Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Precociously reading a Balzac novel (I was perhaps thirteen by this stage), I came across a passage where the hero borrowed his mother’s life savings so as to launch himself in the world. I couldn’t bear to read any further, knowing that he was going to ruin her. I could imagine nothing worse. A steam locomotive would have weighed lightly on me compared to the dreadfulness of impoverishing a mother.

  Connected with the model of the locomotive’s inner workings was another trophy, more obviously dazzling but equally far from the possibility of play – a locomotive name plate, with raised gold lettering against red, mounted at an angle on a stand and given pride of place on the room divider that lived inside the front door, breaking up the space of the hall (a piece of furniture that has since outlived its own naffness and become not only evocative but collectable). The name on the plate was MARS. The locomotive in Dad’s successfully argued case had been in the same class (the Planet class). Having done well by his employers, he had asked to be notified if the time came for MARS to be scrapped and in due course had been presented with its name plate. It too is collectable, though unfortunately the value of locomotive name plates is assessed according to the number of letters, and MARS is about as skimpy a plate as exists. There’s no equivalent of the scoring system in Scrabble. There are no triple word scores, nor even extra points for rarer letters (in which case the M would push the total up a little). So what you want to find in your shed is the SIR TRAFFORD LEIGH MALLORY. The value of the MARS plate shrinks still further when a prospective buyer discovers it was only ever attached to a goods train. It’s a blue-collar plate, not worth much more than the metal it was cast from.

  Dad was christened William Lloyd Jones, with the second barrel added to the surname only at his father’s urging when he was on dangerous duty (Russian convoys) during the War. The thinking seemed to be that the enhancement of his name would protect him in some way. It was a life raft launched by deed poll. Dad was proud of the distinctive compound form that resulted, and I’ve mildly enjoyed inheriting it, though I can’t say I would go to war to defend my hyphen. The last of my film reviews to be published by the Independent, in 1997, appeared under a version of my name with the hyphen inserted in the only other place that is anatomically possible without rupturing tissue (Adam-Mars), which seemed a low blow, after the hundreds of pieces I had filed over the previous decade, but the injury, though curiously literal, was only symbolic. The component letters seem intractable for anagram-making purposes but can be persuaded to yield the pleasing nonsense of As Modern As Jam.

  Though in two parts, the surname isn’t cumbersome, hardly taking any longer to pronounce than (say) Markham or Johnson. The schoolboy nicknames it made possible (Mars Bar, Marzipan) carried no great sting. Names can function as shields in a school setting, protecting the bearer from the more personal assaults of Fatty, Spotty, Speccy.

  Dad himself experienced a little public teasing on the basis of the name, when his great friend Peter Thomas appeared against him in a case of sheep-stealing, and had fun with the formal introduction of counsel by saying, ‘My Lord, in this case I represent the Crown, while my learned friend Mr Ma-a-a-a-s-Jones … appears for the defence.’ Meh-eh-eh-ehs-Jones? I don’t know which transcription best conveys the fondly jeering bleat. It’s the massing of syllables that counts against Hedgepinshot-Mandeville-Pickwort (a minor character in The Apes of God) and even against Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, the organist of Gray’s Inn. When I read my first Guinness Book of Records as a child – I was slow to understand that reference books don’t have to be read from cover to cover – my eyes filled with tears when I imagined the schoolboy teasing that must have been meted out to the bearer of the longest surname in history: Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. Yes, that was all surname, every bit of it, according to the Guinness Book of Records, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of questioning any such authority (in fact any book, at that time). It seemed a pity, though, that the name lacked the full complement of hyphens to give its freight-train length a proper set of couplings.

  It bothered me that the British record was always smaller than the world record, less impressive, unless of course they happened to be the same thing. To my mind, over-instructed and under-informed as it was, pickled in the jingoism of ignorance, the British record should always be bigger than the world record, or what was the point of being British? My dogmatism would have made me a good little Red Guard, though in practice I didn’t join the Scouts or even the Wolf Cubs.

  I should have kept firm mental hold of the British billion with its dozen zeroes, a thousand times larger than what the Americans had to offer. Our billion was the biggest in the world until 1975.

  A year or two after the steam-engine cutaway another super-toy arrived, a meticulous balsa-wood model of a railway bridge, about four feet long. It must have been built as a visual aid for another case of Dad’s, but if I was ever told about the human disaster that led to the litigation I soon forgot it. This mighty piece of engineering did eventually find its place in our world. The model railway layout in the attic, mounted on trestle tables, had reached its maximum size until someone realized that it could extend beyond the awkward area (too narrow for a table) that limited it, by the installation of the providential bridge, which happened to be to scale, more or less. The model railway was already rather elaborate, so that the gala displays we gave for other Inn children required typed programmes and a lot of choreography if all our gadgets were to be properly shown off. After some bravura shunting to get the audience warmed up, a mailbag would be magically collected by a train that didn’t need to stop to pick it up, the giraffe sticking out above the carriage marked ZOO would lower its head in obedience to a concealed magnet inches before striking a low bridge, and (when pop culture had started to colonize and contaminate the Tri-ang Hornby arcadia) rockets fired from one train triggered the destruction of a carriage on another, the panels leaping apart from the impact of a spring-loaded arm whose final act was to detonate a cap, leaving a little wisp of acrid smoke to hang in the air of the attic. Applause.

