Kid Gloves (14 page)

I imagine all these
lubricated parleys taking place in the Grosvenor Hotel, Chester, an institution I've never
visited but one that seemed somehow to be Dad's spiritual home. Perhaps as the hub of the Wales
and Chester circuit in his glory days as a barrister, neither Wales nor London, it was where he
had the most seductive combination of ease and prestige.

Dad was a great exponent of the Churchillian Nap,
a form of refreshment that has since been rebranded the Power Nap or the Disco Nap. He felt that
you should play fair with the god of sleep by getting into your pyjamas and sliding between the
sheets even if you only aimed for the replenishment of five brain-charging minutes offline. When
the late-night pressure was too relentless for him to risk another nap he would keep going on
cigarettes, putting his head under the cold tap every half-hour or so if the nicotine alertness
began to fade.

He smoked every step of the way to the bench, and
when he was told to give the habit up in the 1970s had to learn a different pattern of working.
His brain needed to acquire the ability to walk again without the crutch of a cigarette, and
Dad's solution was to move the intensity of his work life into a different sector of the day,
not the late-late night but the early-early morning. He would set the clock for five or even
four. When a long and complicated case was over he might still get up without fully waking and
sleepwalk his way to his study, where Sheila would find him and coax him back to bed.

By suggesting to Dad that he was prejudiced,
Ronald Waterhouse risked making an enemy who outranked him in a hierarchical profession, and
also cutting off a useful stream of revenue. There's no more efficient way of killing goodwill
than letting a friend know he's a bigot.

Of course he ‘wrapped it up a bit', as advocates
are always being urged to do …
Bill, you have a bit of a bee in your bonnet about
these people. They are not as you suppose them to be.
Even so,
this
seems a case of File Under Moral Courage. I can't think of another category that would fit
it.

Ronald Waterhouse didn't lose Dad's allegiance,
and later he became a judge himself. He's perhaps best known for the painstaking inquiry he
conducted, after his retirement, into the abuse of children in care in North Wales. There should
be a special mention, though, for the question he asked during the proceedings against Ken Dodd
for tax evasion in 1989. He asked, ‘What does £100,000 in a suitcase feel like?' to which Dodd
replied, unsatisfyingly to my mind, ‘The notes are very light, M'Lord.'

Dad didn't forget that Ronald had tried to change
his attitude, but he held on to the contested attitude as well as to the friendship with Ronald.
He wasn't ready to be influenced, to entertain new thoughts. As far as he was concerned the
subject was as exempt from renegotiation as a birth certificate.

Did he have any personal experience of
homosexuals and their ways? He was once, as a young man, on the receiving end of a clumsy pass,
though it was more apocalyptic than that in the telling. Unfortunately he gave few details, and
didn't encourage questions. Any actual information value has disappeared under the build-up of
competitively distorted versions Tim and I exchanged and found funny. Our final reworking went
something like
Wallah at the Club bought me a few drinks between
chukkas. Seemed a
nice enough chap till he tried to slide his filthy paw into my dhoti
–
laid the
blighter out with a chota peg.
(Sometimes ‘polo mallet'.) Quite where the Anglo-Indian
colouring comes in I have no idea. The incident took place, I think, in Geneva before the War,
though Dad never otherwise referred to being in Geneva. The fact that our version ends with
violence isn't part of the distortion. Dad said with a certain amount of righteousness that he
had broken a bottle on the man's head, as if no other form of RSVP was possible.

Dad wasn't even sufficiently
at ease with the existence of homosexuals to tell jokes about them. In fact he hated such jokes
more than any other. Even an anti-gay joke gave perversion the oxygen of publicity, when by
rights it should be smothered in the sulphur of oblivion.

I remember when Dad treated his brother, David,
up from Denbighshire on a visit to the metropolis, to dinner at the Garrick Club. David
embarrassed him by telling an off-colour joke on those hallowed premises. A joke about
lesbians.

