“There’s a moral to this story:
Though your cordwangle be poor
Keep yer ’ands off others’ moulies
For it is against the law”
Kenneth Williams, The Ballad of the Woggler’s Moulie
The law: that’s my theme today.
The law and lawyers.
And lifts.
Why?
Well, why not?
Let’s start with case-law and precedent, shall we? And with one case in particular, concerning the disputed ownership of a child.
This was in the days before birth control, this case. Two women sharing a small house – if ‘house’ is the right word for it: hut, more like. But anyway, these two women shared a house or hut on account of their profession. If profession is the right word for it. But it was also on account of their profession, if you can call it that, that they each found themselves with a baby to support. Baby boys, they were, and both of about the same age.
In the night, when they were not engaged in their trade, these women each slept with their babies in bed with them. As a lot of people do, or did. As I did, as it happens – with both of my children, right from when they were very tiny.
But in this house where the two women lived, it happened that one night that one of them slept rather more heavily than you might expect a new mother to. No-one quite knows why she did this: perhaps she had been drinking, or perhaps it was just the way she slept. But whatever the reason, she rolled over in her sleep and she rolled onto her baby. Her body covered his face, and his struggles to breathe did not wake her, and the baby died.
The first thing she knew of it was when she woke up several hours later, in the middle of the night, to find his body cold and still beneath her.
One can only guess at what passed through her mind when she woke up, and at why she then did what she did.
But what she did was this: she took the body of her own dead child and she carried it over to the other woman’s bed.
There she took out the living child, without waking either it or the woman – which suggests not just one unusually heavy sleeper, I’d say, but a whole house full of them – and she took this child back to her own bed, and left her own in his place.
Well, you can imagine the scene when the other woman woke up the next morning, and the weeping and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth.
And then, at some point, came the moment of realisation that the child this woman held limp in her arms wasn’t, in fact, the child she gave birth to. And that the child she gave birth to was actually, at that moment, sitting looking at her, gurgling, cradled in the arms of the first woman.
And then there was an almighty row. Hair was pulled and faces were clawed, and furniture was turned over and crockery smashed, and the noise of it was such that neighbours rushed in to pull them apart, and the authorities were called; and despite all attempts to sort the matter out each woman was adamant that the living baby was her own, and that the other was lying through her teeth, like the evil witch she was.
And there was no budging either of them, so in the end they all went off to court to settle the matter.
At that time and in that place the court they went to was court of the King, whose name was Solomon.
At the foot of Solomon’s throne and before the King himself they both carried on pretty much as they had done all along with their protestations and accusations, and this went on for some time, and no-one was getting anywhere very fast.
In the end Solomon decided he had had enough
“So,” he said, “This one saith, this is my son that liveth, and thy son is dead; and the other saith, Nay, but thy son is the dead, and my son the living.”
And it was agreed the His Highness was indeed most shrewd in his observation, and that this was exactly the heart of the matter.
Though it was not entirely helpful in bringing things to a satisfactory conclusion.
But then the King came up with an idea, and this idea involved what you might call a bit of freestyle law-making.
“Bring me a sword,” he said.
So they brought him a sword.
“Now,” he said, “Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other.”
At this, the child’s real mother flung herself down on the ground.
“Oh my lord,” she cried, “Give her the living child and in no wise slay it.”
The other woman, meanwhile, just sort of stood there, sneering.
“Let it be neither mine nor thine,” she said, “But divide it.”
“Aha!” cried Solomon, “Got you there!” (Or something like that.)
And the baby was returned, intact, to its rightful owner.
But it was fortunate that things turned out that way,
Because you do wonder what would have happened if the guilty woman, sensing the way the wind was blowing, had also thrown herself down on the floor and said, “No, give it to her…”
Or if Solomon had been called away unexpectedly and he’d given the case over to a lawyer to deal with.
Because I could be wrong, but it is my impression that those whose business is to do with the law are not always… how shall I put this? Not always as sensitive to the needs and the feelings of others as Solomon, shall we say.
It is my impression that making a career out of the intricacies of the law has less to do with wisdom and compassion and more to do with having a somewhat legalistic mindset.
And it is my impression that to work in litigation in particular you have to be up for something of a scrap as well.
Because litigation, when you look at it, is a form of Robot Wars for pedants.
It’s where people of a belligerently nitpicking mindset vie to destroy each other’s cases with words, battering at them with their precedents and quibbling them with their technicalities.
It takes a certain sort of person to be good at that, I think, and a certain way of thinking and feeling.
Like the man known as ‘Mr Loophole’, whose speciality is getting wealthy celebrities off of drink-driving charges.
Or like the City lawyer I heard of who set up as a property developer and – allegedly – came up with a novel way to maximise profits and minimise redevelopment costs. This way was to allow the building-work to reach a certain stage and then – it is claimed – to refuse to pay what was owed. And when the builder complained, he was told ‘So sue me!’ safe in the knowledge that the case would cost more in time and money than the balance owed; and that a hod-carrier who left school at fourteen was going to somewhat ill-at-ease in court.
Or like the partners of the Yorkshire law firm who banked £136 million handling compensation cases for injured miners, most of whom received no more than a few hundred pounds after all of the fees were deducted.
Such was my suspicion about lawyers, and the kind of people many of them are.
And such, apparently, is now the settled opinion of science. Or at least it is according to a television programme I watched a couple of weeks ago.
It was called The Big Personality Test, this programme. It was on the BBC. You may have seen it.
What they did on it was to test people of various professions for agreeableness. Which, in current personality theory, is exactly what it sounds like. Agreeable people, scientifically speaking, are empathetic, considerate, friendly, generous and helpful. And disagreeable people, on the other hand, are competitive, manipulative, unhelpful, suspicious and often, frankly, unpleasant.
So anyway, they took the cameras into a City law firm, and tested all the lawyers for agreeableness. And then they split them into three groups according to how high or low their score, and got each group to go into one of three lifts (elevators, if you’re American) in the building’s glass atrium.
The first lift had in it the most agreeable City lawers. This, you must remember, is a relative term. Like ‘the least camp members of the Village People’. The second had in it the lawyers of medium agreeableness. And the third had in it what psychologists would call the nastiest pieces of work in the building.
“Now”, said the announcer, “Each lift will move up according to how successful its occupants have been in their careers.”
The ‘agreeable’ lift took a while to get going. Probably because no-one wanted to hurt anyone else’s feelings by being the first to press the button. And when it got going it promptly stopped – like the careers of the occupants – about one floor up. Cut to the inside of the lift, where the nice-but-unsuccessful lawyers gave embarrassed little shrugs and waves at the camera.
The second lift set off and did pretty well, getting about halfway up; and its occupants looked rightly pleased with their performance.
Then came the third lift. Up past the first lift it went; up past the second; and up and up it went until it reached the top floor. Because the most disagreeable lawyers, you see, were also by far and away the most successful at their profession.
And then they cut to the inside of the lift; and there they were, all beaming directly at the camera in that ‘Well, well, haven’t we done well for ourselves’ way for all the world to see.
And I remember thinking “Do you not know? Do you not realise what this says about you? Do you not care?”
But of course, that’s the point: they don’t.
Warwick Cairns is an author, he lives in Windsor, Berkshire.
Warwick Cairns
Beat will be following Warwick Cairns through these collumns on his journey to publication of new book “In Praise of Savagery”: the true story of a journey into uncharted land inhabited by murderous tribal warriors and ruled over by a bloodthirsty sultan – and the man, the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who lived to tell the tale. And the story of Warwick’s journey, fifty years later, to a mud hut in Africa to visit him at the end of his life.
More about Warwick Cairns can be found here
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