Kid Gloves (21 page)

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 clothing 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.

After the ashes of our parents, though
asymmetrically canistered, had been safely stowed away in a single billet, Tim took on the task
of commissioning a gravestone for them. The task seemed appropriate not because he was the
eldest but because he had a strong interest in layout, design, typography, which extended
naturally enough to the medium of stone. The inscription finally agreed on was the one adorning
Dad's coat of arms. It's in Welsh and means
Justice The Best Shield
.

Having your own coat of arms
is undeniably grand, though in Dad's case this was grandeur acquired along the way. It's the
custom for Treasurers of Gray's Inn to be honoured after their term of office with a portrait
and a coat of arms. The Treasurer is the figurehead of the Inn, and benchers occupy the position
in order of seniority, so that it is possible for distinguished benchers to see their eminence
approaching, mortality permitting, year by year. Sometimes of course mortality not only permits
the appointment but shortens the wait.

Dad's turn came in 1982. There's little scope for
glory in a Treasurer's tenure – if a new building or the renovation of an old one is
accomplished during your time, then your initials will be incised on it, but Gray's Inn is a
compact parish and major works are needed only at considerable intervals. Perhaps Dad was trying
to sneak his way into this marginal immortality with his decision to install lead planters on
the steps leading up to the Benchers' Entrance to Hall in South Square without consulting the
governing body. He had a good relationship with the Inn's gardener, Malone, thanks to the years
he had spent in the position of Master of the Walks (the Walks being the true name of the fine
gardens, originally laid out by Francis Bacon), and they had dreamed up this pretty scheme
together. His fellow benchers were not pleased to be left out of the decision-making process,
and ordered the removal of the planters. Not quite Watergate, but the kind of thing that stirs
strong feelings in a small community.

I remember Dad dropping into conversation that
he'd had a useful meeting with the Garter King of Arms. He certainly seemed to get a kick out of
the fact that the Inn would stump up for the expense of researching a suitable blazon.
Presumably some of the Inn's Treasurers are snugly pre-escutcheoned by the time they ascend to
the office, but Dad's modest origins ruled that out.

His village background,
neither privileged nor deprived, had left him with a few thrifty foibles. He loved getting
things through the post, and would enter any competition the
Reader's Digest
thought
fit to offer him. Once a compendious book arrived at the Gray's Inn flat, a complete guide to
gardening with all the basics for the beginner but plenty of tips to satisfy the expert. Sheila
proposed sending it back with a stinging letter. How dare they demand money for an unwanted,
unsolicited compendium of anything? Dad was looking rather sheepish, a milder version of the
expression he wore with a hangover, when his whole body was like a dog that knows it has done
wrong and wants to be forgiven without meeting his master's eyes.

‘Bill … you didn't!' But it was true – Dad
had knowingly ordered a complete garden guide when he didn't have a garden, unless you count the
Walks in all their magnificence, since he was Master of the Walks at the time, the Walks where
blooms were whisked into the flowerbeds the moment they were approaching their best and whisked
away in disgrace the moment a petal was out of true.

‘Why, Bill? Why would you do such a thing?'

Dad rallied his self-respect. ‘I'm not a fool,
darling. Give me some credit. I wasn't born yesterday. I know perfectly well they don't put you
into the Grand Prize Draw if you don't order
something
.'

Dad's motto about Justice being the Best Shield
was in Welsh. I was able to remember it for a few months after the interment of his ashes, then
it left me for good. It didn't have the memorability of some phrases in the language, like for
instance the standard Welsh way of referring to a microwave.
Microdon
would be correct
usage, though it's no more than a back-formation from the English word,
micro
meaning
micro
and
don
meaning
wave
. But everyone in the North says
popty
ping
. The oven that goes ping. Then there's the Welsh for a
jellyfish, which my cousins assure me is called
pysgod wibli wobli
. There is of course
a long tradition of mocking the ignorant outsider, or ‘soaking the Saxon', and the Welsh word
saesneg
has some of the disparaging charge of the Scottish
sassenach
.

There were other ways in which I could have
refreshed my memory about Dad's Welsh motto, but they involved a little embarrassment, since I
would have to admit to family members that I'd forgotten it. So why not contact the Royal
College of Arms instead? Stick out my thumb and hope to be given a ride in the mother ship of
heraldry.

There turned out to be a website and an e-mail
address. What had I expected – specifications of the maximum wingspan of the owl to be
despatched with the parchment of enquiry (A4 or smaller, please)? Something of the sort.

Does the Royal College of Arms have a Facebook
page, even? Actually I'd rather not know.

There were some wearily polite answers on the
website intended to nip Frequently Asked Questions in the bud. It was particularly requested
that large amounts of genealogical data should not be forwarded at the initial stage. On the
other hand there was little point in submitting an enquiry that consisted of no more than your
name and a request to be told your coat of arms. Enquiries that displayed a complete failure to
have read the website might not receive a reply. There was no point in asking about clan
membership, clan badges and the like, since the clan system was entirely Scottish and the
College of Arms had no responsibility for Scotland. English families could not be associated to
a clan, still less form a clan themselves, unless they were ultimately of Scottish descent. The
belief, apparently quite widespread but new, that everyone has a clan, and can wear some
specific tartan or display a clan badge, was quite erroneous.