Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  This piece of information wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to Sheila, but it would have tickled Dad very much. Nothing could have been more appropriate for a Navy man like himself than the association with the splendid Horatio, who made the journey back from Trafalgar in a barrel of rum. Sailors on that voyage of triumphant melancholy are supposed to have paid their respects by taking nips from the barrel. This must qualify as the ultimate Nelsonian beverage, grog doubly fortified, spirit infused with a spirit well over proof, from which they took tots of the great man’s essence, helping themselves on the sly to sippers, gulpers, sandy bottoms of immortality.

  Some time had passed after the funeral before it occurred to me that we hadn’t provided our funeral directors with a set of clothes for Dad to wear in his coffin, and that therefore he must have been kitted out by them in some rudimentary way from what had gone with him to the hospital, pyjamas or a tracksuit. Utter violation of his dress code in his prime, the bespoke double-breasted suits with their hint of Cosa Nostra.

  How could this have happened? Sheila’s arrangements the year before had been taken care of more scrupulously, but then the circumstances had been different. She had died in the flat, with her clothes to hand, and it had been an obvious priority to make sure she was turned out as she might have wanted. It seems extraordinary that France & Son could have made no enquiry about our wishes, but extraordinary too that I didn’t think of it.

  How did I imagine that Dad was going to be fitly costumed for the event? That Messrs France would sneak into the Gray’s Inn flat and make their own selection of mobster suit and club tie (the Garrick, please God)? How else except through my agency was Dad to be properly treated, at any stage after I had volunteered to take care of him? The fact is, he was my prisoner, as he is on this page, with no redress against caricature or cheap insight.

  It’s perfectly possible that a discussion about clothes took place, one that passed through one of my brothers (or both), or even one that I was part of but don’t remember. In that case my fretting over the possibility of his going to the flames improperly kitted out is the same sort of mental tic as not being able to sleep for worry that the alarm hasn’t been set or the gas turned off.

  Was there a part of me that wanted Dad to be unsuitably dressed in the coffin? Feelings about parents are such primal things that it’s safer to assume you harbour any and every disreputable emotion rather than give yourself a clean bill of health. The Oedipal agenda doesn’t lay itself out neatly, in the style of a PowerPoint presentation. My first book, Lantern Lecture, for instance, is almost entirely made up of insults to father-figures, something I managed not to notice for years.

  The first-written piece was a fantasia in which the Queen contracted rabies from an infected corgi (the origin of the illness being a bat blown off course). Obviously the Queen is a mother-figure, except that her position of supreme authority makes her an honorary man, and Dad was not just a judge but one of Her Majesty’s Judges. The title story was a commemorative character sketch of one of Dad’s friends, Philip Yorke, the last squire of Erddig near Wrexham, and someone with about as much authority as the Milky Bar Kid. The withheld warmth of the story makes clear that I was choosing him as preferable to the father I actually had, a sort of antidote to the patriarchal poison. The fact that it was of course Dad who introduced me to Philip adds to the ungraciousness. In the final piece of the book, ‘Bathpool Park’, I returned to the patricidal fray but this time managed to do without the Queen getting in the way. The story analysed the operations of Dad’s court in the case of R. v. Donald Neilson and tried to show that it, and he, had missed the point. At the time of writing I thought of each piece as an exercise in a given genre, whether satire, elegy or analytical journalism, and so it is, but the impulse of antagonism is consistent across the group.

  There were a few procedural hiccups before Lantern Lecture was published, but it wasn’t Dad who made difficulties. Faber submitted the typescript to his old instructing solicitor Peter Carter-Ruck for a professional opinion about its vulnerability to legal action.

  The advice he gave was clear. Author and publisher would equally be open to charges of seditious libel. A stay in the Tower of London was not out of the question. Established authors on the Faber list were likely to express their distaste by changing publishers.

  (Note to younger readers: treatment of the royal family was very kid-gloved in those days, a time that pre-dates even the decorous lampooning, as it seems now, of Spitting Image.)

  Carter-Ruck was an old friend of Dad’s, it’s true, but I don’t think his opinion was a put-up job. Nobody ever said Dad backed down from a fight unless he was clearly going to lose it, and if he wanted the book squelched all he had to do was withhold his permission from the part of the book that couldn’t be published against his wishes, ‘Bathpool Park’. I had taken the precaution of showing Dad ‘Hoosh-mi’, the satirical fantasy about the Queen, only after he had rubber-stamped ‘Bathpool Park’, which was good tactics or sneaky dealing according to taste. When he read the more obviously problematic text, he praised it uneasily, adding, ‘But we’re in trouble!’ First person plural, not second person singular. His attitude was troubled support rather than alarm, though of course he might have had second thoughts about having given his blessing to another part of the book. An instinct of solidarity doesn’t necessarily have staying power.

  To me it seems more likely that Carter-Ruck was acting unilaterally, convinced that Dad would be embarrassed by the book and doing what he could to help. Or perhaps he sincerely believed the book was a bombshell and a call for republicans to take up arms.

