What Is Writ

If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

CHARLES FREEMAN, Senior Warder, H.M. Prison Oxford. Aged sixty-one. THE REVEREND PETER ELLIS, Acting Prison Chaplain. Aged twenty-four.

SETTING

The ante-room to the Condemned Cell, H.M. Prison Oxford.

Monday, 27th July 1931. Six-fifteen in the morning.

The room is small and without comfort. A deal table, scarred by years of use. Two wooden chairs. A high barred window through which a column of early light falls on the stone floor. A clock on the wall. On the table: two chipped enamel mugs of tea, a well-thumbed Bible, the Prison Library List, and a small black ledger. The heat is already considerable for the hour. The air has the weight of unbroken summer.

From beyond the thick stone walls: the faint ordinary sounds of a city beginning its day. A cart-horse on cobbles. Market traders calling. A church bell, somewhere distant and unhurried.

CHARLES FREEMAN sits upright in one of the chairs, in full uniform, his keys at his belt. He is heavy-set, grey-haired, and still as iron. He holds the Prison Library List in both hands but is not reading it. His tea is untouched.

THE REVEREND PETER ELLIS sits across the table from him, in his clerical collar, his Book of Common Prayer closed on his knee. He is neat to a fault, and slightly too awake for the hour. He glances at the clock. Then away. Then back again.

The clock reads six-fifteen.

A silence of perhaps two full minutes. Then ELLIS speaks, carefully, as a man tests ice before he steps on it.

ELLIS. One rather wonders whether the market men out there know. What day this is. What the hour means.

FREEMAN. (Not looking up from the Library List.) They know.

Silence.

ELLIS. Yes. Of course they do.

He opens the Book of Common Prayer, reads a line or two, and closes it again without conviction. He picks up his mug and sets it back down without drinking. He looks at the clock. Six-sixteen.

FREEMAN. (Still holding the Library List. He sets it down slowly on the table, then looks across at ELLIS.) If you could rewrite any book’s ending. Which would you choose?

ELLIS. (A pause. Something like relief crosses his face, the relief of a man offered solid ground.) Good Lord. (He straightens in his chair.) One would need a moment to think properly about that.

FREEMAN. Take it.

FREEMAN picks up his mug of tea at last. He holds it without drinking, both hands round it, looking at nothing.

ELLIS thinks. His eyes go to the middle distance. Then he leans forward slightly.

ELLIS. Hardy, I think. I keep returning to Hardy. The man had a remarkable and rather savage gift for the worst possible ending. Jude the Obscure. The whole machinery of it, the long slow accumulation of suffering… (He gestures with one hand, then stops himself.) I would rewrite the ending so that something was earned by it. Not happiness, I am not a fool about these things. But something that justified the long road through. Some mercy in the workings of it.

FREEMAN. You’d have it come out right.

ELLIS. I would have it come out just. There is a difference.

FREEMAN. (After a beat.) There is.

He drinks his tea. Sets the mug down.

FREEMAN. What would you choose?

ELLIS. … I just said.

FREEMAN. (Evenly.) I mean what would I.

ELLIS. (Corrects himself quickly.) Yes. Of course. What would you?

FREEMAN. (Looking at him evenly.) I’ve never finished one.

ELLIS. (Startled.) A novel?

FREEMAN. Any sort of novel. Started a few, over the years. Never got to the last page.

ELLIS. (With genuine care.) Were you never a great reader?

FREEMAN. No.

Silence. He sets the mug down.

FREEMAN. The lad was. My boy. He’d read anything you put under his nose. Used to tell me how they ended.

Silence. ELLIS recognises it as one he should not disturb.

FREEMAN. That was enough for me. How they came out.

ELLIS. (Very quietly.) How long ago did you lose him?

FREEMAN. Twenty-eight. His lungs. (A pause.) He was twenty-four.

ELLIS looks down at his own hands. He is twenty-four. He does not say so.

