Kid Gloves Read online

  After the ashes of our parents, though asymmetrically canistered, had been safely stowed away in a single billet, Tim took on the task of commissioning a gravestone for them. The task seemed appropriate not because he was the eldest but because he had a strong interest in layout, design, typography, which extended naturally enough to the medium of stone. The inscription finally agreed on was the one adorning Dad’s coat of arms. It’s in Welsh and means Justice The Best Shield.

  Having your own coat of arms is undeniably grand, though in Dad’s case this was grandeur acquired along the way. It’s the custom for Treasurers of Gray’s Inn to be honoured after their term of office with a portrait and a coat of arms. The Treasurer is the figurehead of the Inn, and benchers occupy the position in order of seniority, so that it is possible for distinguished benchers to see their eminence approaching, mortality permitting, year by year. Sometimes of course mortality not only permits the appointment but shortens the wait.

  Dad’s turn came in 1982. There’s little scope for glory in a Treasurer’s tenure – if a new building or the renovation of an old one is accomplished during your time, then your initials will be incised on it, but Gray’s Inn is a compact parish and major works are needed only at considerable intervals. Perhaps Dad was trying to sneak his way into this marginal immortality with his decision to install lead planters on the steps leading up to the Benchers’ Entrance to Hall in South Square without consulting the governing body. He had a good relationship with the Inn’s gardener, Malone, thanks to the years he had spent in the position of Master of the Walks (the Walks being the true name of the fine gardens, originally laid out by Francis Bacon), and they had dreamed up this pretty scheme together. His fellow benchers were not pleased to be left out of the decision-making process, and ordered the removal of the planters. Not quite Watergate, but the kind of thing that stirs strong feelings in a small community.

  I remember Dad dropping into conversation that he’d had a useful meeting with the Garter King of Arms. He certainly seemed to get a kick out of the fact that the Inn would stump up for the expense of researching a suitable blazon. Presumably some of the Inn’s Treasurers are snugly pre-escutcheoned by the time they ascend to the office, but Dad’s modest origins ruled that out.

  His village background, neither privileged nor deprived, had left him with a few thrifty foibles. He loved getting things through the post, and would enter any competition the Reader’s Digest thought fit to offer him. Once a compendious book arrived at the Gray’s Inn flat, a complete guide to gardening with all the basics for the beginner but plenty of tips to satisfy the expert. Sheila proposed sending it back with a stinging letter. How dare they demand money for an unwanted, unsolicited compendium of anything? Dad was looking rather sheepish, a milder version of the expression he wore with a hangover, when his whole body was like a dog that knows it has done wrong and wants to be forgiven without meeting his master’s eyes.

  ‘Bill … you didn’t!’ But it was true – Dad had knowingly ordered a complete garden guide when he didn’t have a garden, unless you count the Walks in all their magnificence, since he was Master of the Walks at the time, the Walks where blooms were whisked into the flowerbeds the moment they were approaching their best and whisked away in disgrace the moment a petal was out of true.

  ‘Why, Bill? Why would you do such a thing?’

  Dad rallied his self-respect. ‘I’m not a fool, darling. Give me some credit. I wasn’t born yesterday. I know perfectly well they don’t put you into the Grand Prize Draw if you don’t order something.’

  Dad’s motto about Justice being the Best Shield was in Welsh. I was able to remember it for a few months after the interment of his ashes, then it left me for good. It didn’t have the memorability of some phrases in the language, like for instance the standard Welsh way of referring to a microwave. Microdon would be correct usage, though it’s no more than a back-formation from the English word, micro meaning micro and don meaning wave. But everyone in the North says popty ping. The oven that goes ping. Then there’s the Welsh for a jellyfish, which my cousins assure me is called pysgod wibli wobli. There is of course a long tradition of mocking the ignorant outsider, or ‘soaking the Saxon’, and the Welsh word saesneg has some of the disparaging charge of the Scottish sassenach.

  There were other ways in which I could have refreshed my memory about Dad’s Welsh motto, but they involved a little embarrassment, since I would have to admit to family members that I’d forgotten it. So why not contact the Royal College of Arms instead? Stick out my thumb and hope to be given a ride in the mother ship of heraldry.

  There turned out to be a website and an e-mail address. What had I expected – specifications of the maximum wingspan of the owl to be despatched with the parchment of enquiry (A4 or smaller, please)? Something of the sort.

  Does the Royal College of Arms have a Facebook page, even? Actually I’d rather not know.

  There were some wearily polite answers on the website intended to nip Frequently Asked Questions in the bud. It was particularly requested that large amounts of genealogical data should not be forwarded at the initial stage. On the other hand there was little point in submitting an enquiry that consisted of no more than your name and a request to be told your coat of arms. Enquiries that displayed a complete failure to have read the website might not receive a reply. There was no point in asking about clan membership, clan badges and the like, since the clan system was entirely Scottish and the College of Arms had no responsibility for Scotland. English families could not be associated to a clan, still less form a clan themselves, unless they were ultimately of Scottish descent. The belief, apparently quite widespread but new, that everyone has a clan, and can wear some specific tartan or display a clan badge, was quite erroneous.

