Kid Gloves (7 page)

It's conventional to blame the case for the
deterioration in Fleming's condition, though his health problems were of long standing. Only Ann
Fleming, Ian's wife, seemed to feel that the trial had a beneficial effect on his physical
well-being. ‘Goodness I miss the Old Bailey,' she wrote in a letter to Evelyn Waugh in December
1963, though in fact the case was heard in the Royal Courts of Justice, ‘the case did Ian a
power of good, no smoking in court and one hour for a simple lunch.'

Of course anyone writing to Waugh did well to
keep the entertainment level high and to point up any possible irony, but perhaps she really did
feel that the Chancery Division of the High Court stood in for a health club of a particularly
exclusive kind, a judicial Champneys whose mortificatory element (sitting on hard wooden benches
hour after hour to hear yourself characterized as profiteer and cad) was only an aspect of its
efficacy and its prestige.

I don't know why Dad felt the need to dress up
his involvement in the
Thunderball
case with the fairy story about his inbuilt lie
detector. It's obvious that Kevin McClory didn't come to Dad direct, and that Peter Carter-Ruck
took McClory on as a client not because success was guaranteed but because payment was assured
either way. Dad was the right man for the job, with a methodical approach that ran no risk of
being dry, thanks to the whiff of danger he gave off in court. Why be embarrassed about that?
But perhaps he disliked any idea of being a hired gun, and cried up the moral standing of his
line of work accordingly. The traditional costume of the barrister – wig, gown and bands – is
designed to produce the same effect, lending to a mercenary some of the dignity of a
priest. Stylized battledress and a bandolier, even one made of horsehair,
would attract the wrong sort of client.

Dad didn't have anything as coherent as a
philosophy of the law, and his personal principles could be strongly polarized without adding up
to a standard opinion-poll profile. He was against capital punishment, for instance, and
strongly opposed to pornography. These are common attitudes individually but the combination is
mildly anomalous. Displayed as a Venn diagram, the two relevant circles would show little
overlap. Admittedly the overlap between those in favour of capital punishment and those opposed
to censorship would be smaller still, but Dad still has to count as something of a free-thinker.

This was very much the point made by Geoffrey
Robertson in
The Justice Game
: that when the first ABC trial (the nickname came from
the surnames of the defendants, two journalists and their source being prosecuted under the
Official Secrets Act) was abandoned due to the ill-health of the judge, and Mr Justice
Mars-Jones was named to preside over a new one, Robertson – representing the three – did not
have high hopes of his fair-mindedness in court. Knowing that Mars-Jones J (this is how judges
are styled in law reports) was a great upholder of law and order, and moreover that juries ‘ate
out of his hand', he told his clients they could expect to spend their Christmas in prison.

Instead Mars-Jones J dismissed the charges,
saying that the Official Secrets Act had never been intended to be used in such a way. When told
that the Attorney General had authorized the prosecution, he said (I must go to slow-motion
here, it's such a wonderful moment, a Clint Eastwood moment), ‘Then he can un-authorize it.' Is
that a cheroot clenched between Dad's teeth, or possibly a toothpick? He has slung a dusty
poncho over the ceremonial scarlet. To throw out a case in this way is a permanent possibility
of judicial procedure, but it takes a
strong judge to make it happen,
particularly if the result will be to nullify a case that the government has set its heart on.
The jingle of spurs is rarely heard in the courtroom these days.

His independence of mind was partly protected by
the fact he didn't want to rise any higher in the law. He was content to be a judge of first
instance. Occasional stints in the Court of Appeal, sitting with two judges who seemed to
gravitate towards points of law with a mystical certainty, convinced him that he lacked the
rapid analytical processing required to excel in that arena.

