’ That was not a banishment. On the contrary. It was a recognition of my continued membership of the Freemasonry of the Bar. Would Mr Justice Ableman have used the word egregious when addressing a fraudulent businessman, say, or a pop star embarrassed with drugs? No. He wouldn’t waste egregious and provenance on them. Mr Justice Ableman was talking to one of his own.
So. I shall write like a barrister. But I shan’t plead. I’m not arguing, in these pages, the case for the defence. My purpose, in opening up, is not adversarial. That is what Elizabeth has told me. I’m not here to acquit myself, retrospectively. My brief is to stand in the witness box and – with great deliberation – take off all my clothes.
I’VE BEEN THINKING further on that dentist. The one who can’t enter her surgery until her creator – the writer – permits.
I’m the writer of this book. But I’m also the dentist. I’m both the author of the book and its subject. I am the one who advances my story. Or not.
Here we are, on the threshold of that story, as we have been for some time. We’ve had Quotations. We’ve had Dedications. We’ve had Acknowledgements. We’ve had a Foreword. We’ve had a Preface. Now we’re having an Author’s Note.
The reader is entitled to ask: ‘When will the bastard thing start? What next? “Further Reading”?’
Forgive me. I must delay no more. There’s nothing for it. I must open the door and walk in, even though as I write this I’m overwhelmed by reluctance, distaste and fear. I fear that when I open the door, I’ll fall. Not on the floor, you understand. I fear that I’ll fall and keep falling because there is no floor.
CRIMINAL BARRISTERS DEAL in hindsight. What’s done is done. No barrister’s consulted before the crime: ‘I’m considering robbing a bank. How can I ensure that – if I’m caught – I receive the minimum sentence? Would being “high on a cocktail of drugs” work for or against me? What about “a voice”? As I walk into the bank, should I “hear” “a voice”? If so, whose “voice” should I “hear”? My late mother’s? Jesus Christ’s? What about Sir David Attenborough’s?’
I am not a criminal barrister. My practice was civil. Nevertheless, the point is well taken. This confession is written from the terminus, in hindsight. I have fifty years of hindsight now. Two score years and ten of hindsight – a dangerous amount indeed.
I shall start my confession with a chapter set in 1964. Let us say, for the sake of argument – a sake most precious to me – the chapter contains a reference to a Japanese man. It may be that, a year later, I learned that the man was Chinese. Nevertheless, I shall state what I thought to be the case in 1964. I shall avoid hindsight.
WHEN I WAS eight, I sneaked into my father’s study, knowing he was downstairs in the drawing room with my mother, enjoying a pre-prandial sherry. This was their ritual every evening my father was at home. On the seventh chime of the grandfather clock, my mother would cry out: ‘Sherry!’ Not after it. On it. My mother did not waste time.
My father’s study was out of bounds to my sister and me. It was where our father did his Very Important Work. What havoc, if they entered, might his children wreak? In my case, as opposed to my sister’s, the answer was ‘none’. I entered the study, stood at his desk and felt the might of the Law. I was in the presence of a great power. But I didn’t feel oppressed. On the contrary. I felt ennobled.
As I stood there in my pyjamas, gazing at the tomes on his shelves, I must have seen for the first time those volumes which would later be my constant companions when I, like he, won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, and was awarded, as he was, a first in Law: Winfield & Jolowicz on Tort, Megarry & Wade: The Law of Real Property. Yet it’s not a legal textbook I recall. The book I recall had a red spine. Its title seemed nonsensical and unfinished – why didn’t it have a question mark at the end?
The book was Who’s Who 1964. I had to stand on a chair to reach it. With both hands, I took it down from the shelf, unprepared for its mass and weight. Who’s Who 1964 cannoned painfully off my chest and onto the floor. I followed it, falling off the chair and landing on my elbow. I stopped myself from crying. I didn’t want to alert my parents to my presence in this room.
But the chair, too, had fallen. Surely, the thud above their heads would alarm them. I lay there, waiting to hear them run up the stairs. But no. They remained downstairs, unmoved. I opened the book, which was mercifully unharmed. I turned its pages till I came to one that was dog-eared. There I found this: Purcell, Michael Herbert; a Circuit Judge since 1963; b 3rd July 1919; s of late Robert Arthur Purcell and Margaret Susan (née Hindmarsh).
I had found my father. Before him was Purcell, Sir John Richard, 11th Bt. After him was Purcell, Dame Muriel, DBE 1961. Now I understood. The book was an alphabetical list of people. But it did not include all the people in the world. It was too small for that. It contained only Whos. Every person in this book was a Who.
