Depart in Peace

Edward Kirk was a policeman in the colonies, and the Mau-Mau years left him with memories he would rather not carry into a courtroom. Now the call comes for him to return to Africa and testify at the trial of a onetime Mau-Mau warlord, and he refuses. He simply will not go, and no amount of pressure moves him. There is no mystery about the rights and wrongs of it; the drama is in the stand he takes.

Alun Falconer's script pushes Kirk from every side. There are official summonses and the quiet weight of his wife Mary, and Sullivan makes the argument that some debts to the past have to be paid. Mrs Kaino speaks for the other side of it, for the colony that was. There is the machinery of his own side too, officialdom expecting a man to do his duty and give evidence, and none of it moves him. Jordan and Inman orbit the business, but the story belongs to the Kirks and the refusal sitting at the centre of their house.

Mike Vardy directed. Derren Nesbitt's Jordan and Fulton Mackay's Inman anchor it, with Morris Perry as Moxon, David Langton as Edward Kirk, Pauline Letts as Mary Kirk, Bryan Marshall as Sullivan, Nadia Cattouse as Mrs Kaino, Dennis Thorne as the Deputy Commander and Joan Peart as Lady Customer.

What gives the episode its weight is the setting. The African courtrooms hang over the action long before they appear, and they give the story a gravity a straightforward procedural would never earn. Aired in the summer of 1970, when the empire was recent enough to sting, it does not flinch from what colonial policing meant. Some histories refuse to stay in the record books. They demand to be dealt with in the present.

Kirk stays home, and the episode leaves the argument hanging there, unresolved. The title comes from the old prayer, depart in peace, and nobody in the story offers him that. And the viewer is left to decide whether he was a coward or the only man in the room with his eyes open.