Defending Mr Jefferies

Aweek​ before Christmas in 2010, a young woman called Joanna Yeates disappeared from her home in Bristol. I remember first hearing about it on the car radio, my attention snagged, as it always is when Bristol is on the news, because that’s where I went to school. The fact that Bristol is a big place has never prevented me thinking I know it well, but it was when the reporter mentioned Clifton that I was reeled in. Clifton? I had been there. Indeed, I had lived there between 1977 and 1987. It was where I went to school, arriving from Belgium aged nine, my English imperfect, accented, full of holes. I think of the three years I spent at the prep school as the damp, dark, dry-rotted basement of myself: somehow foundational but not to be visited without protective gear.

In 2010, as my children chatted in the car on the way back from the playground, I made a note to look up the story when I got home. Instead, I forgot, and it wasn’t until the next day that I read about it. The photographs were a shock: not only was that Clifton, but it was a street I knew. I really had been ‘there’. I walked along that street twice a day for five years. I had been in that building, in one of those flats. I could hardly have been much more there.

What came next was completely disorientating. As the neighbours were interviewed by the press, I recognised one of my former schoolmasters. After almost 25 years, he looked the same, according to that pickling process that seems unique to one’s old teachers. He was speaking to the cameras as one of several vox pops, but there was nothing pop about his vox: just as I recalled, he spoke in precise, perfect sentences, despite being flustered. The mot juste every time, whether discussing a George Herbert poem or ordering in a restaurant. His voice was deep, his words perfectly enunciated if a little over-emphasised from years of teaching. He spoke briefly and discreetly, and obviously did not enjoy the sort of attention being trained on him and his neighbourhood.

Over his shoulder was a tote bag advertising a bookshop, one of the many elements of his ‘profile’ that would count against him once the media began to cast him as Yeates’s killer. As so often in these cases, unlike on TV, when the actual culprit was arrested a month later he was not the scapegoated singleton, loner or oddball of indeterminable sexuality, but a heterosexual man with a girlfriend and a good job. But at this early point in the unfolding story, Yeates’s body hadn’t been found and it wasn’t yet widely known that my old schoolmaster was her landlord and her neighbour. He was at this stage just a local, a passer-by, a passer-through. I wondered what it was like for him to be so close to the eye of the storm: what it was like for him to be there, in the thick of it, in the thrill of it. I couldn’t have imagined how terribly that there-ness would play out for him.

Chris Jefferies had been my English teacher at Clifton College, where I continued my studies, and we stayed in touch for a while after I left school. It was Chris I rang in 1987 to find out my A-level results. I was in Bucharest at the time, and to phone outside the country we had to book a slot via the Romanian telephone exchange. Chris was the teacher, more than any other, who taught me to read and love literature. And I was very lucky with my English teachers: they included Brian Worthington, a former pupil of Leavis, and, for a short but inspiring time, David Lambert, a man who spoke about poetry and nature with such passion that it was no surprise when he left Clifton to become a gardener. He later c0-founded the Parks Agency and is now a compelling advocate for Extinction Rebellion.

Jefferies taught with a mixture of forensic attention to language and eloquent enthusiasm. Though no Leavisite (too European-minded and too interested in film and theatre, with tastes that were inclusive but scrupulous in their inclusions), he was rigorous but not didactic. He was a close reader of words, but also of shots and scenes in films. He loved the theatre and loved it as theatre: lighting, staging, the building, painting, the shifting of props. I liked and respected him – we all did (or so I assumed) – because he showed us the world outside and beyond the syllabus. One occasion stands out. For what must have been a pre-O-level English class, he wheeled in a huge TV and video player and put on Fanny and Alexander. A class of twenty-odd 14-year-old boys making innuendo-laden gags about a ‘Swedish film’ was not the most promising of audiences for a slow-moving 188-minute masterpiece of European cinema. But we watched it for the first 45 minutes (an attention-span measured, back then, by the length of an episode of The A-Team), until the lesson ended. Jefferies told us he would show the rest of the film to anyone interested after school. Anyone interested … yeah right … as if we’d come back in our free time … But later that afternoon, at least half the class was back. There were countless instances like this.

