The Light's on at Signpost (17 page)

I’m surprised that Weathers hasn’t gone farther. He is a fine actor with expressive eyes, good looking, and with the physique of the pro footballer he once was, but he has contented himself with mostly supporting parts. He had a good idea for a film about a black American who by chance finds himself back with an African tribe, and encounters complex cultural and social problems; we talked it over at some length, but I haven’t heard that he pursued it.

I finished the scripts, and what the difference was between the “official” version for the Yugoslavs, and the “real” one I have long forgotten. Shaw’s daughter, Debbie, beavered away duplicating them, they were distributed to the cast at supper, Hamilton, the recreant, took evasive action, and I was left to deal with the actors. There wasn’t too much trouble; Harrison Ford, I remember, took me through his part with a professional care which I found impressive; Alan Badel, God bless him, shook his head at me in admiration, exclaiming: “Marvellous! What a difference!” I must have changed at least two words from the original part which he’d already seen, but that was Alan all over, and explains why I liked him as much as any actor I’ve ever worked with.

We had a read through—Shaw, Ford, Fox, Weathers, and Nero, the five principals, while Hamilton stood in for Barbara Bach and others, and I did the occasional German sentry being strangled. It went nicely, with little discussion, the highlight being the abandon with which Shaw threw back his head and bellowed a line at Fox: “Miller, you stupid git!” Why do actors love shouting? Possibly it breaks the monotony. And at the finish he delighted me by remarking: “Well, you’ve got the best part, Eddie—as usual.”

The only major problem was: who was going to kill the traitor, Franco Nero? I know I rewrote the scene, but I don’t remember whether I changed the identity of the killer or not. Anyway, in the
final script the execution was to be carried out by the American colonel, Barnsby, played by Ford, and Shaw objected, not altogether unreasonably.

“I ought to kill him,” he said, when we had adjourned for dinner. “I’m the man he betrayed in the first place, and the audience will expect me to kill him.”

I suggested that was a good reason for having Barnsby do it, to take the audience by surprise, Hamilton agreed, and Shaw, having growled and glared in the direction of Ford, who was sitting innocently at the next table, finally said: “Oh, well, all right…but you’ve got to give me a
line!
” This was accompanied by a fist on the table—a dramatic gesture timed to perfection. Guy and I suggested a few lines, none of which was well received, I had to fight down my fatal impulse to propose something really facetious, and finally Shaw said in a grating voice:

“So Barnsby shoots him, and the audience don’t know who’s fired the shot until I say: ‘Thank you, Colonel!’”

Neat, you have to admit, and so it was done. He was, I realised, an intensely competitive actor—goodness knows why, since he could hold his own with the best in the business, and act most of them off the screen. I think back to him as Henry VIII, and Lord Randolph Churchill, or eyeing Paul Newman across the card table in
The Sting
, dominating the scene simply by his presence.

Perhaps he was just a natural competitor. There was to be a scene involving cliff-climbing (which didn’t get into the movie), and Shaw champed at the bit beforehand, muttering: “I’m going to bloody well kill Franco Nero at this.” In the event, which I didn’t witness, the fastest man up the cliff, ahead even of the stuntmen, was Harrison Ford. Which surprised me, for Harrison had struck me as quite the gentlest of the cast, soft-spoken and quietly courteous, and not the one you’d expect to be first as an action man.

He had just become internationally famous with
Star Wars
, and his part in
Force Ten was
modest by comparison, but he took great
pains over it. He and I shared an acquaintance in Dick Fleischer; Harrison, who during a hiatus in his film career had become a carpenter, had been engaged on building a projection room at Dick’s Hollywood home on South Rockingham when he suddenly had the chance to appear in George Lucas’s
American Graffiti
, and the projection room was abandoned half-finished, which had not endeared Harrison to Dick’s wife, Mickey. I gather that Harrison had emerged somewhat shaken, but eventually it all came right, for I learned later from Mickey that he had completed the projection room, which is an extremely handsome one.

