Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  His 1964 report is another example of a publication that I didn’t read in his lifetime, and I have to admit I was disappointed when I did. It’s not impressive as a piece of writing, the language flat without being particularly correct (‘fortuitous coincidence’ turns up twice), but that’s hardly the problem. The whole thing seems an elaborate exercise in fence-sitting, stating that ‘allegations of violence, threats of violence and the “planting” of offensive weapons are not established beyond reasonable doubt’, before conceding that ‘the bulk of the evidence so disclosed tends to support’ the allegations made by the men in the case ‘and points to their innocence’. Perhaps because I heard Dad talk with such pride about his report, at a time when he loomed large over my world, I expected great things from it. I wanted to think he had laid down some definitive glory to mature over time, like the cellared ‘pipe of port’ he referred to from time to time, supposedly waiting for our twenty-first birthdays but never materializing. It may be that in historical context he was relatively open-minded about the possibility of the police going wrong. I feel a bit flat, that’s all.

  It’s just the opposite of what went on in the ABC trial, where Dad, far from knuckling under, took a tough independent line. His report seems all too tepid and cautious. But why am I bothered? I passed from childish worship through disillusionment to fixed prejudice, and nothing could be more normal. It shouldn’t be hard at this stage to unearth a bit more nuance, except that the states of mind date from different epochs and exist on different scales. They don’t want to work together. It’s only in cop films that the clueless rookie and the hardbitten old-timer turn out to make a good team.

  As a judge Dad became known, rightly or wrongly, for ‘hammering bent coppers’, a phrase whose separate parts come together to form a harmonious visual image. It was inevitable that his emotions would be deeply engaged when he was called upon to preside over the trial of members of London’s Obscene Publications Squad on corruption charges in November 1976. He found it appalling that those whose only function was to root out filth might choose to wallow in it.

  As he described it, a newcomer to the squad would find an envelope full of money on his desk in the first week. When he asked what it was for, he would be told it was for moving expenses. The next week there was another envelope, after the contents of the first had been spent, and there was no longer any pretence about what it was for.

  It happened that I was in the Gray’s Inn flat on the day after the trial ended. Commander Wallace Virgo and Detective Chief Superintendent William Moody had been convicted, and Dad was jubilant, in a mood to celebrate. He produced his wallet and slid out a ten-pound note. For a moment it looked as if he was about to give me some pocket money, except that I was twenty-two and receiving a small allowance from the Department of Education and Science (I remember that the postal address of my benefactors was Honeypot Lane) to pursue a PhD that I never caught up with.

  The ten-pound note wasn’t for me. Instead Dad handed it to Sheila, saying, ‘Darling, I want you to go down to Soho and buy some pornography.’ She looked a little dazed as she took the money.

  ‘What is it exactly you want me to do, Bill?’ she asked.

  ‘Go to Soho and buy some pornography.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because you won’t be able to get any,’ he told us. Then he took the tenner back and returned it to his wallet. As perhaps Sheila had suspected from the start, if only because the scene was played out in my presence, it was just a piece of theatre. I don’t know if she was surprised that Dad should imagine such a direct connection between a decision in law and the life of the streets, but I certainly was.

  Virgo appealed against his conviction, and won. I don’t remember Dad making any comment on this setback, but years later I found an unfamiliar cassette recorder with a tape in it. Might this be the famous memoir, which Dad had found impossibly difficult in the end to get started on, so that he decided that speaking aloud was the solution, with a stenographer typing up the material for him to tidy later? I pressed the Play button. It was Dad’s voice all right, but he was singing rather than speaking, and accompanying himself on the guitar. ‘Virgo – Virgo,’ he crooned, ‘I’ll follow you … just an old sweet song keeps Virgo on my mind.’ He was casting a spell of voodoo justice on the villain who had escaped him, to the tune of Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Georgia on My Mind’.

  Having a master of argument in the family doesn’t necessarily make for a quiet life, particularly if he sees himself not as a user of rhetoric but as someone who speaks his mind. In family arguments Dad was like a professional tennis player who doesn’t even realize how much spin he’s putting on the ball, going for devastating shots even in what is nominally a knock-up. Except that a tennis pro will admit to having a racket in his hand.

  It was part of Dad’s constitution that he wanted to win, but I’m not sure he ever realized how much he wanted it. He could be relentless, though he could also be wily in a way that was endlessly frustrating. He could improvise.

  This was particularly maddening when I was old enough to feel that I could mount an argument myself on a reasonably sophisticated basis. After I had changed my Cambridge course from Classics to English, a change he reluctantly supported, he asked me at the end of one particular term what I’d been studying. American literature, I told him (an option that hadn’t been on the syllabus for long), with special reference to Melville, Hawthorne, Pynchon and Nabokov. ‘Nabokov?’ he asked. ‘The man who wrote that dirty book Lolita? The one who likes little girls?’

