Kid Gloves Read online

  Dad’s non-standard convictions were strongly engaged by one of the most famous cases of his career, the trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in 1966. He was only junior counsel for the prosecution, with the Attorney General, Elwyn Jones, leading, but Dad made the opening speech (in a cleared courtroom, as requested by the defence) at the hearing in front of magistrates at Hyde in Cheshire the previous December. Technically he spoke the first words in the proceedings against Brady, twenty-seven, a stock clerk, and Hindley, twenty-three, typist, of Wardle Brook Avenue.

  The death penalty for murder had only been abolished the previous year, and for many people this case with its specific horrors (sexually charged cruelty, a woman delivering children up to torture) annihilated the arguments for liberalization. Myra Hindley must have driven quite a few supporters of the reform back into the hangman’s arms. It didn’t take Dad that way, even though he was presumably in court when the tape-recording Brady and Hindley made of Lesley Ann Downey being killed was played. He never mentioned it.

  I remember him forbidding us to read about the trial in the papers. From an eleven-year-old’s point of view, this was being warned off something that wouldn’t have occurred to me in the first place, and the prohibition didn’t breed curiosity as it might have done in someone older or more rebellious.

  The trial had its effect on me, but not in any direct way. I was a studious boy, though there were some subjects for which I felt no affinity (history and geography). I’d always enjoyed maths. I remember when I realized how many zeroes were needed to represent a billion (an old-guard British billion of a million million) and how this thrilled me. I was sitting on the lavatory at the time that the realization struck, but this was not an earthbound moment.

  Now I was having trouble, not so much with maths as with a maths teacher who had taken against me. In some way this was tied in with Dad and his frequent appearances in the press. In class I became ‘Mars-Jones, whose clever father is never out of the papers’. I didn’t understand why this was shameful. I doubt if my classmates did either, though they had no difficulty in understanding the invitation to laugh along.

  I had already noticed that some of my classmates, the rough boys, talked to Mr Waller out of lessons in a way I thought was somehow disturbing. Since this was Westminster Under School in Eccleston Square, London SW1, my viewing some of my fellow pupils as ‘rough boys’ indicates that I was in a class of my own as a milksop.

  At lunch one day Mr Waller had charge of our table. The chief ‘rough boy’ took a drink of water, pretended to notice something at the bottom of his glass and said, ‘Sir? Do you see what’s written on the bottom of these glasses?’

  We all looked. All I could see was a word written there (well, stamped really), the name of the manufacturer. Duralex. The boy went on, ‘Funny that they make glasses as well, eh, sir?’

  I knew that something dirty was being insinuated, but not what it was. O happy days before Internet porn, when an eleven-year-old could be so much in the dark. The trade name Durex meant nothing to me. I had a vague knowledge of the existence of the contraceptive sheath, though I knew it under the name of the ‘rubber johnny’. I had also acquired some spectacular misinformation on the subject along the way. Was my unworldliness so obvious that other boys got a kick out of telling me fibs? I knew, or thought I knew, that there was a hole in a rubber johnny and that sometimes the man’s ‘stuff’ (another vagueness, but made authoritative by Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea, which was a true book about the War) took a whole day to pass through it. Perhaps I had been told the old myth about the government insisting on a pinhole being made in one protective in a hundred, to safeguard the birth rate, and had got it turned round. I had only the vaguest idea of what the man and the woman did, and none at all about why they would want to. I seem to have thought there was some sort of filtration involved, or a slow drip process as with coffee made by the Cona method, a feature of dinner parties at the Gray’s Inn flat.

  How did Mr Waller react to this transgressive and smutty line of chat? Clearly his professional response should have been to kill the conversation without making too much of a fuss. Instead he gave a complicit snigger.

  He had his favourites and his unfavourites, and it was no mystery where I fitted in. At one point I was unwell and missed a few days of school, and when I went back it felt as if maths lessons had been purposefully accelerated so as to leave me behind. The equations had turned ugly. The numbers were no longer on my side.

  Mr Waller didn’t seem to want me to catch up. I wasn’t used to academic failure, and went to Dad for help. I don’t remember confiding in my mother, but I expect that’s because I so often did. Sharing my worries with Dad was the memorable event, though I’m sure she smoothed my way to him.

  He took action, not making the fuss I had feared but tracking down a suitably diligent classmate and having the relevant pages of his exercise book photocopied. In those days domestic photocopying was an exotic venture, and he emphasized its fantastic cost. I’m sure his surprise was genuine, but it can’t really have been a significant drain on the family budget, so perhaps he was guarding against the possibility that I would come to expect the mechanical reproduction of schoolwork as a matter of course.

  In fact the photocopied pages were only a limited help. The results of the process were far from crisp, with dark lines superimposed, and I couldn’t reliably make out the handwriting. Dad asked me if I was on my way to recovering my rightful place at the top of the class, and I recognized this from Latin lessons as the type of question that expects the answer Yes. I tried to make out that it was only a matter of time.