  The idea of forming my own clan had never occurred to me, until the stern warning intended to quash the desire inflamed it.

  I submitted my enquiry to ‘the officer in waiting’, not knowing a particular officer of arms and feeling that this was not a case for the Garter King of Arms, a heraldic emergency, even if there was a possibility of his remembering his meetings with Dad. I imagined him on call, twenty-four hours a day, sleeping in crested pyjamas next to a hole cut in the College floorboards to accommodate a pole like the ones in fire stations, only made of solid gold.

  This nervous mockery of mine seems to suggest that I’m secretly impressed, whether by antiquity, poshness or arcane precision of language.

  The next day an unfamiliar name showed up in the sender slot of my e-mail display. It’s ‘Bluemantle Pursuivant’, but the software processes it as if it was an ordinary name, no different from ‘First Hull Trains’ or ‘Nigerian Not-a-Scam’, though it seems to have stronger affinities with (say) Montezuma or Rumpelstiltskin. It’s only because of the comical grandeur of the title that I notice how it is displayed, as if on a pale-blue plaque with rounded edges. So are all the other senders’ names, on miniature versions of locomotive name plates, but it’s only now that I see the style of display as heraldic in its own right, an oblong shape in the tint of bleu celeste. There’s a plus sign next to the name. Do I want to add Bluemantle Pursuivant to my contacts list? Well of course I do. I press the button.

  Bluemantle Pursuivant confirmed that a grant of Arms was made to ‘Sir William Mars-Jones of Gray’s Inn’ by Letters Patent dated 25 March 1986.

  The blazon, or description in heraldic terminology, is as follows: Sable a Stag trippant Argent attired and unguled Or on a Chief Azure three Roman Swords erect point upwards Argent their hilts Gold. The Crest is On a Wreath Or, Azure and Sable A Dragon’s Head coup
ed Gules langued Or and a Griffin’s Head couped Or langued Gules both addorsed and gorged with a gemel dancetty per pale Or and Gules. Mantled Sable and Azure doubled Or and Argent.

  How lovely! The Inn had conspired with the College of Arms to commission a symbolist poem on Dad’s behalf, its vocabulary Old French but its perfumed hieratic sensibility closer to Mallarmé.

  Sable a Stag trippant

  Argent attired and unguled Or

  On a Chief Azure

  Three Roman Swords erect

  point upwards

  Argent

  their hilts Gold

  The Crest is On a Wreath Or, Azure and Sable

  A Dragon’s Head

  couped Gules langued Or

  and a Griffin’s Head

  couped Or langued Gules

  both addorsed and gorged

  with a gemel dancetty

  per pale Or and Gules

  Mantled Sable and Azure

  doubled Or and Argent.

  {Chorus: ‘With a gemel dancetty per pale Or and Gules-O, with a gemel dancetty per pale Or and Gules …’}

  Dad’s motto turns out to be GORAU TARIAN CYF-IAWNDER, which had been Flintshire’s watchword until the county’s abolition in 1974, when it passed to the successor body the Borough of Islwyn (formed by the amalgamation of the Abercarn Urban District, part of the Bedwellty Urban District, the Mynyddislwyn Urban District and the Risca Urban District). This unorthodox bit of twinning, with a motto being shared by a borough and a judge, carried on until 1996, when Islwyn too was abolished. At the time of his death, Dad seems to have had an exclusive claim on his chosen slogan.

  Along with the technical description of Dad’s blazon my new friend Bluemantle passed on the information that his Arms would descend to all of Sir William’s children and be passed on by his sons to their own descendants. It was open to me (and my brothers) to place on record a brief pedigree setting out details of the descent, thus establishing our own right to the Arms. If this was done certified paintings of the Arms could then be issued. He attached an example for my information – but at this point I got a faint whiff of the Reader’s Digest all over again and decided not to go any further. All the same, it was nice to know that if I developed heraldic cravings of my own they could be satisfied with a pedigree and a cheque.

  Dad’s concern with his status seems to have become almost legendary. In an informal interview in the Financial Times (18 January 2013) doubling as a restaurant review, the barrister Sydney Kentridge, aged ninety and going strong, mentions him as a sort of cautionary tale, an example of ‘judge-itis’ or elephantiasis of the self-esteem. Kentridge (who ordered herring with beetroot and mustard, followed by sole goujons with duck-egg mayonnaise) recounts that it fell to Benet Hytner to pay Dad tribute on behalf of the Bar when he retired, saying, ‘There is one distinction that your Lordship and I share. We both have sons who are more distinguished than we are.’ Hytner was referring to his son Nick (already well established as a theatre director) and, presumably, to me. Kentridge goes on, ‘He infuriated the judge and delighted the bar.’

  It seems perverse to contest reports of Dad’s pompousness when I had so much experience of it at first hand. But it happens that Dad passed on this incident, good-humouredly, as a compliment to me, and Ben Hytner made no appearance on his list of four-letter fellers, clearly rascal rather than weasel.