The book was a register, just like the register my form teacher, Mr Fabian, took every morning at twenty to nine. The Whos were at a school of life. Doubtless, they had their own uniform and song. Doubtless, not everyone could attend their school. One had to be special. Hence the litany of accomplishments that followed each name. Hence the private language: educ.
I studied my father’s entry, over and over again. Then, with difficulty, I remounted the chair and replaced the book.
I tiptoed out of the room and stood at the top of the stairs. I’d done a bad thing and got away with it. Now I wished to confess. I walked downstairs, intending to alert the authorities to my wrongdoing. The authorities, of course, were my father and mother. They dispensed justice in the house.
My six-year-old sister Freya was on the landing, with a knife and a dish.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked her.
‘Buttering the stairs.’
I told her to stop. She ignored me. I told her what she was doing was wrong. She ignored me again. I ignored her back and, losing the courage to face the authorities, went to my bedroom.
There, I wrote this: Purcell, Robert Timothy; b 28th March 1956; s of Michael Herbert Purcell, QC, and Valerie Mary (née Jarvis). Educ: Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford.
That’s right. At eight, I wrote an imaginary Who’s Who entry, stating which school and Oxford college I would attend. I was not being whimsical. These were logical deductions, given my pedigree and aptitudes. It would be arrogant to call them inevitabilities. But it would also be true.
Yes, you say, but there are in life no inevitabilities. How did I know, at eight, that I wouldn’t be run over, or struck by lightning, before I reached the age of a Winchester pupil or an Oxford student? There is no satisfactory answer to your question. But there’s a true answer: I just knew. I was certain. My life, at that age and long afterwards, was governed by certainties. Sure enough, I passed through Winchester and Oxford with no interruption from lightning.
From then on, I wrote my Who’s Who entry every year on my birthday. This is the last one, written on my forty-seventh birthday, in March 2003. Like all the entries, it contains an accurate record of my life to that point and a logically deduced projection of my life to come:
Purcell, Rt Hon. Sir Robert Timothy, Kt 2012; PC 2018; Rt Hon. Lord Justice Purcell; a Lord Justice of Appeal since 2012; b 28th March 1956; s of late Sir Michael Herbert Purcell and Valerie Purcell; m 1990 Elizabeth Rose Webb; one d one s. Educ: Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford. Called to Bar, Middle Temple 1979; a Judge of the High Court of Justice, Chancery Div 2012–18; Mem General Council of the Bar 2005–9. Publications: contrib to Halsbury’s Laws of England; (ed jtly) Emerson’s UK Taxation & Trusts 1989–2002. Recreations: bridge, dog-walking, classical music. Address: High Ridge, Priors Hill Road, Aldeburgh, Suffolk 1P15 5HR. Club: Athenaeum.
You can see that I have not spent my life buttering stairs.
That night, I lay awake. My elbow was hurting. Also, I was waiting for my mother to come into my room. I didn’t want to fall asleep before she said goodnight. She didn’t come and she didn’t come. She came so late that when she said goodnight, she woke me up.
‘Goodnight, Little Man. You asleep?’
‘Almost,’ I replied, with a tact and respect children no longer have.
‘Go to sleep then, Little Man.’
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ I said.
I confessed to entering my father’s study. I felt relieved and, yes, proud. I asked her what my punishment would be. She said I should forget it. My sister had been punished for it already. She’d left a telltale muddy footprint on my father’s study chair. (The footprint, of course, was mine.) She’d been smacked for it, along with her other crimes: buttering three stairs and spreading jam on two.
My mother told me to forget it, but I haven’t, have I? Here I am, ‘opening up’ about it, over forty years later. My sister was clearly the victim of an injustice, punished for a crime she did not commit. What of me, though? I went unpunished for a crime I did commit. Was I not also a victim of injustice? Yes. I suffered shame. I suffered frustration. I was outraged by my mother’s incompetence and appalled by her unconcern.
That is why, on the night of 29th September 2003, it was I who reported my crime. I felt a legal, moral and administrative obligation to confess my wrongdoing. Put crudely, I did not trust the police to get the right man unless the right man got himself to the police.
My report of the Who’s Who incident suggests a boy of intellectual and moral maturity. ‘Little Man’, my mother’s nickname for me, would tend to confirm this. In fact, I was not a miniature man so much as a miniature boy. At eight, I was the same height as my younger sister. I grew up to be three inches shorter than her.
These days, everyone has to have an and. Everyone who has some explaining to do has to have an and to explain it.
