Kid Gloves

by Adam Mars-Jones

  By suggesting to Dad that he was prejudiced, Ronald Waterhouse risked making an enemy who outranked him in a hierarchical profession, and also cutting off a useful stream of revenue. There’s no more efficient way of killing goodwill than letting a friend know he’s a bigot.

  Of course he ‘wrapped it up a bit’, as advocates are always being urged to do … Bill, you have a bit of a bee in your bonnet about these people. They are not as you suppose them to be. Even so, this seems a case of File Under Moral Courage. I can’t think of another category that would fit it.

  Ronald Waterhouse didn’t lose Dad’s allegiance, and later he became a judge himself. He’s perhaps best known for the painstaking inquiry he conducted, after his retirement, into the abuse of children in care in North Wales. There should be a special mention, though, for the question he asked during the proceedings against Ken Dodd for tax evasion in 1989. He asked, ‘What does £100,000 in a suitcase feel like?’ to which Dodd replied, unsatisfyingly to my mind, ‘The notes are very light, M’Lord.’

  Dad didn’t forget that Ronald had tried to change his attitude, but he held on to the contested attitude as well as to the friendship with Ronald. He wasn’t ready to be influenced, to entertain new thoughts. As far as he was concerned the subject was as exempt from renegotiation as a birth certificate.

  Did he have any personal experience of homosexuals and their ways? He was once, as a young man, on the receiving end of a clumsy pass, though it was more apocalyptic than that in the telling. Unfortunately he gave few details, and didn’t encourage questions. Any actual information value has disappeared under the build-up of competitively distorted versions Tim and I exchanged and found funny. Our final reworking went something like Wallah at the Club bought me a few drinks between chukkas. Seemed a nice enough chap till he tried to slide his filthy paw into my dhoti – laid the blighter out with a chota peg. (Sometimes ‘polo mallet’.) Quite where the Anglo-Indian colouring comes in I have no idea. The incident took place, I think, in Geneva before the War, though Dad never otherwise referred to being in Geneva. The fact that our version ends with violence isn’t part of the distortion. Dad said with a certain amount of righteousness that he had broken a bottle on the man’s head, as if no other form of RSVP was possible.

  Dad wasn’t even sufficiently at ease with the existence of homosexuals to tell jokes about them. In fact he hated such jokes more than any other. Even an anti-gay joke gave perversion the oxygen of publicity, when by rights it should be smothered in the sulphur of oblivion.

  I remember when Dad treated his brother, David, up from Denbighshire on a visit to the metropolis, to dinner at the Garrick Club. David embarrassed him by telling an off-colour joke on those hallowed premises. A joke about lesbians.

  It was about as sweet as such a joke can be. A man in a bar sees an attractive woman and asks the bartender to send a drink to her from him. ‘I wouldn’t bother if I was you,’ says the bartender. ‘She’s a lesbian.’ The man isn’t deterred and insists on the drink being sent over. He waits a little while and then goes over to strike up conversation. ‘So,’ he says, ‘which part of Lesbos are you from?’

  I know I’m a bit of a subtext hound, but there’s something very satisfying about this constellation of joke, teller, audience and even setting. In theory David was much more of a Country Mouse than Dad, resistant to anything that was ‘far back’ (his code word, slightly mystifying to me, for ‘posh’), but he chose to tell a joke making mild fun of provincialism and ignorance. And meanwhile Dad was appalled that the word ‘lesbian’ should have been spoken in the dining-room of the Garrick.

  The Garrick Club was founded in 1831 (and named after the supreme actor of the previous century) as a place where ‘actors and men of refinement and education might meet on equal terms’, it being taken for granted that actors were unrefined and uneducated. That was certainly the general opinion, and the idea was to improve the position of this raffish line of work (‘profession’ was hardly the right word at the time). The founders hoped that by restricting eligibility to journalists, lawyers and actors, respectability might be leached from those who had more than enough by those who were badly in need.

