16
Ruth Ellis, Mahmoud Mattan
The sun was going down at the end of a sultry summer afternoon in New Orleans. Throughout the day the crowds had been growing, quietly anticipating the appearance of the main men, and just before 6 p.m. the stream of people flowed towards the principal arena, and you would have to take life and limb in both hands if you wanted to be in pole position near the stage to see the action. Freddy was nine and pretty lively, and he became our passport to paradise by racing ahead and scrambling between the legs of the adults until he was in the front row. Yvette and I apologised profusely as we pushed our way forward because we had to retrieve our wayward son – and of course once at the front there was no way back, so we were forced to stay put and listen to the very reason we had come to the 1996 New Orleans Jazz Festival: the Neville Brothers. Their distinctive voices, pulsating rhythms and gospel influence create the sort of music that has everyone moving. ‘Brother Jake’ is one of those numbers: you come away from listening to it with every limb loosened and every mental muscle laid-back.
The New Orleans visit happened quite by chance. I was chairing a debate in London about the iniquities of capital punishment, when my physical appearance must have betrayed the inner strains and stresses I was trying to contain. For me, there are always a number of competing pressures besides the case of the moment (at the time, that of the Stephen Lawrence family): other trials in the pipeline which require constant preparation and end-of-day conferences, sometimes at a prison some distance from London; one or two public speaking engagements per week; and the management of an evolving set of chambers. As Head of the set, this last responsibility can be both invigorating and debilitating, for in a way chambers is not dissimilar to an overgrown family: you love every member, but there lies the rub. It’s unpredictable, and I never know from day to day who may be facing insurmountable problems or even who may decide without forewarning that they need to move on. There is no contract of employment, no partnership between the members; at best, chambers is a loose collective, bound together by a common purpose and understanding; at worst, it is a marriage of convenience – and as far as I am aware, this is unique in the business world. I try to be available, accessible, fair-minded and relaxed, but it is no easy task. Yet when the system works, chambers can provide an incomparably supportive and creative environment at all levels. Achieving this in an undemonstrative, affable and effective manner has been Patrick Roche, for many years deputy head and now cohead, assisted by the diplomacy of Elizabeth Woodcraft. Together they bolt the nuts and turn the screws!
In the midst of this maelstrom of events I have received steady support from successive PAs: Breda, Susie, Emily, and for the last decade, Camilla Cameron. With close family ties to the law and a passionate feel for fairness, Camilla has fielded a stream of endless enquiries from prisoners, journalists, researchers, academics and politicians. The most challenging and time-consuming are the stalkers – in person, on the phone or by email. The patience of Job is a prerequisite, especially when dealing with incessant demands ranging from offers of marriage to threats of arson to chambers.
Most of the time I try to dissipate and absorb feelings of stress, otherwise I’d become an emotional wreck, quite unable to do the job. Since anger and injustice have been two of the predominant and most powerful forces driving me, it needs quite a lot of handling to ensure that I don’t explode at the wrong moment. None the less, there has to be a safety-release mechanism, and mine is having a go at other issues not directly related to the one in hand.
Luckily for me, at the London debate my stressful state was recognised by another participant, a man I had never met before. Clive Stafford-Smith is an English lawyer who had worked and lived in the United States for over twenty years, concentrating on death-row cases, and he was only too aware of the daily pressures faced by criminal lawyers who take their work seriously. At the end of the meeting he was nothing less than forthright: ‘You look drained, Michael,’ he observed, then asked if I needed to get away – and within minutes he had generously offered me his house in New Orleans and mentioned the Jazz Festival. This invitation had come just at the right time, for I was overdue a break. Before long Clive and I became friends and colleagues, and lately he has campaigned tirelessly against the outrageous excesses and illegality of Guantanamo Bay.
While the events affecting the black communities in Notting Hill, Deptford and Bradford were unfolding in the UK, a young man called Andrew Lee Jones was growing up in rural Louisiana, not far from New Orleans. He was the fifth son of a black sharecropping family, and when his father died in 1973 and his family were evicted from their home, he took to the road and to petty crime. In 1984 he was charged with the murder of the daughter of his ex-girlfriend.
