Kid Gloves (15 page)

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.

Oh dear, I'm certainly ramping up the pathos,
conjuring up a scenario perilously close to
The Browning Version
. My mistake. Sir
Hildreth Glyn-Jones wasn't like the classics master Crocker-Harris in Rattigan's play, unaware
of his unpopularity, mortified to learn he's known as ‘the Himmler of the lower fifth'. Sir
Hildreth made no attempt to soften his manner in court as his reign came to an end. It was
almost a point of pride for him to play the tyrant and make things difficult. He must have
considered the possibility that he would forfeit the gracious ritual of farewell on his last
day, so that his career would go to its grave (so to speak) without a kind word to help the
cortège bear up.

Finally counsel for the Crown stood up and spoke.
He said, ‘My Lord, I believe this is your last day as one of Her Majesty's Justices, and I would
not wish to let the occasion go by without passing on the congratulations of this court …'

I have this from Esyr Lewis,
Gray's Inn resident and family friend, the barrister who had to make his choice on the day. It
wasn't that he felt an overwhelming urge to produce the proper gesture; he just found when the
moment came that he couldn't not. And against expectation it wasn't a formality, but a moment of
high stifled emotion. That
Browning Version
note again – not that it's a bad theme, the
defencelessness of the well-defended. Sir Hildreth, having steeled himself against the
likelihood of rejection, found himself still counted within the fold of civility. And when the
Dark Lord of courtroom torture, Queen's Bench Division, went to hang up his full-bottomed wig
for the last time, there were plausibly tears in his eyes.

There was never a real risk that Dad would be
deprived of the customary send-off, when his turn came. He may not have been loved by those who
appeared before him, but he was certainly respected, regarded as formidable rather than actively
oppressive. No barrister ever steered a case inattentively while Dad was in charge of
proceedings.

He had a heedlessness, even when not wearing the
scarlet, which could sometimes seem heroic. Dad had his teeth looked after, for instance, by Sir
Paul Beresford, an MP who set aside a portion of each week for his dental practice, or
alternatively, as some of his constituents complained, a dentist who represented their interests
in his spare time. By either account he was clearly not someone to be trifled with, but then nor
was Dad, who might say, ‘I don't think much of that bridge you gave me last time,' his delivery
muffled by reason of the fact that Sir Paul was scraping and probing away inside his mouth at
the time.

Brecht's Galileo admits that he didn't need to be
tortured to be pressured into recantation – all it took was for him to be shown the instruments.
That's how most people feel in dentists' waiting rooms, as they leaf miserably through
Vogue
and
Country Life
(or
Prima
and
Empire
if your
dentist is less grand), on the brink of a general recantation. But it wouldn't have occurred to
Dad to soften his criticism, or to delay the vote of no confidence until he and his tender gums
were out of harm's way.

In his prime Dad's forthrightness was held in
check by a certain self-censorship. (It made sense that if he approved of external censorship,
of limits on what could be expressed and circulated, he should also be in favour of the internal
Lord Chamberlain.) There were certain things he never discussed, even with drink taken. After he
retired he made less of an effort to project a consistent persona. In conversation he let slip
the news that the absolute wrongness on pre-marital sex that he preached to us in our
adolescence was not something he had paid much attention to during his own. ‘Let slip' gives the
wrong impression, as if a guilty secret had escaped him. He seemed very matter-of-fact about it,
and quite fond of his bad old ways.

I was hearing a new story and an unfamiliar
sexual philosophy. In the days of trains without corridors, their compartments opening directly
onto the platform, an enterprising man and woman taking refuge in an empty compartment could
manage a ‘quick poke' in perfect safety, as long as they remained aware on some subliminal level
of the minutes remaining before the next station.

Perhaps this was how he spoke as an adult to
adults, yet he had never enjoyed ‘off-colour' conversations. He never swore, though that may
have something to do with growing up with Welsh as a first language. It's a myth that there are
no swear words in Welsh, but Dad would hardly have been exposed to any in a Congregationalist
household in the 1920s and '30s. In fact, thanks to the consonantal impact of the language,
almost any syllable can aspire to expletive force in Welsh. ‘
Pobl
Bach!
' for instance means no more than ‘little people' (presumably along the lines of
leprechauns), but can be given any amount of plosive attack.

Dad was a Welsh speaker and proud of it, though
uneasily aware that there were rust spots on his mother tongue from not using it on anything
like a daily basis. Nevertheless he had been that rare thing, a judge who could conduct court
proceedings in Welsh, and he was instrumental in setting up summer schools for magistrates in
Wales, to help them get acquainted with the new technical vocabulary in the minority language
thrown up by new legislation.

Soon after his appointment as a judge he was made
a member of the Gorsedd at the National Eisteddfod for his contribution to Welsh culture. Dad's
sense of the honour being done him wasn't shaken by the discovery that the singer Mary Hopkin
was one of his fellow cultural contributors. I remember the assembled Druids wearing wet-weather
gear in the form of short white Wellington boots. Dad was very tickled by the headline in a
local newspaper – ‘
LOCAL BOY MAKES BARD
'.

