THE FIRST REAL PICTURE I HAVE OF MY MOTHER is, strangely enough, one of her before I was born; it was painted for me by my father.
I used to have a small red toy car; you sat in it and pumped the pedals back and forth and it would lurch along. Sometimes I got my father to push me, which was easier and a lot faster, and he would make roaring noises of the large engines he wished he owned. Milton had a young cousin from America called Joe Bush who came to live with Miss Boyd, and one day Joe and I were on the lawn squabbling over who should drive the car, and my father came over and sat beside us on the little curb at the edge of the lawn. He told us that if we went on quarrelling like that, we’d have to get Solomon from the Bible to cut the car in two. Then Joe said, no, he’d get Pardi as a lawyer to defend him instead.
“Indeed,” said Michael, “you’d have the world’s finest lawyer. He was truly legendary.”
I wished I’d known my grandfather when he was in court. There seemed to be so many stories. Miss Boyd also said he was legendary, and I knew, by the way she groomed herself for the word as she whispered it, that it carried enormous significance. When I asked what it meant exactly, for I always liked a good word, she told me it was something or someone about whom there were many legends—that is, wonderful stories.
It was inside one of these legends that I was surprised to discover my mother—and my elder half-sister, Anita—tucked safely in there, busy and real, like a town that has laws and commerce and banks and a hairdresser and dentist, a flower shop and garbage day and even a fountain, but somehow a surveyor has forgotten to put it on the map.
“Tell us one of Pardi’s legends,” I asked him.
Probably glad not to have to push us in the car, he told us.
“It was in Nottingham. About 1947. Two groups, one white, one black, had a fight, and a young Englishman in the Royal Air Force was killed by a knife wound in the left side of his neck that severed the jugular vein. A young Jamaican at the scene was splattered with blood, so he was arrested and charged with murder. It was established by the coroner that the wound was inflicted by a right-handed person, and the accused was right-handed. There were two key elements to the case. One was a short, stocky English shopkeeper who had picked out the accused in an identification parade. The other was a diagonal bloodstain on the Jamaican’s shirt which ran from the left hip up to the right shoulder. The stain matched the blood type of the victim. It was an open-and-shut case.”
We had forgotten the car.
“Your mother and I were in England then, and Anita was a little girl… you weren’t yet born. Pardi was retained to defend the man, and we met him at the airport; I think the Boeing Constellation had just started flying over the Atlantic. I remember him walking towards me; he looked gaunt and tired and there was egg on his tie, he had obviously spilled something while eating his breakfast… and typical Pardi, he was quite unconscious of it, and typical son, I hadn’t the nerve to point it out to him.”
“What about Mummy?” I asked. Up till then I had had odd snippets of information about myself as an infant in what I saw as a former life, but I had no cohesive impression of my mother. My mother yelling at my father to stop when he and Arthur Wint, an Olympic gold medallist at Helsinki, would throw me, laughing my head off, from one to the other. Amused reminiscences of my christening, when Errol Barrow from Barbados and Forbes “Odo” Burnham from British Guiana became my godparents. My father walking me in Hyde Park, where he said he used to show me off, and where he would collect old cigarette stubs for tobacco to put in his pipe. And my aunt called Madeleine, Mummy’s sister, whom he seemed to like a lot.
“Well, wait,” he said, “and I’ll tell you. Pardi said there was a side to the case he wanted to probe very carefully … it was the bloodstains. Listen, Michael, he said, I’m going to come round to Clanricarde Gardens (that was where we lived). Ask Jacqueline to get a bottle of red ink … I take it she has flour in the house. And I said, yes Dad, she has flour in the house—I knew that because we used to make Yorkshire puddings, I would do the roast and she would do the Yorkshire pudding.”
So she had an address. A place where she lived, with a stove in which she made puddings from the same place as Grandfather Swithenbank and Great-Grandfather Manley.
“It was a Sunday. He arrived at our house with a paper-knife which was to play the role of the murder weapon. And there was a lot of preparation of the ink … your mother kept adding flour, putting in just a little, then too much, then saying, let’s do another batch, then putting in some more till Pardi said, that’s about right … Jacqueline, you have just the right viscosity!”
Fancy, I had a mother who produced the right viscosity for Pardi.
“Now, I want a sheet, he said. What do you want one of my sheets for, asked your mother, who was very fastidious and didn’t like a mess. I’m going to treat that bottle of ink like the victim’s jugular, Pardi explained. I’ll stick the paper-knife in here at the neck and I’ll pull it out, and we’ll just see what sort of blood patterns we create on the sheet. Your mother could never say no to your grandfather, so out came an old sheet. I’ll never forget that scene. Jacqueline stood with the open bottle, and I was positioned opposite as if I were the one who had done the crime—you could see from the wound that the victim must have been almost opposite the assailant, for it was a clean wound that went downward into the side of the neck, and there was no tearing when it came back out. It was established very precisely from the coroner’s report that the knife went in and came straight back out. So I was standing there with the sheet, with my arms out to hold it like a big screen, and there was the diagonal spray of blood. But—nowhere near the victim! The splash pattern, from low to high, from left to right, was a good couple of feet to the right, and splashing beyond the sheet to your mother’s consternation as she witnessed the splattered floor. And in a flash Pardi said, I’ve solved the case! The accused was obviously standing next to the man who did the killing. And it’s all proved by the shirt, which is the Crown’s star piece of physical evidence!”