FREEMAN. (Not unkindly.) Drink your tea, Reverend. It’ll go cold in this heat.

ELLIS obeys, cups both hands around the mug. The clock: six-nineteen. Outside, a horse passes steadily on the cobbles, getting louder and then fading. The city is waking.

ELLIS. (After a while.) You asked the question, though. About endings.

FREEMAN. Aye.

ELLIS. You had a reason for it.

FREEMAN. (A long pause.) Aye.

He reaches across and draws the small black ledger towards him. He does not open it yet. ELLIS looks at it.

ELLIS. What is that?

FREEMAN. I keep a record.

ELLIS. Of what?

FREEMAN. (Opens it, holds it, but does not pass it across.) The last book each man asks for. From the Library List, or from wherever else. The last thing they read, or have read to them.

ELLIS. (Very still.) Each man.

FREEMAN. Each one I’ve watched over. Twenty-two of them.

A pause.

FREEMAN. Twenty-three, come eight o’clock.

Long silence. ELLIS stares at the ledger. From behind the inner door, very faint and brief: the sound of a man praying. Low and steady. Then quiet again. Both men hear it. Neither acknowledges it.

FREEMAN. I didn’t keep it from the start. First three, I didn’t think to. After the fourth, nineteen-nine, I reckoned it ought to be written down. Seemed like the sort of thing that mattered. What they chose at the last.

ELLIS. (With care.) What do they choose?

FREEMAN. (Looking at the ledger. Then reading from it in a flat, careful voice, as though reading a duty roster.) Nineteen-nine: the Psalms. He wanted them read straight through. Good man for the Psalms. Nineteen-twelve: Pilgrim’s Progress. Only got halfway through, then we ran out of… (He stops himself.) … time.

A beat.

FREEMAN. Nineteen-thirteen: a penny dreadful. Wouldn’t say which one. Had it from somewhere. Wouldn’t give it up.

A beat.

FREEMAN. I let him keep it.

ELLIS. (Softly.) You weren’t supposed to.

FREEMAN. (Quite dry.) No.

ELLIS swallows.

FREEMAN. Nineteen-fifteen: he wanted nothing read at all. Couldn’t read. Asked me to talk. (Pause.) So I talked.

ELLIS. What did you say?

FREEMAN. (A long pause.) Northamptonshire. The fields round home. The Nene in summer. Boot-making, that was my father’s trade. I told him about the workshop, the smell of the leather when it was warm. (Pause.) He wasn’t an Englishman. He didn’t follow half of it. (Pause.) But he was listening.

Long silence. ELLIS is very still.

FREEMAN. (Continuing from the ledger, quieter now.) Nineteen-sixteen, that was a bad year here, we had three. First one wanted Mrs Beeton’s household book. (A ghost of something passes over his face.) God knows why. Second wanted a hymn book, which the old Chaplain brought him. Third asked for Dickens. A Christmas Carol. (Pause.) In July.

ELLIS. (Almost to himself.) Good God.

FREEMAN. Aye.

A pause.

ELLIS. Did it help them? The books.

FREEMAN. (Considers this carefully.) Help. (A long pause.) That’s not quite the right word for it. (He looks at the table, considers.) It gave them somewhere to be. Somewhere that wasn’t the cell. A man with a book in his hands, or with someone reading to him, he’s not entirely in that room. He’s somewhere else for a while. (Pause.) That’s not nothing.

ELLIS. No. It is certainly not nothing.

FREEMAN. In the Boer, out in the veldt, men read everything they could lay hands on. A Bible, a shilling novel, a seed catalogue, a letter from home three months old. Anything with words on it. It went hand to hand through the whole company.

ELLIS. I can well imagine it.

FREEMAN. (Evenly, without malice.) No, you can’t.

ELLIS accepts this. He does not argue.

The clock: six-twenty-seven. The market sounds swell briefly outside. Someone laughing, a cart clattering. Then they recede.

