Kid Gloves (9 page)

As he described it, a newcomer to the squad would
find an envelope full of money on his desk in the first week. When he asked what it was for, he
would be told it was for moving expenses. The next week there was another envelope, after the
contents of the first had been spent, and there was no longer any pretence about what it was
for.

It happened that I was in the Gray's Inn flat on
the day after the trial ended. Commander Wallace Virgo and Detective Chief Superintendent
William Moody had been convicted, and Dad was jubilant, in a mood to celebrate. He produced his
wallet and slid out a ten-pound note. For a moment it looked as if he was about to give me some
pocket money, except that I was twenty-two and receiving a small allowance from the Department
of Education and Science (I remember that the postal address of my benefactors was Honeypot
Lane) to pursue a PhD that I never caught up with.

The ten-pound note wasn't for me. Instead Dad
handed it to Sheila, saying, ‘Darling, I want you to go down to Soho and buy some pornography.'
She looked a little dazed as she took the money.

‘What is it exactly you want me to do, Bill?' she
asked.

‘Go to Soho and buy some pornography.'

‘But why?'

‘Because you won't be able to get any,' he told
us. Then he took the tenner back and returned it to his wallet. As perhaps Sheila had suspected
from the start, if only because the scene was played out in my presence, it was just a piece of
theatre. I don't know if she was surprised that Dad should imagine such a direct connection
between a decision in law and the life of the streets, but I certainly was.

Virgo appealed against his
conviction, and won. I don't remember Dad making any comment on this setback, but years later I
found an unfamiliar cassette recorder with a tape in it. Might this be the famous memoir, which
Dad had found impossibly difficult in the end to get started on, so that he decided that
speaking aloud was the solution, with a stenographer typing up the material for him to tidy
later? I pressed the Play button. It was Dad's voice all right, but he was singing rather than
speaking, and accompanying himself on the guitar. ‘Virgo –
Virgo
,' he crooned, ‘I'll
follow you … just an old sweet song keeps Virgo on my mind.' He was casting a spell of
voodoo justice on the villain who had escaped him, to the tune of Hoagy Carmichael's ‘Georgia on
My Mind'.

Having a master of argument in the family doesn't
necessarily make for a quiet life, particularly if he sees himself not as a user of rhetoric but
as someone who speaks his mind. In family arguments Dad was like a professional tennis player
who doesn't even realize how much spin he's putting on the ball, going for devastating shots
even in what is nominally a knock-up. Except that a tennis pro will admit to having a racket in
his hand.

It was part of Dad's constitution that he wanted
to win, but I'm not sure he ever realized how much he wanted it. He could be relentless, though
he could also be wily in a way that was endlessly frustrating. He could improvise.

This was particularly maddening when I was old
enough to feel that I could mount an argument myself on a reasonably sophisticated basis. After
I had changed my Cambridge course from Classics to English, a change he reluctantly supported,
he asked me at the end of one particular term what I'd been studying. American literature, I
told him (an option that hadn't been on the syllabus for long), with special reference to
Melville, Hawthorne, Pynchon and Nabokov. ‘Nabokov?' he
asked. ‘The man who
wrote that dirty book
Lolita
? The one who likes little girls?'

I could see there was no point in arguing that
Humbert's entanglement with Lolita recreated Nabokov's love affair with America, or that it was
an allegory of beauty, or even a novel that refused to address the moral issues it seemed to
insist on raising. Dad had watched the last ten minutes of the film and hadn't read so much as a
page, while I knew both book and film fairly well. He might hate to be underprepared in court,
but now, somehow, lack of knowledge gave him a crushing advantage.

I made the decision to keep things
extra-literary, shifting my ground to face an adversary who wouldn't be drawn into skirmishes
over aesthetics or formal questions but would keep pounding away with the big guns of
traditional morality. I pointed out that Mrs Nabokov, Véra, had rescued the manuscript of
Lolita
when her husband was trying to burn it, and that the book, like all the others
he published, was dedicated to her.

Dad answered by reflex. I'd love to have an MRI
of his brain at that moment, to see which parts were being used, and (almost more fascinating)
which were not. A tiny flare of combative instinct in the limbic system, a few neurones firing
in the linguistic cortex. I dare say that was all it took. ‘And I think she's a wonderful woman
…' he said, leaving a pause long enough for me to wonder if I was losing my wits – did Dad
know Véra Nabokov? How had this come about? Had they shared quaffing wine in Gray's Inn Hall? –
before he delivered the judo throw that used my weight against me, ‘… to accept the
dedication of a book which proves that her husband really likes little girls.' Part of the
frustration of the moment was my sense that Dad could never have riffed so freely if he was
really engaged in a question of morals. He was showing off, he just didn't know it.

If Dad was a driven athlete
in argument, he was also a chess grandmaster. Sometimes, like a resourceful player, he would
establish a gambit over the course of several games and then vary it in a way that was
completely destabilizing. I had become used to one form of non-apology, which ran along the
lines of ‘I'm not a young man … I'm getting to be an old man … we must try to get
along better.' This was in theory a no-fault approach to the family peace process, but one which
made clear just the same where the faults lay. Then one day, shortly before his retirement, he
successfully ambushed me with a variation: ‘I'm not a young man … I'm getting to be an old
man … you have only so much time to make it up to me.'

Over the years he had changed his spots, from the
man who had stood as a Labour candidate after the War, even if he succeeded only in splitting
the vote and letting the Tory in. He never actually admitted helping the Tory cause more
directly, by voting for Mrs Thatcher in the years when it was possible to do so, but I'd be
surprised to learn that he never did.

His support for liberal causes may have started
and finished with the abolition of the death penalty in 1965. He certainly hadn't approved of
the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalized homosexuality, and by the 1970s had become
alarmed by a general culture of permissiveness and the particular anomie of his sons.