‘My name’s Myra and I’m an alcoholic.’ ‘My name’s Sebastian and I was abused as a child.’ These are the kinds of things you say after you commit a crime.
Very well then.
My name’s Robert and I’m short.
Do you nod? Do you say: ‘So that’s why he did it – whatever the hell it was!’?
SOME CHILDREN GROW up in a happy home. I grew up in two. Our London house was in Notting Hill, just off Kensington Church Street, giving me splendid access to all the museums and concert halls London has to offer. Then, most weekends and every summer, my mother, father, sister and I motored eighty-six miles north-east of London, to our Cecil Lay house, High Ridge, in Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk coast. High Ridge was high above the town, overlooking the tennis courts, twixt1 the marshes and the sea. To call High Ridge our ‘second home’ gives the wrong impression. In my mind, High Ridge was as much my home as 12 Kensington Walk. You could say it was my ‘first equal’ home.
It was in Aldeburgh that I learned to ride a bike, sail, play tennis and swim. It was here that I saw my first stained-glass window; here that I played my first hand of bridge; here that I learned to love the music of Benjamin Britten and the ghost stories of M. R. James; here that I had my first holiday job, helping the greengrocer’s man deliver boxes of fruit and veg.
There were so many other like-minded souls from so many other good families. They too had houses in Priors Hill Road, Park Road, The Terrace or (best of all) Crag Path – which, despite its prosaic name, is the jewel of Aldeburgh. Crag Path is a seaside promenade lined with marvellous eccentric private residences, as opposed to the cheap hotels, bingo halls and souvenir shops that disfigure the seafront of most English seaside towns. Crag Path has been called a relic of the 1950s, as if that were not a compliment.
On a typical August day, in any year from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, I would leave High Ridge in the morning and not return till dusk, hungry as a hog for the ham and chutney and boiled potatoes and frozen peas and apple crumble that would be waiting for me on the sideboard, my ice-cream as tepid as my ham.
‘What have you been up to?’ my mother would ask.
And always I would give the same reply: ‘Having fun!’
‘Very good!’ she’d say.
My partners in fun were the younger generation of these Aldeburgh house-owning families: the Holts, the Pilkingtons, the Thodays, the Moxon-Smiths, the Cattos, the Farquharsons, the Hamilton-Woods. The back doors of their houses were always open. It was true then and it is true today. Of how many places can that be said? Where in London can a back door be left unlocked, without being removed from its hinges?
After supper it was time for a bath in which to soothe my battered knees. Knees, in those days, took a most terrible battering. They were always muddy and often grazed. Then I’d stare in the mirror to see what other damage the day had brought. A bump on the head from a flying apple. An elbow bruise, acquired in some rough-and-tumble game. Or a pain in the stomach, from a punch by Pilkington, largest and most vicious of my Aldeburgh contemporaries.
Do not tell me, please, that my childhood was unhappy because Pilkington punched me. Pilkington punched Martin Thoday. Pilkington punched Stephen Catto. Pilkington punched Damian Hawes and Jeremy Hamilton-Wood. (Once, when they were standing side by side, he punched them simultaneously, with a double-fisted jab I’ve never seen elsewhere, not even in a film.) His punches were invisible badges of honour, forced on members of my boyhood club. Had I not been punched by Pilkington, I’d have been unhappy.
Every Christmas, on the eve of Christmas Eve, my parents invited the tradesmen of Aldeburgh to High Ridge for a drink. Year after year they came – Mr and Mrs Martin the greengrocers, Nancy and Jim our appointed newsagents, Jack the coalman, Bert the gardener, Dudley who tinkered with my father’s cars, Rita who nursed my maternal grandmother through her terminal years, Terry the handyman, Eric the builder, Billy who ‘did’ the boiler, Margaret the treasure who cleaned High Ridge for more than twenty-five years. The butcher was there, as was the baker. Had my parents patronised a candlestick-maker, he would have been there too.
My father moved from guest to guest, spending the same short time with each. Handing round the snacks, gripping the bowl as tightly as Oliver Twist, I could sense the esteem in which my father was held. My father knew how to talk to a greengrocer – not with oily charm but with benevolence. As Bert the gardener said to me, taking a fistful of crisps in his black-fingernailed hand: ‘Your father’s a good man, boy. Never makes me feel like a criminal.’
Indeed. My father made everyone feel they weren’t criminals. Even criminals. They recognised, as did everyone else, that he sought and found in them a common humanity.
‘Call me Michael,’ he said, hoping his guests wouldn’t call him anything. He didn’t want to watch them struggling for the right form of address. Mrs Martin, who took pills ‘for her nerves’, called him ‘Your Worship’ – then, sensing she’d made a mistake, overcompensated with ‘Sir Judge’.
