1. 2 The Inquest
I’d never given evidence at an inquest before, so I was quite nervous – although I tried not to show it. I was one of the first witnesses, so I was able to relax a bit afterwards and take in everything that went on. I suppose I probably ought to have gone back to my normal work straight away, but I wanted to see the outcome so I stayed around and hoped that nobody would question where I was.
The main evidence came from the doctor who had performed the post mortem examination. He went in to the injuries in some detail and I could see that the parents found his description quite upsetting. I wondered why the coroner didn’t tell him to confine himself to giving an opinion as to how the boy – which, at just turned twenty-one, was really all he was – had died. Cause of death was multiple injuries as a result of falling from a height. There was no evidence of any injuries inconsistent with having been caused by the fall.
The mother and the girl (the one that I assumed was the boy’s sister) didn’t contribute to the proceedings. They just sat looking shell-shocked, as if they couldn’t really believe what was happening. The boy’s father, however, gave a very dignified speech in which he described his son as hardworking and conscientious and told the court that he had never said or done anything to suggest that he might take his own life. He mentioned that he was their only child – which made me wonder who the girl could be – and talked eloquently about how their lives would be changed by losing him, just as they had been expecting to see him graduate and go out into the world as an adult.
He spoke in a strong Newcastle accent, which I sometimes found hard to understand. The only experience of listening to Geordies that I’d had at that time was the Likely Lads on TV. Stanley Corbridge was much broader than Rodney Bewes and James Bolam. In those days, the BBC used to tone down regional accents, thinking that people wouldn’t understand them.
I knew from the police reports on the case that he was a welder who worked in the shipyards, so I was surprised that he was such a good speaker. My father was a Baptist Pastor in a rather nice, middle-class area of Oxford and I hadn’t had much dealings with working class people when I was growing up, so I was taken aback to discover that an uneducated man could speak in public and hold the attention of an audience for twenty minutes with only a few notes. What I didn’t know then was that he was a Methodist Local Preacher and so had plenty of experience of preparing and delivering a message.
I should have twigged when, towards the end, he gave thanks for his son’s short life and said that he hoped that his parents’ pride in his achievements had not been a factor in making him unable to face the prospect that he might have failed his final exams. He finished by saying something about meeting again at the “heavenly banquet, prepared for all mankind” and then asking his son to forgive them if they had unwittingly put him under pressure to succeed. The whole speech put me very much in mind of my own father’s sermons, and I found myself comparing the two men. My father was older – I discovered later that Stan and his wife had been childhood sweethearts and had married when still in their teens – and much less strongly-built and muscular, but they both had the same quiet confidence in what they were saying and the same air of caring very much about things.
The verdict was inevitable: suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed (although, by what, no one seemed to be able to say).
I left the inquest feeling puzzled. I had gone in expecting to hear that the young man, whose broken body I had stood over in the street, was a neurotic boy with a history of nervous illness – probably caused by being pushed too hard by parents and teachers who had unreasonable expectations – who habitually panicked over examinations and probably drank too much or took drugs. This suicide victim didn’t fit the pattern at all. Everyone agreed that he seemed happy with life and confident in his own ability – but not over-confident. He was just a few months older that I was and appeared on the face of it to be very similar to me in many ways – which was rather disconcerting. As for his parents, his father gave the impression of being proud of his son, but not in a way that might give him cause to be afraid of the reaction that failure might provoke. The whole setup made no sense to me.
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