Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Roger Holloway was a man whose faith co-existed with a formidable worldliness – while living in Hong Kong in the 1980s he had appeared every day on each of the colony’s two television channels, in the morning contributing the equivalent of Thought for the Day, presenting a claret-tasting programme on the other channel in the evenings. There can’t be many preachers who have used Lady Diana Cooper as an authority for a point of doctrine (the impossibility of repentance as an act of will), quoting her as saying that when she met her Maker she would only be able to say, ‘Dear God, I’m sorry I’m not sorry.’

  Roger claimed to have a list of names that were guaranteed to kick-start Dad’s dormant desire to hold the floor. The one I remember is ‘Goronwy Rees’ (not a name I knew). Accusations of Cold War-era betrayal and double-dealing would follow. A Welshman who turned his coat was not to be forgiven, even if there was no proof of his treachery. I can’t say I ever tried my luck with this Open Sesame. I accepted the new Dad, who was so different from the old one that any flashback would be jarring. He became exasperated from time to time but there were no outbursts.

  Dad didn’t seem to have religious faith so much as religious confidence. Every morning he woke with the expectation of having fine things shown to him by life or its executive officers. It seemed obvious that God would turn out to (i) exist and (ii) put in a good word. Round His omnipresent neck he might wear a Garrick Club tie.

  It was strange to see Dad take so little interest in food after Sheila’s death, and even in drink. Gray’s Inn was, and perhaps is, very male socially, certainly at the higher levels. Students eat a certain number of dinners in the Hall, while benchers like Dad are well looked after at table. The cellars of the Inn are grandly stocked. When I made arrangements for a reception after Sheila’s funeral service in the Chapel, it was proposed that we serve the Inn’s ‘quaffing wine’. I agreed to this without asking for more detail, though it would have been interesting to know how many grades there were below this, and how many above.

  There’s a gesture people make in social settings like weddings where drink flows freely, and glasses are discreetly topped up without an enquiry, so as not to interrupt conversation. The gesture involves placing the hand palm down over the glass, symbolically blocking access to the vessel. It’s not an elaborate gesture, not a difficult thing to get right, but I never saw Dad make it.

  Dad’s background in Congregationalist Denbighshire was teetotalitarian – his own father drank only one alcoholic drink in his life, and that was (fair play) a glass of champagne at Dad’s wedding reception. I imagine him choking it down as if it was sparkling rat poison. The early prohibition left traces: not having a taste for beer, Dad rather disapproved of pubs, but had no objection to drinking at home or on classier premises.

  He had joined the RNVR (Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve) before the War and served on a number of ships, having particularly fond memories of HMS Euryalus. The custom of ‘splicing the mainbrace’, the distribution of a tot of rum daily, was still in force. This Nelsonian beverage was not just a ritualized perk but a form of currency. Favours could be secured or acknowledged by pledging all or part of one’s tot.

  The smallest possible subdivision of the ration was ‘sippers’. When you were taking sippers, everyone would be watching your Adam’s apple to make sure it didn’t move. The spirit was admitted to the mouth by a subtle suction amounting to osmosis. A larger share was ‘gulpers’. When it came to gulpers the Adam’s apple was allowed a single movement. When the whole tot was being offered up, the cry was ‘Sandy bottoms!’.

  Not much remained in Dad’s vocabulary of naval lingo, though he did hang on to the expression ‘belay the last pipe’, used to indicate that an order has been countermanded. I absorbed it unthinkingly, so that it has become my normal way of saying ‘Forget what I just said’ or ‘Ignore my last e-mail’ – but then I have to explain what the phrase means, and its advantages as a piece of shorthand disappear.

  It doesn’t seem likely that Dad got another of his standard phrases – ‘Rally buffaloes!’ – from his time at sea. It was the very unwelcome phrase he used in our teenage years to tell us to get out of bed.

  The staple adult drink that I remember from my childhood was gin and bitter lemon. No-one has been able to explain to me the vogue for this mixer, with a taste both caustic and insipid. Was tonic water rationed in some way?