  I could see there was no point in arguing that Humbert’s entanglement with Lolita recreated Nabokov’s love affair with America, or that it was an allegory of beauty, or even a novel that refused to address the moral issues it seemed to insist on raising. Dad had watched the last ten minutes of the film and hadn’t read so much as a page, while I knew both book and film fairly well. He might hate to be underprepared in court, but now, somehow, lack of knowledge gave him a crushing advantage.

  I made the decision to keep things extra-literary, shifting my ground to face an adversary who wouldn’t be drawn into skirmishes over aesthetics or formal questions but would keep pounding away with the big guns of traditional morality. I pointed out that Mrs Nabokov, Véra, had rescued the manuscript of Lolita when her husband was trying to burn it, and that the book, like all the others he published, was dedicated to her.

  Dad answered by reflex. I’d love to have an MRI of his brain at that moment, to see which parts were being used, and (almost more fascinating) which were not. A tiny flare of combative instinct in the limbic system, a few neurones firing in the linguistic cortex. I dare say that was all it took. ‘And I think she’s a wonderful woman …’ he said, leaving a pause long enough for me to wonder if I was losing my wits – did Dad know Véra Nabokov? How had this come about? Had they shared quaffing wine in Gray’s Inn Hall? – before he delivered the judo throw that used my weight against me, ‘… to accept the dedication of a book which proves that her husband really likes little girls.’ Part of the frustration of the moment was my sense that Dad could never have riffed so freely if he was really engaged in a question of morals. He was showing off, he just didn’t know it.

  If Dad was a driven athlete in argument, he was also a chess grandmaster. Sometimes, like a resourceful player, he would establish a gambit over the course of several games and then vary it in a way that was completely destabilizing. I had become used to one form of non-apology, which ran along the lines of ‘I’m not a young man … I’m getting to be an old man … we must try to get along better.’ This was in theory a no-fault approach to
the family peace process, but one which made clear just the same where the faults lay. Then one day, shortly before his retirement, he successfully ambushed me with a variation: ‘I’m not a young man … I’m getting to be an old man … you have only so much time to make it up to me.’

  Over the years he had changed his spots, from the man who had stood as a Labour candidate after the War, even if he succeeded only in splitting the vote and letting the Tory in. He never actually admitted helping the Tory cause more directly, by voting for Mrs Thatcher in the years when it was possible to do so, but I’d be surprised to learn that he never did.

  His support for liberal causes may have started and finished with the abolition of the death penalty in 1965. He certainly hadn’t approved of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalized homosexuality, and by the 1970s had become alarmed by a general culture of permissiveness and the particular anomie of his sons.

  In soft cultural terms, as distinct from actual politics, he could boast of having an open mind, or certainly open ears. Dad had been an unlikely but fervent first-generation Beatlemaniac. This was a shared taste in the household, though I have to admit when I first heard ‘She Loves You’ on the car radio in 1962 I thought in my infant élitism that it was a bad joke. Oh dear oh dear, I thought, have we really come to this? I was eight. A little later, when Tim and I were given record tokens by our grandfather (Sheila’s father, the only grandparent we knew) we made highbrow choices of EP, at least partly, I’m sure, to impress each other, with him choosing Finlandia while I cast my vote for Gieseking playing the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. I wonder who won, and how we knew.

  Dad worked out the chords of ‘Michelle’ on the guitar, and Sheila acquired the sheet music for ‘Eleanor Rigby’ for trying out on the piano. She had the advantage of being able to read music, though from his Chapel childhood Dad was at home with tonic sol-fa notation for hymns, and could with a little effort decode the little grids studded with black dots, like wiring diagrams for transistors, which represented guitar chords in the tablature used for popular sheet music. On songs without a piano part Sheila might find herself relegated to that unglamorous not-quite-instrument made from a comb and pieces of tissue paper.

  Dad bought us The Beatles’ albums when they came out, as far as The White Album, anyway, whose experimentation displeased him (and many others) so that the capital for Abbey Road had to be raised by private subscription.

  There was always a worry, since records could only be played in the public spaces of the flat (we were too young to have our own record players), that Dad would find something objectionable coming out of the grand Decca television-cum-radiogram. It was a relief, for instance, when he pronounced ‘Lady Madonna’ essentially reverent in its appropriation of biblical imagery, though he must have expressed himself less pompously. He could be touchy about anything that mocked holy subjects, though he did enjoy telling one high-class joke with just a touch of blasphemy about it:

  Jesus (addressing the crowd gathered round the woman taken in adultery): Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

  (A stone flung with great force strikes the woman on the forehead. Shocked silence.)

  Jesus: Really, mother, sometimes you can be impossible.

