Valerie Grove - A Voyage Round John Mortimer

I have distinguished John Mortimers two wives in the same way as they tended to be identified in life: the first Mrs Mortimer, Penelope, is invariably referred to as Penelope; the second Mrs Mortimer, later Lady Mortimer, is always Penny.

I envied my subject his freedom to produce two volumes of memoirs without including an index or notes. My own notes are minimal. Most of the information about Johns life, if the source is not specified in the text, comes from the dozens of conversations I have had with him since April 2004, and with the friends listed in the Acknowledgements; also from his fathers diaries, and his own scrapbooks, notebooks and manuscripts kept at Turville Heath Cottage.

Penelope Mortimer wrote, like her husband, two volumes of memoirs. When writing these she depended on the detailed diary she had always kept, and which she distilled into a rsum she referred to as her Chronology. To Jeremy Mortimer, Penelopes literary executor, and to his sisters, who allowed me to use and quote from the Chronology, as well as from her published works, I am deeply indebted.

I am sure you would love John and I do wish he could know you; he will be 17 next April and he is the most cheerful and entertaining of companions so that Mother and I feel very glum when he is at school I think him a genius, though Kathleen wont have it so. I have never known a boy of his age so deeply read in English literature and he has a decided talent for writing verse. He is also very interested in painting and very clever in designing stage sets & costumes and spends endless time designing settings for different plays on a miniature stage with scenery lighting and figures complete. He paints a good deal at Harrow and contributes to the Harrow weekly paper & won a prize in the reading aloud competition & passed his school certificate with seven credits theres a paragon for you! With all this he is a dear boy with a great sense of fun

Clifford Mortimer, who wrote these words in 1939 to his sister Gertie, would have been gratified to know that, by the end of the century, the British public agreed with him that his boy was a lovable genius. He would perhaps be amazed to have become his sons prime source of material. The author of Mortimer on Probate had steered his son, an aspiring writer, towards the legal profession. Obediently the only child followed him into the same Probate, Divorce and Admiralty division of the High Court, and shared his fathers gloomy chambers at 1 Dr Johnsons Buildings in the Temple. Being a barrister was to prove John Mortimers unique selling point. The law would give him cachet among authors, as the only playwright-QC. And he chose, in his work, to celebrate Clifford Mortimer by recreating him, time and again.

Every opinion he held came from his father, with the notable exception of Cliffords aversion to music. He absorbed Cliffords literary enthusiasms. He inherited his retentive memory, his atheism, his terror of boredom; also his asthma and glaucoma. He continued to live in the house Clifford built, unable to consider changing anything in it, and expanding its surrounding acres. The garden became for him, as it had been for his father, the basis of his affection for the English countryside, a symbol of stability and permanence, a refuge, a solace and a kind of drug. He even replicated, eventually, his fathers ability to carry on working in spite of physical dependence on others. Indeed, he most admired his fathers ability to rise above his blindness, never complaining or referring to it at all, and applied the same stoicism to his own immobility. I miss him all the time, and Im terribly overshadowed by him, John said. And I do find myself with the feeling that Im repeating his life.