  I’m not making claims for Dad’s modesty. I was in the room, after all, when he had a negotiation on the phone with American Express about how many of his honorifics – MBE, LLB – could be crammed onto his Gold Card. It was explained to him that there was a physical limit to the space available. Perhaps he imagined an exception being made in his case, and a special extended format devised for the credit card, making it as long as a chequebook, along the lines of the outsized platform ticket that used to be available at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch railway station.

  After tough negotiation he agreed to drastic surgery on his first name and become Sir Wm. Very few people would ever see the form of words on that Gold Card but that wasn’t the point. His first name he had been given. Those qualifications had been earned.

  He didn’t exactly come from nothing, but he came from a much less promising social background than most of those he came to call his brothers. The other case of over-developed self-esteem that I knew about in Gray’s Inn, Edward Gardner, was also a self-made man. Strictly speaking he can’t have suffered from judge-itis since he didn’t get as far as the bench, moving into politics instead. Dad had at least gone to university, to Aberystwyth and even Cambridge. Ted’s family ran a small jeweller’s in Preston, and he worked as a journalist after leaving school. After having an outstandingly ‘good war’ in the Navy, starting as an ordinary seaman and ending up as a Commander, he managed to read for the Bar directly. His political attitudes were more coherent than Dad’s, in that he not only opposed homosexual law reform but actively campaigned as an MP for the restoration of the death penalty, getting as far as a free parliamentary vote on the topic in 1983.

  Underlying the self-importance must have been a sense of disbelief at how far he had come. He mastered Received Pronunciation, the vocal intonations of those in power, perhaps later in life than Dad did, so that it was only in his last illness that his children ever heard his underlying Preston voice. In a sense he died a stranger to them, emigrating to his home region of speech.

  He once framed a half-smoked cigar he had been offered by Winston Churchill, with a plaque testifying to its provenance. There was also a time when he encountered difficulties (I have this from his daughter Sally) when re-entering the country after a holiday. It was pointed out to him that his passport had been defaced. He denied it. He was shown where handwritten letters had crudely been inserted. At last he protested at the unfairness of it all. ‘I have recently been knighted. By the Queen, in whose name as perhaps you know passports are issued. I am now Sir Edward Gardner. I haven’t defaced my passport, I have corrected it.’

  Clearly neither of these men had acquired the knack of playing his achievements down, but then they didn’t go to the sort of school where such skills are taught, the informal sessions of self-deprecation practice beside the fives court.

  It wasn’t his own crest that Dad displayed in the domestic spaces of the Gray’s Inn flat but the escutcheons of the four ships on which he had served during the War, Euryalus being the ship, or the crew, for which he felt the most fondness. I don’t know the position of the College of Arms on heraldry for ships.

  One day soon after Dad’s life-reviews had been published, I fielded a phone call from a woman who expressed condolences, saying she had known my father long ago, and seemed anxious to know if my mother was still living. One of the obituaries had seemed to indicate that she had died first, but she wanted to be sure. I confirmed the fact, and then she told me that Dad had proposed to her in Malta during the War.

  It seemed almost excessively scrupulous, to make sure there was no widow to consider before revealing an association which could hardly hurt her, going back as it did to a distant period, before he and Sheila had even met.

  According to this Esmé-from-Malta, Dad had said she should marry him because he was going to be Prime Minister. He would drive her around in his Bentley. She knew he hadn’t become Prime Minister, but had he got as far as the Bentley of his dreams? I had to admit he had only got as far as a Jaguar Mk II, though that had seemed pretty much the best car in the world when we were children and urged him (in those days before a speed limit) to accelerate on the app
roach to humpback bridges.

  It seemed that Dad’s courtship technique included a fair bit of jovial braggadocio. It was hard to believe he was in earnest rather than playing a part. I asked Esmé why she didn’t accept his proposal. Because she was Catholic, she said, and he wouldn’t commit himself to having any children of the marriage raised in the faith.

  If he wasn’t willing to compromise on something that was so important to her, I wondered whether Dad had only been honing his wooing technique with this Esmé. ‘Do you think he was serious about you?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I know he was. He carved my name on his ukelele.’ There was no answer to that. We shared a moment of respectful silence, until I spoiled it by saying there was no answer to that.

  Esmé had married another naval officer in the end, who had the advantage of being Catholic. She was now a widow, or she wouldn’t dream of making this phone call, but there was no possible harm now. She had moved to Britain with her husband, so this phone call was coming from Guildford rather than Valletta.

  She said she had seen Dad once in London by accident. It was on the top deck of a 38 bus going along Theobald’s Road, just by Gray’s Inn. Dad and buses seems an unlikely pairing, but if forced to that extremity he would certainly choose the top deck, stronghold of smokers. ‘I was with my husband,’ Esmé said, ‘and Lloyd sat near me. He didn’t speak. He was wearing a bowler hat and I could see he was trembling.’

  And you, Esmé? How did you feel? ‘How did I feel? I felt jolly glad I was wearing my new Marshall and Snelgrove hat.’