  Dad always told us when we were little that he could tell when someone was lying. With children this is a safe, self-fulfilling prophecy, and it certainly worked with us up to a certain age. But he also made out that his divination was just as effective outside the immediate context of family.

  Dad was proud of having sized up a potential client called Kevin McClory as being honest, though McClory’s narrative had the odds stacked against it. He had taken it to a number of lawyers already, according to Dad, and none of them had thought there was any substance in his claims. This was the early 1960s. Kevin McClory’s story was that Ian Fleming had stolen work he had done for a James Bond screenplay and incorporated it without payment or credit into a James Bond novel, Thunderball. It wasn’t an easy claim to believe. Successful authors attract allegations of plagiarism as fine wool sings to the moth.

  Was it likely that a writer with a reputation and a following would stoop to stealing another man’s ideas? Much more probable, surely, for a nonentity to be searching for a payoff in return for not making any more trouble. Nevertheless Dad looked him in the eyes, decided Kevin McClory was telling the truth and agreed to represent him.

  In the fantasy I somehow absorbed of what happened in court Dad cross-examined the snooty Fleming, who of course drawled through his cigarette holder throughout, then finally broke down and admitted iniquity. The patient intellectual abrasion of cross-examination is the forensic equivalent of those mills of God which grind slow but grind exceeding fine. It was Dad’s special skill, thanks in part to a subtly ag
gressive instinct and in part to the hundreds of hours he put into mastering the material in all its aspects, and this was a complicated case, heard in front of Mr Justice Ungoed-Thomas, whose magnificent name makes him seem half Welshman and half mushroom.

  In fact the case was settled, on humiliating terms for Fleming, without his going under Dad’s forensic dentist’s drill. McClory received damages and also the film rights to the contested story, which meant he could now make his own James Bond film, although he didn’t own film rights to the character of ‘James Bond’ outside a narrowly defined context.

  Even so it was a tremendous result. Kevin McClory had suits made on Savile Row with ‘007’ embroidered on the inside breast pockets, now that he had a licence to make a killing. It must have been quite a payday for Dad too. A colleague of his remembered his fee for the case as being £10,000, not in today’s money but in 1963 pounds. And not in fact in pounds but guineas – the extra shilling over each twenty would go to his clerk. Dad loved to pronounce the abbreviation for guineas that appeared on chambers invoices (‘Guas’) the way it was written, as ‘gwahs’, and no wonder.

  If the sum is accurate, then its vast size must reflect both the importance of the case and the fact that this was a client with deep pockets and access to his wealthy wife’s capacious handbag.

  Dad was proud of the result he had achieved for his client and took the family to a gala preview of Thunderball. At ten, I was not yet at the age when boys long to see the films from which their parents want to protect them. I was at an age when I longed to be protected from the film my parents wanted me to see. The underwater battle which provides the film with its climax (very much Kevin McClory’s idea, as was established in court) horrified me with the grimness of its violence. I kept my eyes closed as much as I could while the harpoon-guns did their worst, and managed not to develop any overwhelming fetish for scuba gear.

  Courtroom advocacy is just as much a performing art as dance or theatre. A courtroom is routinely described as being a sort of theatre itself, but it’s a small one – closer to a rehearsal studio than a stadium – and the performance is never repeated. You have to be there. It leaves no traces except written ones, though we’re so used to seeing court cases on film and television that the evanescence of the real thing gets forgotten. It’s easier to form a direct impression of Anna Pavlova’s skills than F. E. Smith’s. Even if Dad had been given his chance to flay Ian Fleming in the witness box there would only be circumstantial evidence to show how he went about it.

  The closest thing I can get to a display of Dad’s expertise as a barrister in the Thunderball year of 1963, when he must have been at his most formidable, is the cross-examining of witnesses he did during the Vassall tribunal, as transcribed in the eventual report. Even so it’s like looking at a musical score that lacks expression marks, tempo indications, dynamics. I suppose it’s obvious that the spoken word is elusive even when it has the power to win or lose people money – or freedom – but I had never really thought about it.

  John Vassall was a civil servant who had been sent to prison for eighteen years in 1962 after being convicted of passing secrets on to the Soviets. While working at the British embassy in Moscow during the 1950s he had been invited to a party, drugged and photographed in compromising positions with a number of men. The question for the tribunal to decide was whether he had been shielded by his superiors during his miserable career of espionage, the implied motive being a shared sexual secret if not necessarily ideological common ground, though the two were generally thought to converge. Was there in fact (as press coverage of the case had broadly hinted) a nest of perverted traitors at the Admiralty? Why had T. G. D. (Tam) Galbraith, a Conservative Party politician and Civil Lord of the Admiralty, sent letters to a junior civil servant, one who was apparently known in his department as ‘Aunty’, and had even visited him in the Dolphin Square flat that was so obviously too luxurious for a junior’s income such as his?