‘Give Mrs Martin a crisp!’ said my father, helping an awkward moment on its way. I stepped up with the bowl. Mrs Martin looked anxiously into it and selected the only remaining crisp.
My mother, meanwhile, was in the kitchen, where no guest ventured. My mother was the daughter of the Lord Lieutenant of Gloucestershire. It was she, not my father, who’d inherited High Ridge, built as a seaside bolt-hole by her grandparents in the late nineteenth century. But at Christmas, when my maternal grandmother – Granny P – came to stay, my mother wasn’t the hostess in her own house. On the eve of Christmas Eve, she remained out of sight. Her mission was to sit with Granny P in the kitchen, keeping her away from the guests. They wouldn’t have known how to respond to my grandmother’s senility. They’d have been embarrassed and unhelpfully polite, unlike my mother.
I entered the kitchen to refill the crisp bowl.
‘Do you know what the doctor wants to do with me now?’ asked Granny P. ‘He wants to send me to see a psychiatrist.’
‘Do shut your cakehole, Ma,’ said my mother.
‘Do you know what a psychiatrist is?’ asked my grandmother.
‘Yes,’ I said. But it didn’t stop her telling me.
‘A nosy Jew.’
‘Bring on those crisps, Robert!’ called my father, from the door.
My father was a delicate man with pronounced cheekbones and swept-back silver hair. He looked exactly as a judge should. In 2003, in Andros, Mike Bell told me my father looked ‘like an actor playing a judge’, as if the old man’s dignity and probity had to be feigned. My father’s integrity was as shiny as an apple’s – therefore, it had to be skin-deep. It is a typically contemporary presumption. Bad apples are presumed to be the rule. We hear ‘judge’ or ‘policeman’ and what do we see? We see perverts, not upholders and enforcers of the law. We see the judge in – where else? – a brothel, paying a sadist to beat him up. Is he not aware that the sadist’s a policeman who’d – of course! – beat him up for free?
The eve of Christmas Eve invitation said: ‘Drinks. 6 to 7 p.m.’ Sure enough, the guests arrived at six on the dot. By ten to seven, they’d all gone. Their main aim, in attending the party, was to leave and be seen to leave at the correct time. No one wished to overstep the mark. They could see the mark approaching on the clock on the wall and accordingly understepped it. They’d been invited for a drink and a drink was what they had. They knew their place.
It’s seen as bad that such as Bert knew their place. But how bad was it to know one’s place, when one’s place was in a dignified Suffolk coastal town where everyone knew their place? That gave one a sense of security, continuity, rightness and order. The Queen was in Buckingham Palace. My father was in High Ridge. Bert was in the garden. Amen.
That particular night, when I was twelve, gripping the replenished crisp bowl, my sister signalled to me from the doorway of the living room to join her in the den. The den was where we children went to be ignored by adults. The den was in fact the attic, an elevated room for low behaviour.
I didn’t want to leave. I had duties. I had status. I didn’t want to be ignored by adults. On the contrary, I wanted to be acknowledged. As the son of my father, I felt like a prince, one gracious enough to hand out crisps to artisans who should, by rights, be handing them out to him.
Freya grabbed me. She told me I had to come now, or I’d ‘miss it’.
In the den were Christopher Pilkington, his henchman Stephen Catto, Catto’s sister Emma, Boo Risdon, Ticky Moxon-Smith and Sam, our chocolate Labrador. Pilkington was wearing a sneer, that harbinger of trouble. I felt sick in my stomach, the one he’d so often hit. I wanted to leave but couldn’t as I’d only just arrived. This was my house, my den, my younger sister. I couldn’t accede my territorial advantage.
‘Have you ever snogged?’ he asked me. I recognised this, from my study of Latin, as a question expecting the answer ‘no’. A Roman, instead of prefixing the question with a sneer, would have used the term num. To fill the time allotted for my answer, I essayed a silent Latin translation: ‘Num ecquando snoggavisti?’ Though obviously incorrect, this formulation calmed me. I felt unique, superior, potent. Who else in that den was thinking in Latin?
‘Course you haven’t snogged,’ said Pilkington, as I knew he would. ‘I’ll show you how it’s done.’
He knelt down. Freya, Emma, Boo and Ticky squealed with excitement.2 I prayed that Freya wouldn’t be the one to kneel in front of him. I’d be obliged to defend my sister’s honour, notwithstanding she had none. The gangling, stair-buttering Freya did not think in abstractions like ‘honour’. If I tried to separate Freya from Pilkington, it would be Freya that hit me first.
