Sir John Mortimer, wheelchair-bound and coughing weakly, watches his buxom
blonde assistant leave the room, then becomes brightly animated as he
describes a recent cataract operation. The author, barrister and playwright
best known for Rumpole of the Bailey describes his health as
“pretty awful at the moment” and laughs ruefully into his jumper. But within
his racked 84-year-old frame, the mischievous old spirit still burns, and
holds an insouciant fascination for his current condition.
Mortimer has only hours previously returned from a speaking engagement in
Dublin. He has also been travelling around Britain, watching the progress of
his latest stage show, Legal Fictions, as it prepares for a London
run. He’s about to start writing a piece for a Sunday newspaper, deadline
the next day. It’s the sort of schedule that might exhaust a young man in
good health.
But Mortimer’s busy days are further crowded by health appointments. “I have
got to have another operation with a cataract. My eyes are not very good at
all,” he says, removing his trademark Tweety Pie glasses and gazing
myopically to one side. “I have a very nice eye surgeon. Three weeks ago I
was lying on the couch, a nurse was holding my hand and he was digging my
cataract. I said would he mind if I recited Othello’s final speech? He said,
‘Fine’.” Mortimer proceeds to repeat the speech, in a sibilant mumble, just
to give me the idea. “Then my wonderful eye doctor retorted with a speech
from Richard III, and we spent the entire operation quoting streams
of Shakespeare.”
“Insist on a sparkling start to every day”
We are in the clutter-crowded writing room of Mortimer’s home in the Chiltern
Hills, surrounded by pictures of his parents, children – including the
actor, Emily – and grandchildren. Mortimer’s beloved barrister father built
the house in the 1930s, when he was 9. But now, in estate agents’ parlance,
it might benefit from some updating. In front of Mortimer, on the old desk
designed by his Uncle Harold (a member of the Heals family), sit two
glasses, from which he takes occasional, alternate sips. One contains a
greyish fluid: Complan, a complete nutrition drink that doctors recommend to
patients who can’t cope well with solid food. “I’m not very good at eating
of late, so I’m on this stuff to keep me going,” he explains. The other
glass holds Guinness.
Does he still hold to his sybaritic drinking habits? He smiles naughtily. “One
of my weaknesses is that I like to start the day with a glass of champagne
before breakfast. When I mentioned that on a radio show once, I was asked if
I had taken counselling for it. But I’ve not been drunk for a long, long
time. I should not even be drinking at all, really, because I have got a
urine infection at the moment.” He waves a hand dismissively.
“We don’t want to talk about that, do we?”
We don’t. But I feel obliged to ask about the most obvious sign of his
travails, his wheelchair. “Oh,” he says, with casually vague recollection.
“I fell over. In the summer, when I was going out of the study door up the
steps. I have always had something wrong with my leg, and have always walked
with a stick. I fell over and did the whole business, broke my leg and my
foot had to be turned around. But life in a wheelchair is not so dreadful.
It can be a luxury when you’re travelling. I get whisked through any of the
queues. Everyone else has to wait to have their passport checked.”
Despite this nigh-biblical visitation of serried physical misfortunes,
Mortimer staunchly maintains his one-man stand against our culture’s
increasing health-consciousness. By way of illustration he calls his young
assistant to bring him a pack of cigars and a fresh ashtray. “Nonsmoking? I
absolutely hate that,” he says wheezily. “I’m not particularly keen on
smoking. I’m not particularly good at it. I used to smoke and then I gave it
up, partly because I don’t like dirty ashtrays. But I forced myself to take
it up again when the Government said it would ban smoking in public places.”
Don’t people complain? He shakes his head. “My second wife, Penny, smokes like
a chimney. Both of my wives have smoked quite a lot. Nearly all of my
children have been breast-fed by smoking people and they are all extremely
healthy,” he smiles. But the clinical evidence? “There may be a link between
smoking and lung cancer,” he says nonchalantly. “Anyway, actresses look so
beautiful when smoking. There’s a bit in the film Now, Voyager with
people blowing smoke at each other. Very beautiful.”
Physical culture gets similar short shrift. “I have never taken exercise,” he
declares proudly. “At school I had to do sports, but I used to make sure I
was always farthest away from the action.” Although he has written a murder
story based in a health farm, he maintains: “I’ve never actually been
to a health farm or spa. For the purposes of research I visited one, but
certainly didn’t use the facilities.”
In fact, the whole world of health consciousness had best clear off, as far as
he’s concerned.
“The Government is there only to make the trains run on time and to keep the
drains clear. It has absolutely nothing to do with what people eat and
smoke. It’s none of their business to stop people doing dangerous things. We
won two world wars with people constantly smoking. They were given
cigarettes in their rations. Mountain climbers, hunters and divers are
entitled to endanger their lives. I can’t stand this Government of busy
control freaks, it’s like being under a bossy matron.”
“You don’t go to school to scramble eggs”
“It’s a very dour and grey world under Brown,” he adds, chewing the end of his
glasses. “The Sixties were a very relaxed period. They really were swinging.
But even they were not as relaxed as during the war, when everyone slept
with everyone else because you might be dead in the morning. It would be
great if today’s government ministers concentrated on something important
rather than what we eat. You go to school to enhance your mind, to learn
poetry and Dickens and beauty, not how to cook scrambled egg.”
It’s the sort of opinion that plays well in the “world’s gorn mad” pages of
the Daily Mail, so it’s no surprise that Mortimer (despite his
professed lifelong support for the principles of the Labour Party) has an
easy sideline in writing those very type of reactionary pieces. But his
convictions are seriously held, if also mischievously expressed. “I think
what happened is that the decline of religion meant that bossy people had to
find other ways to make people uncomfortable and worried about things,” he
says.
Has he no sense of religion? After all, many people consider such questions
when nearing the end of their lives, if not least as an insurance policy.
“No, not at all. I was never brought up to be religious by my parents. My
father went blind after an accident and carried on working. I had the
greatest respect for him for not turning to God.” So where did Mortimer bury
him? “He got buried in the local church,” he replies, smiling broadly. “I
appreciate Christianity for the culture and buildings and for the beautiful
language. You can get the best parts of it without believing any of it.
Christianity has conferred great blessings on the world. But the most
dangerous thing in the world is the view that God is on your side. You’re
absolutely lost.”
So what does he think will happen after death? “Nothing. Nothing at all,” he
says with forensic finality. “My father used to say that the prospect of an
afterlife would be like living in some vast trust house with nothing to
provide relief. That belief in the afterlife was put there by people in
power to control you.”
“I still have an awful lot of things to do”
It all seems pretty bleak, the illnesses, the blank atheism and the disgust
with modern mores. Why does he keep going at such a furious pace? “It’s
awful to give up working,” he says. “You will die on a golf course or end up
sat with nothing to do in an old people’s home. Ugh. I think that as long as
all these things, the plays, the books, are happening, you don’t remember
about your age. I have had times of depression. But I have always had an
awful lot of things to do. In my most productive period I was writing and
being a barrister at the same time. I used to get up at four in the morning,
write a chapter or two, then get up at the Old Bailey and defend someone.
Depression comes if I’m bored. So hard work is a form of self-medication.”
And then there’s always Rumpole of the Bailey. “Yeah, there’s
another one coming,” Mortimer says. “There’s no plan, but Rumpole is very
convenient. Everything the Government is doing, foolish things such as
Asbos, you can have a Rumpole book about it. You just have to wait for the
next subject to come along – and they come along pretty quickly.”
John Mortimer’s new play, Legal Fictions, opens next Thursday
at the Savoy Theatre, London. To book tickets, call 0870 1648787
