It started perfectly innocently. ‘Do you know the story about the newly appointed judge who doesn’t feel he’s got the hang of the sentencing guidelines …?’ I wonder what had got into George Walford. Perhaps there was an element of the raconteur’s Olympiad, a desire to tell a joke or funny story that would beat Dad at his own droll game. By this stage of the meal much food had been eaten, much drink drunk. Crackers had been tortured until they voided their trinkets. Paper hats had been distributed and put on with variously good and bad grace.
Dad expressed neutral interest in this recent appointee to the bench, praiseworthy in his concern to master the proper procedures.
George went on with his story. ‘So he approaches a senior colleague and asks for the benefit of his experience. “What,” he asks, “should I give a young man for allowing himself to be buggered?” “Oh,” says the senior judge, “I’d say thirty bob and a box of Black Magic should do the trick.”’
We sons were incredulous with delight but managed to suppress any manifestation of it. Sheila looked anxious and unhappy. Nobody round the table laughed. In fact a laughter-vacuum was created which could have annihilated a great deal of entertainment value — not just a single off-colour joke but Richard Pryor’s entire 1973 Christmas show (assuming that by some anomaly of booking agency he was performing in the next room). Pryor was in his full foul-mouthed prime around then, but although Dad would have hated his comedy he wouldn’t have felt betrayed by it, not personally attacked. He was so thunderstruck by George Walford’s joke that he hardly seemed to react, though it was clear to us all that he had sustained a heavy blow.
George had danced on the grave of a number of his most precious assumptions. 1) A joke about a judge who was not just a pervert but a frivolous one, 2) told in mixed company, by which he would have meant not just that there were women present but that the younger generation was being exposed to insidious flippant evil, 3) at Christmas. He couldn’t stage a protest because we were guests and thereby beholden, though I have to say such considerations hadn’t necessarily held him back in the past.
It almost seemed to be too much for him to take in, this compound assault, being simultaneously stabbed (as it may have seemed) in the back, in the front and in the sides. Finally he managed to say, ‘I’m afraid I don’t see much humour in that sort of thing.’ And after that nothing could put the bubbles back in the champagne. They had symbolically migrated to the bloodstreams of the Mars-Jones boys, black bubbles of mischief, and we had to pretend not to be made tipsy and exhilarated by them.
It was the same juvenile impulse that made us choose the Mille Pini off Queen Square (basic Italian) whenever a family meal in the Gray’s Inn area was on offer — until there was an actual restaurant called A Thousand Penises we would make do with the Mille Pini. I don’t know what had led Dad to choose George Walford to preside over Matthew’s spiritual development, and perhaps that Christmas he regretted it. The godparents we were allotted were either neighbours and friends from Gray’s Inn or colleagues of Dad’s. So I was under the care of Cynthia Terry (Aunty See-See), who lived at number 5 Gray’s Inn Square, and James Wellwood (Uncle Jimmy) from number 1. To complete the set I had a more august and remote presence, Sir Hildreth Glyn-Jones. I’ve never met a Hildreth since. It’s a rare first name, and it means ‘battle counsellor’, usually given to females when given at all.
A godparent is supposed to watch over a child’s interests, to underwrite renunciation of the Devil and his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, not to mention desires both covetous and carnal. Informally there’s some sort of residual watchdog function, though intervention would only ever be a last resort. During deadlocked arguments of the 1970s it would have been handy to empanel my trio as a higher tribunal, a family Court of Appeal (perhaps that was why we had been given three godparents each). In such a hearing I might not have done too badly. Cynthia was a layperson, not much of a match for Dad in argument, and Jimmy Wellwood, though a lawyer, was academic by temperament, easily distracted and easily overruled, but Sir Hildreth was a senior judge with rather a relish for barneys in court, who might have taken my side for the sheer hell of it.
Sir Hildreth didn’t live in the Inn, but would seek me out every now and then when I was a schoolboy at Westminster. A message would be tucked behind the lattice of ribbons on the College noticeboard, making an appointment to take me out one afternoon. We would walk across Green Park to Fortnum & Mason for tea. I remember him telling me that Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale described himself as a ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’, and that the word for this indispensable faculty was ‘serendipity’. Before he delivered me back to school he would dependably hand over a five-pound note.
All of this was highly satisfactory. This was godparental behaviour of a sort I could understand, with its own compass points: English Breakfast tea, Shakespearean conversation, anchovy-paste sandwiches, five-pound note. It was only long after the event, after Sir Hildreth had signed off on his sponsorial duties by giving me a copy of Peake’s Commentary on the Bible — I had been confirmed, so in spiritual terms I was flying solo — that these visitations acquired an extra dimension.
Sir Hildreth was an acerbic judge notorious for the humiliations he visited on counsel appearing before him. Presiding over a court was his version of blood sport, and the blood spilled was unlikely to be his. It’s virtually impossible for a judge to be defeated in a contest with a barrister (though F. E. Smith landed a few good blows), and any such victory will come at a cost. The bull never gets awarded a matador’s ears. Technical redresses can be secured in a higher court, assuming that the judge is wrong in law as distinct from abusive in person, but this precious ointment can only be applied long after the bruises have faded.
So there was some calculation involved in awarding this oppressive personage a stake in my spiritual development. Giving Sir Hildreth this honour might confer a certain immunity on Dad. I was a sop to Cerberus, a studious little hobbit offered up to take the edge off the Orc King’s appetite. Dad was trying to draw Sir Hildreth into the charmed circle of family with its qualms and taboos. When this senior judge stood by the font and undertook to watch over me, so that the old Adam might be buried and a new man rise in his place, I imagine Dad was looking for a related promise. That he himself wouldn’t be stretched on a rack in open court any time soon.
Obviously I exaggerate. It’s a family failing. Dad wasn’t propitiating the Dark Lord of Mordor, nor even Torquemada (the actual Inquisitor, not the still-remembered crossword compiler). He was doing something I should have been able to understand even as a schoolboy, especially as a schoolboy. He was sucking up. The Honourable Sir Hildreth Glyn-Jones was twenty years older than Dad. He was never invited to drinks parties at the flat, or if invited didn’t attend. I don’t even know if he lived in London. He had a wife and three daughters but I never met them.