Pilkington leaned forward and swept Sam off his four feet.
‘Snog the dog!’ shouted Boo. Freya clapped loudly. Ticky covered her eyes and screamed.
‘Leave our dog alone!’ I said. Or did I? I have, as I’ve claimed, uncommon recall of the spoken word. Yet I’m not completely convinced I said ‘Leave our dog alone!’ A not-complete conviction is, of course, no conviction at all. I’m convinced I thought it. Perhaps I said it and nobody heard, leaving me uncertain if I said it at all.
There was, at this point, no need for me to interpose my body. Sam, though he lay in Pilkington’s arms like a canine lover, was doing a perfectly good job of not snogging Pilkington. Whenever his (Sam’s) mouth fell open, revealing his juicy pink tongue, Pilkington’s mouth advanced towards it. But Sam spurned every advance, turning his head at the critical moment, with Garbo-like hauteur.
‘I know what to do,’ said Pilkington. ‘Back in a couple of minutes.’ He dumped Sam on the carpet. He felt nothing for that dog. Emma, Ticky, Freya and Boo fell on Sam and cuddled him. The dog was having quite a day.
Why didn’t I leave? What did I hope to achieve by staying? Two minutes later, true to his word, Pilkington bounded back into the den, oozing confidence but saying nothing. Again he knelt in front of Sam. This time, instead of cradling the dog, he raised Sam onto his hind legs. Sam was only a year or so old. With Pilkington kneeling and Sam standing, the disparity in heights was negated. Boy and dog looked into each other’s eyes.
The boy opened his mouth wide enough to satisfy the most officious dentist. I smelt it before I saw it: Pilkington had coated his tongue with dogfood. His eyes blazed. He willed his tongue to be bigger.
Now it was the dog who went for the snog. Sam was hungry for Pilkington’s mouth. He licked Pilkington’s tongue. He slurped. He salivated. Pilkington made a strange keening sound through his nose. My sister laughed and pounded the floor with her fists. Emma and Boo tried to be sick but could come up with nothing. Ticky uncovered her eyes. Her curiosity outweighed her disgust.
Downstairs, the guests were leaving. One could hear the slamming of their cheap car doors, the ignition of their small engines. Up here in the den, at the scene of the crime – a phrase that will recur in these pages – I felt neither curiosity nor disgust.
I was my father’s son. Amid the slurping and keening, the laughing and pounding, the retching and screaming, I found a silent space, in my head, where I could feel judicious. Judicious is distinct from judgemental. I wasn’t interested in condemning Pilkington. I wanted to shine a mental light on the legal issues posed by his actions.
It was 1968. I was aware, from reading The Times, that homosexuality had been legalised, between consenting adults in private. Pilkington (minor) and Sam (near-puppy) were not adults. Nor was the den private. I turned to a less straightforward matter: was there consent?
Sam’s consent had been procured by a trick: the coating of a tongue with Chum. Was consent obtained in this way invalid? Or did the Chum, in fact, alter the nature of the act, from sexual to culinary? Was Sam having food not sex? In any event, was a dog intellectually and morally capable of giving its consent? Sam certainly looked like he was consenting.
And then it was over. Sam had licked all the food off Pilkington’s tongue. Sam was off now.
Pilkington got to his feet. The girls went quiet. Pilkington went quiet. I’d expected him to be triumphant – but no, he acted hurt. He behaved, perversely, as if he’d been exploited by a dog, a dog who’d got what he wanted then abandoned him. Pilkington was humiliated. Possibly, he was sexually frustrated. He’d kissed a dog. Was that it? Was that all there was?
‘Go on then. You snog it now.’
‘No thank you,’ I said.
‘It’s your dog. Snog it.’ He turned to the girls, hoping they’d side with him. But the girls were neutral. This emboldened me.
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I said, which it didn’t. ‘Why would I snog my dog any more than I’d snog someone else’s? I’d be less likely to snog my dog. Surely you’ve heard of incest.’
‘Shut up!’ he said. I could tell he’d never heard of incest. As he headed out of the den, he swung a punch at me, without even looking. Blood spurted from my nose.
‘Why d’you do that?’ asked my sister.
‘What d’you do that for?’ asked Ticky.
‘I didn’t!’ said Pilkington. Then, close to tears, he shouted at me: ‘I meant to hit you in the stomach! Why aren’t you taller, you spazz?’
‘Yeah!’ said Catto, his loyal henchman. ‘Grow up, you spazz!’
With that, Pilkington and Catto were gone.