It was about as sweet as such a joke can be.
A man in a bar sees an attractive woman and asks the bartender to send a drink to her from
him. ‘I wouldn't bother if I was you,' says the bartender. ‘She's a lesbian.' The man isn't
deterred and insists on the drink being sent over. He waits a little while and then goes over
to strike up conversation. ‘So,' he says, ‘which part of Lesbos are you from?'

I know I'm a bit of a subtext hound, but there's
something very satisfying about this constellation of joke, teller, audience and even setting.
In theory David was much more of a Country Mouse than Dad, resistant to anything that was ‘far
back' (his code word, slightly mystifying to me, for ‘posh'), but he chose to tell a joke making
mild fun of provincialism and ignorance. And meanwhile Dad was appalled that the word ‘lesbian'
should have been spoken in the dining-room of the Garrick.

The Garrick Club was founded in 1831 (and named
after the supreme actor of the previous century) as a place where ‘actors and men of refinement
and education might meet on equal terms', it being taken for granted that actors were unrefined
and uneducated. That was certainly the general opinion, and the idea was to improve the position
of this raffish line of work (‘profession' was hardly the right word at the time). The founders
hoped that by restricting eligibility to journalists, lawyers and actors, respectability might
be leached from those who had more than enough by those who were badly in need.

The club achieved its goal,
but the respectability of actors is as provisional as anyone else's. John Gielgud, for instance,
a prominent member, was respectable (to the point of being recently knighted) when he entered a
Chelsea public convenience one day in 1953, not so much when he left it in police custody. He
had been advised (by Michael Redgrave, was it?) of the crucial importance of giving a false name
if arrested. Accordingly he identified himself to the authorities as Arthur Gielgud. He seems to
have thought ‘John' was the bit that gave him away.

It seems thousands of years ago, the time when a
vulnerable public figure could behave with such marvellous naivety. It's only fair to point out
that Arthur John Gielgud was his full name, so he may have been trying in some quixotic way to
avoid a lie while also masking his identity with an alias. He did dissemble about his
profession, describing himself in court as a clerk.

Though worldliness was a very variable quality in
those post-war years, when Dad was building his reputation in London, his own innocence and
alarm seem hard to credit. Even in Aberystwyth, where he had been heavily involved in student
stage productions, there must surely have been at least a few dodgy characters sheltering under
the capacious skirts of Dame Theatre. There have been plenty of young men over the years who've
joined a drama group when the only acting they were really keen to do was acting on their own
prohibited desires.

Dad thought that such dark matters shouldn't be
dis-cussed – yet there was no lenience extended to those who were properly secretive. Dad
harboured a particular animus towards Gilbert Harding, the 1950s television personality, famous
for his rudeness, who broke down when interviewed (for the programme
Face to Face
) by
John Freeman, who asked searching
questions about death and his mother. The
programme proved that television could be both intimate and intense, even harrowing. The impact
was correspondingly greater in a culture more buttoned-up than today's.

Dad's logic was hard to follow. Gilbert Harding's
sexuality only became public knowledge after his death, but Dad seemed to feel that there was an
element of deception involved in his appearance on the programme. A monster had been allowed to
lay claim to recognizable human emotions, things he couldn't possibly experience given the
corruption of his desires. Such a person wasn't entitled to weep for his mother's death.

Ideally, crimes against nature should also be
ignored by culture. Dad felt it to be appalling that Emlyn Williams, actor and playwright,
should willingly address the issue in his autobiographies. One book,
George
, appeared
before the decriminalization of homosexuality, the other (
Emlyn
) afterwards. A Welsh
homosexual was a particular sort of traitor, a quisling between the sheets, a friend who chose
to help the enemy. If there was a connection suggested here between the theatrical world and
sexual double-dealing then it was all the less welcome for that.