I was studying in the States at the time of the
ABC case, and heard only the vaguest rumblings about it. I didn't need to know more, as I
thought then, since it was so obvious that Dad would be on the wrong side. If no man is a hero
to his valet, then certainly no judge is a libertarian to his son. In the ABC affair I had the
excuse of geographical distance, but even when I was much closer to his professional life I
ignored its possible element of idealism. There was a case in 1982, for instance, presided over
by Dad, in which a Jamaican couple sued the police for assault, wrongful arrest and malicious
prosecution. Dad seemed to find it mildly amusing that a black couple should have the surname
White. He gave a wouldn't-you-just-know-it shrug when he mentioned it, though he would never
have thought it strange that a white couple should have the surname Black. There was nothing
odder about a black person being called White than for a person called Smith not to work in a
forge, or for someone called Mars to be living right here on Earth. He would have given the same
sort of shrug and raised his eyebrows, mock-indulgence, mock-exasperation, if the couple in his
case had been surnamed Black, though if a third party had pulled a wry face at a white person
being called White he would have been puzzled about where the element of humour lay.

Of course my friendship group
wasn't the delirious funky mix my attitudes implied. Even so, I could take up anti-racist
attitudes with a suavity that left Dad in the dust – it's just that it wasn't me who awarded
David and Lucille White £51,392, describing police conduct as ‘monstrous, wicked and shameful'
and giving the plaintiffs some assurance, finally, that not every part of the system was
contemptuous of their rights.

Fifty thousand pounds was a substantial sum in
1982. I had a friend who started work at Faber that year on a salary of £2,000 odd, in an
economy and a publishing climate that seems in retrospect lustily, even obstreperously vital.
(Admittedly that sort of job was always close to being an internship with pocket money thrown
in, and was a respectable work environment for educated young women before they got married,
even perhaps actively in search of a husband.)

There were less newsworthy cases that Dad
mentioned with quiet satisfaction. One was a case of arson in the 1970s, proved by an unusual
exhibit. The malefactor, against whom there was no other evidence, and who denied ever being on
the premises, had eaten an apple before setting the fire, and had foolishly left the core in a
desk drawer before he left. The apple core survived the blaze, and a conviction was obtained on
the basis of the arsonist's bite matching the marks that had been left on it. Almost a biblical
incident – he had eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whereof his
legal representatives would certainly have advised him not to eat. Or, if he did, to dispose of
the core.

By
CSI
standards this was fairly
elementary forensic science, but it got the job done and the criminal put away. Not a case with
very wide implications, admittedly. Even a handbook of
Arson for Dummies
might not feel
the need to warn its readers against writing their names in wet cement
before torching a factory, or leaving behind photographs of themselves – in the act of
striking the relevant match – locked in a fireproof safe.

Dad's non-standard convictions were strongly
engaged by one of the most famous cases of his career, the trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley
in 1966. He was only junior counsel for the prosecution, with the Attorney General, Elwyn Jones,
leading, but Dad made the opening speech (in a cleared courtroom, as requested by the defence)
at the hearing in front of magistrates at Hyde in Cheshire the previous December. Technically he
spoke the first words in the proceedings against Brady, twenty-seven, a stock clerk, and
Hindley, twenty-three, typist, of Wardle Brook Avenue.

The death penalty for murder had only been
abolished the previous year, and for many people this case with its specific horrors (sexually
charged cruelty, a woman delivering children up to torture) annihilated the arguments for
liberalization. Myra Hindley must have driven quite a few supporters of the reform back into the
hangman's arms. It didn't take Dad that way, even though he was presumably in court when the
tape-recording Brady and Hindley made of Lesley Ann Downey being killed was played. He never
mentioned it.

I remember him forbidding us to read about the
trial in the papers. From an eleven-year-old's point of view, this was being warned off
something that wouldn't have occurred to me in the first place, and the prohibition didn't breed
curiosity as it might have done in someone older or more rebellious.

The trial had its effect on me, but not in any
direct way. I was a studious boy, though there were some subjects for which I felt no affinity
(history and geography). I'd always enjoyed maths. I remember when I realized how many zeroes
were needed to represent a billion (an old-guard British billion of a million million) and how
this thrilled me. I was sitting on the
lavatory at the time that the
realization struck, but this was not an earthbound moment.