Edward Fox and Alan Badel and I gravitated together, when Edward was not in his room studying to be Edward VIII in the TV series which won so much acclaim. He was one of those actors whose personality off-screen is in keeping with his professional image: quiet, humorous, unfailingly polite. Badel, on the other hand, was the opposite of his acting persona: on screen he was usually the coldest of cold fish, icy-eyed and with a voice to match, the kind of heavy who could make Rathbone or Henry Daniell seem positively jolly—and that last word is a good description of him as he really was, exuberant, talkative, given to explosive laughter, and as busy as they come.

When Edward Fox, former subaltern in the Loyal North Lancs, and no stranger to khaki, put on his sergeant’s battle-dress and stood forth for our inspection, I thought he looked pretty good—but not good enough for ex-Paratrooper Badel, who fussed round him, tugging, straightening, and exhorting, while I, at Alan’s insistence, manufactured a circlet of the little lead weights with which we used to make our trousers hang neatly over our anklets. Edward bore it with his usual patience, and I must admit that Badel had him looking fit to mount guard. He didn’t stop there. Harrison Ford emerged from the unit barber looking slightly bemused; Alan, I gathered, had been supervising his haircut.

I have said he was likeable, with his happy enthusiasm and unfailing
good humour; he was also a very hard man indeed. On the one hand, there was the brilliant classical actor, one of the great Romeos and for many the one and only Darcy in
Pride and Prejudice
, a splendid mimic who did a superb Gielgud and a truly cruel Olivier. “Larry would try to psych you out, you know. He quite upset Michael Redgrave, but when he tried it on with me, looking down his nose from a great height—” Alan was quite short, perhaps five-seven or-eight “—I fixed the bugger. I just stared at his fly buttons.”

On the other hand, there was the man who told us straight-faced that when he had caught hooligans vandalising his car, he had broken their wrists—I can still see Edward Fox’s look of horror at this revelation. For there was no doubt it was true; the war taught cold-blooded ruthlessness to a generation, and produced many walking paradoxes, trained killers who were also kind and sincere Christians. Alan was a devout Roman Catholic, and genuinely compassionate; I’ve no reason to doubt the story that he had spent an hour on the telephone using all his charm and tact (and probably his acting ability) to persuade a hysterical girl not to commit suicide; it was at the time of his Stratford Romeo, when he was being bombarded with worshipping messages and confidences from admiring females.

But the old Airborne man was never far from the surface, as William Dieterle, the German director, discovered on the Hollywood set of
Salome
, in which Alan appeared with Rita Hayworth and Charles Laughton. Dieterle was, in Alan’s description, “a typical Hun”, and when he slapped the face of an unfortunate gofer he found himself confronted by an icy Badel.

“I told him, ‘Look, mate, I’ve just spent five years putting down your bloody countrymen, and I don’t mind adding you to the list. You don’t slap anyone while I’m around, see?’ And he didn’t.” Which may explain why Alan’s Hollywood career was comparatively brief—that and his spirited objection to changes made in the
Salome
script to the words of Christ as given in the New Testament; this ended in confrontation with the celebrated Harry Cohn and a writer who explained: “Well, you see, Alan, we thought Jesus sounded just a bit cocky in there.”

With the script complete my job was effectively over, and I was able to spend time with Kathy and two of the children who had flown out to Zagreb. I rejoined the unit later, for the life of me I can’t think why, for all that stays in memory is an argument with Robert Shaw about rugby—he had played at county level, for Cornwall, I think—and a rain-sodden afternoon on a bleak hillside watching him and Ford hitting German guards with shovels while Barbara Bach shot them with a tommy-gun.

I didn’t see the film until many months afterwards, but in the meantime, near the end of shooting, I received a letter from a friend in the unit which read, in part: “Eddie as always is a delight, Barnsby grows on one, Shaw is competent when sober.”

