Kid Gloves Read online

  Oh dear, I’m certainly ramping up the pathos, conjuring up a scenario perilously close to The Browning Version. My mistake. Sir Hildreth Glyn-Jones wasn’t like the classics master Crocker-Harris in Rattigan’s play, unaware of his unpopularity, mortified to learn he’s known as ‘the Himmler of the lower fifth’. Sir Hildreth made no attempt to soften his manner in court as his reign came to an end. It was almost a point of pride for him to play the tyrant and make things difficult. He must have considered the possibility that he would forfeit the gracious ritual of farewell on his last day, so that his career would go to its grave (so to speak) without a kind word to help the cortège bear up.

  Finally counsel for the Crown stood up and spoke. He said, ‘My Lord, I believe this is your last day as one of Her Majesty’s Justices, and I would not wish to let the occasion go by without passing on the congratulations of this court …’

  I have this from Esyr Lewis, Gray’s Inn resident and family friend, the barrister who had to make his choice on the day. It wasn’t that he felt an overwhelming urge to produce the proper gesture; he just found when the moment came that he couldn’t not. And against expectation it wasn’t a formality, but a moment of high stifled emotion. That Browning Version note again – not that it’s a bad theme, the defencelessness of the well-defended. Sir Hildreth, having steeled himself against the likelihood of rejection, found himself still counted within the fold of civility. And when the Dark Lord of courtroom torture, Queen’s Bench Division, went to hang up his full-bottomed wig for the last time, there were plausibly tears in his eyes.

  There was never a real risk that Dad would be deprived of the customary send-off, when his turn came. He may not have been loved by those who appeared before him, but he was certainly respected, regarded as formidable rather than actively oppressive. No barrister ever steered a case inattentively while Dad was in charge of proceedings.

  He had a heedlessness, even when not wearing the scarlet, which could sometimes seem heroic. Dad had his teeth looked after, for instance, by Sir Paul Beresford, an MP who set aside a portion of each week for his dental practice, or alternatively, as some of his constituents complained, a dentist who represented their interests in his spare time. By either account he was clearly not someone to be trifled with, but then nor was Dad, who might say, ‘I don’t think much of that bridge you gave me last time,’ his delivery muffled by reason of the fact that Sir Paul was scraping and probing away inside his mouth at the time.

  Brecht’s Galileo admits that he didn’t need to be tortured to be pressured into recantation – all it took was for him to be shown the instruments. That’s how most people feel in dentists’ waiting rooms, as they leaf miserably through Vogue and Country Life (or Prima and Empire if your dentist is less grand), on the brink of a general recantation. But it wouldn’t have occurred to Dad to soften his criticism, or to delay the vote of no confidence until he and his tender gums were out of harm’s way.

  In his prime Dad’s forthrightness was held in check by a certain self-censorship. (It made sense that if he approved of external censorship, of limits on what could be expressed and circulated, he should also be in favour of the internal Lord Chamberlain.) There were certain things he never discussed, even with drink taken. After he retired he made less of an effort to project a consistent persona. In conversation he let slip the news that the absolute wrongness on pre-marital sex that he preached to us in our adolescence was not something he had paid much attention to during his own. ‘Let slip’ gives the wrong impression, as if a guilty secret had escaped him. He seemed very matter-of-fact about it, and quite fond of his bad old ways.

  I was hearing a new story and an unfamiliar sexual philosophy. In the days of trains without corridors, their compartments opening directly onto the platform, an enterprising man and woman taking refuge in an empty compartment could manage a ‘quick poke’ in perfect safety, as long as they remained aware on some subliminal level of the minutes remaining before the next station.

  Perhaps this was how he spoke as an adult to adults, yet he had never enjoyed ‘off-colour’ conversations. He never swore, though that may have something to do with growing up with Welsh as a first language. It’s a myth that there are no swear words in Welsh, but Dad would hardly have been exposed to any in a Congregationalist household in the 1920s and ’30s. In fact, thanks to the consonantal impact of the language, almost any syllable can aspire to expletive force in Welsh. ‘Pobl Bach!’ for instance means no more than ‘little people’ (presumably along the lines of leprechauns), but can be given any amount of plosive attack.

  Dad was a Welsh speaker and proud of it, though uneasily aware that there were rust spots on his mother tongue from not using it on anything like a daily basis. Nevertheless he had been that rare thing, a judge who could conduct court proceedings in Welsh, and he was instrumental in setting up summer schools for magistrates in Wales, to help them get acquainted with the new technical vocabulary in the minority language thrown up by new legislation.

  Soon after his appointment as a judge he was made a member of the Gorsedd at the National Eisteddfod for his contribution to Welsh culture. Dad’s sense of the honour being done him wasn’t shaken by the discovery that the singer Mary Hopkin was one of his fellow cultural contributors. I remember the assembled Druids wearing wet-weather gear in the form of short white Wellington boots. Dad was very tickled by the headline in a local newspaper – ‘LOCAL BOY MAKES BARD’.