The trial took place in Baton Rouge, in front of an all-white jury because black people were traditionally excluded. It lasted less than one day and, with no scientific evidence to link him to the crime – the main connection appeared to be the fact that he did, of course, know the victim – he was found guilty and sentenced to death. On appeal (which was not concerned with conviction, only sentence) in 1991, his court-appointed lawyer admitted that he had not been able to provide a fair defence for Andrew: he’d only received the papers a short time before the trial began; and anyway he hadn’t had enough experience to conduct capital trials of which this was his first. Worst of all, he had not been aware that throughout the trial Andrew had been medicated with Thorazine, prescribed as a tranquilliser, far in excess of the normal amounts. Andrew spent seven years on death row and was given nine execution dates.
Over the fifteen months leading up to his execution Andrew had corresponded with an English woman named Jane Officer, whom he had met through Lifelines, an organisation founded in 1987 by Jan Arriens as a ‘pen-pal’ initiative: it began with a solitary letter and grew to 2,500-plus people writing to prisoners on death row. As a result of her correspondence, Jane Officer went to the USA for the first time in her life to plead for Andrew’s life at the Parole Board hearing, and spent the remaining hours of Andrew’s life with him and his family. But despite all that effort and the support of his ex-girlfriend (the mother of the victim), Andrew was executed on 22 July 1991.
In order to offer support to others on death row, the Andrew Lee Jones Fund was established in 1992. Jane published his letters and diaries in a book entitled If I Should Die,1 for which I wrote an introduction that compared the contents with the dramatised work of Sister Helen Prejean in the remarkable film Dead Man Walking, produced by Working Title and starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.
I was invited to a preview of the film, after which there was an interesting and informative discussion. One of the contributors was a woman whose son had been murdered, but who had no wish to see the murderer executed: she argued that execution would not bring back her son and it would not deter others; all it would mean was that there would be another bereft mother like herself. The film depicted a particularly brutal killing and you were left in little doubt that the Sean Penn character was guilty, but this is at the sharp end of the debate, and for me there can be no morality in retributive justice. If you want to make a point about the undesirability of taking life, you do not do so by committing the very same act, even though it bears judicial legitimacy. In the words of Andre Sakharov, a prisoner of conscience in the USSR: ‘I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution which undermines the moral and legal foundations of a society . . . and that savagery begets only savagery.’2
My visit to Louisiana brought home to me how serious the situation was. Clive was fighting a lone battle, with the odds stacked well against him, and death-row work was not attractive – let alone remunerative so far as American lawyers were concerned, for the majority of death-row inmates were black, poor and badly represented. For example, in the 1992 trial of George McFarland, his lawyer was asleep for most of the hearing, missing important prosecution witnesses. No one seems to have bothered to wake him up, and the trial judge, while accepting that there was a constitutional right to a defendant having the services of a lawyer, added, ‘The constitution doesn’t say the lawyer has to be awake.’ The Court of Appeal upheld the judge’s view.
It seemed to me that back in Britain we could increase our practical assistance to Clive and others, but I was in two minds about raising money and awareness for these issues when the United States, one of the richest countries in the world and supposedly at the heart of democratic values, should have remedied the situation itself. The vast majority of states in the USA practise the death penalty, and the main debate appears to be primarily about how it is carried out. Currently that debate centres on the use of a three-drug cocktail delivered by lethal injection: the first one is supposed to sedate, the second to paralyse all parts of the body except the heart, and the third stops the heart, finally causing death. There are occasions when sedation is not effective.
A terrible example of the inhumanity of the system is the case of Michael Richard, who was executed in Texas on 25 September 2007 after a state courthouse refused to stay open an extra fifteen minutes to allow the filing of an appeal based on the constitutionality of lethal injection. Richard’s attorneys had been unable to file the appeal on time because of computer problems – problems that they had already brought to the court’s attention. The US Supreme Court then refused to stop the execution. Earlier in the day, however, it had agreed in a Kentucky case to review the lethal-injection issue, a decision that led to a de facto moratorium on all other lethal-injection executions around the country. The Supreme Court’s ruling on 16 April 2008 held that the use of lethal injection does not violate the American constitution’s ban on ‘cruel and unusual punishment’.
It doesn’t really matter which form of execution is considered: firing squad, electrocution, gas chamber, hanging or, in some countries, stoning. The whole process is cruel and inhumane.