  The club achieved its goal, but the respectability of actors is as provisional as anyone else’s. John Gielgud, for instance, a prominent member, was respectable (to the point of being recently knighted) when he entered a Chelsea public convenience one day in 1953, not so much when he left it in police custody. He had been advised (by Michael Redgrave, was it?) of the crucial importance of giving a false name if arrested. Accordingly he identified himself to the authorities as Arthur Gielgud. He seems to have thought ‘John’ was the bit that gave him away.

  It seems thousands of years ago, the time when a vulnerable public figure could behave with such marvellous naivety. It’s only fair to point out that Arthur John Gielgud was his full name, so he may have been trying in some quixotic way to avoid a lie while also masking his identity with an alias. He did dissemble about his profession, describing himself in court as a clerk.

  Though worldliness was a very variable quality in those post-war years, when Dad was building his reputation in London, his own innocence and alarm seem hard to credit. Even in Aberystwyth, where he had been heavily involved in student stage productions, there must surely have been at least a few dodgy characters sheltering under the capacious skirts of Dame Theatre. There have been plenty of young men over the years who’ve joined a drama group when the only acting they were really keen to do was acting on their own prohibited desires.

  Dad thought that such dark matters shouldn’t be dis-cussed – yet there was no lenience extended to those who were properly secretive. Dad harboured a particular animus towards Gilbert Harding, the 1950s television personality, famous for his rudeness, who broke down when interviewed (for the programme Face to Face) by John Freeman, who asked searching questions about death and his mother. The programme proved that television could be both intimate and intense, even harrowing. The impact was correspondingly greater in a culture more buttoned-up than today’s.

  Dad’s logic was hard to follow. Gilbert Harding’s sexuality only became public knowledge after his death, but Dad seemed to feel that there was an element of deception involved in his appearance on the programme. A monster had been allowed to lay claim to recognizable human emotions, things he couldn’t possibly experience given the corruption of his desires. Such a person wasn’t entitled to weep for his mother’s death.

  Ideally, crimes against nature should also be ignored by culture. Dad felt it to be appalling that Emlyn Williams, actor and playwright, should willingly address the issue in his autobiographies. One book, George, appeared before the decriminalization of homosexuality, the other (Emlyn) afterwards. A Welsh homosexual was a particular sort of traitor, a quisling between the sheets, a friend who chose to help the enemy. If there was a connection suggested here between the theatrical world and sexual double-dealing then it was all the less welcome for that.

  As late as the 1970s Dad could listen with evident pleasure to a radio programme in which a pair of elderly spinsters, spending their retirement in the idyllic village of Stackton Tressel, reminisced about their long-ago operatic careers, without realizing that his beloved Hinge and Bracket were female impersonators. (Admittedly drag on the radio takes gender transgression into the domain of conceptual art.) When informed of the true situation he seemed baffled. What on earth was the point? It was hard to explain to him that however little point there was to the act in question, there was even less if they were really what they claimed to be.

  David’s lesbian joke had only made
a ripple, but another comic routine caused Dad considerable offence. Since it happened in the 1970s, it gave his sons much joy. We weren’t used to seeing him at a loss, and no pathos attached to the novelty at the time. Whether or not that decade was a difficult time to be a post-adolescent male, it must have been an excruciating time to be the father of such creatures. The occasion was Christmas lunch, displaced from the Gray’s Inn flat for once. The reason was that Sheila was still recovering from the effects of a road accident, and wouldn’t be up to the strain of catering, so the date is likely to have been 1973. The venue was the Waldorf Hotel in the Aldwych, and we went there as the guests of George Walford, a colleague of Dad’s, family friend and in fact godfather of Matthew. On a cryptic-crossword level I enjoyed the fact that we were going to the Waldorf with the Walfords, but there was also a bit of history being invoked, since the Waldorf was where my parents had held their wedding reception. We would be near the very spot where Dad’s father, Henry, had fallen on the sword of his abstinence in the name of family unity. There might be a plaque to commemorate this heroic ingestion of fizz, virtual hara-kiri of non-conformist temperance.

