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.