In soft cultural terms, as distinct from actual
politics, he could boast of having an open mind, or certainly open ears. Dad had been an
unlikely but fervent first-generation Beatlemaniac. This was a shared taste in the household,
though I have to admit when I first heard ‘She Loves You' on the car radio in 1962 I thought in
my infant élitism that it was a bad joke. Oh dear oh dear, I thought, have we really come to
this? I was eight. A little later, when Tim and I were
given record tokens
by our grandfather (Sheila's father, the only grandparent we knew) we made highbrow choices of
EP, at least partly, I'm sure, to impress each other, with him choosing
Finlandia
while
I cast my vote for Gieseking playing the ‘Moonlight' Sonata. I wonder who won, and how we knew.

Dad worked out the chords of ‘Michelle' on the
guitar, and Sheila acquired the sheet music for ‘Eleanor Rigby' for trying out on the piano. She
had the advantage of being able to read music, though from his Chapel childhood Dad was at home
with tonic sol-fa notation for hymns, and could with a little effort decode the little grids
studded with black dots, like wiring diagrams for transistors, which represented guitar chords
in the tablature used for popular sheet music. On songs without a piano part Sheila might find
herself relegated to that unglamorous not-quite-instrument made from a comb and pieces of tissue
paper.

Dad bought us The Beatles' albums when they came
out, as far as
The
White Album
, anyway, whose experimentation displeased him (and many others) so that the
capital for
Abbey Road
had to be raised by private subscription.

There was always a worry, since records could
only be played in the public spaces of the flat (we were too young to have our own record
players), that Dad would find something objectionable coming out of the grand Decca
television-cum-radiogram. It was a relief, for instance, when he pronounced ‘Lady Madonna'
essentially reverent in its appropriation of biblical imagery, though he must have expressed
himself less pompously. He could be touchy about anything that mocked holy subjects, though he
did enjoy telling one high-class joke with just a touch of blasphemy about it:

Jesus (addressing the crowd gathered round the
woman taken in adultery): Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

(A stone flung with
great force strikes the woman on the forehead. Shocked silence.)

Jesus: Really, mother, sometimes you can
be
impossible
.

The White Album
, which came out shortly
after my fourteenth birthday, was a particular embarrassment. I was extremely prudish at this
stage, though my prudishness was of a particular kind. It was a matter of social context. I
could listen to dubious lyrics on the
White Album
perfectly calmly, though with
disapproval, as long as neither parent was around. My mother's presence, even if she was moving
in and out of the sitting-room with other things on her mind, would make me nervous, and Dad's
presence brought on a much more intense agitation. So it was only the conjunction of all three
elements that was unbearable: the offensive record, the paternal presence and the confused son.
I had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but it stuck in my throat. I
could no longer be a child and had little idea of how to be an adult, but adolescence was the
role, of the three, that I found hardest to inhabit. I disliked surliness as a characteristic,
and it repelled me just as much when it was my own. All this had little to do with puberty as a
physical fact, news of which reached my body rather later.

My solution was as desperate as I felt the
problem to be. As the offending moment of the
White Album
approached, I would walk
casually over to the radiogram and either turn the volume dial all the way down or lift the
needle from the record. Turning the volume down worked well enough for scandalous individual
moments, such as the cursing of Sir Walter Raleigh (‘he was such a stupid git') on ‘I'm So
Tired', but lifting the stylus out of the compromising groove was called for when the outrage
lasted for longer than a few seconds, as it did for instance on ‘Why Don't We Do It in the
Road?'. I cursed the
Beatles in my turn (without using bad language) for
their disobligingness in leaving no visible division between tracks, selfishly advancing their
credentials as makers of a unified artwork and ignoring the needs of those who might want to
skip the needle lightly across a trench of filth. It was difficult to guess exactly where to put
down the needle again. It might happen that the upsetting lyrics sounded out all over again, if
I'd underestimated the distance, so it was better to play safe.

The result was that I'd end up skipping whole
tracks that had done nothing wrong, so it seemed better to revert to the volume-down method of
censorship. I would sit on a patchwork leather pouffe (for yes, we followed trends) near the
radiogram until I could hear, from the tiny unamplified sound made by the needle, that we had
safely come to the end of ‘Why Don't We Do It In The Road?' or ‘Sexy Sadie'. Would I have been
less vigilant if I had known that ‘Sexy Sadie' was originally called ‘Maharishi', and was
Lennon's bitter farewell to the guru he'd outgrown, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi? Probably not.

I hate to think what my parents felt about my
purity campaign focussed on the
White Album
, my attempt to make the two-LP set live up
to its name (a name that didn't appear anywhere on the cover or label). No-one ever said
anything about it, which was probably for the best. I don't think I was making a cry for help
but something a little more contradictory, a cry to be left alone, not to be required to think
about certain things.

Early and mid-period Beatles were genuinely
things the whole family could enjoy, a category that seems stable until one day it's gone. Late
Beatles were already divisive, opening up a rift between us or perhaps just a rift in me. Then
there came a point when we would have lost face if Dad liked any of our chosen music, though he
was always waiting for us to
come around to his choices, just as he assumed
that in due course we would abandon
Monty Python
and join him in front of
Dad's
Army
.

If we didn't want to share the experience of
music then it followed that we needed our own means of mechanical reproduction.

By the time the Mothers of Invention released
Over-Nite Sensation
in 1973, my brothers and I had a record player of our own and could
shut ourselves safely away in our bedrooms to be dazzled by the toxic jewels of the
counterculture. In the years between 1960 and 1981 there was a holiday home by the seaside on
Anglesey, and it was there that Tim and I listened in shock and wonder to the album
,
which I had bought in Bangor's only forward-looking record shop.