  It started perfectly innocently. ‘Do you know the story about the newly appointed judge who doesn’t feel he’s got the hang of the sentencing guidelines …?’ I wonder what had got into George Walford. Perhaps there was an element of the raconteur’s Olympiad, a desire to tell a joke or funny story that would beat Dad at his own droll game. By this stage of the meal much food had been eaten, much drink drunk. Crackers had been tortured until they voided their trinkets. Paper hats had been distributed and put on with variously good and bad grace.

  Dad expressed neutral interest in this recent appointee to the bench, praiseworthy in his concern to master the proper procedures.

  George went on with his story. ‘So he approaches a senior colleague and asks for the benefit of his experience. “What,” he asks, “should I give a young man for allowing himself to be buggered?” “Oh,” says the senior judge, “I’d say thirty bob and a box of Black Magic should do the trick.”’

  We sons were incredulous with delight but managed to suppress any manifestation of it. Sheila looked anxious and unhappy. Nobody round the table laughed. In fact a laughter-vacuum was created which could have annihilated a great deal of entertainment value – not just a single off-colour joke but Richard Pryor’s entire 1973 Christmas show (assuming that by some anomaly of booking agency he was performing in the next room). Pryor was in his full foul-mouthed prime around then, but although Dad would have hated his comedy he wouldn’t have felt betrayed by it, not personally attacked. He was so thunderstruck by George Walford’s joke that he hardly seemed to react, though it was clear to us all that he had sustained a heavy blow.

  George had danced on the grave of a number of his most precious assumptions. 1) A joke about a judge who was not just a pervert but a frivolous one, 2) told in mixed company, by which he would have meant not just that there were women present but that the younger generation was being exposed to insidious flippant evil, 3) at Christmas. He couldn’t stage a protest because we were guests and thereby beholden, though I have to say such considerations hadn’t necessarily held him back in the past.

  It almost seemed to be too much for him to take in, this compound assault, being simultaneously stabbed (as it may have seemed) in the back, in the front and in the sides. Finally he managed to say, ‘I’m afraid I don’t see much humour in that sort of thing.’ And after that nothing could put the bubbles back in the champagne. They had symbolically migrated to the bloodstreams of the Mars-Jones boys, black bubbles of mischief, and we had to pretend not to be made tipsy and exhilarated by them.

  It was the same juvenile impulse that made us choose the Mille Pini off Queen Square (basic Italian) whenever a family meal in the Gray’s Inn area was on offer – until there was an actual restaurant called A Thousand Penises we would make do with the Mille Pini. I don’t know what had led Dad to choose George Walford to preside over Matthew’s spiritual development, and perhaps that Christmas he regretted it. The godparents we were allotted were either neighbours and friends from Gray’s Inn or colleagues of Dad’s. So I was under the care of Cynthia Terry (Aunty See-See), who lived at number 5 Gray’s Inn Square, and James Wellwood (Uncle Jimmy) from number 1. To complete the set I had a more august and remote presence, Sir Hildreth Glyn-Jones. I’ve never met a Hildreth since. It’s a rare first name, and it means ‘battle counsellor’, usually given to females when given at all.

  A godparent is supposed to watch over a child’s interests, to underwrite renunciation of the Devil and his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, not to mention desires both covetous and carnal. Informally there’s some sort of residual watchdog function, though intervention would only ever be a last resort. During deadlocked arguments of the 1970s it would have been handy to empanel my trio as a higher tribunal, a family Court of Appeal (perhaps that was why we had been given three godparents each). In such a hearing I might not have done too badly. Cynthia was a layperson, not much of a match for Dad in argument, and Jimmy Wellwood, though a lawyer, was academic by temperament, easily distracted and easily overruled, but Sir Hildreth was a senior judge with rather a relish for barneys in court, who might have taken my side for the sheer hell of it.