Amnesty International’s yearly statistics3 suggest that in 2007 at least 1,252 people were executed in twenty-four countries. Up to 27,500 people are estimated to be on death row across the world, while 88 per cent of all known executions took place in five countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the USA. Saudi Arabia had the highest number of executions per capita. China, which the report refers to as the world’s top executioner, classifies the death penalty as a state secret. As the world and Olympic guests were left guessing in August 2008, only the Chinese authorities knew exactly how many people were being killed with state authorisation. And so it remains. By the time of the 2009 Amnesty report (for the year 2008) the number of recorded executions worldwide had nearly doubled to 2,390. Fifty-nine countries were involved but China again led the way with 1,718 executions. The most chilling aspect of this increase is China’s deployment of ten mobile death chambers masquerading as ordinary coaches but with the seats removed and the windows darkened. Inside a lethal injection is delivered.4
Given these serious breaches of human rights, one has to ask how the British Government justifies its economic links with and staunch support for regimes in Saudi Arabia, China and the USA itself, and it seems to me and to others that in these circumstances we should at least begin the campaign in the West before tackling the Middle East and the Far East.
Building on the experiences of the Andrew Lee Jones Fund and the work of Clive Stafford-Smith, I felt it important to broaden our ambit of activity and the constituency of support in the UK. With that in mind, we began an enlarged intern scheme under the name of Amicus5 to train young lawyers to undertake death-row cases, initially in the USA.
The stated objects of Amicus are:
to promote the relief of suffering and distress to those persons and families of those persons who are awaiting execution in any state of the United States of America and who, for reasons of their poverty, are in need of legal or other assistance to ensure the preservation of their rights of appeal and to ensure that their imprisonment is administered, so far as is possible, humanely.6
For more than twelve years Amicus has been extremely successful, and up to 2009 had helped to fund or place over 250 interns. Sister Helen Prejean has become an active patron of fundraising events in the UK, and the charity has saved lives. For example, in the case of Bobby Purcell in Arizona the defendant was sixteen years old at the time of the offence, and after he was found guilty the judge adjourned the sentencing part of the hearing to another date. His lawyer alerted Amnesty International to the potential breach of international standards, and Amnesty contacted Amicus. Lawyers Owen Williams and Fiona Elder, both from Bristol, drafted an amicus curiae brief for the sentencing hearing, explaining the position in international law, as part of the overall strategy for the mitigation – and the judge was persuaded by Bobby’s attorney to pass a life sentence. Similar work has been successfully undertaken by Tooks member, Hugh Southey, on behalf of the Bar Human Rights Committee, in seeking to persuade the US Supreme Court to stay executions which violate basic human rights.
There was a glimmer of hope about the death penalty in 2007, when the United Nations General Assembly voted, by 104 to 54 with 29 abstentions, to end its use. All that remains is for the resolution to be implemented . . .
Now that Amicus is well established in the USA, it is hoped that it will be able to extend its services to other parts of the globe – for example, the Caribbean and Africa, which are often forgotten. There is now a remarkable project initiated by a young barrister named Alexander McLean, who has been personally tending to the needs of prisoners in Uganda, Sierra Leone and Kenya by raising money and helping with medical facilities, libraries and farming schemes. Some of the prisoners – particularly in Uganda – are teenagers on death row imprisoned for minor crimes.7
I find it a sobering thought that the death penalty was only abolished8 in the UK two years before I began to practise in 1967, and – remarkably – continued for some offences right up until 1998. The last hangings took place on 13 August 1964, when Gwynne Evans was executed at Strangeways and Robert Stewart at Walton jail. Had the penalty not been abolished in 1965, a large number of the innocent people whom I have represented and who are mentioned in this book would now be dead – most notably the Birmingham Six, the Bridgewater Four, Judith Ward, the Tottenham Three, the Cardiff Three and Barry George – and that is one of the most compelling arguments against the use of an irreversible and final sentence of death when the criminal-justice system itself is fallible.
I can only imagine what it must have been like to conduct a murder trial under the shadow of the noose: it’s bad enough at the moment, when defendants receive extraordinarily long sentences of thirty years or more. The nearest I have come to it, however, is in relation to cases from other parts of the world where the death penalty persists, and in appeals in domestic cases from the period when it was still in operation. When I first started there were a large number of such appeals in capital cases, from the West Indies to the Privy Council in Downing Street, London, as the last Court of Appeal. The convicted person often had no money, and on many occasions had not even been represented at his trial. Senior members of the Bar were reluctant to undertake this unpaid work as it entailed a fair amount of research and preparation, and therefore it was thought to be an appropriate experience for young entrants who had to learn on the job. I found this a trifle odd and very worrying, realising that somebody’s life – a person whom I would never meet, but had only read about – depended on my getting it right.