Poor Robert. He died only a year later, of a heart attack; he was only fifty-one. A multi-talented man, not only a fine actor but a gifted writer, and it is good to remember how he threw off his customary gruffness and became positively cheerful in telling me about his latest play, which was half-finished and, he believed, the best thing he’d ever written. But being Robert Shaw it was not long before he was giving tongue to his vexation at the mounting expense of the golf course he was having built on his estate in Ireland, and the cares of fatherhood—he had, I believe, ten children. “God, d’you have any idea of the cost of kids’ shoes? Yes, of course you have.” Brooding pause. “Not as much as I have, though.”

I got no writing credit on
Force Ten
in Britain, which I thought a bit hard, since I’d contributed a fair amount, but I was given one in America, which was a consolation. Carl Foreman’s typewriter, I’m afraid, is still somewhere on a hilltop in Yugoslavia.

F
EW THINGS
infuriate the ordinary citizen more than liberal attitudes to crime and criminals. And not only infuriate, but offend against justice, common sense, and fair play. The ordinary citizen is neither a brute nor a sadist; he is humane (as most liberals are not), he is compassionate when it is called for, leans over backwards to be fair, and is ready to give a second chance. But he knows the difference between right and wrong, and has an instinctive sense of the difference between right and mere legality. He believes that wrongdoing should be punished with appropriate degrees of severity; deep in his understanding lies a feeling that eye for eye and tooth for tooth is not without merit, and that the punishment should fit the crime.

He is disturbed at the way in which liberal concern seems focused on the criminal rather than the victim. He grits his teeth when he reads of young offenders being sent on luxurious safaris which honest folk cannot afford, of derisory sentences handed down for heinous crimes, of criminals who hold the law and society in open contempt, of old, helpless folk battered and tortured and slain, and of little children raped and murdered—and knows that the law of his land decrees that not a finger must be laid on the perpetrator, assuming he is caught, which he probably won’t be. He is justly furious when the vilest of criminals, the Bradys and Hindleys and Krays, are the subjects of campaigns for their release,
when every decent instinct tells him that they should have been dead long ago.

He is tired, almost beyond anger and disgust, of liberals who insist that rehabilitation of the criminal must have priority, that he must be “understood” rather than punished, that our prisons are a “national disgrace”—which they are in that they are far too soft and shockingly run—and that he, the citizen, is some kind of vengeful monster when he suggests that a harsher way with criminals might be tried with advantage. He is tired of being called a barbarian, and uncivilised, when he knows that the true barbarians are the liberals who by their policies have turned Britain into an open sewer, have encouraged the criminal, and so undermined the forces of law and order that the citizen can no longer count on that protection which is the first duty of a civilised state.

He knows that those who brought about the abolition of the death penalty and corporal punishment (both, he notes, in defiance of the great majority of public opinion), who “reformed” the penal system so that hard labour became a thing of the past and prisoners were given sheets on their beds, television to watch, and recreational facilities denied to many outside prison—he knows that they are the criminal’s friends, their aiders and abettors, and, it follows, the enemies of the law-abiding public.

This statement will be scoffed at, of course, but we, the public who do not believe in putting the criminal first and the victim second, know that it is true. We know that chatter about being tough on crime and the causes of crime is just a politician’s silly lie, and that absolutely nothing will be done to combat crime until there is a return to common sense by treating the criminal as an enemy and dealing with him accordingly. But that, of course, is something that no politician would dare to say, even if he believed it, which most of them probably do not. Why should they? They’re all right, Jack, and when a beleaguered householder shoots a burglar and, against all decency and reason, is sentenced to life imprisonment
the liberal lobby shake their heads censoriously and agree that he has no right to effective self-defence.

A thought occurs: Mr Blair and his kind presumably have armed security—so if, in the undoubtedly worthy cause of protecting Mr Blair, a security man were to kill an intruder, would the security man go to prison for life?