Looking back on my schooldays, I think there was something quietly rebellious about the way he taught, not just in the homeopathic doses of subversion in the works he chose, from outside the syllabus, to accompany the set texts, but also in his after-school activity. Clifton had a Cadet Force, in which schoolboys would dress up as soldiers. It was much prized by a number of pupils and teachers because it formalised – gave a certain order to – the otherwise sprawling bullying. Teachers such as Jefferies were far away from all of that. He was one of a small group who didn’t go to chapel and didn’t referee sports. One of the facets of his character that was later repeated in the papers as evidence of his being sinister was his dislike of sport.

Those of us whose parents had got us off the toytown-army gig for ideological, religious or health reasons, or who had simply refused to take part, had nonetheless to undertake what was known as a ‘Monday Afternoon Activity’. Jefferies ran what we called ‘Theatre Service’. It was like a version of the Foreign Legion for misfits: the asthmatics and the diabetics, the boys with the hearing aids and the boys on crutches, the epileptic, the attention-challenged, the marginal, the sad and the emotionally combustible. We loved it. We got changed into scrappy clothes, and as we passed the lines of boys playing soldiers we ran a gauntlet of abuse. Encouraged by the teachers who oversaw the Cadet Force and had ranks in the Territorial Army (‘commanding officers’), the Monday afternoon military whistled and shouted insults. My favourite was ‘Theatre poofs!’ crooned in a falsetto voice. Homophobia was rampant both at school and in the insinuations about Jefferies that came later. We’d make our way to one of Bristol’s theatres, sometimes with CJ (which is what everyone called him) driving the college van, and set to work building sets, cleaning up stages, fiddling with the lighting. There was tea, coffee, biscuits, friendly people. Sometimes we got to see rehearsals. We often finished early, and would walk back through Bristol by ourselves, smoking or having a drink, and we’d return as the cadets were taking off their boots and massaging their blistered feet after three hours of pointlessly marching about being shouted at.

I mention these things – foreign films, the theatre, book bags, poetry – because much of what was great about Chris Jefferies was used to attack him and destroy his reputation when the media, unimpeded by the police and maybe even aided by them, decided he must be Joanna Yeates’s murderer. The things that made him such an interesting teacher, such a thoughtful and articulate lover of literature, music, art and film, and such a completely individual character, were used to turn him into a monster.

The scale of the vilification would take too long to encompass here and anyhow it is better to read Jefferies’s witness statement to the Leveson Inquiry, which is moving as much for the composure and dignity with which he expresses himself as it is for what he describes. I had lost touch with him a year or two after leaving university, but what was most apparent to me from where I stood – watching TV almost twenty years after our last meeting – was how quickly the media went to work. The rumour, innuendo and lies were already in circulation before he was arrested at 7 a.m. on 30 December 2010, five days after Yeates’s body was found. The day before, he had been stopped in the street by journalists and TV reporters with cameras and quizzed on the contents of the two (voluntary) statements he had previously made to the police. It’s still not clear how the press got hold of that confidential – and potentially evidentiary – material.

I followed the case closely, not just because of Chris, or because it was a little of my own past that was coming to light, but because I recognised the names of some of the ex-pupils and teachers who spoke to the press: those who were happy to get stuck into the lying and smearing, but also those who defended him. I kept getting reeled in by things I half-recognised, things that had, in some way, ‘happened’ but not like that, not in the way they were being presented. I had been there, but I was no longer sure where or what there meant. For example, the Sun reported that ‘an ex-pupil of Joanna Yeates murder suspect Chris Jefferies yesterday claimed he was obsessed with death. The former student said eccentric English teacher Jefferies made them watch films about Nazi death camps – and scared some children with his macabre fascination.’ (Note the move from ‘student’ to ‘children’, and the way the passage taps into a whole substratum of mob fear on the turn of a word.) I remembered that occasion because I had been there. Jefferies, with some other teachers, arranged a screening of Resnais’s Night and Fog in the school theatre. The film was contextualised and, so far as I can recall, attendance was voluntary. As for ‘obsessed with death’, it would be quite difficult to find an English literature course in which death didn’t play a prominent part. The day after his arrest, one of my former classmates spoke to the Telegraph. The article was headlined ‘Joanna Yeates Murder: Suspect Christopher Jefferies was eccentric with love of poetry’ and my classmate was quoted as saying: ‘He was particularly keen on French films.’ If innocence can look this bad, who needs guilt? Jefferies became the nation’s High-Culture Hermit-Ogre.