The initial stages would be completed on paper only, and if I didn’t proceed successfully there wouldn’t even be a hearing; if I did succeed in getting a hearing, it might be extremely short and not very sweet. I cannot now remember just how many of these cases I did, but it was well into double figures – and, sadly, mostly I failed.
Several of those executed before 1964 have subsequently been exonerated, including Timothy Evans for two of the 10 Rillington Place murders and Derek Bentley for his part in the shooting of a police constable in November 1952. A lesser-known instance was Mahmoud Hussein Mattan, whom I represented in the Court of Appeal on 24 February 1998 and who had been executed on 3 September 1952, after Evans in 1950 and before Bentley in 1953.
A merchant seaman originally from Somalia, Mattan settled in Cardiff in the late 1940s, but such was the level of racism against him that he and his Welsh wife were forced for a while to live in separate houses on the same street. He became a steel worker, but was made redundant in 1952, and on 6 March that year a shopkeeper named Lily Volpert was found murdered with her throat cut at her shop at 203–4 Bute Street, in the Butetown area of Cardiff docks. The key evidence at Mattan’s trial came from an eyewitness called Harold Cover, who claimed to have seen him coming out of the doorway of the shop at about the time the murder must have been committed. Mattan’s defence was one of alibi: he said he’d been at the cinema and then gone home, never having been in Bute Street, let alone in the shop.
But what had not been disclosed to the defence at the time of Mattan’s trial was a statement made by Cover on 7 March 1952, the day after the murder, a significant element of which had been that the person he described coming out of the doorway of the shop had a gold tooth. This was not a feature he described in his trial evidence before the jury that convicted Mattan, and anyway Mattan did not have a gold tooth. The defence were also unaware that Cover had received a reward in the region of £200 – which in 1952 would have bought a house in Cardiff – and that another Somali called Taher Gass had been interviewed by Cardiff police on 10 March. He lived at 196 Bute Street, and admitted that he had been past the shop three times on the evening of the murder.
The story took a sinister turn when in May 1969 Harold Cover was convicted of the attempted murder of his daughter by cutting her throat with a razor: he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Just before the start of the appeal in 1998 there was a dramatic development, which gloriously illustrates the fundamental technique I’ve always propounded of going back to the drawing board and starting all over again. The day before the appeal was due to be heard, my junior Anne Shamash from my chambers, at my request was trawling through unused documents for a second time in the back room of a South Wales police station when there fell out of a notebook a small slip of paper bearing the faint traces of pencilled copperplate handwriting. It had been written by the senior investigating officer, DI Roberts, by then deceased, and the assiduous researches made by Anne and my solicitor Bernard de Maid revealed an explosively important observation by the Inspector: ‘The man seen by Cover was traced – Gass (Taher) . . . useless? Cover left Cory’s Rest, 7:50 p.m., identifies the Somali in the porch as Gass.’ What we then discovered was that Gass had been tried for murder in 1954 and committed to Broadmoor on the grounds of insanity: it was thought he had been deported later to Somalia and was no longer alive. At the time of his trial a telex had been circulated giving a description of Gass, which was consistent with the eyewitness evidence about the man in the doorway – most crucially, he had a gold tooth in his left upper jaw.
In quashing the conviction for Mahmoud Mattan, the Vice President of the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Rose, went on to comment that the case had a wider significance:
First, capital punishment was not perhaps a prudent culmination for a criminal justice system which is human and therefore fallible. Secondly, in important areas, to some of which we have alluded, criminal law and practice have, since Mattan was tried, undergone major changes for the better. Thirdly, the Criminal Cases Review Commission is a necessary and welcome body without whose work the injustice in this case might never have been identified. Fourthly, no one associated with the criminal justice system can afford to be complacent. Fifthly, injustices of this kind can only be avoided if all concerned in the investigation of crime and the preparation and presentation of criminal prosecutions observe the very highest standards of integrity, conscientiousness and professional skill.9
Mattan’s name was cleared, but he had paid for this injustice with his life.
The last woman to be hanged in Britain was Ruth Ellis on 13 July 1955. Her appeal in September 2003, which I also undertook with Anne Shamash and Bernard de Maid before a court led by Lord Justice Kay, received very different treatment from Mattan’s. There was palpable hostility from start to finish and the court, when dismissing the appeal, questioned whether it had been a sensible exercise and use of court time to consider an appeal so long after the event – especially when Ruth Ellis herself had consciously and deliberately chosen not to appeal at the time – and urged the Criminal Cases Review Commission to consider these factors in future before referring a case back to the court.10
What the court did not know was that the family and friends of Ruth Ellis were so upset by the court’s approach to the appeal that they wished to withdraw at the beginning of the second day’s hearing. I persuaded them to remain, believing that it is always important for the full picture to be deployed and examined, in the hope that something positive will prevail, but on reflection perhaps they should have left when they wanted to.
