THE PROBLEM OF PAIN

Boris Johnson talks to P.D. James

about crime, punishment

and the BBC BEFORE I meet P.D. James I stay up late with one of her 14 bestsellers, much warped from a poolside holiday. It's called Devices and Desires and it has the creepiest introit you have ever read. There's a girl who is walking at night along a Suffolk road having missed the last bus from the disco; and we know there is a killer on the roam, and she's jolly jumpy — and so are we all by the second page — until she sees another girl walking ahead of her, with long blonde hair and little dog and she thinks, phew, and runs up to join her.

At which point the stranger turns round and yee-ikes, she's all pale and sweaty and smells of drink — and she's not a girl at all of course. . . . But the bit that gets me is not so much that moment of horror, as the description of the instant of death: 'And now her brain was bursting and the pain in her chest, growing like a great red flower, exploded in a silent wordless scream of "Mummy! Mummy!" ' `Ah yes,' says Baroness James with satisfaction, 'the most terrifying of all my openings.' But — I hardly dare call her P.D., let alone Phyllis — but how did you come up with that red flower thing? Was it, perhaps, something you picked up when you were working in the Home Office in the department responsible for pathology?

`Oh no,' she says, 'No police doctor in the world can tell you about that. When I do know, I shan't be able to write about it, shall I?' The answer is that she just imagined the experience of death. It popped into her head; how, she cannot say,

`There's a kind of dichotomy with creative imagination,' she says, 'because with part of my mind I am that girl and I am walking down that lane, and everything she is experiencing I am experiencing and attempting to put into words, and there's another part of my mind that is absolutely detached, which is saying, "What about trees? It's more frightening to have some bushes where people can hide. Shall I have a car coming past? Yes, I will, in this great roar and flash of noise, to show this is real life, going uncaring past."' As for how she imagined the girl on the road, she says, it was simple. 'There can't be any woman living who hasn't experi- enced the fear of the unknown.' Phyllis Dorothy James has just turned 80, which gives a fan an excuse to interview her.

I notice that she double-locks the door after she has let me in to her Holland Park house. Is she more fearful now than she was? 'I had absolutely no fear walking around London in the blackout during the war. The world has changed in the most extraordinary way,' she says, as she makes us coffee in the kitchen, and explains not just the prevalence of mugging, but the viciousness of the crimes.

`Men are being brought up without fathers, without adequate role models. There are these estates where there is a great deal of lawlessness, and much of it has to do with drink. It was very interesting to see how liberal we are in our attitudes to drunkenness, and the response that was shown to the PM's son.' We are altogether too soft on alcohol, says the former magis- trate, since it is much more pernicious than drugs.

Upstairs, we sit on the sofa, and implaca- bly she presses a piece of shortbread on me. `Go on,' she says with muttered urgen- cy, 'get your blood sugar up.' In fact, she continues, one of the reasons women write so many crime novels is that the world is so violent and unpleasant. 'I think psychologi- cally it's a very reassuring job, not only to read but to write, because it does affirm the sanctity of life and it is about murder coming into an ordered society and destroying it, and the restoration of order; and women have a huge psychological interest in order because of bringing chil- dren into the world.'

P.D. James was elevated to the peerage in 1991, and famously had a career in the NHS and the Home Office, and raised two daughters before, at 42, she gave the world the sleuth Adam Dalglish, who writes poet- ry — though exactly what kind of poetry is the one mystery never fully explained. She rises early to write fast, in longhand, and then dictates the results to her secretary.

She thinks there has never been a tougher time for women who want to have children and a career. 'When my mother had her children — and I came from a lower-middle-class family, so by today's standards we were poor, probably very poor — there were always elderly women available, aunts and so on, who could come and take you out for the afternoon.'

That had changed by the time she had her own, and life was especially hard for her because her husband went away to fight in the Navy and came back incapacitated, mentally unable to work. He died at the age of 44.

Does her interest in motive derive from studying her children? She laughs. `They are pretty elemental objects as far as I am concerned. I have always thought they were savages.' I wonder whether she thinks we are all, in fact, pretty savage underneath.

She considers, her dark brown eyes contemplating the fine porcelain object — a kind of orange cat, I think — on the table. 'I think there is badness in all of us. Yes. I would take the religious view that we are all in need of divine grace, but I don't think we are all capa- ble of murder, and I do think there are people who seem to be naturally good. I've met them and they seem to be born generous, kind, stoical, self-effacing, loving, just generally rather good. Others torture animals from childhood; they take pleasure in cruelty from really quite an early age. They seem to be born with a greater propensity to evil than the rest of us.'

