The Accidental Editor

Further embarrassment came at Wells Assizes, to which I was promoted after avoiding all the many legal pitfalls awaiting a young reporter at a magistrates’ court. Wells is a glorious little city, boasting lots of quaint and narrow streets, ancient buildings and one of the finest cathedrals (around which flows a water-filled moat, complete with dazzling white swans) in the whole of Britain. It was a pleasure to be paid to spend a day there and I had many happy days exploring it, and writing amorous postcards to Pat, while waiting for any cases to be dealt with which might be of interest to the people of Weston. On one of my earliest visits I found myself in the cheery company of Clive Jackson, a roly-poly man of about my age, who managed to hold down a job as a reporter on the Cheddar Valley Gazette without ever taking it wholly seriously. It was good to see a friendly face in the austere surroundings of the ancient Assize Courthouse – not least because I was still new to this more intimidating level of the judicial system and was desperate not to put a foot wrong. I was there for a major fraud trial involving a man from Weston and Clive was there for the sentencing of a Cheddar woman who had plunged a broken beer glass into the face of a man in a pub, but the first case on the list was that of a petty criminal from Shepton Mallet. No one from Shepton Mallet was of any interest to the readers of either the Mercury or the Cheddar Valley Gazette but Clive and I both decided we would go into the courtroom to watch, if only to find out more about the court process so that we would be better able to follow proceedings when the cases we were interested in eventually came on. The case was fairly uninteresting, until the defence barrister got to his feet and started telling the judge of the problems that had turned his client, the defendant, from a decent and respectable citizen into the sort of middle aged offender who was on every policeman’s list of suspects whenever any crime was committed within five miles of Shepton Mallet town centre. It all started, he said, with an accident in the hapless man’s youth, which had resulted in his receiving a nickname from his schoolmates which had distressed him so deeply that he had taken to drink. The drink led him into a downward spiral of drugs, vandalism, theft and minor violence and now here he was facing his umpteenth burglary charge. ‘He recovered quite well from the accident in his youth, Your Honour, but the sad fact is that he has never – not even today, 25 years later – fully recovered from the nickname that was so unfairly bestowed upon him,’ the barrister said. ‘It was not the accident, but the nickname that brought him here today and I ask you to take that fully into account. I would ask Your Honour not to send this man to jail because of an unfortunate nickname, but to give him a chance to prove that he can put all that behind him and live the useful life he might have lived had he not been given it in the first place.’ Clive and I were all agog. Novices though we were, we reckoned that we’d grasped the point that it was all to do with the nickname. But we, just like everyone in that courtroom, wanted to know what the nickname was. There was only one person who had the power to find out. And he came up trumps. ‘Are you ever,’ the judge asked, ‘going to tell us what the nickname was?’ We braced ourselves, knowing that this was to be some sort of defining moment in the case. ‘Er . . . if Your Honour pleases,’ said the barrister. ‘It was One-Ball Hancock, Your Honour.’ There followed the sort of silence which comes only when a lot of people are determinedly trying not to make a sound. Not a grin passed anyone’s face, not a chuckle escaped their lips. But as I sat there in that hushed courtroom, squeezed close to the ample frame of Clive Jackson, I felt his body begin to tremble. Soon his giggles racked his whole body, his fat was wobbling convulsively and I was conscious that he had ceased breathing lest something audible should escape from his mouth. And, of course, as he giggled, so did I. We soon exploded into a series of snorts and coughs, which did nothing to disguise the fact that we were tittering like naughty schoolboys in a manner that did our professionalism no credit at all.