ELLIS. (After a while.) You asked about endings. About rewriting. Not because of Hardy. Not for yourself.

FREEMAN. (Looks at the ledger.) Any one of these. If it were possible. I’d rewrite any one of them. Give each man a different last chapter. Send him down a different road before it was too late. (Quietly.) Back twenty years, thirty, to the turning where he went wrong.

ELLIS. (Moved.) Yes.

FREEMAN. Ill-luck, bad company, the drink. Hard times and no work. (Pause.) Or his own black sin, and he’s known it all along. (Pause.) After thirty-one years on the landings, I’m still not always certain which is which.

ELLIS. The Church teaches that genuine repentance…

FREEMAN. I know what the Church teaches.

ELLIS. (Quietly.) Forgive me. I didn’t mean to recite at you.

FREEMAN. (Mildly.) It’s your trade. I’m not sniping at it. (He looks toward the inner door.) The man in there. Has he repented?

ELLIS. (Slowly.) He received the sacrament last evening. He made his confession before God. He… (Pause.) Yes. I believe, in my conscience, that he has.

FREEMAN. (Very quietly.) Good. (Pause.) That matters. Whatever else.

ELLIS. You believe that.

FREEMAN. I believe a man who goes before his Maker with a clear account stands better than one who doesn’t. Whether that changes the earthly outcome… (He shakes his head once.) That’s not mine to say.

Silence. FREEMAN loosens his collar by a single button. Outside, the heat is building. The light through the barred window has strengthened perceptibly.

The clock: six-thirty-eight.

ELLIS. (After a long moment, looking at the ledger.) What did he ask for? The man in there. From the Library List.

FREEMAN. (Pause.) He didn’t use the Library List.

ELLIS. He had something of his own?

FREEMAN. His wife brought it in the day he was sentenced. (Pause.) A book of wild flowers. Illustrated. Drawn by hand, coloured in. An old book. Said it was his mother’s.

Very long silence.

ELLIS. Has he been looking at it all night?

FREEMAN. When he wasn’t praying. Or sleeping. (Pause.) He’s had it open on his knee most of the watch. Pointing at this one and that one. (Pause.) Told the other warder on duty that he used to know all the names. Learned them as a boy. (Pause.) Said he’d forgotten most of them now.

ELLIS stands. He goes quickly to the barred window and looks out. He is working to keep himself in order. His hands are clasped behind his back. He speaks without turning.

ELLIS. I have read rather a good many books about death. About the proper manner of facing it. The Stoics. The Christian martyrs. Donne’s Devotions, the seventeenth meditation, do you know it?

FREEMAN. No.

ELLIS. He wrote of the bell. The passing bell. That no man is entire of himself, that any man’s death diminishes us all, because we are each of us bound up in one another. (Pause.) I first read it at seventeen, in my father’s study in Kensington. I thought it was the finest thing I had ever encountered.

FREEMAN. (After a pause.) And now?

ELLIS. (Turns from the window.) Now I think it is entirely true. And entirely insufficient.

A long pause. FREEMAN looks at him steadily.

FREEMAN. That’s about right.

ELLIS. I mean… (He comes back to the table, sits. He leans forward.) I stood at that man’s door last night, at the beginning of the watch, and I tried to find words. Words of genuine spiritual comfort. Words that would do the work they were meant to do. And I could hear myself. (He taps his chest.) From in here. I could hear that I was only reciting. Not ministering. Reciting.

FREEMAN. Aye. It’s different in the room.

ELLIS. Yes. (Pause.) I found the Psalms in the end. He knew the Twenty-Third. We said it together. (His voice is slightly unsteady.) That was as near to real ministry as I managed all night.

FREEMAN. (Simply.) That’s the right one. (Pause.) I have heard it said in twenty-two cells. It is still the right one.

FREEMAN refills both mugs from a tin pot on the table. He does it without comment and without being asked, as a matter of simple course.

ELLIS. Do you believe in Hell, Mr Freeman?

