Kid Gloves (22 page)

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 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.

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.

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 approach 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.'

I had registered a faint shock at hearing her
refer to Dad as ‘Lloyd', his name in the family when he was growing up, discarded in favour of
‘Bill' for his post-war life at the Bar. In a strictly limited sense her attachment to my father
was deeper than my mother's, by dint of going further into the past, reaching back to a simpler,
more dreamy form of life, with luxury
cars and offices of state lined up
like ducks in a shooting gallery, his for the picking off.

At the end of our phone conversation Esmé
mentioned that she sometimes came up to town. Would I care to join her one day for tea at the
Ritz? I would, with pleasure.

Tea never came about. Perhaps I should have
called 1471 and made a note of Esmé's number (risking the discovery that she had withheld it),
though I'm not sure I would have wanted to bother her.

It must have been a habit of Dad's in those days
to personalize the instruments he played. The guitar he took with him on active service ended up
inscribed with the names of any number of shipmates. At the end of the War he took it to a shop
on Denmark Street, hoping to get a good price, since many of the friends whose names it bore had
attained high rank in the service. He was disappointed to be told that he had virtually
destroyed its market value.

The ukelele seems a rather flighty instrument on
which to inscribe the name of a beloved when there is a more high-toned one available. The
guitar is the serenader's weapon of choice, after all – but perhaps Dad's guitar was already
rather crowded out, like a teenager's plaster cast, with the names of his messmates. Even if
there was room physically I can see that there might be a social qualm. Dad might be reluctant
to make a nice well-brought-up girl consort, even on the bodywork of a guitar, with rough male
company, a contingent from below decks. Better to be the admiral aboard a ukelele than share the
bridge of a guitar.

The best that Denmark Street could do for Dad was
to accept the reverently vandalized guitar in part-exchange for another instrument. Dad dug deep
into the pockets of his demob suit and forked out sixty pounds (excluding the exchange value of
the inscribed guitar) for the Gibson L4,
beautiful to look at as well as to
play, lacquered and already a vintage item (made in 1928), subsequently an heirloom inherited by
Matthew, the guitarist among the brothers, while Tim took away the Monington & Weston, also
lacquered but less precious, and I made off with the contraband Clavinova.