  Sometimes I wonder how anyone of that generation got home safe after a party, at a time when refusing an alcoholic drink was bad manners and the breathalyser didn’t exist. Of course the roads were emptier then.

  One of Dad’s early cases, and one of his favourite anecdotes, involved a charge of drink-driving from that ancient time, the period in a barrister’s early professional life when he borrows briefs from his fellows in chambers in advance of a conference with a client, piling them up on his desk to give the necessary impression of a thriving practice.

  Dad’s client had been charged on the basis of his poor performance walking a straight line. This was the period’s low-tech guide to intoxication, a white line drawn on the floor at police stations. Urine tests? Blood tests? Not relevant to the story as he told it.

  The client’s defence was that he suffered from Ménière’s disease, a problem of the inner ear which affects hearing and balance. His was a severe case, making it impossible for him to walk a straight line. Dad marshalled an expert witness to testify to his medical condition. The Crown did the same. The outcome of the case depended, as it so often does, on which of these carried more weight, whether Tweedledum or Tweedledee excelled in authority and gravitas. The expert witness called by Dad gave evidence that the accused did indeed suffer from Ménière’s disease, and could not therefore be expected to walk a straight line. The Crown’s counterpart testified that he did not in fact suffer from the disease. His inability to walk a straight line amounted only to a confession by the legs that unlawful quantities of alcohol had been admitted to the mouth.

  The verdict went in favour of Tweedledum, with Dad’s client acquitted. His driving licence was safe – but then it was officially rescinded, on the basis that his severe Ménière’s disease rendered him unfit to drive. This was the aspect of the story I liked best, the irony of the trump card turning into the joker. The law is not mocked! Except that Dad’s client asked if there was a mechanism for getting his licence back. Yes there was – but he would need to get a medical expert to certify that he didn’t have Ménière’s disease. A phone call to Tweedledee, and Dad’s client was on his way to the swift reissue of a driving licence. The law is mocked on a regular basis, perhaps most heartily by those who make a living from it.

  In his free-drinking social circle Dad rarely came up against abstainers, but the parents of Peter Rundell, a schoolfriend of mine when I was ten or eleven, turned out to be fierce advocates of Moral Rearmament. Dad learned this at an evening event that turned out to be governed by the statutes of Prohibition. The discovery gave him a hunted look, and his small talk was unusually small. Though the deprivation hit Dad hard I didn’t much care how adults carried on, and I even enjoyed being the Rundells’ guest at plays put on at the Westminster Theatre, then a stronghold of Moral Rearmament. I was theatrically naive, but sophisticated enough, even so, to feel uneasy when we in the audience were issued with white sticks during the interval of a play called Blindsight. I tapped my way across the lobby with my eyes shut, making broad gestures with my free hand, hoping it would close round an ice cream.

  Dad the raconteur, in full flow at the dinner-table, was a very different creature from Dad the solemn upholder of his profession, though he was always confident of his o
wn consistency. I don’t think he noticed that the view of the law as an amoral game, which he could pass on with such relish while telling a story such as the one about the alleged Ménière’s disease, was the same one that he so violently objected to in the event that other people advanced it and he wasn’t in the mood to laugh along.

  When he was a beginner at the Bar Dad was able to acquire a wig second-hand, and so was spared the effort of ageing a new one, by dusting it with ash or soaking it in tea. Heavy smokers have an inbuilt advantage when it comes to achieving the yellow tint desired, but the effect isn’t immediate.

  Those who go shopping for barristers’ wigs in long-established shops on or near Chancery Lane, such as Ede & Ravenscroft or Stanley Ley, are offered two tiers of quality, but they aren’t all that far apart. They don’t correspond to the economy and luxury own-brand lines in a supermarket, since the price differential is hardly more than 10 per cent. If you ask what the difference is, you’ll be told that although both are made from horsehair, the more expensive ones are made from the tail hair, the marginally thriftier ones from the mane.