The failure of successive governments to deal with crime, their surrender to liberal pressure and flat refusal to do anything practical, is in itself the greatest crime of all. When any particularly appalling crime is committed—the murder of a child, usually—there is an immediate pious wail from the Left and an endless waffling of platitudes featuring the word “unacceptable”, an earnest debate about the causes of crime, a hypocritical lip-service to “doing something”, a laying of flowers and weeping for the cameras, a great shaking of fat heads on
Question Time
, perhaps a rushing through Parliament of cosmetic and totally useless measures to “crack down” which everyone, including the police and judiciary, regard with contempt, and a stern admonition from Downing Street that it is the responsibility of us all, because government can’t tackle the problem on its own, and it is up to the public, etc., etc.—and it is all meaningless, and we know it, but it beats the hell out of doing anything. Government, of either party, talks about the public’s responsibility while abdicating its own with a cowardice matched only by its callousness, and, failing to protect the public, refuses the public the right to defend themselves.

Ask the man or woman in the street what should be done about this disgraceful state of affairs, and they’ll tell you, in simple terms which no politician would have the nerve to use, much less act upon. Easier by far to pontificate fatuously while the next victim is raped and strangled…and then the great mockery of inactivity and pretended concern can be gone through again.

We could discuss the failure to deal with crime at length, but there’s no profit in that; better to say what should be done about
it, and I am confident that what follows would command the support of a majority of Britons, if it were ever put to them in a referendum, which of course it never will be.

First, it is plain that no country can call itself civilised which does not have the death penalty for murder. That is not to say that it must be inflicted in every case; far from it. But it must be there. Since it was abolished, criminal killing and violent crime have rocketed, and only a fool or a liar would deny the obvious truth: the death penalty is a deterrent, and those abolitionists who deny it are lying. They’ve got to lie. To admit the truth that they know in their hearts, that the gallows deters, but that they still want none of it, would be to put themselves in the morally impossible position of saying that they would rather the innocent died than the guilty. So they must persist in their falsehood, flying blindly in the face of common sense, honesty, and human experience since time began.

What, in all our literature, in our very sense of being, is the ultimate sanction? Death. Not life imprisonment (which term is a lie also), not probation, not stern words from the bench, not even prison visits from the late Lord Longford, but death. (I am reminded of what a Glasgow police sergeant told me about his arrest of a villain: “He didn’t say don’t put me in jail, he didn’t say don’t send me to the psychiatrist, he said don’t hit me, mister. So I hit him—blooter!” No doubt Lord Macpherson would say that this was institutional violence. The point is that the policeman knew what worked.)

Deterrence is not the only reason for capital punishment. Simple justice is another, equally strong. There is a human instinct that one who kills deliberately and unlawfully has forfeited the right to live. Not because anything less would leave him able to kill again, but because it is just and proper that he should die. There have, incidentally, been some seventy cases, since abolition, of murderers killing a second time after release, and even the most fervent abolitionist cannot deny that the death penalty, if applied, would have
saved many innocent lives. (So would a true life sentence.) The abolitionist has no answer to this except the outworn claptrap about the sanctity of human life (the murderer’s life, never mind the victim’s), and the parrot-cry that the state has no right to end a human existence, no Christian conscience can condone it, and so on.

Therein lies the nub: conscience—of which, no doubt, the abolitionist is proud. The appalling fact is that he puts his conscience above the life of the victim. It is not too much to say that as long as he can go to bed thinking: “Thank God I hold the right, enlightened view on capital punishment, and live in a country where it doesn’t exist”, he couldn’t care less how many children and old folk are butchered. They are expendable, but his conscience isn’t. What it is to have a conscience, eh? To be able to live with the knowledge of the abominable tortures inflicted on children by Hindley and Brady, and yet maintain that the lives of those two bestial murderers must remain inviolate. Liberals have achieved abolition, and are proud of it, and the devil with those victims they have condemned to death as a result.