FREEMAN. (No surprise at the question.) I believe a man can make a Hell of himself in this life. What comes after… (A long pause.) I think there is a judgement. I think a man stands to account for what he has done and what he has left undone. Whether that accounting has a fire to it, or only a light… (He shakes his head slightly.) I can’t say that. I’m not a theologian.

ELLIS. (Quietly.) No. (Pause.) I was trained to answer that question with certainty. (Pause.) I find I cannot.

FREEMAN. No shame in it. Not in here.

ELLIS. The Thirty-Nine Articles…

FREEMAN. (Mildly.) Articles are for the church, Reverend. This is a cell. Different sort of wrestling.

ELLIS looks at him.

FREEMAN. My wife was a great churchwoman. Every Sunday without fail, until she couldn’t get up for it any longer. She used to say, and she was a sensible woman, not given to nerves, she used to say that the hardest thing about faith was that it didn’t make things easier. It only made them bearable. (Pause.) I thought she was wrong about that for a long while.

ELLIS. And now?

FREEMAN. (Very quietly.) I reckon she had the rights of it.

The clock: six-fifty-one. Both men look at it. There is a shift in the quality of the silence, as though the room itself has noticed the hour.

From somewhere deeper in the prison: the faint and ordinary sound of a key turning in a lock. Then nothing.

FREEMAN. (After a moment, looking at the ledger.) Your question, Reverend. The ending you’d rewrite.

ELLIS. Hardy. Jude. Yes.

FREEMAN. Not Hardy. (He lays one hand flat on the ledger, gently.) One of these.

ELLIS is still for a moment. He understands.

ELLIS. (Very quietly.) Yes. (Pause.) Yes. All of them.

FREEMAN. Aye. (A long pause.) And so would I. Every last one. (Pause.) But you cannot rewrite what’s already written.

ELLIS. No.

FREEMAN. And you cannot close the book before the last page.

Silence.

The clock: six-fifty-three.

ELLIS. (Rising, taking up his Book of Common Prayer.) I should go to him.

FREEMAN. (Rising. No hurry.) Aye.

ELLIS stands a moment longer. He looks at the table: the mugs, the Bible, the Library List, the ledger.

ELLIS. Mr Freeman.

FREEMAN. Reverend.

ELLIS. In the twenty-two… did most of them… was there… (He cannot find his way to the end of it. He does not need to. FREEMAN understands.)

FREEMAN. (Quietly.) Most of them died decent. (Pause.) Whether they lived decent is a different question altogether. But the dying of it, when the moment came, most of them found something. Some quietness, right at the last.

ELLIS. (Needing this to be true.) You are certain.

FREEMAN. (A pause. Then with level plainness.) Sure enough.

ELLIS nods. He straightens his collar. He holds the Book of Common Prayer in both hands, the way a man holds something he is leaning against.

FREEMAN. The collect for the day, and the Twenty-Third. He knows the Twenty-Third. Start with what he knows.

ELLIS. (Simply.) Yes. (A breath.) Thank you.

FREEMAN moves to the door of the Condemned Cell. He takes his keys from his belt. He stands a moment with his hand on the door, his back to the audience. When he speaks, his voice is quiet and level, as though reading a final entry.

FREEMAN. The wild flowers book. (Pause.) I shall put it in the ledger tonight. That is his entry. His mother’s book of wild flowers.

He turns the key. The door opens. The light beyond is grey and plain and ordinary.

FREEMAN steps through. ELLIS takes one breath. Then follows.

The clock on the wall reads six-fifty-six.

The stage is empty. The two enamel mugs remain on the table. The Library List. The Bible. The ledger, closed. The early light comes through the barred window and falls across them all.

Outside, the city goes on: a horse, a bell, a trader calling out his wares, the sound of someone laughing, far away, ordinary and indifferent and alive.

The lights hold for a long moment. Then fade, slowly, without ceremony.

END

Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.

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