  And is tail hair so much better as wig material than mane (which would seem to grow in smaller quantities)? Does that account for the difference in price? If you ask these supplementary questions, and are alone in the shop, and have happened on the right sales assistant, you may be told: ‘To put it bluntly, sir, we need to wash the shit out of it.’

  After the gin-and-bitter-lemon years, in the 1970s, Dad took to drinking whisky and ginger ale, which he described as a ‘whisky sour’ though it bears no real relation to the drink of that name.

  Alcohol amplified something Dad also felt in full sobriety, a sense of disappointment with the way his sons were developing. This was especially true in the mid-1970s, when we were all coming to the end of our education. Where was our drive, our ambition? We seemed to be coasting at best. He wasn’t so much disappointed as incredulous. We seemed to think the world owed us a living!

  There was some truth in this, of course, though it could hardly be otherwise. Our circumstances were so different from his. He had tunnelled through rock to make his way in the world, while we had been accustomed from an early age to using the tube, with Chancery Lane station just round the corner from our childhood home.

  Dad’s ideal was that we would all become lawyers, which would be following his footsteps in one sense, except that his drive and ambition had taken him very far from the paths trodden by his farming ancestors. To follow him would be very different from being like him, would mean in fact that we were very unlike him. The more we were like him the less we would follow him. All this tangle needs to be kept distinct from the common-sense awareness that we would most likely never emerge from his shadow and be assumed, even if we went on to ‘great things’, to have got our start thanks to his eminence. It was understandable that he wanted us to soar, but how could we do that if we used him as a launch-pad?

  We confidently diagnosed Dad in the popular-science terms of the day as a ‘Type A personality’, unable to relax, likely to suffer from strokes, heart attacks and other forms of stress-related condition, the self-inflicted wounds of an oppressive character. When he developed a stomach ulcer it seemed to prove us right, though that particular line of punitive pseudo-medical reasoning has since been discredited and retired.

  Dad always called sherry ‘sherry wine’ with a slightly lah-di-dah pronunciation, though I didn’t know what nuance of pretension was being identified. Sherry wasn’t classified by Dad as a women’s drink – it was associated with the young man who had saved my parents’ lives in Spain the year after they were married, when they had got themselves into difficulties swimming. On special occasions we might toast his name. ¡Xavier Cremades!

  When the time came, Sheila organized a retirement party for him at the Garrick. She decided to serve champagne cocktails, the only such drink she herself liked. She also decided to do things properly, improving on the standard catering protocol whereby the drink is topped up with champagne but the other ingredients (a little brandy, a few drops of angostura, a sugar lump) are not reinforced. On this special occasion, there would be no mere top-up but the provision (expense be damned) of a whole new drink.

  Surely she knew she was playing with firewater? Even the angostura raises the alcohol content. Only the sugar can enter a plea of not guilty, and even then can be suspected of aiding and abetting by disguising the potency of the drink with sweetness. Dad had a strong head for alcohol in those days, which is only a way of saying that it distorted him less on the surface than in the depths. In the second hour of the party a woman of my generation, known to him since her birth, exercising perhaps unconsciously the double privilege of good looks and long intimacy, made some mild enquiries about the ideological assumptions of the judiciary – the sort of thing that might be aired on Start the Week without setting the switchboard alight. She asked Bill (as she called him, having graduated to that intimacy from Uncle Bill) if he thought judges as a group had really taken on board the recent upheavals in society, such as multiculturalism and the transformed position of women.

  This was never the sort of speculation that Dad welcomed, but perhaps the champagne cocktails played a part in making him so grandly cold, coldly grand. He told her that she had spoiled his party and must leave immediately. She was horrified and did what she could to make amends, saying that casting any sort of shadow on his special day had been the furthest thing from her mind. She was terribly sorry if she had given offence. Again it may have been the influence of the cocktail, multicultural in its own right, combining champagne and brandy from the Old World, sugar and bitters from the New, which gave Dad’s verdict its austere force. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is something you will have to live with for the rest of your life.’