The stark truth, of course, is that they have not abolished the death penalty at all. They have merely transferred it from the guilty to the innocent—and incidentally ensured that many more violent deaths occur. They can live with that, apparently, shielding those ragged shreds of conscience behind the lie that the death penalty would have no effect on the murder rate. Well, we know of seventy cases where it would, and that is one hard fact that not all the twisting of truth and careful selection of statistics can explain away.

It can be objected, very properly, that the trouble with the death penalty is that you may execute the wrong man, and many abolitionists try to link this with the false pretence that people like me want every murderer to hang. Certainly not, and I remind them that
before
abolition only a minority of murderers were executed. My contention is that the death sentence should be applied only when
the guilt of the accused is beyond doubt—not what is called reasonable doubt, but any doubt at all. There are such open and shut cases. Where a shadow of doubt attends a conviction, the sentence should be life imprisonment—meaning just that, not release after nine years. (It is a sign of the law’s guilty conscience that it has to pretend that a few years in jail is “life”. Why the silly and unnecessary lie, which only brings the law’s integrity and intelligence into disrepute, and reflects no credit on those who administer it without protest?)

What is necessary is simply that the death penalty should exist, a permanent deterrent, and that would certainly be enough at least to give pause to the armed robber, the violent thug, and (dare one suggest it?) the domestic killer who pleads loss of control, provocation, drink, drugs, an abused childhood, and any other excuse that comes to mind. Thanks to the reformers, we are now used to the wife who murders her husband in his sleep, and the husband who bludgeons or stabs his wife to death—and both will plead that the dead spouse had made life hell for them, and all too often walk free with a sympathetic benediction from the idiot on the bench. It seems not to occur to anyone that they heard only one side of the case; that the dead victim, reviled from the witness box (and no doubt often deserving of vilification), has had no chance to put a case, being dead.

We are assured that such murders, usually committed in blind passion, would not be deterred by the death penalty, that penalties don’t cross the minds of such killers. No? Could that be because the penalties don’t exist—not real penalties to stay a murderous hand even in blind rage. Is it ridiculous to suggest that the knowledge, at the back of every mind, that the gallows is there, the ultimate sanction, might not prevent many domestic quarrels from becoming fatal ones?

No one would suggest for a moment that the deranged mother should face the death penalty for murdering her child in a frenzy
of desperation—but again, is it not possible that even a deranged mother, knowing that she lived in a state that executed murderers, might out of that awful knowledge be moved to hold her hand? And if I am thought to be lacking in compassion and understanding even to cite such a case, let me point out that I do so out of concern not for the mother but for the infant victim.

Surely even liberals are not too obtuse to have learned the age-old lesson that when it comes to restraining the criminal, or imposing discipline (whether on the mob or in the classroom), a threat is sufficient nine times out of ten if it is understood that it is not an empty one. At present all the tough talk of “cracking down” and “three strikes and out” is seen for what it is: empty sound, and the criminal simply laughs at the fatuous politician and goes his lawless way in the sure knowledge that nothing can possibly happen to him except a short spell of what Solzhenitsyn called warm cells and white bread. With the enlightened lobby getting their bowels in an uproar about the prisoner’s human rights, too.

But if the brute knows, as he puts the boot into the old lady’s face, that he will be flogged extremely painfully, he will think twice; he will be less liable to throw people into rivers and laugh as they drown if he knows that his neck will be broken by way of retribution.

That paragraph should be enough to convince anyone of liberal tendencies that I am a vengeful sadist. I’m not, but if I were, would it matter if it saved an old lady from being battered to death, or a young life from being snuffed out by a true sadist?

There are many emotional arguments against the death penalty—the horror of execution, the cold-blooded extinction of life, the ghastly ritual of trapdoor and noose. Yes, it’s horrible. It was equally horrible when the victim died. I have been asked, could I bear to carry out an execution. Yes, without hesitation. I was trained to kill, like my whole generation, and for the life of me I fail to understand how the liberal conscience can live with killing in war (blowing children to pieces in Kosovo, for example) but insist
on the right to life of the Hindleys and Bradys and similar vermin.