  However much Dad tried to help me with my maths problem, he was part of it himself. His appearances in the papers, associated with a shocking court case, seemed to inflame my teacher. Mr Waller would ask me a difficult question, already grasping the piece of chalk he would throw at me if I got it wrong. The pressure he applied made it more likely that I would fail, and I duly acquired an incompetence when faced with mathematical operations. I don’t think Mr Waller explicitly aimed at this effect. A week or two of cringing would have satisfied him. Of course I didn’t know the exact source of his resentment and badgering, but it seems obvious that I was really only a stand-in for Dad, unlucky enough to be within range of flung chalk.

  I was fitfully aware of Dad’s public status. At one stage we went on a family holiday to Ireland, taking the ferry to Dun Laoghaire and hiring a car for further exploring. The tune I pounded out on the piano in any hotel unwise enough to leave one unlocked was ‘A Walk In The Black Forest’. I did my best to duplicate the ersatz bounce of that exemplary, laboratory-designed earworm. Horst Jankowski’s instrumental was a big hit worldwide in 1965, which suggests (unless I was criminally behind the times) a time roughly contemporary with the trial of Brady and Hindley. I remember us getting as far as Galway. We went fishing and caught some pollack, though Mum said we wouldn’t be asking the hotel kitchen to cook them for us, since (as everyone knew) pollack tasted of blotting paper. If I’d been able to make the leap from precociousness to actual prescience, I would have sung out, ‘But Mum, they’re sustainable!’

  At the hotel there was a swimming pool with a tricky name, the Fuchsia Pool. The word had to be said very carefully to avoid embarrassment, though it turned out that ‘fuchsia’ was only the name of the pinky-red ballerina-like flowers that grew round the pool. The book in which I eventually saw the word ‘fuck’ in print for the first time, Mark Rascovich’s The Bedford Incident, was already in existence (published 1963) but I hadn’t come across it yet.

  The Bedford Incident is a Cold War reworki
ng of Moby-Dick, ending with the mutual destruction by warhead of a Russian submarine and a US destroyer. I couldn’t altogether blame the American sailors for their use of foul language. They were about to be blown to atoms, by an atom bomb no less, and as I understood it ‘fuck’ was the equivalent of the nuclear option in conversation.

  I had assumed, though, that this supremely taboo four-letter word was so beyond the pale as to resist the normal conventions of English spelling. I imagined specialized characters being necessary to transcribe it, lead-lined ones perhaps. Even so it might cause mutations in neighbouring words.

  In the Welsh language, of course, mutation is a fact of consonantal daily life, and doesn’t indicate the presence of background radiation, though it certainly helps to deter visitors.

  It was disappointing that ‘fuck’ was spelled no differently than ‘buck’, ‘duck’, ‘luck’. Even ‘fuch’ would be some sort of homage, however half-hearted.

  The Fuchsia Pool itself was shaped like a stylized fish, with the tail section being a shallow area safe for toddlers. I was a confident swimmer and nervous diver, but the hotel pool had, instead of a diving board, a white metal slide. I climbed up the ladder to the top of it and then became paralysed. After a while Dad came over and suggested that I hold on tight to the edges of the slide on my first ride down, so as to control my descent. There was a bucket of water next to me at the top of the ladder, and he volunteered to slosh it liberally over the slide so as to make it easier for me to hold on. Not bothering to examine the logic of the proposition, I agreed to it.

  Only when I had committed my body weight to the slippery metal, and the world slid out of control, did I understand that I had been betrayed, lied to by someone who maintained that only the truth would set you free. It was wonderful, not the betrayal as such but the accelerating joy it forced me to feel. I didn’t bother him with protests, in fact I hardly noticed him as I rushed back to the bottom of the white metal ladder. Dad had found a way to nudge me brusquely free from the deadlock of my milksop psychology.

  I remember we travelled under assumed names. It was felt unwise for Dad to visit the Irish Republic after having sent so many of its irregular affiliates down. That’s what I remember, but of course it makes no sense. In 1965 Dad wasn’t yet a judge, and even if he had been, no Troubles had arisen for him to get the wrong side of. I hope at least that the confusion in my memory doesn’t mean I was, say, sixteen and trembling at the top of the slide beside a hotel swimming pool, rather than eleven.

  I must be mixing up two holidays – except that we only went to Ireland the once, and no other destination would call for precautions of even this rudimentary kind. I don’t have a memory, not even a false one, of the name we travelled under, though I find it hard to imagine not being interested. Perhaps I was reading a book. I’ve always been able to read without queasiness in cars, on trains, in planes, on roller-coasters. Nice to think we might have gone under some name rich in associations, travelling perhaps as the Melmoths. Did we have false passports, even? The existence of the Common Travel Area may have made such elaborate preparations unnecessary, but the whole business of travelling incognito suggests the murder mysteries played out in country hotels off season.

  Later on, in the 1970s and ’80s, there were definite security concerns. Dad had some firearms training and was even issued with a gun, though it was kept locked up in the safe of the Gray’s Inn Treasury Office where there was no risk of its being useful. Certainly if the weapon had lived in the flat, I would have wanted to see it and Dad would have wanted to wave it about with all due solemnity.

