"Mortimer, John - Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mortimer John)

John Mortimer - Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces

IN the varied ups and downs, the thrills and spills in the life of an Old Bailey hack, one thing stands as stone. Your ex-customers will never want to see you again.

Even if you've steered them through the rocks of the prosecution case and brought them out to the calm waters of a not guilty verdict, they won't plan further meetings, host reunion dinners, or even send you a card on your birthday. If they catch a glimpse of you on the Underground, or across a crowded wine bar, they will bury their faces in their newspapers or look studiously in the opposite direction. This is understandable. Days in Court prob-ably represent a period of time they'd rather forget and, as a rule, I'm not especially keen to renew an old acquaintance when a face I once saw in the Old Bailey dock reappears at a "Scales of Justice" dinner or at the Inns of Court garden party. Reminiscences of the past are best avoided, and what is required is a quick look and a quiet turn away. There have been times, however, when recogniz-ing a face seen in trouble has greatly assisted me in the solution of some legal problem and carried me to triumph in a difficult case. Such occasions have been rare but, like number thirteen buses, two of them turned up in short order round a Christmas which I remember as being one of the oddest, but certainly the most re-warding, I ever spent.

"A traditional British pantomime. There's nothing to beat it!"

"You go to the pantomime, Rumpole?" Claude asked with unexpected interest.

"I did when I was a boy. It made a lasting impression on me.

"Pantomime?" The American judge who was our fellow guest round the Erskine-Brown dinner table was dearly a stranger to such delights. "Is that some kind of mime show? Lots of feeling imaginary walls and no one saying anything?"

"Not at all. You take some good old story, likeRobin Hood..."

"Robin Hood's the star?"

"Well, yes. He's played by some strapping girl who slaps her thighs and says lines like `Cheer up, Babes in the Wood, Robin's not far away."'

"You mean there's cross-dressing?" The American visitor was puzzled.

"Well, if you want to call it that. And Robin's mother is played by a red-nosed comic."

"A female comic?"

"No. A male one.

"That sounds interesting," he said in a tone that suggested he had the wrong idea. "We have clubs for that sort of thing in Pittsburgh."

"It's not what you're thinking," I assured him. "The dame's a comic character who gets the audience singing. "

"Singing?"

"The words come down on a sort of giant song sheet," I explained, "and she, who is really a he, gets the audience to sing along."

Emboldened by Erskine-Brown's claret (smoother on the tongue but with less of a kick than ChГteau Thames Embank-ment), I broke into a stanza of the song I was introduced to by Robin Hood's masculine mother.

"I may be just a nipper,

But I've always loved a kipper...

And so does my loving wife.

If you've got a girl just, slip her

A loving golden kipper

And she'll be yours for life."