  This wasn’t the general reaction. Faber took the sensible step of taking a second opinion, this time from John Mortimer, a lawyer of a different stripe. Having defended the editors of Oz on obscenity charges, he was unlikely to panic over my little squib about the Queen. Mortimer’s opinion was that it was in thoroughly bad taste, as was more or less required by the genre of satire, but far from actionable.

  Dad can hardly have avoided coinciding with John Mortimer at the Garrick Club, but had mixed feelings about him. On the one hand Mortimer was the best-known example of the lawyer-turned-writer, even if he had started early, while Dad’s creativity was waiting for the ripeness of retirement. Dad would certainly have approved of my borrowing the title of Mortimer’s play A Voyage Round My Father to serve as subtitle here, carrying the suggestion of a personality so large that only chartered shipping could get a proper view, even if his real admiration was for an earlier play, The Dock Brief. Dad responded with sentimental fullness, and no identification whatever, to Mortimer’s central character of a washed-up barrister given a last chance of glory. On the other hand, John Mortimer consistently aligned himself with opposition to censorship, and disputed the corrupting effects of pornography. Hadn’t he said, in court, that if pornography really had the power to corrupt then the Old Bailey would be chugging to the sound of massed vibrators by now, considering how much smut their Lordships had seen in their time? Well, apparently not, since I can find no evidence for such a statement, though it was one of my favourite quotations for many years. There’s no search engine as powerful as wishful thinking.

  When Lantern Lecture came out, Faber were hoping that Hatchards of Piccadilly, booksellers by appointment to Her Majesty, would refuse to stock it, so as to provide a starting-point for some whipped-up indignation in the press. Unfortunately they denied us that publicity coup, ordering twelve copies rather than their usual six, a favourable verdict but overall a disappointment.

  In the pages of the book I had given Dad an invaluable hostage for us
e in future disagreements. From then on, if ever we were getting testy with each other he would announce, ‘I’m not going to take that from a son who described me in print as “wizened”!’ and we would each hare off in search of a copy of the book. When the text of ‘Bathpool Park’ was consulted I would make my case that its reference to the judge’s expression, as caught by the press photographers, being one of ‘wizened disapproval’ when he emerges onto a bright street after a day in a dark courtroom was a very different thing from saying he was actually wizened in the general run of things and under standard lighting conditions. Dad would grumble and be soothed.

  In writing about the dead it’s not possible to give them the last word, except in the most artificial, self-admiring way. There can’t be a power struggle – the writer, the survivor, has all the power. You can try not to use it, or to use it responsibly, but the real gulf isn’t between the various ways of using the power you have, it’s between having the power and not. If, for instance, I want to mention a couple of occasions on which I humiliated Dad in his powerlessness, reproaching him for lapses he couldn’t help, being brusque and even sarcastic, I humiliate him all over again. Yet, given that I have written about my mother, there is no neutral position. Not to write about him, having written about her, implies a statement in itself, either that he’s not worthy of my attention or that I can’t find a way to do it.

  Writing about Sheila was different. I wrote about her in her lifetime, with her consent and power of veto. I was surprised that she didn’t exercise that power, since I had included many potentially embarrassing details. Sheila was happy to attend the Virago party launching Sons and Mothers, the book for which the piece had been commissioned, and seemed to have a sense almost of ownership about what I had written. It’s funny, she said, I want to turn the page over and see what happens next, although I know what happens next and on the whole I didn’t enjoy it when it actually happened. ‘Are there any more reviews of our book?’ she would say, and stick them in a clippings file. Since my contribution was much the longest in the book it was likely to be singled out for special praise or condemnation. I particularly enjoyed reading one review aloud to her, which suggested that she had never taught me how to shut up.

  When Sheila was in hospital after diagnosis, she asked me to explain to the consultant that she didn’t want to prolong her life with minimally promising treatment. I found I was repeating things I had already written about her attitude to life, and broke off to say, ‘I don’t think you realize! This is a famous woman. She’s had her life story published …’ He was extremely disconcerted. It was nice to turn the tables on authority for a moment, and for Sheila to feel that she was more than one patient among many. The paperback of Sons and Mothers had just come out, as it happened, so I was able to nip down to Foyles to pick up a copy, which we both signed and presented to the consultant.

  Would Dad feel a sense of ownership about what I’ve written here? Unlikely. (Too parsimonious with the short sentences to fit the strict Denning template.) He would have enjoyed his obituaries more, with their properly formal lists of honours and famous cases. In fact one of my friends had a slip of the tongue when referring to them, and said, ‘Didn’t your Dad get great reviews?’ He became flustered and corrected himself, but it seemed the right choice of word, just the same. Perhaps obituaries should have star ratings (everything else does these days), in which case Dad would have got four-and-a-half across the board. How would that appear on a poster – a jaw-dropping roller-coaster of a life? A live-out-loud? Unambiguous success at any rate, pats on the back from every quarter.