  Sir Hildreth didn’t live in the Inn, but would seek me out every now and then when I was a schoolboy at Westminster. A message would be tucked behind the lattice of ribbons on the College noticeboard, making an appointment to take me out one afternoon. We would walk across Green Park to Fortnum & Mason for tea. I remember him telling me that Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale described himself as a ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’, and that the word for this indispensable faculty was ‘serendipity’. Before he delivered me back to school he would dependably hand over a five-pound note.

  All of this was highly satisfactory. This was godparental behaviour of a sort I could understand, with its own compass points: English Breakfast tea, Shakespearean conversation, anchovy-paste sandwiches, five-pound note. It was only long after the event, after Sir Hildreth had signed off on his sponsorial duties by giving me a copy of Peake’s Commentary on the Bible – I had been confirmed, so in spiritual terms I was flying solo – that these visitations acquired an extra dimension.

  Sir Hildreth was an acerbic judge notorious for the humiliations he visited on counsel appearing before him. Presiding over a court was his version of blood sport, and the blood spilled was unlikely to be his. It’s virtually impossible for a judge to be defeated in a contest with a barrister (though F. E. Smith landed a few good blows), and any such victory will come at a cost. The bull never gets awarded a matador’s ears. Technical redresses can be secured in a higher court, assuming that the judge is wrong in law as distinct from abusive in person, but this precious ointment can only be applied long after the bruises have faded.

  So there was some calculation involved in awarding this oppressive personage a stake in my spiritual development. Giving Sir Hildreth this honour might confer a certain immunity on Dad. I was a sop to Cerberus, a studious little hobbit offered up to take the edge off the Orc King’s appetite. Dad was trying to draw Sir Hildreth into the charmed circle of family with its qualms and taboos. When this senior judge stood by the font and undertook to watch over me, so that the old Adam might be buried and a new man rise in his place, I imagine Dad was looking for a related promise. That he himself wouldn’t be stretched on a rack in open court any time soon.

  Obviously I exaggerate. It’s a family failing. Dad wasn’t propitiating the Dark Lord of Mordor, nor even Torquemada (the actual Inquisitor, not the s
till-remembered crossword compiler). He was doing something I should have been able to understand even as a schoolboy, especially as a schoolboy. He was sucking up. The Honourable Sir Hildreth Glyn-Jones was twenty years older than Dad. He was never invited to drinks parties at the flat, or if invited didn’t attend. I don’t even know if he lived in London. He had a wife and three daughters but I never met them.

  As for whether Sir Hildreth’s bullying tendency was immobilized once he had been bound by the spider-thread of godparenthood, I don’t know. Dad would take him occasionally to Twickenham to see the rugby, and may have thought that Sir Hildreth was eating out of his hand. But, according to what Dad said late in life, the habit of courtroom barracking was too strong for my godfather to break. Sir Hildreth admired Dad’s advocacy but couldn’t resist squashing him. And when he’d gone too far and had dragged Dad slowly over live coals, there was a ready-made way of making amends without needing to apologize. Almost a trick out of Dad’s book. He could drop a note by my school and take me out to tea. He had realized that the relationship designed to tame him could be used for his own purposes. Tea for two at Fortnum’s with a five-pound note thrown in came much cheaper than humble pie for one, eaten under the eyes of a junior colleague.

  Sir Hildreth was near the end of his time on the bench by then, and it seems to be true that he wasn’t popular within his profession. There’s a tradition that at the end of the last day of a judge’s working life, the advocate appearing for the Crown refers to this milestone and wishes him well in his retirement. On Sir Hildreth’s last day the barrister who would ultimately speak those words, if in fact they were to be said, still hadn’t decided what to do. It was only a custom, after all, not a requirement, and there would be no repercussions if it was omitted. He had a choice between seeming to truckle to power even while it was in the process of disappearing, or to expose a man to humiliation at the first moment when he could do so without fearing the consequences. Sir Hildreth’s career as a judge of first instance was over, and he would never tear the wings off a barrister again.