No Comebacks

'If there are any more disturbances from the body of the court, I shall cause those responsible for them to be removed,' said the magistrate.

'So you see, sir,' proceeded Chadwick, 'I began to brood. I wondered by what right an ill-informed clown too idle to check out his allegations could hide behind the ramparts of legal and financial resources afforded by a major newspaper and from that vantage point ruin a small man he had never even bothered to meet; a man who had worked hard all his life and as honestly as he could.'

'There are other recourses for an alleged libel,' observed the magistrate.

'There are indeed, sir,' said Chadwick, 'but as a man of the law yourself you must be aware that few nowadays can afford the immense burden of trying to take on the might of a national newspaper. So I tried to see the editor to explain, with facts and documents, that his employee had been utterly wrong and had not even made an attempt to be accurate. He refused to see me, then or ever. So I went to see Gaylord Brent personally. As they wouldn't let me see him in the office I went to his home.'

'To hit him on the nose?' said the magistrate. 'You may have been seriously libelled, but violence can never be the answer.'

'Gracious, no, sir,' said Chadwick in surprise. 'Not to hit him at all. To reason with him. To ask him to examine the evidence, which I believed would show him that what he had written was simply untrue.'

'Ah,' said the magistrate with interest. 'Motive at last. You went to his house to appeal to him?'

'That indeed I did, sir,' said Chadwick. He was as aware as the prosecution that, as he had not taken the oath and was speaking from the dock, he could not be cross-examined.

'And why did you not reason with him?' asked the magistrate.

Chadwick's shoulders slumped. 'I tried,' he said. 'But he just treated me with the same dismissive contempt that I had received at the newspaper offices. He knew I was too small a man, a man of no account; that I could not take on the mighty Courier.'

'Then what happened?' asked the magistrate.

'I confess something inside me snapped,' said Chadwick. 'I did the unforgivable. I dotted him one on the nose. For just one second in all my life I lost control.'

With that he sat down. The magistrate gazed across the court from his bench.

You, my friend, he thought privately, lost control like the Concorde flies on elastic bands. He could not, however, help recalling an incident years earlier when he had been savaged in the press over a judgement he had given in another court; his anger then had been compounded by the knowledge that he had later been proved to be right. Out loud he said, 'This is a very serious case. The court must accept that you felt you had been wronged, and even that you did not proceed from your home to Hampstead that morning with violence in mind. Nevertheless, you did hit Mr Brent, on his own doorstep. As a society, we simply cannot have private citizens feeling able to go around dotting the country's leading journalists on their noses. Fined one hundred pounds with fifty pounds costs.'

Bill Chadwick wrote out his cheque as the press benches emptied and the scribes pelted for telephones and taxis. As he came down the steps of the court building he felt himself seized by one arm.

He turned to find himself facing Gaylord Brent, pale with anger and trembling with shock.

'You bastard,' said the journalist. 'You can't bloody well get away with what you said in there.'

'I can, actually,' said Chadwick. 'Speaking from the dock, yes, I can. It's called absolute privilege.'

'But I'm not all those things you called me,' said Brent. 'You can't call another man things like that.'

'Why not?' said Chadwick mildly. 'You did.'

DUTY

THE CAR'S ENGINE had been spluttering for more than two miles and when it finally began to give up the ghost I found myself heading up a steep and winding hill. I prayed to all my Irish saints that it would not pack in at that point and leave me lost amid the wild beauties of the French countryside.

By my side Bernadette darted alarmed glances at me as I hunched over the wheel, pumping the accelerator to try and coax the last gasp of power from the failing machine. Something was evidently amiss beneath the bonnet and I was surely the most ignorant man on earth about such technological mysteries.

The old Triumph Mayflower just made the brow of the hill, and finally coughed into silence at the peak. I shut off the ignition, put on the handbrake and climbed out. Bernadette joined me and we gazed down the other side of the hill where the country road sloped away towards the valley.

It was undeniably beautiful that summer evening in the early fifties. The area of the Dordogne in those days was completely 'undiscovered' — by the smart set at least. It was an area of rural France where little had changed over the centuries. No factory chimneys or electricity pylons jutted to the sky; no motorways carved a scar through the verdant valley. Hamlets nestled beside narrow lanes, drawing their Jiving from the surrounding fields over which the harvest was drawn in creaking wooden carts hauled by pairs of oxen. It was this region that Bernadette and I had decided to explore in our elderly tourer that summer, our first holiday abroad; that is, beyond Ireland and England.

I sought my road map from the car, studied it and pointed to a spot on the northern fringes of the Dordogne valley.

'We are about here — I think,' I said.

Bernadette was peering down the road ahead of us. 'There's a village down there,' she said.

I followed her gaze. 'You're right.'

The spire of a church could be seen between the trees, then the glimpse of a barn roof. I glanced dubiously at the car and the hill.