Kid Gloves (8 page)

I was fitfully aware of Dad's public status. At
one stage we went on a family holiday to Ireland, taking the ferry to Dun Laoghaire and hiring a
car for further exploring. The tune I pounded out on the piano in any hotel unwise enough to
leave one unlocked was ‘A Walk In The Black Forest'. I did my best to duplicate the ersatz
bounce of that exemplary, laboratory-designed earworm. Horst Jankowski's instrumental was a big
hit worldwide in 1965, which suggests (unless I was criminally behind the times) a time roughly
contemporary with the trial of Brady and Hindley. I remember us getting as far as Galway.
We went fishing and caught some pollack, though Mum said we wouldn't be asking
the hotel kitchen to cook them for us, since (as everyone knew) pollack tasted of blotting
paper. If I'd been able to make the leap from precociousness to actual prescience, I would have
sung out, ‘But Mum, they're
sustainable!
'

At the hotel there was a swimming pool with a
tricky name, the Fuchsia Pool. The word had to be said very carefully to avoid embarrassment,
though it turned out that ‘fuchsia' was only the name of the pinky-red ballerina-like flowers
that grew round the pool. The book in which I eventually saw the word ‘fuck' in print for the
first time, Mark Rascovich's
The Bedford Incident
, was already in existence (published
1963) but I hadn't come across it yet.

The Bedford Incident
is a Cold War
reworking of
Moby-Dick
, ending with the mutual destruction by warhead of a Russian
submarine and a US destroyer. I couldn't altogether blame the American sailors for their use of
foul language. They were about to be blown to atoms, by an atom bomb no less, and as I
understood it ‘fuck' was the equivalent of the nuclear option in conversation.

I had assumed, though, that this supremely taboo
four-letter word was so beyond the pale as to resist the normal conventions of English spelling.
I imagined specialized characters being necessary to transcribe it, lead-lined ones perhaps.
Even so it might cause mutations in neighbouring words.

In the Welsh language, of course, mutation is a
fact of consonantal daily life, and doesn't indicate the presence of background radiation,
though it certainly helps to deter visitors.

It was disappointing that ‘fuck' was spelled no
differently than ‘buck', ‘duck', ‘luck'. Even ‘fuch' would be some sort of homage, however
half-hearted.

The Fuchsia Pool itself was shaped like a
stylized fish, with the tail section being a shallow area safe for toddlers. I
was a confident swimmer and nervous diver, but the hotel pool had, instead of a diving
board, a white metal slide. I climbed up the ladder to the top of it and then became paralysed.
After a while Dad came over and suggested that I hold on tight to the edges of the slide on my
first ride down, so as to control my descent. There was a bucket of water next to me at the top
of the ladder, and he volunteered to slosh it liberally over the slide so as to make it easier
for me to hold on. Not bothering to examine the logic of the proposition, I agreed to it.

Only when I had committed my body weight to the
slippery metal, and the world slid out of control, did I understand that I had been betrayed,
lied to by someone who maintained that only the truth would set you free. It was wonderful, not
the betrayal as such but the accelerating joy it forced me to feel. I didn't bother him with
protests, in fact I hardly noticed him as I rushed back to the bottom of the white metal ladder.
Dad had found a way to nudge me brusquely free from the deadlock of my milksop psychology.

I remember we travelled under assumed names. It
was felt unwise for Dad to visit the Irish Republic after having sent so many of its irregular
affiliates down. That's what I remember, but of course it makes no sense. In 1965 Dad wasn't yet
a judge, and even if he had been, no Troubles had arisen for him to get the wrong side of. I
hope at least that the confusion in my memory doesn't mean I was, say, sixteen and trembling at
the top of the slide beside a hotel swimming pool, rather than eleven.

I must be mixing up two holidays – except that we
only went to Ireland the once, and no other destination would call for precautions of even this
rudimentary kind. I don't have a memory, not even a false one, of the name we travelled under,
though I find it hard to imagine not being interested.
Perhaps I was reading
a book. I've always been able to read without queasiness in cars, on trains, in planes, on
roller-coasters. Nice to think we might have gone under some name rich in associations,
travelling perhaps as the Melmoths. Did we have false passports, even? The existence of the
Common Travel Area may have made such elaborate preparations unnecessary, but the whole business
of travelling incognito suggests the murder mysteries played out in country hotels off
season.

Later on, in the 1970s and '80s, there were
definite security concerns. Dad had some firearms training and was even issued with a gun,
though it was kept locked up in the safe of the Gray's Inn Treasury Office where there was no
risk of its being useful. Certainly if the weapon had lived in the flat, I would have wanted to
see it and Dad would have wanted to wave it about with all due solemnity.