My father was really excited. And so was I, for at last I had placed my mother; there in a room in Clanricarde Gardens, during a complex experiment, she was busy making blood for Pardi.
“Did Anita help too?”
“Yes, she would have been an eye witness.” He then returned to his story.
“All right, let’s probe it some more, Dad said, and he proceeded to try to see if there was any other way to get that pattern of drops, consistent with a clean exit wound. He was able to demonstrate physically, by the laws of physics, that it was impossible to reproduce that bloodstain in that position. He was triumphant!
“So … time for the case. I go with him to Nottingham to keep him company, and we stay in a hotel. But he can only afford one room, and I can afford no room at all, so we have to sleep in the same room … and there’s only a double bed! It was the first time in history that we were sleeping in the same bed. Both of us take up our positions on the very edges of the bed—I tell you, how nobody ever fell out of that bed I don’t know—and I’m just about settling, recovering from the sheer shy shock of being in the same bed with my father …”
And he says “father” so grandly that I know that he means “paterfamilias,” a phrase I am particularly proud of having learned from my grandfather, and I wonder if my mother would be surprised to discover all the good words I know.
“… when I suddenly hear him get out of the bed and fumble around in the dark, because he’s very nice, he doesn’t want to wake me. He opens the door and I realize he’s put his shoes out to be cleaned, but he hears me awake and he suddenly says, you know, Michael, I’m not taking any chances, it’s the only pair of shoes I have here. Suppose in the morning they haven’t come back with my shoes—anything could happen—they could be stolen—they could be mislaid—how could I walk into court to represent my client in my stockinged feet?
“We go into court. The Crown presents the case. The knife, the arrest, the bloodstained shirt, the blood type … the facts of the fight are established, the nature of the wound described. Comes now the end of their case: the star witness who saw it all. And he’s taken through his evidence by the Crown, and it soon becomes obvious that this is the day of his life! He’s the star, and he’s full of his own importance. He proceeds to paint the picture in spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs. I remember Dad just listening and watching him … making the odd note. So the fellow is finished, having established that he saw the two groups advancing, and the knife flash in the accused’s hand. Is this person in the court? Yes, and he points to the accused.
I’m sorry my mother has left the story.
“Dad gets up to cross-examine. He is almost meek … just a little brown man come from Jamaica to go through the formalities before the poor man hang. He takes the witness back through the story, and the man likes to chat. He says, I noticed up a side street so and so was going on…. Anything else, asks Dad. Yes, as a matter of fact I remember there was. … So Dad has him literally like God, seeing everything—and the guy was quite patronizing.
“And then you notice just a touch of steel entering Dad’s voice as he walks him more closely through the story: now as I recall where you were standing, the black group was walking away from you. Of course, the shopkeeper replies…. And you had no particular reason to notice them before it became evident a fight was about to start? Of course not; nothing to notice…. So when you first became aware of them, they were advancing on the white group (he doesn’t put it the other way)? Yes…. And that meant going away from you? Yes…. So presumably their backs were to you? Of course…. I see, says Dad. Pause. And then you saw the knife flash. Had that person suddenly got in among the white crowd, and turned his back to them? Of course not, says the witness, he wouldn’t have dared do that….
“So when the knife flashed, all the backs would still have been turned to you?
“The first tremor of doubt enters the witness’ voice. Of course, he says.
“So they were going away from you, and the knife flashed, and whoever had that knife had his back to you.
“Well—maybe they were side on….
“Oh! When did they suddenly become side on? Did you tell the police that?
“No. I didn’t think of it….
“So when did you think of it? Silence. Pardi looks at him with contempt. Come on—when did you think of it? Perhaps you just thought of it at this minute? And Pardi looks at the judge.
“Of course not. I’m under oath. I’ve been telling the truth the whole way through….
“So Dad says, oh I see. And he finally draws the noose, and what I will never forget till the day I die is that all of a sudden there emerged from hiding—the hiding of a great cross-examiner—the true Norman Washington Manley, and with the whole force of his personality he said to the man, I put it to you, Mr. Smith, that you never saw anybody’s face at all. There was silence.
“Let me put it to you one last time—you are under oath, you know. And finally he just spat the words at him: you saw nothing, did you?
“No, sir.
“M’Lord, I suspect there’s no case to answer.
“And the funny thing was this. There was jubilation in the court, which was packed with Jamaicans, and we’re walking out after all the congratulations, and I notice Pardi looks quite dejected. He says to me, you know, Michael, I really am a little disappointed. I know, Dad, I said, you never gave your little demonstration. He had with him the sheet, the bottle of ink with the right viscosity, his paper-knife. He had hoped they might even lend him the real knife for the demonstration—it would be far more dramatic in court, he said, if I had the real knife. And he said, when you think of all the trouble we went to—me, you, Jacqueline….”
So Mummy was there, right to the end of the story, her contribution bottled and waiting to be called to its civic duty; meanwhile, in that safe world called Clanricarde Gardens, she presumably tidied up everything, for she was fastidious, and then returned to her kitchen, where in my mind she continued making puddings from Yorkshire for the rest of my childhood.