My favourite moment during my six-year watch on Death Row came fairly early on. I had been running the stiffs' page of the Times for a month or two when I found myself in a London club with an MI6 officer. My spy companion and I were doing no harm to anyone - or that at least was my intention. Coming down the club staircase to lunch, though, I happened to spot a distinguished novelist hardly in the first flush of youth, who was somewhat shakily making his own way up. It was then that I made what Edgar Lustgarten used to call in his radio talks about murder trials my "fatal mistake".
Remembering that I had written to the same novelist a week or two earlier and had not yet got an answer, I stopped in my tracks and turned towards him perhaps a little too decisively. My MI6 friend - a veteran of various cloak-and-dagger exploits - still maintains that he has seldom seen a man so terrified. "As you bore down upon him, he visibly shrank, looking as if he felt his last hour had come." Such, I suppose, is the fear commonly felt of a recording - not to say an avenging - angel.
Being an obits editor is very bad for the character. In an age when we're all constantly told the one thing we must never be is "judgemental", there you are night after night being exactly that. It was probably easier in the past when the motto de mortuis nil nisi bunkum still held sway. But, thanks to the founding father of the modern craft, Hugh Massingberd, that has largely now gone out of the window. Truth today generally prevails over tact, candour over charity. I would certainly defend the new dispensation - while still being very much aware that there is not yet anything like a level playing field. Those whom Massingberd used to call "the moustaches" - the products of the armed services - still receive kid-glove treatment, if only because the pieces about them are nearly all written by products of their own loyalty culture. Politicians, civil servants and, perhaps above all, clerics tend to fare much worse. One recent notice in the Times about an Anglican bishop even got denounced from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral. I'm tempted to think of that as my own proudest memorial.
Within the trade itself any newspaper obituaries department is generally regarded as the graveyard of journalistic ambition. In Patrick Marber's fine play Closer, Dan - the obituarist - speaks openly of having been sent to "outer Siberia". It's never seemed to me immediately obvious why this should be so. It can only, I assume, be the closeness to the fact of death that does it. Who believes we've yet got rid of the last phobia?
The unforgivable sin, of course, is to bury someone alive. The Daily Telegraph did it at least once in my time. Although the luckless subject (a former Tory minister) was - like poor King Hussein last week - already at death's door, it found itself covered with confusion and driven to the resort of having to produce two successive obituaries within a fortnight (the second, as it happens, notably more fulsome than the first).
Still, as Willie Whitelaw would say, "mustn't gloat". We, after all, once did the same, if with a more decent interval. The only man I know to have been the subject of two separate obituaries in the Times was the BBC sports commentator Rex Alston. He got his first one in 1983, when very much alive and kicking, and his second - in my time - in 1994. The latter notice recorded that he had reacted with great good humour to the first.
One thing never ceased to surprise me - the number of people who sent in their own obits. Nearly always accompanied by a letter containing some such arch remark as "Since I do not seem to be getting any younger, I thought the enclosed might be of some assistance to you", they invariably and unfailingly amounted to anthems of self-praise. Some of the phrases have even stayed with me - "a man of unusual charm", "his gifts never received the recognition they deserved", "it was his misfortune that others did not always appreciate his essential warmness of heart". They all went straight into the WPB. But what a curious and vulnerable thing human nature is.
The gender-sensitive will, no doubt, note that none of the examples given above comes from a woman. I suspect that women do view their own characters more clearly than men - but that is not the real reason. I laboured day after day to try to get more women on to the obituaries page. But it was an uphill struggle - in an average week I was lucky if four out of 20 notices were about women.
The explanation is that an obituaries page necessarily reflects the state of society as it stood some 30, 40 or even 50 years ago. And in those days there were precious few career women. My post- millennium successors should have better fortune.
I retire this week. Is there, I wonder, life after dealing with death? I owe to a resourceful friend a suggestion that I may well act upon. In this era of lifestyle magazines, why should one category of people be ruled out from participating in the general bonanza? The homes and interior furnishings of the dead are surely just as interesting as those of the living.
Why should they not have a glossy weekly periodical as well? I have already thought of the title. It will be called Cheerio!