  I learned a few surprising things about his career from those columns, such as Dad’s having passed the longest single sentence ever imposed in this country. Nezar Hindawi had tried to blow up an Israeli aeroplane by planting a bomb in his pregnant girlfriend’s luggage. Dad gave him forty-five years in 1986. I remember him in conversation at the time, expressing grave dismay that a human being could do such a thing, but I never quite knew if he was being sincere at such moments. Sometimes it seemed that he needed to rehearse his outrage in a slightly stylized way, to prove (whether to himself or others) that he was still capable of registering civic horror rather than professional inurement.

  The abolition of capital punishment was a measure that had Dad’s approval, but it didn’t make the problem of evil any more tractable. Seeing Myra Hindley on trial hadn’t made him reverse his judgment on the issue, and nor did the Hindawi case, but he seemed to be reaching for some extra measure of punishment by passing that sentence.

  Dad certainly wouldn’t appreciate being made out to be a hypocrite in matters of sexual morality. Eminent Victorians was published in the year he was three, but he never really cottoned on to the disappearance of piety from biography, the eclipse of deference in general. He didn’t go along with this trend but had instead suppressed his own resistance and presented his father as wholly admirable. There seemed to be a law of succession in operation, as he saw it, governing the emotional dealings between successive generations of fathers and sons, so that only those who didn’t challenge their fathers were entitled to inherit respect from their children in turn. Even in the 1950s there must have been other models for the transmission of family feeling, but that seems to have been the one Dad was stuck with. I honestly don’t understand the benefits of this system. Why would I want a father who was identical with his principles, the same person inside and out, leaving nothing to be found under his bed more startling than a copy of Pamela Hansford Johnson’s On Iniquity?

  Respect seems such a meagre currency, so unsatisfying if you’ve ever been paid in brighter coin. In the pre-history of the family it seems likely that Dad wanted transactions of love rather than duty. His moral fixity made him hard to please, of course, and we became wary of him, consciously inadequate. I’m speaking for myself here, though reaching for the shelter of a first person plural. In his turn he registered distance and defiantly claimed it, saying to Sheila that she had spoiled us, would do anything to be popular with us, while his was the stern love that refuses to fawn. Finding his soft feelings rejected he rejected them too.

  I see myself as taking after my mother, but then he had the same idea about himself, and if Dad was a judge with a fixed objection to the death penalty then in the world of book reviewing I’m presumably regarded as a proponent of capital punishment. Not just a hanger but a flogger too. Possibly even an actual hangman, measuring a book for the drop. Pulling the lever with professional slickness and a pride, à la Pierrepoint, in my work rate.

  There are some odd secondary symmetries in our professional lives. By writing ‘Bathpool Park’ and suggesting that Dad’s court failed to understand what happened to the kidnapped teenager Lesley Whittle, I opened up his workplace to the methods of mine, and treated the case as a verbal construct that could yield results if subjected to practical criticism of a wayward sort. In his turn, a few years later, Dad was called upon to adjudicate on how far critical comment could go before it attracted potential penalties in law.

  The TV critic of the Sunday People, Nina Myskow, had written a catty review of a programme in which Charlotte Cornwell played a rock star. She remarked that Cornwell’s bottom was too big to belong to such a person. The title of the programme was No Excuses, which might have whispered caution to the indignant performer. But Cornwell wasn’t incensed by lack of invention – it was the personal nature of the comment that struck her as outrageous. She sued. The case came up before Dad, who ruled that although the comment was highly disagreeable it fell within the limits of free speech.

  Returning to the question of suits in the sense of cl
othing rather than cases in court: let’s assume that the alarm has been properly set, the gas turned off and that A. France & Sons did the decent thing as regards Dad’s wardrobe. There was only one definite respect in which the firm let us down as clients. We had stipulated that Dad’s ashes be put in a casket like Sheila’s, since they were to be interred together. It’s the word ‘like’ that let us down, I imagine, with its spread of possible meanings. Dad’s casket was indeed like Sheila’s, in the sense that it was an elongated wooden box of modest size. What it wasn’t was identical. Why would an undertaker’s think that rough resemblance was all that was required? It seems doubtful that the firm was making an elegant demonstration of the fact – it was indeed a fact – that our parents, though a couple, were very far from being a pair. By the time we had discovered the error it was too late to ask.

  The ceremony of double interment in Llansannan, Denbighshire, was given an awkward undertone by our self-consciousness about the mismatching caskets that were to be carried out of the chapel, at the end of the service, and conveyed ceremoniously to the tidy hole prepared for them. The graveyard at Llansannan always seemed a peaceful place, the baa-ing of sheep from the hill more restful even than bells or birdsong.

  We invited Bamie to attend the ceremony. It would have seemed wrong to leave him out, after the large contribution he had made to Dad’s last year. There was a slight element of embarrassment about his attending, just the same, and we didn’t press him to make an extended visit. The ethnic diversity of Denbighshire has presumably come along a certain amount since Dad’s childhood, but it seemed painfully obvious that the only non-white face in the community, the only possible candidate to keep him company, was the inn sign of the smoky pub where the family group was billeted, the Saracen’s Head.