Then there were the outright lies: the claims, for instance, that he made lewd comments or asked about our sexual experiences. Schools are small and rumour-filled communities, and not only did I not hear of anything remotely like this, none of my friends did either. Students know which teachers go in for this sort of thing, for questioning and touching students, and Jefferies wasn’t one of them. To me, and to others who had been taught by him, events seemed to be happening in a sort of binocular vision: on the one hand, there was material we recognised, narratives composed, in part at least, of familiar facts; on the other, there were lies, travesties, inventions. Looking back, I imagine that telling lies was easy because the first defence against lies had been broken by the selective arrangement of pieces of fact (this film, that poem, that piece of music). That’s the way the tabloids work and, on occasion, the broadsheets too. We think the truth is enough, that it doesn’t need defending – it is the defence. We think that once known, the truth will win. But the monstering of Jefferies showed me that truth and untruth were not regarded as opposites but notches on a continuum. The years since 2011 have only proved that to be more urgently and more damagingly true.

Many of Jefferies’s ex-pupils followed the case closely. We felt we were involved somehow. We had been there. I kept seeing pictures of places and people I knew. I read about film screenings and theatre performances I had attended, classrooms, even individual lessons I had sat in. I could remember the smells, the chalk dust on fingers, the whump of three hundred backsides rising at the bell followed by the sound of three hundred chairs being dragged across lino. Maybe I was still there? Everything was familiar, but distorted, as though seen underwater: Jefferies himself, the other teachers, a few pupils I recognised, the school buildings, the streets, the classroom where we sat in what’s known today as ‘boardroom seating’, the echoing corridors.

Every now and then someone would emerge with their ‘take’ on Jefferies and I noted that, by and large, those who had positive things to say about him (‘engaging’, ‘memorable’, ‘he seemed to break the mould,’ ‘I still remember those classes years later as being really fascinating’) were named. Those who spoke against him, on the whole, were not. I knew some of them, recognised the names of others, but it wasn’t just the school, its staff and ex-pupils. The neighbours joined in on the act, anonymously, of course: Jefferies was a ‘peeping Tom’; he was nicknamed ‘Hannibal Lecter’; he was a stalker.

But Clifton’s former headmaster, Mr Andrews, a pompous historian I disliked and with whom I had several run-ins, behaved with honour and defended Jefferies in the very thick of the monstering. While Jefferies was still in police custody, he not only vouched for his character but stated that in all his years as headmaster there had never been a complaint against him or rumours about his behaviour. To speak up as he did would have taken some doing – not least because the headmaster of Clifton at the time of the murder had made an extraordinarily curt and unpleasant public statement that took Jefferies’s guilt for granted and fed into the witch-hunt. (Jefferies was no longer at the school; he had retired in 2001.) Five years later, that headmaster was forced to resign after mishandling a genuine case of paedophilia. Stuart Andrews, who retired from Clifton in 1990, has my very belated respect.

Luckily for Chris Jefferies, he didn’t own a TV (this was also part of what made him ‘strange’), and as for newspapers, ‘I buy a paper if there’s something I particularly want to read.’ In his statement to the Leveson Inquiry, he said that when he finally learned – from an article in the Financial Times in October 2011 for which he was interviewed – the extent of his vilification at the time of his arrest and afterwards, ‘it was one of the most distressing experiences I have had in my life.’ After his release, some friends took him in: for his own safety he needed to change his appearance and stay away from his flat. The police didn’t drop their charges for another two months, long after Vincent Tabak had been arrested and charged with Yeates’s murder. Friends gave Jefferies refuge, shielded him from what was being said about him, kept him away from the news. But at some point, he was bound to find out at least some of what had been said.

