Jonathan Goodman - Murder on Several Occasions

I start uncertainly. I believe that the slaying of Prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey was the first murder case I heard of, but I may be wrong. Perhaps earlier tellings of other murders had gone in one twice-daily-washed ear and out the other.

My parents were unconventional bedtime tale-tellers: they referred to, but never actually told me, fairy stories, assuming that I would prefer to hear how Dorothy Ward, boyish as Jack, had scaled a giant beanstalk and, vanishing from the audiences view, received rapturous applause for her vertical exit; of the Australian Oscar Asche, sort of Chinese as Chu-Chin-Chow; of Jose Collins, the exalted Maid of the Mountains; of Phyllis Neilson-Terry, masculinized as Oberon at the Open Air Theatre in Regents Park; of young Meggie Albanesi, a bright flame that suddenly died. My parents, as you will have gathered, were great ones for the theatre. And, for them, theatre was not confined to the stage. They were what would now be called, I suppose, lateral thinkers: memories were corroborated by other memories, or were jogged into being mentioned by recollection of things that had happened at the time, or in the locality, of things that had stayed, higgledy-piggledy, in their minds.

I know the day of the month when I first heard of the Fahmy case: the seventeenth day of a January between King Edward VIIIs announcement on the wireless that he had abdicated (I was too young to be awake for it) and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlains announcement on what people were starting to call the radio that Great Britain was at war with Germany. (I heard that in the cottage at Castle Combe to which, presciently, I had been evacuatedand from which, later that day, I, hopelessly homesick, would be driven back to dangerous London. Certainly selfishly, perhaps irrationally, I hated the Germans, not long enough ago calling themselves the master race, for having taken away part of my childhood.)

On that 17 January, a birthday for me, my Aunts Amy, Henrietta, and Rachel were supposed to call; for days before, my mother had unsubtly hinted that if I behaved myself, the aunts would bear gifts. Butand this could probably fix the yearby the time the table was laid, cake and all, it had started to rain, to pour. The hour arranged for the aunts arrival passed; my father returned, dripping wet, from work; we were not on the phone, and so the auntswho had told my mother that they would gather together in Putney and travel en masse to Wimbledoncould not explain to us the reason for their absence. I was told, first, to stop making naughty faces, and then to sit at the table, to sit up straight, to eat my allotment of the birthday feast, sticking to the established order of fishpaste sandwich, buttered scone with raspberry preserve, a helping of pink junket, and, if I really wanted it, a slice of the centrepiece cake (which, my memory says, had not been decked with candles for me to blow out).