  The White Album, which came out shortly after my fourteenth birthday, was a particular embarrassment. I was extremely prudish at this stage, though my prudishness was of a particular kind. It was a matter of social context. I could listen to dubious lyrics on the White Album perfectly calmly, though with disapproval, as long as neither parent was around. My mother’s presence, even if she was moving in and out of the sitting-room with other things on her mind, would make me nervous, and Dad’s presence brought on a much more intense agitation. So it was only the conjunction of all three elements that was unbearable: the offensive record, the paternal presence and the confused son. I had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but it stuck in my throat. I could no longer be a child and had little idea of how to be an adult, but adolescence was the role, of the three, that I found hardest to inhabit. I disliked surliness as a characteristic, and it repelled me just as much when it was my own. All this had little to do with puberty as a physical fact, news of which reached my body rather later.

  My solution was as desperate as I felt the problem to be. As the offending moment of the White Album approached, I would walk casually over to the radiogram and either turn the volume dial all the way down or lift the needle from the record. Turning the volume down worked well enough for scandalous individual moments, such as the cursing of Sir Walter Raleigh (‘he was such a stupid git’) on ‘I’m So Tired’, but lifting the stylus out of the compromising groove was called for when the outrage lasted for longer than a few seconds, as it did for instance on ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’. I cursed the Beatles in my turn (without using bad language) for their disobligingness in leaving no visible division between tracks, selfishly advancing their credentials as makers of a unified artwork and ignoring the needs of those who might want to skip the needle lightly across a trench of filth. It was difficult to guess exactly where to put down the needle again. It might happen that the upsetting lyrics sounded out all over again, if I’d underestimated the distance, so it was better to play safe.

  The result was that I’d end up skipping whole tracks that had done nothing wrong, so it seemed better to revert to the volume-down method of censorship. I would sit on a patchwork leather pouffe (for yes, we followed trends) near the radiogram until I could hear, from the tiny unamplified sound made by the needle, that we had safely come to the end of ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ or ‘Sexy Sadie’. Would I have been less vigilant if I had known that ‘Sexy Sadie’ was originally called ‘Maharishi’, and was Lennon’s bitter farewell to the guru he’d outgrown, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi? Probably not.

  I hate to think what my parents felt about my purity campaign focussed on the White Album, my attempt to make the two-LP set live up to its name (a name that didn’t appear anywhere on the cover or label). No-one ever said anything about it, which was probably for the best. I don’t think I was making a cry for help but something a little more contradictory, a cry to be left alone, not to be required to think about certain things.

  Early and mid-period Beatles were genuinely things the whole family could enjoy, a category that seems stable until one day it’s gone. Late Beatles were already divisive, opening up a rift between us or perhaps just a rift in me. Then there came a point when we would have lost face if Dad liked any of our chosen music, though he was always waiting for us to come around to his choices, just as he assumed that in due course we would abandon Monty Python and join him in front of Dad’s Army.

  If we didn’t want to share the experience of music then it followed that we needed our own means of mechanical reproduction.

  By the time the Mothers of Invention released Over-Nite Sensation in 1973, my brothers and I had a record player of our own and could shut ourselves safely away in our bedrooms to be dazzled by the toxic jewels of the counterculture. In the years between 1960 and 1981 there was a holiday home by the seaside on Anglesey, and it was there that Tim and I listened in shock and wonder to the album, which I had bought in Bangor’s only forward-looking record shop.

  My hands went instinctively in such premises to the racks labelled New Wave & Progressive (that’s the old New Wave, of course, not the one that succeeded punk). I was an anti-connoisseur of most popular music. Dance music, in particular, I didn’t understand at all. Music was to be listened to in stillness, with a little tapping of the foot if there was no avoiding it. Both fee
t might be called on in the case of polyrhythms.

  It seems very plausible that we kept Matthew out of the room, theoretically to protect his innocence but really to reinforce our feeling of being a corrupt secret society. Almost every lyric on the album was filthy in a way that left the Beatles in the dust. Sometimes the words were witty, like these from ‘Camarillo Brillo’: ‘She stripped away / her rancid poncho / An’ laid out naked by the door / We did it till we were un-concho / An’ it was useless any more …’ But usually not.

  The doors in the house had 1930s-style locks which only worked from the inside, little depressed recesses about the size of a thumb that could be slid across to engage a catch. We were safely locked in. Dad tried the door and when it failed to yield he gave the knob a theatrical rattling. ‘Tim? Adam? What are you doing in there?’ We weren’t doing anything – we weren’t smoking cigarettes, for instance, let alone dope. We were giggling at smut. But by great good fortune Dad entered the room just at the point when Frank Zappa’s relentless campaign of obscenity was taking a break. It was the long fade-out on a disgraceful song called ‘Dinah-Moe Humm’, in which the song’s narrator – which doesn’t seem the right word – accepts a bet of forty dollars from a defiantly unresponsive woman that he won’t be able to give her an orgasm. She (the Dinah-Moe Humm of the title) has in turn bet her sister, also present, an unspecified number of dollars that she (D-M H) can prove that men are scum. The whole song glories in its woeful crassness. The only lyric I could make any sort of claim for is ‘Kiss my aura, Dora – it’s real angora’. Not Cole Porter, to be sure, but creditable in the cultural context.