But then is it right to punish them, it they are born evil? 'That's really the most difficult of all questions. We have to believe that we have free will. We have to assume that unless people are mad, they have some control.'

I wonder whether people can be made worse. What about the corrupting influ- ence of television, sex and violence on the screen? 'It's a much less gentle world than it was when I was a child, and, all right, when I was a child, people did die because they couldn't afford a doctor and it wasn't a just world, but it was a world in which people felt safer, and somehow there was a sense of mutual kindness and community, and children could walk around without fear, which suggests to me that this greater licence has had the effect of coarsening our sensibilities.

`There's some control over television, but there's no control over the Internet at all. You can infiltrate a paedophile ring, or learn how to make bombs, or just sit there enjoying a whole evening's pornography. It's astonishing. It's one of the most depressing things that one of the so-called ideas of our Prime Minister is that there should be a computer on every desk, and not a library in every school.'

P.D. James was for many years a gover- nor of the BBC. What does she think of the output now? Is it a wholesome influ- ence? 'I think it is very uneven. There is less talent, particularly in comedy. Comedy is quite atrocious. It relies almost entirely on double entendres, on sexual jokes. Peo- ple don't seem to be capable of writing comedy any more. I miss what used to be extremely good individual plays.

`Time and again I open the paper or the Radio Times and I think, "But there is nothing here, nothing that I want to see." I will not stay up to watch Newsnight, and even the news — is that really the most Important thing that has happened in the world in the last 24 hours? Extraordinary.'

What about Greg Dyke, the new direc- tor-general? 'I think the jury's rather out on Greg Dyke,' she says tactfully, noting that the field of candidates was not very strong. But she does worry that the BBC is increasingly biased, and that Dyke's dona- tion to the Labour party has not helped that impression.

`Certainly the result of that is to feel that the BBC is slightly skewing the picture. I feel it especially over Europe. I feel they're pro-Europe. I'm sure of that. There's a great deal of subtle propaganda that's going on that's pro-Europe, and I feel quite strongly about this, because nowhere really have we been given the facts on both sides.

`What I find depressing is that over and over again the argument is this: we will go in when it is economically right. I feel, Boris, that there are other things in the world than economics. I can see that for big business there are advantages. I want to know, what's it going to do for our insti- tutions, what's it going to do for our sys- tem of law, our system of welfare, our pensions? What's it going to do for the power of Parliament? What's it going to do for the UK as a separate kingdom? I'm very much against being drawn into a unit- ed states of Europe, and I'm very much against drawing a parallel with the USA. The USA is one country. We're not going to be Europeans in quite the same way.

`I voted to go into Europe, and I speak for a lot of people who feel the same way. We were told at the time, "You are not voting to go into a federal Europe." I can't remember that we were ever asked, do you want the situation we have got into now?'

She doesn't read much crime fiction, apart from novels sent to her by her friends, such as Dick Francis. 'I have the Kingsley Amis letters by my bed, and I am reading them in conjunction with his son's book [Martin Amis's Experience]. I rather deplored that book. I thought making use in the book of the death of his cousin Lucy Partington who was killed by the Wests I couldn't imagine that he'd had a great deal to do with her life, or that she was the kind of woman he would have had much sympathy for. Somehow I find that sort of thing distasteful. I thought it was an extremely egotistical book. . . . '

Oh, I say, but he's a brilliant writer.

`There's some clever writing, but he's not the sort of writer who appeals very much to women. There's very little human- ity, very little humanity.'

I find I agree with almost everything P.D. James says, though I feel a bit awed, in the end, by the standards she sets, the goodness she seems to require in others. Blair she finds charming (he said he liked her books), but puzzling in his vacuity.

`I suppose I am always hankering for a politician who probably now doesn't exist, a leader who is a statesman as well as a politician, who has immense moral as well as political stature.' As I rise to leave, she is determined to leave me with her person- al maxim.

`I think as I grow older there is no point in agonising over the eternal questions to which we have no answer: the nature of God, the suffering of the innocent, the problem of pain. I think it was Iris Mur- doch who was asked what was important in life, and she said, "To love well, to work well, and to try to be good." ' I repeat it. It sounds like a tall order. She repeats it, too.

To love well, to work well, to try to be good. That's the plan then, I say, and promise I'll give it a whirl.