THE LAW
Kathryn Hughes
Unlawful Killings
Life, Love and Murder:
Trials at the Old Bailey
by Wendy Joseph
Doubleday £20 pp336In Unlawful Killings Her
Honour Wendy Joseph QC
issues a backstage pass to
six of the most noteworthy
murder trials from her time
as a judge at the Old Bailey.
Names and identifying
details have been changed,
but everything else reads
as if it had been pulledstraight from the Digital Case
System, the online depository
that has replaced all those
picturesque pink-ribboned
briefs of yesteryear.
Among the defendants
is Meshach, a 16-year-old boy
accused of ambushing his
former friend Daniel in an
alley and stabbing him to
death over something no one
can quite recall. Then there
is Akhi, a middle-aged man
who is accused of strangling
his teenage daughter for
dishonouring the family
with her tight trousers
and leather jacket. And then
comes Angela, who shot her
slap-happy robber husband
when he raised his handFrom grime to
In Our Time
No fridge, no phone and an outdoor loo:
Melvyn Bragg’s childhood made him
MEMOIR
Christina Patterson
Back in the Day A Memoir
by Melvyn Bragg
Sceptre £25 pp416
At her 90th birthday lunch,
Melvyn Bragg’s mother
turned to her best friend and
said, so loudly that everyone
could hear: “I always wanted
a girl.” It’s quite a thing to say
when your son is a bestselling
writer of almost 40 books,
one of the country’s most
eminent broadcasters and
a peer of the realm. It’s also
a shocking moment in a
childhood memoir bursting
with affection and gruff love.
Bragg was born in Carlisle
in 1939 and grew up in nearby
Wigton. His mother, Ethel,
was illegitimate, fostered by
“a Victorian matriarch” whom
Bragg believed to be his
grandmother until long after
she died. Those lies, deemed
necessary because of the
shame of being “a bastard”,
left him with unanswered
questions and a lingering fear
of the truth. For his mother
the legacy was more
straightforward. After leaving
school at 14 and working
in a clothing factory,
she was relieved to
meet Stanley Bragg, the
son of a farm labourer
turned park keeper,
relieved to marry him,
have a child with him
and embark on a
“respectable” life
with him.
Until he was eight
Melvyn lived in houses
with no bathroom and a
shared outside loo. A bath
was a once-a-week affair,
a hot scrubbing in the
kitchen, and a clean shirt
had to last a week. No one
had a fridge, hot water, a
washing machine, phone,
electricity or central
heating. Food was
rationed. Yet there was,
he says, “no feeling” of
poverty. After he came back
from the war, Stan worked in
a factory and took on extra
part-time jobs. Ethel delivered
the post and worked as a
cleaner. When their son was
eight they took over a pub, the
Black-A-Moor, and lived
upstairs. For the next decade
it was Melvyn’s daily task to
swill out the men’s urinal in
the yard.
What emerges most clearly
from his account is a sense of
community. The Black-A-Moor,
like other pubs in Wigton, was
part of the warp and weft of
daily life in the town, like the
park, the bowling green, the
market, the bookie, Ronnie’s
the Hairdresser, Miss Peters’s
sweet shop, the Co-op and Joe
Cusack’s Palace Cinema. There
were poor families who went
hungry and middle-class
families who were “few and
floated above the rest of us”.However, Bragg, his family and
his friends were secure in their
identity as members of a
“decent” working class who
loved their town and country
and knew what was expected
of them.
As in so many writers’
memoirs, what changed
things for Bragg was
education. Dedicated
teachers offered glimpses of
opportunities beyond a job
at 16 and, as he discovered
the joy of learning, those
opportunities began to seem
more real. They also brought
tough choices: between the
people and the world he knew
and the world he feared and
didn’t. Even though we know
which choice he made, there
are moments when you really
do feel it could go either way.
Back in the Day is a
charming account of a lost
era, full of detailed and often
lyrical descriptions of people
and places and a world where
the local dialect was “the
sound of our identity”. If it
sounds idealised, it isn’t.
Bragg is clear-eyed about
the “harshness under the
surface”: the snobbery, the
repression, the violence, the
sometimes deadly weight of
tradition and the lives worn
down by “deadening work”.
It isn’t hard to see how his
Wigton childhood has shaped
his political sensibility. He
also captures the dignity, the
pleasure taken in small things,
the beauty of the landscape
and, movingly, his parents’
largely inarticulate love.
It is, as Bragg hints in an
author’s note, a book of two
halves. The first half is, he
says, “a series of impressions
in no strict order”. He isn’t
joking. While full of
delightful cameos, these can
appear disjointed and at
times a little confusing. A
clearer focus might have
brought more of a sense of
narrative drive. The second
half is much more absorbing,
partly because Bragg brings
his novelistic skills to entire
scenes, including ones where
he wasn’t present. In that
author’s note he confesses to
“a patch of embroidery”, but
to me it felt more like a quilt.
In the end it doesn’t matter.
Back in the Day is a fascinating
and often moving portrait of a
time, a place and a working-
class boy who fell in love with
words and made a
distinguished career out of
using them extremely well. cStrong identity Melvyn
Bragg and his mother, Ethel,
at ButlinsBOOKS
Woman of
conviction
Judge Wendy gives us a backstage pass to
six recent murder trials in a gripping look
at the law that reads like a cliffhanger
LOUISE ROSE, ALAMY30 29 May 2022