As late as the 1970s Dad could listen with
evident pleasure to a radio programme in which a pair of elderly spinsters, spending their
retirement in the idyllic village of Stackton Tressel, reminisced about their long-ago operatic
careers, without realizing that his beloved Hinge and Bracket were female impersonators.
(Admittedly drag on the radio takes gender transgression into the domain of conceptual art.)
When informed of the true situation he seemed baffled. What on earth was the point? It was hard
to explain to him that however little point there was to the act in question, there was even
less if they were really what they claimed to be.

David's lesbian joke had only made a ripple, but
another comic routine caused Dad considerable offence. Since it
happened in
the 1970s, it gave his sons much joy. We weren't used to seeing him at a loss, and no pathos
attached to the novelty at the time. Whether or not that decade was a difficult time to be a
post-adolescent male, it must have been an excruciating time to be the father of such creatures.
The occasion was Christmas lunch, displaced from the Gray's Inn flat for once. The reason was
that Sheila was still recovering from the effects of a road accident, and wouldn't be up to the
strain of catering, so the date is likely to have been 1973. The venue was the Waldorf Hotel in
the Aldwych, and we went there as the guests of George Walford, a colleague of Dad's, family
friend and in fact godfather of Matthew. On a cryptic-crossword level I enjoyed the fact that we
were going to the Waldorf with the Walfords, but there was also a bit of history being invoked,
since the Waldorf was where my parents had held their wedding reception. We would be near the
very spot where Dad's father, Henry, had fallen on the sword of his abstinence in the name of
family unity. There might be a plaque to commemorate this heroic ingestion of fizz, virtual
hara-kiri of non-conformist temperance.

It started perfectly innocently. ‘Do you know the
story about the newly appointed judge who doesn't feel he's got the hang of the sentencing
guidelines …?' I wonder what had got into George Walford. Perhaps there was an element of
the raconteur's Olympiad, a desire to tell a joke or funny story that would beat Dad at his own
droll game. By this stage of the meal much food had been eaten, much drink drunk. Crackers had
been tortured until they voided their trinkets. Paper hats had been distributed and put on with
variously good and bad grace.

Dad expressed neutral interest in this recent
appointee to the bench, praiseworthy in his concern to master the proper procedures.

George went on with his
story. ‘So he approaches a senior colleague and asks for the benefit of his experience. “What,”
he asks, “should I give a young man for allowing himself to be buggered?” “Oh,” says the senior
judge, “I'd say thirty bob and a box of Black Magic should do the trick.”'

We sons were incredulous with delight but managed
to suppress any manifestation of it. Sheila looked anxious and unhappy. Nobody round the table
laughed. In fact a laughter-vacuum was created which could have annihilated a great deal of
entertainment value – not just a single off-colour joke but Richard Pryor's entire 1973
Christmas show (assuming that by some anomaly of booking agency he was performing in the next
room). Pryor was in his full foul-mouthed prime around then, but although Dad would have hated
his comedy he wouldn't have felt betrayed by it, not personally attacked. He was so
thunderstruck by George Walford's joke that he hardly seemed to react, though it was clear to us
all that he had sustained a heavy blow.

George had danced on the grave of a number of his
most precious assumptions. 1) A joke about a judge who was not just a pervert but a frivolous
one, 2) told in mixed company, by which he would have meant not just that there were women
present but that the younger generation was being exposed to insidious flippant evil, 3) at
Christmas. He couldn't stage a protest because we were guests and thereby beholden, though I
have to say such considerations hadn't necessarily held him back in the past.

It almost seemed to be too much for him to take
in, this compound assault, being simultaneously stabbed (as it may have seemed) in the back, in
the front and in the sides. Finally he managed to say, ‘I'm afraid I don't see much humour in
that sort of thing.' And after that nothing could put the bubbles back in the champagne. They
had symbolically migrated to
the bloodstreams of the Mars-Jones boys, black
bubbles of mischief, and we had to pretend not to be made tipsy and exhilarated by them.