The original trial of Ruth Ellis had taken place at the Old Bailey in June 1955 and had lasted a mere two days. There was no question that she had shot her lover David Blakely outside a public house near Hampstead Heath,11 and her defence throughout was that she was guilty of manslaughter by reason of provocation, rather than guilty of murder. She gave evidence about the considerable abuse that she had suffered from Blakely over a long period of time, but before Melford Stevenson, QC, came to make his final speech to the jury, the judge, Mr Justice Havers, ruled that her evidence did not amount to a defence in law as it then stood. There was therefore no closing speech for the defence, and after the summing-up the jury took barely twenty minutes to return its verdict of guilty.
The kernel of the argument revolved around whether the undoubted cumulative effect of months of abuse and violence contained a sufficient and immediate nexus to the shooting, which occurred after a lapse of time and a journey from Ruth’s home to the pub, carrying a gun, with which she intended to inflict serious injury. Put another way, for the claim of provocation to succeed there had to be evidence from which a jury could infer that there was an impulsive loss of self-control flowing immediately from some incident of provocation. Interestingly, at the time of Ruth’s execution, changes to the law were being contemplated (and were eventually brought about by Section 3 of the Homicide Act 1957), in which the ambit was expressly stated to include ‘things done, as well as things said’. The jury had to determine whether these things were enough to make a ‘reasonable man’ do as the defendant did. It was that same statute (at Section 2) that provided a defence of diminished responsibility for someone who killed another, but was suffering from such an abnormality of the mind (meaning arrested or retarded development, inherent cause, or disease or injury) that it substantially impaired their mental responsibility.
The difficulties and complexities thrown up by these definitions has been canvassed a number of times since Ruth Ellis’s trial and appeal, most notably in the cases of Kiranjit Ahluwalia and Sara Thornton, both of whom had killed their abusive husbands. I represented Sara at her second appeal against a murder conviction in 1995 and during her retrial in 1996 at Oxford Crown Court. This time she was convicted of manslaughter and was subsequently released.
The most obvious difficulty is that while the Homicide Act 1957 does not require the loss of control to be ‘sudden and temporary’ (derived from the words of Lord Devlin in 1949), that still tends to be the benchmark. For women the moment of violent and fatal reaction may be delayed, either because they are physically unable to use force at the time of the worst abuse or because the provocation which finally unleashes the violence is triggered by a very minor occurrence. Often this received an extraordinarily hostile reception from judges of the old order, who came out with all the usual clichés about women being free to leave their battering partners. But gradually the courts have begun to recognise what is variously described as ‘the slow burn’, ‘the last straw’ or cumulative provocation. At the centre of this is a woman battered physically and psychologically, and unless she can place herself within the confines of the two very limited defences of provocation and diminished responsibility which result in manslaughter, then she will be convicted alongside serial killers, contract murderers and multiple bombers. It is partly for these reasons that members of the higher judiciary and others have wanted a change in the mandatory sentence of life incurred by a murder conviction in these cases. The Southall Black Sisters have provided inestimable support for women defendants and their families, as well as campaigning effectively to get both law and practice changed.
In the first major review and re-examination of the law on murder since the abolition of hanging more than forty years ago, the government proposes to abolish the existing law on provocation and replace it with new partial defences, tailored to those who kill as a response to ‘a fear of serious violence; and/or in exceptional circumstances, a justified sense of being seriously wronged’. The rationale for this is ‘a concern that the current partial defence of provocation is too easy to access by those who kill after losing their tempers, but that it does not provide a sufficiently tailored response to those who kill out of fear of serious violence’.12
All this is too late for Ruth Ellis, but thankfully Sara Thornton did not have to face execution after her first trial and failed appeal.