  He had spent a lot of time choosing his bardic name. This wasn’t the down-to-earth sort of Welsh coinage associated with the need to differentiate between the many bearers of a single name, like Dai Central Eating for a man with only a single tooth remaining or Dai Quiet Wedding for someone who turned up to tie the knot wearing carpet slippers, to quote two of Dad’s favourite examples. This was a serious and ceremonial business. He settled on Gwilym Aled, Gwilym being the formal Welsh equivalent of William, Aled being the name of the river near his birthplace of Llansannan, really more of a stream running across fields.

  He told me I should have my own Bardic name in readiness. His suggestion was ‘Adda Chwith’, meaning Adam Lefthand, celebrating one of my more innocent deviations from the statistical norm. He didn’t explain how I was going to make a contribution to Welsh culture without being part of it.

  In the 1980s I was excited when I came across a gay activist in London who was doing something similar to Dad’s translation project for the benefit of magistrates, helping to translate the technical terms of gay liberation into Welsh. I remember ‘llon’ as the Welsh for ‘gay’. I may not speak the language, but the ability to hiss that double l is part of my birthright, inalienable. If there are Welsh words that have added music to such terms as ‘self-oppression’ and ‘heteronormativity’, they haven’t reached my ears.

  The activist and I were getting on just fine (wasn’t I an activist too?) till I mentioned my own Welsh connection. After that the engines of intimacy went into full reverse, since he regarded Dad as a sort of Uncle Tom for laying the treasure of his language at the feet of the foreign oppressor. As he saw it, a Welsh-speaking judge was a particular sort of traitor and fitted the same painful profile as Emlyn Williams did for Dad, an enemy who was born to be a friend. It was a moment of something like symmetry, the correcting of a balance. Normally I was Dad’s shaming family secret but now he was mine.

  In English Dad avoided four-letter words, though he could go as far as referring to someone as a ‘four-letter feller’. In practice this was usually Bernard Levin, who had (as he felt) traduced him in an article written for The Times during the 1970s. A juror had tried to walk away from his r
esponsibilities on the basis that he didn’t understand the issues in the case. Dad responded by sending him to the cells for contempt of court. It’s certainly true that if people could evade their civic duty so easily by claiming incompetence the system would soon collapse. It would have been better for the reluctant juror to stick to the traditional practice of turning up in a tracksuit and dark glasses, confident of being held back on the reserve bench as dodgy, presumptively druggy, then sent swiftly home.

  Levin, as a columnist and contrarian, was bound to take a different line – to suggest, for instance, that this self-recusing juror was a hero of democracy, refusing merely to rubber-stamp the court procedures without true intellectual participation in the administration of justice. This was not a threat to the system but its vindication. The judge in the case who had slapped him down was, correspondingly, an agent of oppression and a sworn enemy of civil liberties.

  What galled Dad was the relish with which the piece was written, as if Levin was tickled pink to be putting a judge into the public pillory, even the laughing-stocks. His article began: ‘Mr Justice Mars-Jones was in a rare old paddy down the Old Bailey last week …’ I remember reading it in a coffee shop in Cambridge, shocked by the eruption of the family name into my placid breakfast ritual. I was also undeniably thrilled by mockery at Dad’s expense. We must have made quite a pair in Belinda’s on Trinity Street, my ham roll and I, my tongue hanging out in stupefaction to match the pale meat lolling over the bread on my plate.

  Dad felt he had been subjected to a personal attack camouflaged as commentary on something in the news. The worst of it was that he wasn’t able to respond, either as one of Her Majesty’s Judges nor as an individual. He had been targeted by the might of the fourth estate, and there was nothing he could do in protest or retaliation except rehearse the phrase to which Levin’s name would always be chained with links of bitter contempt, ‘four-letter feller’. The word suppressed in this formula rhymes with threepenny bit.

  And perhaps there was another small thing he could do. He did have one small weapon at his disposal, the dark marble of social death. This he would fire from his catapult to strike back at the giant Levin, to bring the sneering Philistine-Pharisee down to earth. If ever Bernard Levin applied for membership of Dad’s beloved Garrick Club, the black ball would fly swift from Dad’s sling.

  It was almost a pity that Levin was already so unpopular with the legal profession, largely as a result of his (very likely justified) criticism of Lord Justice Goddard in 1971, that Dad’s additional veto would have had no effect. He could safely have risen above rancour and offered up a white ball in the spirit of charity and fair play. The result would still have been the one he wanted, with the Garrick Club turned for the occasion into a sort of Goth pinball arcade of careering black marbles.

  Though it was understood that judges should not comment on any matter of public interest, sometimes Dad exaggerated the discretion that was required of him. It was an easy way out of family arguments in the 1970s for him to say that professional etiquette prevented him from expressing any sort of opinion on the issues of the day, as if there was no difference between the dining-table at number 3 Gray’s Inn Square and a press conference bristling with microphones.

  His first-born, Tim, having inherited a certain forensic zeal, once suggested that if it was so important to keep the political opinions of the judiciary out of circulation then Dad should read the newspapers in a protected environment such as the lavatory, since it was obvious what he thought from his expression while he read them … after that the wrangle was on again, with Dad’s attempt to claim the high judicial ground ruled out of court.