  I remember Dad referring to Vassall at the time, and my confusion about whether this was a name of a person or a role. I knew that to be a vassal was to be an underling, though I don’t know how I knew. Perhaps despite my imperviousness to history I had learned something about feudalism at school, though it was too early for the celebrated Jackdaw series put out by Jonathan Cape, reinforced folders of documents in facsimile that made the past come alive, to my myopic eyes, by making it shine on the level of stationery. From Dad’s grim tone when he said the word ‘Vassall’ I knew not to ask questions, and osmotically absorbed the message that submissiveness was always culpable, though for some people an inescapable destiny.

  The Vassall tribunal was Britain’s mirror-image of the Stalin-era show trial, not a charade of manufactured guilt but a masque of questionable innocence. Some sort of whitewash took place under floodlights. If there had been actual evidence against Galbraith, his resignation would long since have been offered and accepted. Instead the ranks had closed behind him, and being examined in public on the eleventh day of the tribunal, Thursday, 31 January 1963, was an ordeal for him but not a hanging matter. It was his job to get through the day somehow, and Dad’s job was to trip him up.

  It wasn’t likely that an experienced politician like Galbraith would be broken down by cross-examination, assuming that such breakdowns are anything more than a convention of courtroom scenes in films and plays. Mars-Jones QC wasn’t going to land a knockout blow, nor was it his job to, but he could do something entirely appropriate for counsel retained by the Beaverbrook press, by inflicting paper cuts.

  Mars-Jones QC puts it to Galbraith that he is conceding some degree of friendship with Vassall. Galbraith ties himself in knots trying to resist that impossible formula ‘some degree of friendship’.

  ‘I tried to be friendly with everybody,’ he says, ‘but it is not the same thing as being a friend of anybody’s … It is impossible to say one is an enemy. I think one is therefore presumably a friend.’

  Mars-Jones QC presses the point: ‘… there was no degree of friendship between you and Vassall at any time?’ ‘If friendship implies affection, no. I do not know what friendship means, you see, it is such a wide word.’

  He claimed to see no difference between Dear Vassall and My dear Vassall as forms of address in correspondence. (How glad he must have been not have written Dear John or My Dear John, leaving the smoking gun of a Christian name in Vassall’s possession.) Under pressure from Mars-Jones QC he says, ‘I am therefore going to eliminate the word “my” from my vocabulary.’ Any impossibility of retrieving Dad’s tone applies equally to Galbraith. The last sentence could be delivered with an attempt at dismissive lightness or with real exasperation.

  It was being formally established at a public hearing that Beaverbrook’s papers had printed only responsible innuendo, a nod and a wink in the public interest. From the transcript I get an impression of chilly sparring, a needling cross-examination with an undertone of disrespect.

  At some point Galbraith complains about there being no mention in the newspaper coverage of visits paid to Vassall’s Dolphin Square flat of his wife being present. Mars-Jones QC suggests that if he wanted the fact mentioned he should have brought it up himself. Galbraith maintains that it was up to the journalists to ask him. He wasn’t obliged to volunteer the information. This seems rather contorted logic, and Mars-Jones QC points out that journalists asking such a question would seem to be making an indelicate suggestion (never mind that the whole coverage in the press had been suggestively indelicate).

  At one point in the cross-examination Mars-Jones QC says, ‘But you still have not answered my question. I have asked it tw
ice.’ ‘Perhaps you will be third time lucky.’ ‘I will try.’ After another bit of skirmishing Dad says, ‘That is not an answer to my question, Mr Galbraith, but I am not going to ask it again.’ This seems more or less rude, in that more deferent era, when speaking to a government minister not charged with any offence.

  Mars-Jones QC argues that the edition of the Express that circulated in Galbraith’s Glasgow constituency omitted material printed in the first edition that he later objected to, so that there could be no question of the paper conducting any sort of campaign against him. A major part of Galbraith’s objection attached to the headline, and Dad points out that sub-editors make those decisions. He replies, ‘I am really very ignorant on the make-up of newspaper work. So far as I can see, everybody is able to shuffle off his responsibility to somebody else.’

  Dad begins to treat him like a child. ‘Is that a fair answer to give, when you do not know anything about it?’ ‘No, I said that is what it appeared to me, but I do not know.’ The slight slippage of grammar in this answer may indicate flusterment.

  Dad continues to strike the infantilizing note. ‘But you do not know who is responsible for the format of the front page or for the headlines?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know why headlines are prepared? Do you know what the function of a headline is?’ Dad could hardly go further in this line of calculated humiliation if he told Galbraith to stand up straight or to take the chewing-gum out of his mouth.