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.
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.