  After Dad retired I felt the need to add a new element to a household that was at risk of becoming little more than the sum of its routines, unless and until Dad buckled down to that book of reminiscences, those songs, that radio play. Rachmaninov symphonies weren’t enough by themselves to make the flat hum with purpose.

  I arranged to come round every Monday evening and help with the making of a meal. I had taken an interest in cooking in the sixth form at school, where Friday afternoons were set aside for non-academic activity under the banner of ‘Guilds’. Cookery had easily sidelined the other two options, photography and social work (known as ‘old ladies’). Westminster didn’t do too badly by me if it taught me how to make a white sauce as well as an elegiac couplet.

  Normally I made soup and Sheila would put together a main course, though sometimes we exchanged roles. From Dad’s point of view soup was always the highlight of a meal. In fact soup was the meal. A meal without soup barely qualified as such. As teenagers we were well used to restaurant meals at which Dad would ask, ‘Soup for everyone? Five soups?’ as if he could imagine no other preference. Possibly he was just gingering us up to order promptly, rather than overruling our right to whitebait or prawn cocktail, but in that case he wouldn’t have spoken for the lady as well, Sheila who had never chosen soup in all the time he had known her. Since roughly 1946.

  The bargain over Monday dinner, as I explained it to Dad, was that I would make soup every week on condition that he laid the table. I was managing him. Perhaps I was trying to show Sheila that this so strongly counter-suggestible man could be controlled after all. Dad said, rather pitifully, that he didn’t know where the cutlery lived. I pointed out that he had been living in the flat for upwards of thirty-five years, which should help to narrow the range of the search.

  I warned Dad that if ever he left the table unlaid, I would pour the soup away. He would never see another of my making. Why does this now sound so insulting? In fact Monday evenings were generally enjoyable, and though Dad’s laying was often approximate he never failed to make an attempt. One Monday I accidentally overdid the chilli oil, and Sheila was unable to choke down as much as a mouthful. Dad finished his bowl, and though his face was very red and his voice oddly hoarse said yes to another. It was as if soup was self-evidently such a good thing that the question ‘More soup?’ must always meet a Yes. The logic gates swung open irresistibly and there was no possibility of override.

  He didn’t like vegetables with a few exceptions such as beans (green ones and broad ones), but would relish any kind whatever as long as it was in a soup. He could never explain the depth of his attachment to a liquid first course. It didn’t go back to childhood. He couldn’t remember his first exposure but thought it must have been at a hotel. Soup carried no associations with the mother he had adored or the father he held up firmly as a model.

  Until he died Dad spoke of his mother as the only perfect human being he had ever known. His voice went into a distinctive constricted register when he spoke of her. It throbbed with tears withheld. He had been twenty-one when she died and most sons, even the most devoted, have detected the odd flaw by then, but for Dad flaws were out of the question. His mourning, which had taken the form of being unable to sleep in the home she no longer occupied, so that neighbours had to take him in, exceeded the bounds of what was thought proper and became something of an embarrassment.

  It seems terribly obvious that he loathed Gilbert Harding’s emotional devastation when talking about his mother on Face to Face not because it was unfamiliar but because it wasn’t. He wanted to share nothing with such a man, absolutely nothing, and to share the unhealed wound of his mother’s death was close to unbearable.

  On the other hand the Dad I came to know after his retirement had no great love for his own father, and not much affection. He gave no account of how and why a mother’s boy, who had never fully processed her death (to the extent that death is something we process), should turn himself into a fa
ther who cracked down on any sign of unmanliness. He reproduced for our benefit the character, and the moral absolutism, of someone he claimed to admire but hadn’t actually liked.

  It was a theatrical performance, in a way, which made sense given that as a student he had done so much acting. It was in fact his father who wouldn’t accept the idea of the theatre as a career for him. Dad’s theatricality found an effective outlet in court. Playing his own father backstage, as a role in the family drama, was a capitulation perhaps subtly edged with revenge, but the rest of us didn’t know that.

  One of his favourite memories of his acting days was playing Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck as a student in Aberystwyth. He felt he excelled in the part, particularly at the tragic climax when Hjalmar finds his daughter Hedvig dead. During one evening’s performance, even so, he became aware that he was not exercising his usual casual monopoly on the audience’s attention. There seemed to be distraction, even tittering. He set himself to scale the tragic heights with ever more flair and boldness, climbing without ropes or oxygen.

  What he didn’t know was that the distraction was caused by the actress playing Hedvig. Dad had carried her in and reverently laid her down, but in such a way that her slip was showing. Hedvig was a Scandinavian lost soul, dead by her own hand, but she was also a young Welsh woman of the 1930s who didn’t think such exposure was at all the thing. So the corpse’s hand inched towards the offending edge of underwear, and set about tucking it out of sight. The play is much concerned with the Livslognen or life-illusion. The actress’s Livslognen seems to have been that unrespectability in dress is a fate worse than death.