There were musicians who took their cue. Sting sued over inequitable contracts (before the appeal in O’Sullivan & Another v. Management Agency & Music Ltd & Others, I think), with Mars-Jones J presiding. This was in the early days of the soundbite as an art form, and I imagine Dad must have wished he had worked harder on a truly quotable dictum when he remarked, after the defendants had finally capitulated to Sting and settled, ‘This has been a very trying trial.’ Elton John also sued Dick James Music, though before a different judge.
In all this I am feeling my way, humiliated by an inability to distinguish the core issue from the contingent circumstances, the steak from the parsley garnish. It has been a Socratic process, to learn how much I don’t know, and I fully understand the feelings of the ancient Athenian citizenry, who might acknowledge that Socrates was a cultural treasure without equal, but would cross the road or remember a previous engagement rather than be drawn into dialogue with him.
From the dawn of pubescence if not before, my assigned role in the family was peacemaker, a not uncommon casting for a middle child, but Dad further characterized me as dreamy and unworldly, only too likely to be exploited by more savvy folk. Watching me as a child flitting from the piano keyboard to a book and the television, then back again, he would tell me that I had a butterfly brain. I wish I had had the wit to tell him I had something much more useful, a bee brain.
In many areas of life he simply ignored evidence that contradicted his fixed ideas, but this wasn’t one of them. After the moment in 1980 when he learned that I had a book contract with Faber for the book eventually titled Lantern Lecture, he never seriously questioned my judgement. Did I start riding a motorbike (in 1988) when I was too old to be classed as a boy racer, too young for it to qualify as a midlife crisis with handlebars? Dad was confident I’d ride safely. Did I venture into an unconventional family life (in 1991) by having a daughter with a friend? Dad was delighted. He would have preferred a grandson but was prepared to wait for a further instalment of this pleasing twist in the family saga. He didn’t imitate the ritual cry of his beloved Fred Flintstone — Yabba-dabba-doo! — but that may have been because he was too busy calling for champagne.
His earlier idea of me as dreamy simply fell to the ground, and he decided that I must have been planning the Faber coup more or less from the egg. Useless to say that good luck and social contacts — thank you, Rosemary Hill — had led me first of all to a magazine editor (Craig Raine of Quarto) and then, thanks to Craig’s urgings, to a publisher, with the ragbag of fact-based fictions that was pretty much all I’d ever attempted. My dreamy side was still there, though I took care to defend it behind intellectual barricades, topped with all the razor wire I could rustle up.
The problem area was my sexuality, something not touched on in that first book, since Dad had always had such a horror of men who were attracted to men. He was more than a standard-issue homophobe, not far from a homophobe’s homophobe. If there were Annual General Meetings of the Homophobia League then he would be an honoured guest if not keynote speaker, guaranteed any number of brief manly pats on the back.
Part of this was an unworldliness of his own. He was one of the very few judges of his day who hadn’t gone to public school. He had studied at St John’s, Cambridge, but only for a year after the end of his time at Aberystwyth. He didn’t enjoy talking about sex of any sort, and wasn’t comfortable when anyone else raised the subject.
It seems obvious that his metropolitan colleagues, once he had moved to London and started to practise as a barrister, were more relaxed, meaning more hypocritical, about such things, not unduly distressed when some of those funny people, who as everyone but Dad agreed could be highly entertaining, hairdressers and so on, were silly enough to get caught. Dad became every inch a Town Mouse, in his Church’s handmade shoes and bespoke suits, but in this one respect he reverted to Country Mouse type.
I only know of one person who tried to alert him to the unreliability of his ideas on the subject of homosexuality, and that was Ronald Waterhouse, a junior colleague who sometimes worked for Dad as a ‘devil’ in his days at the Bar, working informally on aspects of a complicated case and being paid directly by Dad.
Working with devils was an arrangement that suited Dad very well. Perhaps it was a way of buying in the raw analytical power he felt he lacked, the X-ray vision of the natural lawyer. It was an intensive but also convivial system, not exactly democratic but not quite formally structured either. They all worked hard, in bursts, and Dad napped hard too. (Napping wasn’t part of a devil’s job description.) If he was in court and it was a matter of preparing the next day’s material then he would have a nap after the afternoon session, before meeting the devil (or devils) for a drink and a briefing. They would meet again for dinner, when Dad would receive a progress report. Drinking at dinner would be moderate, by the standards prevailing. Dad would fix a deadline, perhaps for midnight, when the devil(s) would bring him comprehensively up to date. In the meantime Dad would have another nap.
I imagine all these lubricated parleys taking place in the Grosvenor Hotel, Chester, an institution I’ve never visited but one that seemed somehow to be Dad’s spiritual home. Perhaps as the hub of the Wales and Chester circuit in his glory days as a barrister, neither Wales nor London, it was where he had the most seductive combination of ease and prestige.
Dad was a great exponent of the Churchillian Nap, a form of refreshment that has since been rebranded the Power Nap or the Disco Nap. He felt that you should play fair with the god of sleep by getting into your pyjamas and sliding between the sheets even if you only aimed for the replenishment of five brain-charging minutes offline. When the late-night pressure was too relentless for him to risk another nap he would keep going on cigarettes, putting his head under the cold tap every half-hour or so if the nicotine alertness began to fade.
He smoked every step of the way to the bench, and when he was told to give the habit up in the 1970s had to learn a different pattern of working. His brain needed to acquire the ability to walk again without the crutch of a cigarette, and Dad’s solution was to move the intensity of his work life into a different sector of the day, not the late-late night but the early-early morning. He would set the clock for five or even four. When a long and complicated case was over he might still get up without fully waking and sleepwalk his way to his study, where Sheila would find him and coax him back to bed.
By suggesting to Dad that he was prejudiced, Ronald Waterhouse risked making an enemy who outranked him in a hierarchical profession, and also cutting off a useful stream of revenue. There’s no more efficient way of killing goodwill than letting a friend know he’s a bigot.
Of course he ‘wrapped it up a bit’, as advocates are always being urged to do … Bill, you have a bit of a bee in your bonnet about these people. They are not as you suppose them to be. Even so, this seems a case of File Under Moral Courage. I can’t think of another category that would fit it.
Ronald Waterhouse didn’t lose Dad’s allegiance, and later he became a judge himself. He’s perhaps best known for the painstaking inquiry he conducted, after his retirement, into the abuse of children in care in North Wales. There should be a special mention, though, for the question he asked during the proceedings against Ken Dodd for tax evasion in 1989. He asked, ‘What does £100,000 in a suitcase feel like?’ to which Dodd replied, unsatisfyingly to my mind, ‘The notes are very light, M’Lord.’