I stayed in the den as long as I could. I managed to avoid my parents till it was time to brush my teeth. I put a cold flannel on my nose, umpteen times. But, evidently, Freya told them Pilkington had hit me. For Freya, it was better to report the crime than be accused of it.
My mother came into the bathroom and shut the door.
‘Did you hit him back?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘He’s bigger than me.’
‘Nonsense. You must hit back, Little Man. Hitler was short.’
‘I promise,’ I said.
‘Good. That’s more like it. There’s a bit of ice cream left, if you want it.’
‘No thank you. I’ve brushed my teeth.’
‘Right. I’ll have it. Goodnight then.’
‘Goodnight.’
I went to bed. I switched off my bedside light. That, it seemed, was the cue for my father to enter. He wished to speak to me in the dark, in the manner of a radio. He sat on the edge of the bed and began, without any preamble.
‘You’re a boy of limited height. At the moment. But you’ve got unlimited intelligence. Don’t forget that.’ I felt the mattress shake. My father was trembling. ‘Intelligence never stops growing. Men of violence and stupidity are always discontented. Whereas men of superior intelligence always have their thoughts to keep them happy. I’d rather you were a short gentleman than a large lout, no matter how rich or successful.’3
I did not reply. You do not reply to the radio, nor to a judge when he hands down your sentence. That is what I felt I had heard. A life sentence, if you will. It was now my duty to go off and serve it.
‘Thank you,’ I said. But there was more.
‘Disputes must be resolved by word not deed. That’s why law exists. So man can rise above his violent instincts. You’ll learn all about this if you study law.’
‘There’s no “if”, Pater. I want to be a judge like you.’
‘That’s good, Robert. Good.’ He sounded irritable. ‘Please don’t call me “Pater”. Don’t overdo it, all right?’
‘Right.’ I had no idea what he meant.
He paused. ‘Psychiatrists aren’t nosy Jews. They’re professional men.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ I said. My father, in that pause, had tuned himself to a different station. It was still my father broadcasting, but on a different theme. The volume, I noted, was louder.
‘Jews and Negroes are as welcome in this house as anyone else.’
‘I’m so glad,’ I said. Then I asked: ‘Were there any Jews here tonight?’
My question seemed to exasperate him. But I could hardly have asked if there were any Negroes. I’d have spotted them with ease.
‘The point is not how many Jews were invited tonight. The point is, had there been any Jews, they’d have been as welcome to our drinks and crisps as anyone else, white, black or brown.’
I nodded. It was dark but I’m sure he sensed my nod.
‘Goodnight then,’ said my father, exactly as my mother had done, though I’m sure there was no collusion. ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ he added, as if he’d already said too much. He was now, I could tell, reverting to the subject of my bloody nose and its boy perpetrator, whose name he hadn’t said once.
These days, of course, we believe the opposite: most said, soonest mended. Hence this book.
I waited till I heard my mother’s and father’s bedroom doors shut. Then I crept downstairs to the kitchen. I found Sam in his dog basket and woke him up.
I told Sam that men of violence are always discontented, whereas men of intelligence always have their thoughts to keep them happy. He did not reply, except by licking his lips, which of course made me think of Pilkington.
On Christmas Day, 1968, as always, my mother said, ‘Good-oh!’ as she doused the Christmas pudding in the supermarket brandy she bought because it was cheaper and ‘went further’.
I understood, as she did so, what was meant by pudding-basin haircut. The pudding looked like a darker version of Pilkington’s brown mop. My mother struck a match and set it on fire. I watched it burn.
Many years later, on 29th September 2003, I recalled this image of Pilkington’s head, studded with nuts, cherries and raisins. 29th September 2003 is the date of my crime. Please do not think of it, as my sister does, as my ‘Nine Twenty-Nine’, my equivalent to Nine Eleven. That is an insult not only to the dead but to the language itself. Mine was an English crime, committed in England. We don’t say ‘September 29’. We say ‘29th September’.
Call it, if you must, my ‘Twenty-nine Nine’. But never call it my ‘Nine Twenty-Nine’. That’s not a crime but a train.
Pilkington was there, on 29th September. Tragically, my father was not.4
On Boxing Day morning, I played tennis with my mother, after she’d had her swim and whisky.
As I prepared to serve, she spotted Boo, Ticky and Pilkington on their bikes, riding down the path that leads to the allotments. I served but my mother made no attempt to return. Instead, she strode purposefully off the court, shouting at him: ‘Excuse me!’