I have often wondered what hurt most. The crassness of the lies? The malice of the distortions? The countless smaller betrayals by colleagues and ex-pupils who let themselves be quoted or misquoted in exchange for a piece of the action, or maybe even some money? All of those, yes. But worst of all, I imagine, was going back over his life and his decades-long career in the context of those articles, thinking of his friends and colleagues, his pupils and ex-pupils, and asking: is that how people saw me? Is that how I appeared?

He must have stood outside himself and looked in, and questioned what he thought he knew about his life and his relationships. I suspect it was only once the exonerations were made official, the (financial) compensation paid, the liars and attention-seekers muted or shamed into silence, that the damage could be assessed. When you are forced outside yourself to that degree, it can be difficult to get back inside. I imagine Chris looking at his life and at himself, both as an ‘I’ and as a ‘he’, across a dangerous faultline.

My recollection, for what it’s worth, is that none of the smears in the press reflected the way he was seen, or the way anyone I knew felt about him, at the time. But the media weren’t interested in that story. When Greg Reardon, Joanna Yeates’s boyfriend, condemned the ‘character assassination’ of Jefferies, journalists either didn’t report that part of his statement or found ways of deflecting the criticism away from themselves and onto the ‘ghouls’ and ‘internet warriors’.

I wrote a letter to a large national newspaper on 3 January 2011 (the so-called quality papers weren’t much better than their tabloid cousins) saying that I had been taught by Jefferies and that I remembered him as an excellent and generous-minded teacher. I specifically addressed the insinuations about his behaviour and teaching on the grounds that I was, that I had been, there. I sent the letter twice and included my address and phone numbers in case they wanted to check my veracity, or at any rate my existence. But there was no reply, no acknowledgment and no publication.

It has occurred to me in the years since Joanna Yeates’s murder that the Chris Jefferies story is not only a story about impressions and assumptions and the irrepressible desire in the media to demonise and humiliate the other. It is also a story about our attitude to culture. The things Jefferies loved – books, music, theatre, opera, architecture, poetry – were, in the hands of the press, weapons to be used against him. They were evidence. And all the more so because he tried to communicate them to the pupils he taught, could not help but communicate them, in a way few other tutors and lecturers I encountered at school and then at university ever did. He didn’t just ‘teach’ these things; he showed us what it meant to be changed by them, to make them part of ourselves.

I have often wondered why those ex-pupils, colleagues and neighbours said what they said. Were they fed words like ‘odd’, ‘strange’, ‘weird’? Did they really think showing a Jean-Luc Godard film or reading Browning indicated murderous potential? I wondered, too, about the wild, unsubstantiated allegations of stalking and sexual voyeurism. Where did they come from? Were the distortions and lies part of the speakers’ attempts to make sense of what they were being told or was there a thrill in staking a claim on a lurid national story, of being able to say I was there, I was in that classroom, I lived in that building, I knew a murderer.

One of the films we watched with Jefferies was The Go-Between with Alan Bates and Julie Christie. We also read the book by L.P. Hartley, though I can’t recall which we did first. I was influenced by the phrase ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ It has become a bit of a cliché, but I always liked the present tense in that quotation: the is and, especially, the do. Whatever they were doing in the past, they’re still doing it, and they’re doing it right now. I’ve never been able to let go of that idea. The past isn’t some over-and-done-with thing: it’s still wet, malleable. It may not be the main track we’re on, which we call the present (as in the present tense, a matter of time, but also as in present and correct, a question of place, of being in place, another version of being there), but the past is there too, a branch line, and it has its own traffic, its own freight, its own timetables and stops.