It was the same juvenile impulse that made us
choose the Mille Pini off Queen Square (basic Italian) whenever a family meal in the Gray's Inn
area was on offer – until there was an actual restaurant called A Thousand Penises we would make
do with the Mille Pini. I don't know what had led Dad to choose George Walford to preside over
Matthew's spiritual development, and perhaps that Christmas he regretted it. The godparents we
were allotted were either neighbours and friends from Gray's Inn or colleagues of Dad's. So I
was under the care of Cynthia Terry (Aunty See-See), who lived at number 5 Gray's Inn Square,
and James Wellwood (Uncle Jimmy) from number 1. To complete the set I had a more august and
remote presence, Sir Hildreth Glyn-Jones. I've never met a Hildreth since. It's a rare first
name, and it means ‘battle counsellor', usually given to females when given at all.

A godparent is supposed to watch over a child's
interests, to underwrite renunciation of the Devil and his works, the vain pomp and glory of the
world, not to mention desires both covetous and carnal. Informally there's some sort of residual
watchdog function, though intervention would only ever be a last resort. During deadlocked
arguments of the 1970s it would have been handy to empanel my trio as a higher tribunal, a
family Court of Appeal (perhaps that was why we had been given three godparents each). In such a
hearing I might not have done too badly. Cynthia was a layperson, not much of a match for Dad in
argument, and Jimmy Wellwood, though a lawyer, was academic by temperament, easily distracted
and easily overruled, but Sir Hildreth was a senior judge with rather a relish for barneys in
court, who might have taken my side for the sheer hell of it.

Sir Hildreth didn't live in
the Inn, but would seek me out every now and then when I was a schoolboy at Westminster. A
message would be tucked behind the lattice of ribbons on the College noticeboard, making an
appointment to take me out one afternoon. We would walk across Green Park to Fortnum & Mason
for tea. I remember him telling me that Autolycus in
The Winter's Tale
described
himself as a ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles', and that the word for this indispensable
faculty was ‘serendipity'. Before he delivered me back to school he would dependably hand over a
five-pound note.

All of this was highly satisfactory. This was
godparental behaviour of a sort I could understand, with its own compass points: English
Breakfast tea, Shakespearean conversation, anchovy-paste sandwiches, five-pound note. It was
only long after the event, after Sir Hildreth had signed off on his sponsorial duties by giving
me a copy of Peake's
Commentary on the Bible
– I had been confirmed, so in spiritual
terms I was flying solo – that these visitations acquired an extra dimension.

Sir Hildreth was an acerbic judge notorious for
the humiliations he visited on counsel appearing before him. Presiding over a court was his
version of blood sport, and the blood spilled was unlikely to be his. It's virtually impossible
for a judge to be defeated in a contest with a barrister (though F. E. Smith landed a few good
blows), and any such victory will come at a cost. The bull never gets awarded a matador's ears.
Technical redresses can be secured in a higher court, assuming that the judge is wrong in law as
distinct from abusive in person, but this precious ointment can only be applied long after the
bruises have faded.

So there was some calculation involved in
awarding this oppressive personage a stake in my spiritual development. Giving Sir Hildreth this
honour might confer a certain immunity on Dad. I was a sop to Cerberus, a studious little
hobbit offered up to take the edge off the Orc King's appetite. Dad was
trying to draw Sir Hildreth into the charmed circle of family with its qualms and taboos. When
this senior judge stood by the font and undertook to watch over me, so that the old Adam might
be buried and a new man rise in his place, I imagine Dad was looking for a related promise. That
he himself wouldn't be stretched on a rack in open court any time soon.

Obviously I exaggerate. It's a family failing.
Dad wasn't propitiating the Dark Lord of Mordor, nor even Torquemada (the actual Inquisitor, not
the still-remembered crossword compiler). He was doing something I should have been able to
understand even as a schoolboy, especially as a schoolboy. He was sucking up. The Honourable Sir
Hildreth Glyn-Jones was twenty years older than Dad. He was never invited to drinks parties at
the flat, or if invited didn't attend. I don't even know if he lived in London. He had a wife
and three daughters but I never met them.