Pilkington was uncertain. My mother’s booming voice had stopped him in his tracks. Having registered the source of the boom, he was keen to get away. But any attempt to avoid my mother would have looked like an admission of guilt.
I watched, from the court, as my mother went up to him. The girls, intimidated, freewheeled down the path. They distanced themselves sufficiently to avoid involvement, yet remained within earshot.
I, though, was too far away to hear. I watched my mother speak to Pilkington. I saw him shake his head. I knew his head-shake was a lie. It was obvious, even from distance, that a nod was the truthful answer to what my mother had asked.
My mother took two steps back and hit Pilkington on the side of the head, with her racquet, as if his ear were a ball. It was a forehand drive volley, heartily and lustily struck. Pilkington was stunned. Remarkably, he didn’t move.
For my part, when I saw my mother volleying Pilkington’s ear, I knew exactly what kind of man I’d be: the kind of man who’d never do a thing like that. I would wound with words, with logic, with the withdrawal or withholding of respect. I would be what my father wanted me to be: a short gentleman of superior intelligence.
1 Yes, a winsome and ‘writerly’ word. But appropriate in this context.
2 Names, too, know their place. I cannot hear ‘Boo’, ‘Ticky’, ‘Ping Farquharson’ or ‘Pidge Holt’ without thinking of Aldeburgh. These names gain substance and weight when you say them thousands of times. They’re no longer twee. They’re inevitable.
3 A prophetic remark. Pilkington grew up to be Head of Alternative Asset Management at a bank whose name escapes me because it doesn’t interest me.
4 Tragically, here, means ‘tragically’. I’m not using it as in: ‘Tragically, Beckham’s penalty ballooned over the bar.’ I’m using it as in: ‘Tragically, Beckham’s penalty hit the post which snapped and struck the goalkeeper on the head, causing him to be substituted by a living replacement.’
MY FATHER HAD a friend called Maurice Perlstein. He’d known Maurice since childhood. My father’s father, to toughen him up, had dispatched my father to a boxing club in the East End of London, which he naturally hated. Maurice, however, was kind to him, not giving him the bloody nose of which he knew Maurice was capable. A friendship was formed.
My father went to see Maurice about once a month, always on his own. Maurice was a Jewish greengrocer who lived in Whitechapel. Did these facts – the religion, the occupation, the location – explain why he went without my mother? Possibly. Certainly, the religion would account for Maurice never coming to Aldeburgh. Granny P would have asked the Jewish Maurice if he had come to lend her some money – which would have been ironic, given that she was rich and Maurice was poor.
So. My mother, my sister and I never met Maurice. But my father was always loyal to him. There was something in my father’s trips to the East End – I was going to write ‘something of the missionary’, but my father would have disliked the religious connotation. There was something philanthropic, something benevolent. My father wished to help a man less fortunate than himself.
Mike Bell was my Maurice.
* * *
‘Hi, I’m Mike, I live next door. Can you help me with my essay? You’re brainier than me. I’ve got a bottle.’
These were the first words he spoke to me, in October 1974, when he and I were first-year law students at Christ Church, Oxford. He knocked at my door and there he was, with his copy of Megarry & Wade: The Law of Real Property and a bottle of Hirondelle. He was taller, better-looking and more charismatic than I – though looks and charisma, I think you’ll find, are curses as much as blessings. He was, as he was literally the first to admit, less brainy than me. He was poorer, too, or he wouldn’t have been carrying a bottle of a ‘branded’ wine that belonged in no man’s cellar.
He entered with no further invitation; indeed, no invitation at all. He was unstoppable. This is what he did, without stopping: turned the light on, found two glasses, took a penknife with a corkscrew facility from his pocket, opened the bottle, poured two glasses, found a saucer to use as an ashtray, sat at my desk with his textbook, moved my papers to one side, opened his textbook, asked me about the difference between express and implied trusts and lit a cigarette.
I, meanwhile, shut the door and sat down on my bed. He then stood up to bring me my glass of wine, which I refused. He was offended but proceeded to drink that glass as well as his own.
At no point did Mike Bell refer to the onset of midnight, or my pyjamas, or the probable congregating, on the college lawn, of badgers and other nocturnal creatures. I had a tutorial at nine in the morning, as did he. I needed sleep. But he needed help. I gave him help, clarifying the distinction between express and implied trusts with minimal fuss. I gave him my help, and continued to do so, because he was less advantaged than me.
Working-class students were rare in Oxford. Nowadays, it may be where all ‘lads’ study, before they join Oasis. But in 1974, working-class men and women were like blacks are, to this day, in Aldeburgh: people one is tempted to photograph.