He had spent a lot of time choosing his bardic
name. This wasn't the down-to-earth sort of Welsh coinage associated with the need to
differentiate between the many bearers of a single name, like Dai Central Eating for a man with
only a single tooth remaining or Dai Quiet Wedding for someone who turned up to tie the knot
wearing carpet slippers, to quote two of Dad's favourite examples. This was a serious and
ceremonial business. He settled on Gwilym Aled, Gwilym being the formal Welsh equivalent of
William, Aled being the name of the river near his birthplace of Llansannan, really more of a
stream running across fields.

He told me I should have my own Bardic name in
readiness. His suggestion was ‘Adda Chwith', meaning Adam Lefthand,
celebrating one of my more innocent deviations from the statistical norm. He didn't explain
how I was going to make a contribution to Welsh culture without being part of it.

In the 1980s I was excited when I came across a
gay activist in London who was doing something similar to Dad's translation project for the
benefit of magistrates, helping to translate the technical terms of gay liberation into Welsh. I
remember ‘
llon
' as the Welsh for ‘gay'. I may not speak the language, but the ability
to hiss that double
l
is part of my birthright, inalienable. If there are Welsh words
that have added music to such terms as ‘self-oppression' and ‘heteronormativity', they haven't
reached my ears.

The activist and I were getting on just fine
(wasn't I an activist too?) till I mentioned my own Welsh connection. After that the engines of
intimacy went into full reverse, since he regarded Dad as a sort of Uncle Tom for laying the
treasure of his language at the feet of the foreign oppressor. As he saw it, a Welsh-speaking
judge was a particular sort of traitor and fitted the same painful profile as Emlyn Williams did
for Dad, an enemy who was born to be a friend. It was a moment of something like symmetry, the
correcting of a balance. Normally I was Dad's shaming family secret but now he was mine.

In English Dad avoided four-letter words, though
he could go as far as referring to someone as a ‘four-letter feller'. In practice this was
usually Bernard Levin, who had (as he felt) traduced him in an article written for
The
Times
during the 1970s. A juror had tried to walk away from his responsibilities on the
basis that he didn't understand the issues in the case. Dad responded by sending him to the
cells for contempt of court. It's certainly true that if people could evade their civic duty so
easily by claiming incompetence the system would soon collapse. It would have been better for
the reluctant juror to stick to the traditional practice of turning up in a tracksuit
and dark glasses, confident of being held back on the reserve bench as dodgy,
presumptively druggy, then sent swiftly home.

Levin, as a columnist and contrarian, was bound
to take a different line – to suggest, for instance, that this self-recusing juror was a hero of
democracy, refusing merely to rubber-stamp the court procedures without true intellectual
participation in the administration of justice. This was not a threat to the system but its
vindication. The judge in the case who had slapped him down was, correspondingly, an agent of
oppression and a sworn enemy of civil liberties.

What galled Dad was the relish with which the
piece was written, as if Levin was tickled pink to be putting a judge into the public pillory,
even the laughing-stocks. His article began: ‘Mr Justice Mars-Jones was in a rare old paddy down
the Old Bailey last week …' I remember reading it in a coffee shop in Cambridge, shocked
by the eruption of the family name into my placid breakfast ritual. I was also undeniably
thrilled by mockery at Dad's expense. We must have made quite a pair in Belinda's on Trinity
Street, my ham roll and I, my tongue hanging out in stupefaction to match the pale meat lolling
over the bread on my plate.

Dad felt he had been subjected to a personal
attack camouflaged as commentary on something in the news. The worst of it was that he wasn't
able to respond, either as one of Her Majesty's Judges nor as an individual. He had been
targeted by the might of the fourth estate, and there was nothing he could do in protest or
retaliation except rehearse the phrase to which Levin's name would always be chained with links
of bitter contempt, ‘four-letter feller'. The word suppressed in this formula rhymes with
threepenny bit.

And perhaps there was another small thing he
could do. He did have one small weapon at his disposal, the dark marble of social death. This he
would fire from his catapult to strike back
at the giant Levin, to bring
the sneering Philistine-Pharisee down to earth. If ever Bernard Levin applied for membership of
Dad's beloved Garrick Club, the black ball would fly swift from Dad's sling.

It was almost a pity that Levin was already so
unpopular with the legal profession, largely as a result of his (very likely justified)
criticism of Lord Justice Goddard in 1971, that Dad's additional veto would have had no effect.
He could safely have risen above rancour and offered up a white ball in the spirit of charity
and fair play. The result would still have been the one he wanted, with the Garrick Club turned
for the occasion into a sort of Goth pinball arcade of careering black marbles.

Though it was understood that judges should not
comment on any matter of public interest, sometimes Dad exaggerated the discretion that was
required of him. It was an easy way out of family arguments in the 1970s for him to say that
professional etiquette prevented him from expressing any sort of opinion on the issues of the
day, as if there was no difference between the dining-table at number 3 Gray's Inn Square and a
press conference bristling with microphones.

His first-born, Tim, having inherited a certain
forensic zeal, once suggested that if it was so important to keep the political opinions of the
judiciary out of circulation then Dad should read the newspapers in a protected environment such
as the lavatory, since it was obvious what he thought from his expression while he read them
… after that the wrangle was on again, with Dad's attempt to claim the high judicial
ground ruled out of court.