Now I was having trouble, not so much with maths
as with a maths teacher who had taken against me. In some way this was tied in with Dad and his
frequent appearances in the press. In class I became ‘Mars-Jones, whose clever father is never
out of the papers'. I didn't understand why this was shameful. I doubt if my classmates did
either, though they had no difficulty in understanding the invitation to laugh along.

I had already noticed that some of my classmates,
the rough boys, talked to Mr Waller out of lessons in a way I thought was somehow disturbing.
Since this was Westminster Under School in Eccleston Square, London SW1, my viewing some of my
fellow pupils as ‘rough boys' indicates that I was in a class of my own as a milksop.

At lunch one day Mr Waller had charge of our
table. The chief ‘rough boy' took a drink of water, pretended to notice something at the bottom
of his glass and said, ‘Sir? Do you see what's written on the bottom of these glasses?'

We all looked. All I could see was a word written
there (well, stamped really), the name of the manufacturer.
Duralex.
The boy went on,
‘Funny that they make glasses as well, eh, sir?'

I knew that something dirty was being insinuated,
but not what it was. O happy days before Internet porn, when an eleven-year-old could be so much
in the dark. The trade name Durex meant nothing to me. I had a vague knowledge of the existence
of the contraceptive sheath, though I knew it under the name of the ‘rubber johnny'. I had also
acquired some spectacular misinformation on the subject along the way. Was my unworldliness so
obvious that other boys got a kick out of telling me fibs? I knew, or thought I knew, that there
was a hole in a rubber johnny and that sometimes the man's ‘stuff'
(another
vagueness, but made authoritative by Nicholas Monsarrat's
The Cruel Sea
, which was a
true book about the War) took a whole day to pass through it. Perhaps I had been told the old
myth about the government insisting on a pinhole being made in one protective in a hundred, to
safeguard the birth rate, and had got it turned round. I had only the vaguest idea of what the
man and the woman did, and none at all about why they would want to. I seem to have thought
there was some sort of filtration involved, or a slow drip process as with coffee made by the
Cona method, a feature of dinner parties at the Gray's Inn flat.

How did Mr Waller react to this transgressive and
smutty line of chat? Clearly his professional response should have been to kill the conversation
without making too much of a fuss. Instead he gave a complicit snigger.

He had his favourites and his unfavourites, and
it was no mystery where I fitted in. At one point I was unwell and missed a few days of school,
and when I went back it felt as if maths lessons had been purposefully accelerated so as to
leave me behind. The equations had turned ugly. The numbers were no longer on my side.

Mr Waller didn't seem to want me to catch up. I
wasn't used to academic failure, and went to Dad for help. I don't remember confiding in my
mother, but I expect that's because I so often did. Sharing my worries with Dad was the
memorable event, though I'm sure she smoothed my way to him.

He took action, not making the fuss I had feared
but tracking down a suitably diligent classmate and having the relevant pages of his exercise
book photocopied. In those days domestic photocopying was an exotic venture, and he emphasized
its fantastic cost. I'm sure his surprise was genuine, but it can't really have been a
significant drain on the family budget, so perhaps he was guarding against the possibility that
I would
come to expect the mechanical reproduction of schoolwork as a matter
of course.

In fact the photocopied pages were only a limited
help. The results of the process were far from crisp, with dark lines superimposed, and I
couldn't reliably make out the handwriting. Dad asked me if I was on my way to recovering my
rightful place at the top of the class, and I recognized this from Latin lessons as the type of
question that expects the answer Yes. I tried to make out that it was only a matter of time.

However much Dad tried to help me with my maths
problem, he was part of it himself. His appearances in the papers, associated with a shocking
court case, seemed to inflame my teacher. Mr Waller would ask me a difficult question, already
grasping the piece of chalk he would throw at me if I got it wrong. The pressure he applied made
it more likely that I would fail, and I duly acquired an incompetence when faced with
mathematical operations. I don't think Mr Waller explicitly aimed at this effect. A week or two
of cringing would have satisfied him. Of course I didn't know the exact source of his resentment
and badgering, but it seems obvious that I was really only a stand-in for Dad, unlucky enough to
be within range of flung chalk.