In 1974, nineteen years after the execution of Ruth Ellis, her sister Muriel made contact with the executioner Albert Pierrepoint, who had also been responsible for the hangings of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley. Not only did she meet him, but a number of letters passed between them, and it is clear from her book, My Sister’s Secret Life, that she was less than impressed with the description he gave of Ruth’s last moments. None the less, also in 1974 Pierrepoint published his autobiography in which he wrote: ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people.’ Interestingly, Muriel cites the words of another executioner, H. W. Critchell of Brixton:
There were at least ten people waiting to witness or carry out the execution of Ruth Ellis. There was the governor, the padre, the sheriff, a hangman, the death watch – all would have been greatly relieved had a reprieve been granted. No such miracle happened as Ruth Ellis hit the road. These ten or more people looking down at the pit at that ghastly spectacle suspended from that rope received a severe shock to their systems. It is the living that suffered by this devilish, uncivilised practice. I write this in good faith. I have entered that pit and shamed myself many times. I am thoroughly ashamed. No medicine can ever help me. I still suffer.13
Peter Aitken (now Adams) was the first man not to be hanged after the abolition of capital punishment. I didn’t represent him at trial or on appeal, but I knew Shirley Cooklin, who was his prison visitor for many years and with whom he corresponded.14 I helped her campaign to secure his release, and when that was successful she held a celebratory party at her home in Gospel Oak, north London. At this event she spoke, I spoke and then the novelist Beryl Bainbridge spoke.
Either Beryl was overcome with excitement or the effect of champagne, because as she finished her speech she began to fall backwards. I saved her from hitting the floor, and we carried her to a bedroom upstairs and wrapped her in a coat that happened to be on the bed. A taxi was ordered and she was duly dispatched to her terraced house in Camden Town. Some time later a woman at the party became distraught and then nearly hysterical: her coat, which had been on the bed upstairs and contained her money and keys, had disappeared.
This was a double trauma because the woman was going through an acrimonious divorce and did not want to contact her husband for help, so she pleaded for someone to track down Beryl and the coat – and as I happened to know the road where Beryl lived, I offered to take her to the address.
When we arrived, all was in darkness. I knocked on a neighbour’s door to see if she knew if Beryl was in, or if there was any way of gaining access. Meanwhile the coat owner was growing ever more distressed, and the neighbour, seeing this, told me that I could get into Beryl’s house if I wanted – the preferred point of entry being a large Georgian sash window on the first floor that was permanently unlocked.
To reach this window you had to get onto a small wrought-iron balcony, climb over railings onto a narrow ledge, and then over more railings onto the balcony in front of the said window. The neighbour offered me a large screwdriver to lever up the sash, but as I had had a drink myself and am hopeless at heights, I declined the offer (in addition to which, I wasn’t sure this was going to be a good career move). But by now the damsel in distress was going berserk: there was no alternative, and I caved in.
I have little memory of how I arrived at the window, but I do starkly recollect a moment of extreme hesitation on Beryl’s balcony. If apprehended by the law, how on earth was I going to explain breaking into a house with a screwdriver on behalf of a woman I didn’t know, to retrieve a coat from another woman I didn’t know? But having got this far there was no going back, so I used the screwdriver to ease up the sash window and entered what appeared to be an upstairs living room. As I edged my way across to the door, I looked back towards the window where a street light was illuminating the room – and to my horror, silhouetted against it, was a man sitting at a grand piano. Seemingly I had been caught in the act, and as always in such circumstances I tend to blurt out rather banal observations. ‘Terribly sorry to disturb you . . . just passing through . . . forgot my coat,’ I muttered. But the man was not impressed and remained resolutely silent. So, switching to a more personal approach, I went up to the piano, stood behind the man and touched him on his shoulder – only to find that it was stiff! A momentary frisson of fear gripped me, until I realised that he was a dummy.
With a sense of relief, but feeling extremely stupid, I proceeded downstairs to the ground floor, where I could hear Beryl snoring, but my progress along the hall was barred by a rather large stuffed moose, which doubled as a coatstand. The desired coat not being on the unfortunate moose’s head, I made my way tentatively into the front room, where I found Beryl fast asleep on the couch, still wearing the blessed apparel.
This was a bridge too far. How would I explain to Beryl, if she was roused from her slumbers, that while wielding a screwdriver I was merely retrieving a coat for a stranger? I rushed out of the front door and told the stranger, ‘Over to you’, but she was in such a state by now that she could scarcely move a muscle. So once again this naive soul capitulated and went back in to do the deed.
If you’ve ever tried to get a garment off a limp body you’ll know how difficult it is, especially if you don’t want them to know that you’re disrobing them – and in this case I certainly didn’t want a National Treasure being dropped unceremoniously on the floor. But somehow I managed to slip the coat off Beryl and return it to its rightful – and grateful – owner, whom I then drove back to her car in Gospel Oak.
By this time, sadly, the party was over.