Mike Bell came from south London. He’d attended a comprehensive school of which neither I nor anyone I knew had ever heard. His father, who ran a shoe-repair business, was Irish. His mother, who looked after him and his two brothers and sister, was Italian. He was born, he told me, as he lit his second cigarette, ‘with a Guinness in one hand and an ice cream in the other’. I nodded politely. He looked disappointed. He was expecting some kind of chummy guffaw. Surely he could see I was not a guffawer.
I could not but look down on him. Yes, there was ascent in Mike Bell’s immigrant trajectory. But I was born on the summit – the summit of a mountain that was English to the core, as if it were made of Gentleman’s Relish. My mother, a Jarvis, grew up in a house where servants ironed one’s newspaper. When Aldeburgh got its first ‘happy clappy’ vicar, he made the mistake of asking my mother what her family in Gloucestershire did.
‘They own it,’ my mother said, witheringly, embarrassing the vicar and making God look foolish for choosing him as His earthly representative, in a town so happily unclappy.
My father was a descendant of Henry Purcell, the greatest of all English composers before Benjamin Britten. On his mother’s side, he was related to Prince Alfred, the second son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg; hence the slightly Germanic cast of his eyebrows. When he met my mother, he was living with that most Wodehousian of creatures, an aunt with a house in Pimlico, his parents having died in the war.
When Mike Bell asked me to tell him about myself, I edited my family history to a simple: ‘I’m a Wykehamist.’ The confidence drained from him. He had no idea what a ‘Wykehamist’ was. I refused to patronise him with an explanation. That was what an education at Winchester had brought me – effortless superiority. I couldn’t say that ‘Wykehamist’ meant ‘pupil or graduate of Winchester College’. That would have been effortful.
‘What branch of the law do you wish to go into?’ I asked. I was keen to level our conversational playing field. I felt exactly like my father, on Christmas Eve Eve, with the coalman.
‘Fuck knows,’ said Mike Bell, unhelpfully. ‘That’s not what college is about. It’s about having the best sex of your life and the best music and the best films and the best drink and the biggest drugs.’
‘I trust you didn’t say that at the interview,’ I replied.
Mike Bell roared. My neighbour banged on the wall. Much to my embarrassment, Mike Bell banged back. Then he calmed down. He became thoughful. He drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘I think I’ll use my degree to go into entertainment.’ I was shocked. I had never heard of anyone ‘using’ a law degree, as if it were some kind of fork.
‘I don’t think you use the law,’ I said. ‘The law uses you, surely. It’s a greater force than any individual. If you’re an ant on the back of an elephant and the elephant moves forward, your motion is due to the elephant. But I hardly think you’re “using” it, are you?’
‘Yeah, you are.’
I said nothing. I was convinced I was right. I saw no need to convince him too.
The atmosphere between us was now tense. Mike Bell poured two more glasses of wine but failed to offer me either.
‘What do they call you then, Robert?’ he asked, inclined to change the subject.
‘They call me Robert,’ I replied.
‘I can’t call you Robert after all you’ve done for me.’
I failed to see the logic of this, as I failed to see the logic of so much he did and said. But he was true to his word. From then on, he went out of his way not to call me Robert. Bob, Bobby, Rob, Robbie, Roberto, Boberto, Bobbity: anything Robert-related would do.
At half past one, he said I looked tired. Since he was the one who’d made me tired, how could he sound so concerned? He suggested I go to bed. I agreed. I waited for him to leave.
‘Don’t wait for me to leave,’ he said. ‘You just get into bed.’ I got into bed. ‘You look much more relaxed now,’ he said.
Mike Bell stood up and went towards the door. I was about to say goodnight when I saw him fail to leave. He stopped at the light switch, turned it off then sat back down again. I heard the click of a lighter and saw the tip of a cigarette, darting this way and that, like Tinkerbell.
‘I’d like to be a film producer. Yeah, that’s what I’d like to do. The hard thing is finding the stories. People want authenticity. You know?’
Tinkerbell dive-bombed into the saucer and was stubbed.
A week later, I was in my room at 8 p.m., writing an essay on Donoghue v. Stevenson (1932), that celebrated case in which Lord Atkin formulated what is called ‘the neighbour principle’. This established that you must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you could reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour, a neighbour being a person so closely connected with and directly affected by (proximate to) your act (or omission) that you should have had them in mind when you committed the act (or omission). Compare that, in its muscularity, precision and enforceability, with the woolly: ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’
I heard someone knock at my neighbour Mike Bell’s door then wait. Having received no reply, the knocker knocked at my door instead.
wasThe Times