Before terrorism put judges at risk, there was
the old-school underworld. The High Court Judge Edmund Davies, who lived at number 1 Gray's Inn
Square, received threats after he passed controversially severe sentences on those responsible
for the ‘great' train robbery of 1963. Precautions were put in place. Cynthia Terry, wife of the
Under-Treasurer (and also my godmother, ‘Aunty See-See' as we called her), was asked to give up
her normal seat in the Chapel and position herself upstairs in the gallery. There she would be
well placed to deter, by screaming or lobbing a hymn book, any intruder devious enough to walk
into the Inn from High Holborn and enter the Chapel during morning service.

I feel sure that if Aunty See-See was
combat-ready in any marked way she would have mentioned it.

Dad was certainly advised, once terrorism was a
real force, to check the underside of his car for explosive devices. I didn't ever see him do
it. In fact my mind's eye shows me him very
much not doing it: leaning over
to one side a little way from the car, as if that would give him the necessary visual access. By
this time his Jaguar days were over and he drove sensible estate cars with automatic
transmissions. Then I see him going halfway down on his knees for a better view before realizing
he would risk sullying the excellence of his suiting with dirt if he allowed his knees to touch
down on the road surface. He considers the use of newspaper to protect the cherished cloth and
then understands that ink-smudges are at least as much of a threat to his turn-out as
tarmac-scuffs … of course none of this amounts to a memory. On a television screen these
images would be accompanied by a caption warning of
RECONSTRUCTION
, though why
anybody but me would want to watch I couldn't say.

If the national shock delivered by the Moors
Murders had led to the restoration of the death penalty, Dad might have found himself in
difficulties. He not only disapproved of the death penalty, implicitly on religious grounds, but
said, after the event, that he would not have accepted appointment as a judge if he was required
to pronounce it. Technically capital punishment was retained for a few specialized offences,
such as treason, piracy with violence, and arson in naval shipyards, but it would be a scruple
too far to expect him to decline preferment in case these virtually hypothetical crimes
materialized in his court.

His principle wasn't tested, since the black cap
remained a historical item (he became a judge in 1969), but that doesn't make his moral position
unreal. It's true that I never saw Dad undergo a real crisis of conscience, and his ambition
seemed to lie close to the core of him, though I saw enough discrepancy of temperament in the
last phase of his life not to be so sure. What's the appropriately judicial phrase? To reserve
judgment.

What Dad felt he learned from
the Moors Murders case was that pornography was an actively corrosive force. The books Ian Brady
read, the images he saw, inflamed and released an underlying inhumanity. It's doubtful that even
before 1966 he was in favour of sexual material being made freely available – I can't see him
approving of a world in which copies of
Reveille
and
Titbits
were brazenly
displayed where minors could see them – but after that case his opposition became definite.

If conversation turned in that direction he would
maintain that the last word on the subject had been spoken by Pamela Hansford Johnson in her
book
On Iniquity
, which describes her change of heart on this issue from a liberal to a
conservative stance, the catalyst being Ian Brady.

There was a sort of troubled open-mindedness in
our household, the product I suppose of slightly different attitudes between my parents. I
remember one evening when the BBC broadcast some footage of
Oh! Calcutta!
There was
debate over whether we should watch it. We did. The images were of naked bodies frozen every few
frames and allowed to overlap, producing an effect that soon became abstract (particularly on a
black-and-white television) and we uneasily agreed they were beautiful.

I never got around to reading Hansford Johnson's
book in Dad's lifetime. Perhaps he was only using it as a sort of barricade, to keep dissension
at a distance. If I had read it and taken issue with its arguments, he might only have withdrawn
behind another obstacle, though his withdrawals were usually feints and it was never safe to
assume a lasting retreat.

The tone of
On Iniquity
is sometimes
impossibly quaint:

Not so long ago, I raised a little storm by
suggesting, in a letter to the
Guardian
, that it was not desirable for Krafft-Ebing
[who wrote
Psychopathia Sexualis
, intended as a serious study] to be
available in relatively cheap paperback edition on the bookstalls of English railway-stations
…

Class seems to dog the discussion of censorship,
just as it had at the
Lady Chatterley
trial in 1960, with Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC
asking the jury: ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?' The
cheapness of a book, and consequently its availability to the lower orders, seems to be an
important element in discussion of the issue.

As Hansford Johnson visualized it, ‘The walls of
the police storerooms are almost bulging outwards with the pressure of tons upon tons of dirty
books.' Dad had a similar mental picture, but at least there were buttresses in place to keep
those storerooms from exploding. Dirty books were being kept out of circulation by the proper
authorities.

Everyone assumed that the smut was safe in its
silos, the general public screened from contamination by thick bulkheads of probity. It was
because Dad had such a high opinion of the police force in general that he regarded corruption
there as the ultimate betrayal of trust.

In 1964 he had been commissioned to write a
report investigating a particular set of allegations, that confessions had been extracted under
duress. He found there to be some substance to the allegations. Dad was particularly proud of
his report, in which he had tried to match the terse clarity of Lord Denning's prose style, and
felt vindicated when it was held up as a model of its kind. One newspaper suggested he would
make a good candidate for Ombudsman, defender of the individual against the injustice of
institutions. That office didn't actually exist, but he was on some sort of spectral short
list.

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.