  This was a dismal own goal, to send a guest away, taking all the shine off the occasion, and a warning that some of Dad’s less appealing behaviour patterns were still some way from retirement.

  There were times after he retired when Dad would have to be helped the two hundred yards home from Hall, more or less to the point of being carried by Inn staff or fellow benchers. This was hideously embarrassing, for my mother having to receive this stumbling procession of dignitaries, for me if I happened to run into them as they tried to negotiate the steps outside number 3 Gray’s Inn Square, but it was nowhere as bad as it might have been if he had felt any shame himself. Hangdog wasn’t his style, or it wasn’t until the next morning. He was serene, as if this was the way he always came home, or as if these nice fellows had wanted to give him a treat and he hadn’t liked to say no. The whole charade made it surprisingly easy to play along.

  Sometimes he would remain roughly vertical until he reached the bedroom, then topple slowly sideways without distress to the floor, perhaps pulling some bedclothes with him in what was more a slide than a fall, a controlled descent with a touch of the maladroit grace of the performers he most admired, Max Wall, Tommy Cooper, Ralph Richardson.

  Moderation didn’t come naturally to Dad, and self-discipline needed reinforcement from outside. At various points in later life Dad went to a luxurious health farm, his favoured being called Champneys, to lose a few pounds. The regime also required abstinence from alcohol. These expensive bouts of self-denial could be redeemed if he happened to coincide with a woman who shared his taste and talent for flirting. Flirtation without possibility made the hours speed by. Age didn’t disqualify such compatible women, but nor certainly did youth. The word he used of them was ‘sparklers’.

  Flirtation as he practised it wasn’t any sort of rehearsal for infidelity but a formal vocal di
splay, lyrical rather than heroic, little Wigmore Hall recitals rather than opera house tours de force. When a woman friend of mine paid a visit to the Gray’s Inn flat, Dad called her ‘darling’. My mother was only marginally piqued, but decided to patrol the marital perimeter by asking sweetly, ‘If Frances is Darling, what then am I?’

  In general Dad imposed himself on company by force of personality rather than brute quickness of wit. His preferred style was the polished story (‘Did I ever tell you about the time …?’), not the dazzling improvisation. It helped that from his perch among the higher ranks of a hierarchical profession he didn’t often meet the Challenge Direct. But now he had to exert steady pressure on the charm pedal if he was to accelerate safely out of danger. ‘Sheila is Darling One,’ he said, ‘Frances is Darling Two.’ This formula not only smoothed any ruffled wifely feathers but passed into currency. If Frances was visiting, or if Dad answered the phone to her, he would greet her as Darling Two, and be rewarded, as we all hoped to be, by her throaty smoker’s laugh.

  In the absence of sparklers Champneys could be a bit of a martyrdom, forcing his thoughts inward. Once I received a postcard from him at that address, saying: ‘No sparklers here this time. You have always been a rewarding son.’ The lack of a logical connection only added to the touchingness of the message. Except when in exile from bibulous normality, this was a vein of intimate introspection that he preferred to leave alone.

  From quite early on in his career, perhaps even before he became a judge, Dad had told us about how he was looking forward to retirement, to all the things he would set his hand to when he only had the time, although he undertook hobbies (such as painting in oils or french-polishing) only in brief unrestful spasms. As a family we had once built a Mirror dinghy, and this was a hobby he organized and delegated. The Mirror dinghy was a kit, though of a full-sized craft, a flat-pack yacht, ordered through the Daily Mirror. There were red sails to match the Mirror’s masthead, though I’m not sure I had seen the newspaper then (ours was a Times and Express household). We were all dragooned into doing some of the work in the garage of our holiday house, attaching the prefabricated pieces to each other with twists of copper wire before waterproofing the seams (caulking them, even, in an amateurish way) with a strong-smelling resin paste. His actual hobby wasn’t building a boat, more being the clerk of works, project manager of a small family boat-building business.