When I first heard the news of Joanna Yeates’s murder, I had been trying and failing to write something about my schooldays. I had settled on making it a memoir but one of the reasons the book kept stalling was that I couldn’t decide whether to write it in the first person or the third. It then came to me to write it in both, with one character in the present being ‘I’, and his childhood self being ‘he’. At the book’s halfway point, it would become clear to the reader that the he and the I were one and the same; or rather, two and the same. After watching the Yeates case unfold, I decided to return to the sidelined book. Now it would be a detective novel. A detective would be investigating his old teacher, accused of a crime he didn’t commit. The contemporary story would be told in the present tense, with the detective relaying events in the first person: trying to solve the crime, revisiting his school, meeting his former teachers and classmates. At the same time, on the other side of the tense-divide, his child-self would be there in the third person, part of the story, a young, confused witness to the truth that became the distorted allegations against his former teacher. Like the two ends of a bridge, the first and third person would meet across the thirty-year gap – or fail to. The book would need to make clear almost from the start that the teacher was not guilty. The ‘case’ to be solved was not so much the murder as the identity of the detective, a person whose past and present do not, and may never quite, meet.

I had to be careful not to provoke any of the traditional thrillerish suspense, which, in its anticipatory energy, its forward-driving tack, would upset the balance of the tenses that gave the book its purpose. When the book was translated, it was taken up by publishers who either placed it in their detective-novel series or advertised it as a thriller. Judging from many of the reviews, it was a case of false advertising. People complained it was slow-moving. ‘Slow-moving’? I had failed – I wanted it static. I didn’t want time to be a fast-moving stream, the time I’m interested in is more like an estuary, like the Avon Gorge seen from Clifton Suspension Bridge: a counterpoint of drain and glut, crosscurrents and backsliding, mud and silt.

I did not wish to hurt Jefferies and I made my character – Mr Wolphram – sufficiently different from him in appearance, habits and tastes. I changed the location, too, though Clifton Suspension Bridge plays a big role in the book. I spent a lot of my writing time examining my own motivations. In some selfish and appropriative way, I felt it was my story too. For three years, I abandoned the novel altogether and thought myself somehow unforgivable. I didn’t lie about Jefferies, but I made his story mine, or latched mine onto his. Like those people who spoke to the press, I was projecting myself into the drama. I was fearful, too, of adding to the mountain of English boarding school fiction, the genre by which the British upper classes say to the world and to the rest of the country: ‘If you think what we did to you is bad, wait until you see what we’ve done to our children.’

But I was still thinking about it in 2015 and decided to try again. I wrote the opening scene, in which a character who is not me interviews a suspect who is not Chris Jefferies. I decided that the letter I had sent to the newspaper in 2011, and which had never been published, would appear verbatim, albeit with the names changed. I liked the idea that, like Monet mixing grains of sand into the paint as he worked on his seascapes, I could use a bit of the ‘real’, a bit of my own brute being there, in the story. One of my friends later suggested that if the letter had been published, I wouldn’t have written the novel – that the novel was fiction doing the work of reality, paying reality’s debt in fictional currency. I think that’s true.

In 2016, I was invited to a bookshop in Bath to read from my memoir, Other People’s Countries. I had written to Chris in 2011 but, not knowing his address, sent my letter to the school. It never reached him. Arriving at the bookshop in Bath, I recognised him immediately, though he now looked very different from the seemingly unchanged person I had watched on TV. It was an emotional moment, not just because I hadn’t seen him for so long and because I knew what had happened to him, but because I had begun to write a book which might, in its own way, add to what he had been through.

The conversation was a little halting on my part and haunted by the fear that I was being duplicitous in not telling him what I was up to. Bath was the closest I had come to Bristol for many years, and the journey by train had been nervy and introspective. As we talked, I told Chris I was working on something that would interest him. Did he already know? Maybe, but he simply said he’d be interested, when I was ready, to hear about it. I think he knew all along, but when I showed him the final draft of the novel and he told me to go ahead and publish it, it was clear that I was also repaying another debt: this time to him.