MEMORIES OF THE POST WAR ENGLISH BAR An Appreciation by Phillip Taylor MBE and Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green Chambers Wheatley’s new book consists of five short stories, each tale as much a memoir as a narrative, and each, except the final story, based on a criminal trial in which the author acted as Counsel for the defence at the beginning of his career. ‘So what’s it like to be an Old Bailey hack then?’ someone once is said to have asked Rumpole of the Bailey. Okay, Horace Rumpole is fiction, but even as a fictional character, he might have objected to being called a “hack”, however affectionately! Derek’s “Brief Encounters” tells it like it is at the Bailey, or rather, like it was at the Old Bailey (and other courts), back in the fifties and sixties. Speaking of fictional characters, the names of the protagonists as well as antagonists have been changed, obviously, to protect their identities and spare their blushes. Wheatley leaves the impression that, but for skilled advocacy, they would all have been judged ‘guilty as charged’, an assumption which we have no doubt is true. For example, there’s the story of the Romeo and Juliet-style familial feud in North London centering on a romance between Ismet, a Turkish Cypriot and, would you believe, Julietta, a Greek Cypriot. ‘My only love sprung from my only hate’ observes the author quoting Shakespeare, and adding that ‘Ismet was probably not very strong on Shakespeare.’ Read on, dear reader, for a number of pages and you find out that the enmity between these two ethnicities ends with an attempted murder via a 12-bore shotgun. The victim is not seriously injured, but it all ends up at the Central Criminal Court: “The Old Bailey” – in Court No. 1– reputedly a special court reserved for -- the crimes most heinous -- as Poirot would say. This is all quite a coup for young barrister, Tam Pearse, the main autobiographical character in this and the next three stories which intriguingly, are chock full of atmospheric description and sixties nostalgia- the sort of minute but pertinent detail you might predictably find in a witness statement. ‘A trial by jury is certainly war for the counsel taking part in it,’ observes Tam who, in this case was so convincing to the jury that his Turkish Cypriot client got off. As is often typical in these situations Tam is less triumphant than bemused, with some lingering doubts as to whether justice was really done. This is a curiosity of a book which we are sure will be much enjoyed by courtroom drama buffs and definitely those members of London’s close knit legal fraternity who are happy to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of legal London in a bygone age. The last story in this collection is of a slightly different ilk. Here, a new barristerial character called Lumsden has an illicit fling on holiday in Santiago de Compostela with an aristocratic beauty who prefers to remain anonymous, thank you. But who is this lovely lady (whose first language is not English) who refers to herself self-deprecatingly as a ‘keeped woman’? Lumsden finds out only when he peruses the Jennifer’s Diary section of “Harpers and Queen” magazine. He’s by no means a regular reader of this fashion and society mag, you understand. He merely picks it up in the dentists’ office and in so doing makes a surprise discovery which we will leave you to guess at. And if you’re old enough to remember Jennifer’s Diary in the days when “Harpers Bazaar” was called “Harpers and Queen”, you will certainly enjoy this book. If you aren’t, you’ll find yourself intrigued anyway by this almost quasi-Victorian mixture of (as T. S. Eliot would have put it), ‘memory and desire’ for the way we were in Derek’s ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ tales from Pegasus.