John Mortimer: Sleeping juries and my life in the law

From a talk given by the novelist, playwright and QC at the Charleston Festival, in East Susse

I was born into the Laws. My father was, I think the most celebrated, busiest and best-paid divorce barrister of his day. So In my childhood, I was educated, clothed, housed, entirely on the proceeds of adultery, cruelty and wilful neglect.

My father would come home to me in the nursery and give me news of his triumph in court. He would say, "Wonderful day in court, John. Managed to prove adultery by evidence of opportunity and inclination. But really, the only evidence I had was footprints upside down on the dashboard of an Austin 7 motor car parked in Hampstead Garden Suburb."

My father taught me many things, not just about divorce. But in the middle of his career at the bar he went blind, which was a terrible tragedy for him. It didn't make much difference to him in court, but my sainted mother had to read aloud to him all this terrible witness evidence in all these awful divorce cases. They used to travel up to London and the Divorce Court from Henley-on-Thames. You can picture the scene in the First Class compartment. And there was my mother, sitting next to my father reading aloud all this private detective evidence of male and female clothing scattered in rooms of the Ritz Hotel, stains on the bedsheets. By that time my father had grown deaf as well as blind so he used to say "Speak up Cath!" The train would grind to a halt somewhere around Slough and the the entire first-class compartment would fall absolutely silent to the ever-diminishing and even more embarrassed tones of my mother in the faint hope of grasping the name of some friend or relative.

It was of great importance to me in my life as a writer, because I had to read aloud lots of things to my father. I read lots of poetry I might not otherwise have read. And really I would write so I might have something to read aloud to my father. Two things I didn't have to read were the Sherlock Holmes stories and the plays of Shakepeare, because my father knew all the plays of Shakespeare by heart anyway. He used quotations of no particular relevance to the situation, like Rumpole does. As some people whistle favourite tunes, he would say favourite lines. For instance, when the cook brought in his breakfast, he used to say "Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remember'd," and the cook would say, "Well, here's your bacon."

I followed my father into the Divorce Courts, and in the war I had been a scriptwriter and a documentary film maker. So I was divorcing people during the day and writing in the night, writing a large number of novels. I began to do more important cases, and I began to talk to juries. I found great respect for juries I think they take their duties very seriously. Sometimes they go to sleep in court, but sometimes everyone goes to sleep in court.

I remember we were doing one case, and it was some indecent proposal or act by the man in the dock to the woman who was giving evidence. The prosecutor was taking her through her evidence and said "Would you mind telling the court what this man in the dock said to you?" And she said "I couldn't possibly say that." The judge said "I can understand just how you feel. Give her a piece of paper and a pen and she can write it down."

What she wrote down was "Would you care for a screw?" The judge said, let the note be taken up to the jury. The first juror read it and passed it on to the second, who read it and passed it on, and so on. The number 12 juryman was an elderly gentleman who was fast asleep. Seated next to him was a fairly personable young lady. She saw this sleeping man and gave him a great nudge. He woke up with a start and she handed him this note. He read it with apparent satisfaction, folded it up very neatly and put it away in his wallet. The judge said "Let that be handed up to me," but the man said: "No, purely private matter, my lord!"

That was the sort of thing that kept us alive down at the Old Bailey.