  Before terrorism put judges at risk, there was the old-school underworld. The High Court Judge Edmund Davies, who lived at number 1 Gray’s Inn Square, received threats after he passed controversially severe sentences on those responsible for the ‘great’ train robbery of 1963. Precautions were put in place. Cynthia Terry, wife of the Under-Treasurer (and also my godmother, ‘Aunty See-See’ as we called her), was asked to give up her normal seat in the Chapel and position herself upstairs in the gallery. There she would be well placed to deter, by screaming or lobbing a hymn book, any intruder devious enough to walk into the Inn from High Holborn and enter the Chapel during morning service.

  I feel sure that if Aunty See-See was combat-ready in any marked way she would have mentioned it.

  Dad was certainly advised, once terrorism was a real force, to check the underside of his car for explosive devices. I didn’t ever see him do it. In fact my mind’s eye shows me him very much not doing it: leaning over to one side a little way from the car, as if that would give him the necessary visual access. By this time his Jaguar days were over and he drove sensible estate cars with automatic transmissions. Then I see him going halfway down on his knees for a better view before realizing he would risk sullying the excellence of his suiting with dirt if he allowed his knees to touch down on the road surface. He considers the use of newspaper to protect the cherished cloth and then understands that ink-smudges are at least as much of a threat to his turn-out as tarmac-scuffs … of course none of this amounts to a memory. On a television screen these images would be accompanied by a caption warning of RECONSTRUCTION, though why anybody but me would want to watch I couldn’t say.

  If the national shock delivered by the Moors Murders had led to the restoration of the death penalty, Dad might have found himself in difficulties. He not only disapproved of the death penalty, implicitly on religious grounds, but said, after the event, that he would not have accepted appointment as a judge if he was required to pronounce it. Technically capital punishment was retained for a few specialized offences, such as treason, piracy with violence, and arson in naval shipyards, but it would be a scruple too far to expect him to decline preferment in case these virtually hypothetical crimes materialized in his court.

  His principle wasn’t tested, since the black cap remained a historical item (he became a judge in 1969), but that doesn’t make his moral position unreal. It’s true that I never saw Dad undergo a real crisis of conscience, and his ambition seemed to lie close to the core of him, though I saw enough discrepancy of temperament in the last phase of his life not to be so sure. What’s the appropriately judicial phrase? To reserve judgment.

  What Dad felt he learned from the Moors Murders case was that pornography was an actively corrosive force. The books Ian Brady read, the images he saw, inflamed and released an underlying inhumanity. It’s doubtful that even before 1966 he was in favour of sexual material being made freely available – I can’t see him approving of a world in which copies of Reveille and Titbits were brazenly displayed where minors could see them – but after that case his opposition became definite.

  If conversation turned in that direction he would maintain that the last word on the subject had been spoken by Pamela Hansford Johnson in her book On Iniquity, which describes her change of heart on this issue from a liberal to a conservative stance, the catalyst being Ian Brady.

  There was a sort of troubled open-mindedness in our household, the product I suppose of slightly different attitudes between my parents. I remember one evening when the BBC broadcast some footage of Oh! Calcutta! There was debate over whether we should watch it. We did. The images were of naked bodies frozen every few frames and allowed to overlap, producing an effect that soon became abstract (particularly on a black-and-white television) and we uneasily agreed they were beautiful.

  I never got around to reading Hansford Johnson’s book in Dad’s lifetime. Perhaps he was only using it as a sort of barricade, to keep dissension at a distance. If I had read it and taken issue with its arguments, he might only have withdrawn
behind another obstacle, though his withdrawals were usually feints and it was never safe to assume a lasting retreat.

  The tone of On Iniquity is sometimes impossibly quaint:

  Not so long ago, I raised a little storm by suggesting, in a letter to the Guardian, that it was not desirable for Krafft-Ebing [who wrote Psychopathia Sexualis, intended as a serious study] to be available in relatively cheap paperback edition on the bookstalls of English railway-stations …

  Class seems to dog the discussion of censorship, just as it had at the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, with Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC asking the jury: ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?’ The cheapness of a book, and consequently its availability to the lower orders, seems to be an important element in discussion of the issue.

  As Hansford Johnson visualized it, ‘The walls of the police storerooms are almost bulging outwards with the pressure of tons upon tons of dirty books.’ Dad had a similar mental picture, but at least there were buttresses in place to keep those storerooms from exploding. Dirty books were being kept out of circulation by the proper authorities.

  Everyone assumed that the smut was safe in its silos, the general public screened from contamination by thick bulkheads of probity. It was because Dad had such a high opinion of the police force in general that he regarded corruption there as the ultimate betrayal of trust.

  In 1964 he had been commissioned to write a report investigating a particular set of allegations, that confessions had been extracted under duress. He found there to be some substance to the allegations. Dad was particularly proud of his report, in which he had tried to match the terse clarity of Lord Denning’s prose style, and felt vindicated when it was held up as a model of its kind. One newspaper suggested he would make a good candidate for Ombudsman, defender of the individual against the injustice of institutions. That office didn’t actually exist, but he was on some sort of spectral short list.