He told me I should have my own Bardic name in readiness. His suggestion was ‘Adda Chwith’, meaning Adam Lefthand, celebrating one of my more innocent deviations from the statistical norm. He didn’t explain how I was going to make a contribution to Welsh culture without being part of it.
In the 1980s I was excited when I came across a gay activist in London who was doing something similar to Dad’s translation project for the benefit of magistrates, helping to translate the technical terms of gay liberation into Welsh. I remember ‘llon’ as the Welsh for ‘gay’. I may not speak the language, but the ability to hiss that double l is part of my birthright, inalienable. If there are Welsh words that have added music to such terms as ‘self-oppression’ and ‘heteronormativity’, they haven’t reached my ears.
The activist and I were getting on just fine (wasn’t I an activist too?) till I mentioned my own Welsh connection. After that the engines of intimacy went into full reverse, since he regarded Dad as a sort of Uncle Tom for laying the treasure of his language at the feet of the foreign oppressor. As he saw it, a Welsh-speaking judge was a particular sort of traitor and fitted the same painful profile as Emlyn Williams did for Dad, an enemy who was born to be a friend. It was a moment of something like symmetry, the correcting of a balance. Normally I was Dad’s shaming family secret but now he was mine.
In English Dad avoided four-letter words, though he could go as far as referring to someone as a ‘four-letter feller’. In practice this was usually Bernard Levin, who had (as he felt) traduced him in an article written for The Times during the 1970s. A juror had tried to walk away from his responsibilities on the basis that he didn’t understand the issues in the case. Dad responded by sending him to the cells for contempt of court. It’s certainly true that if people could evade their civic duty so easily by claiming incompetence the system would soon collapse. It would have been better for the reluctant juror to stick to the traditional practice of turning up in a tracksuit and dark glasses, confident of being held back on the reserve bench as dodgy, presumptively druggy, then sent swiftly home.
Levin, as a columnist and contrarian, was bound to take a different line — to suggest, for instance, that this self-recusing juror was a hero of democracy, refusing merely to rubber-stamp the court procedures without true intellectual participation in the administration of justice. This was not a threat to the system but its vindication. The judge in the case who had slapped him down was, correspondingly, an agent of oppression and a sworn enemy of civil liberties.
What galled Dad was the relish with which the piece was written, as if Levin was tickled pink to be putting a judge into the public pillory, even the laughing-stocks. His article began: ‘Mr Justice Mars-Jones was in a rare old paddy down the Old Bailey last week …’ I remember reading it in a coffee shop in Cambridge, shocked by the eruption of the family name into my placid breakfast ritual. I was also undeniably thrilled by mockery at Dad’s expense. We must have made quite a pair in Belinda’s on Trinity Street, my ham roll and I, my tongue hanging out in stupefaction to match the pale meat lolling over the bread on my plate.
Dad felt he had been subjected to a personal attack camouflaged as commentary on something in the news. The worst of it was that he wasn’t able to respond, either as one of Her Majesty’s Judges nor as an individual. He had been targeted by the might of the fourth estate, and there was nothing he could do in protest or retaliation except rehearse the phrase to which Levin’s name would always be chained with links of bitter contempt, ‘four-letter feller’. The word suppressed in this formula rhymes with threepenny bit.
And perhaps there was another small thing he could do. He did have one small weapon at his disposal, the dark marble of social death. This he would fire from his catapult to strike back at the giant Levin, to bring the sneering Philistine-Pharisee down to earth. If ever Bernard Levin applied for membership of Dad’s beloved Garrick Club, the black ball would fly swift from Dad’s sling.
It was almost a pity that Levin was already so unpopular with the legal profession, largely as a result of his (very likely justified) criticism of Lord Justice Goddard in 1971, that Dad’s additional veto would have had no effect. He could safely have risen above rancour and offered up a white ball in the spirit of charity and fair play. The result would still have been the one he wanted, with the Garrick Club turned for the occasion into a sort of Goth pinball arcade of careering black marbles.
Though it was understood that judges should not comment on any matter of public interest, sometimes Dad exaggerated the discretion that was required of him. It was an easy way out of family arguments in the 1970s for him to say that professional etiquette prevented him from expressing any sort of opinion on the issues of the day, as if there was no difference between the dining-table at number 3 Gray’s Inn Square and a press conference bristling with microphones.
His first-born, Tim, having inherited a certain forensic zeal, once suggested that if it was so important to keep the political opinions of the judiciary out of circulation then Dad should read the newspapers in a protected environment such as the lavatory, since it was obvious what he thought from his expression while he read them … after that the wrangle was on again, with Dad’s attempt to claim the high judicial ground ruled out of court.
After Dad retired I felt the need to add a new element to a household that was at risk of becoming little more than the sum of its routines, unless and until Dad buckled down to that book of reminiscences, those songs, that radio play. Rachmaninov symphonies weren’t enough by themselves to make the flat hum with purpose.
I arranged to come round every Monday evening and help with the making of a meal. I had taken an interest in cooking in the sixth form at school, where Friday afternoons were set aside for non-academic activity under the banner of ‘Guilds’. Cookery had easily sidelined the other two options, photography and social work (known as ‘old ladies’). Westminster didn’t do too badly by me if it taught me how to make a white sauce as well as an elegiac couplet.
Normally I made soup and Sheila would put together a main course, though sometimes we exchanged roles. From Dad’s point of view soup was always the highlight of a meal. In fact soup was the meal. A meal without soup barely qualified as such. As teenagers we were well used to restaurant meals at which Dad would ask, ‘Soup for everyone? Five soups?’ as if he could imagine no other preference. Possibly he was just gingering us up to order promptly, rather than overruling our right to whitebait or prawn cocktail, but in that case he wouldn’t have spoken for the lady as well, Sheila who had never chosen soup in all the time he had known her. Since roughly 1946.
The bargain over Monday dinner, as I explained it to Dad, was that I would make soup every week on condition that he laid the table. I was managing him. Perhaps I was trying to show Sheila that this so strongly counter-suggestible man could be controlled after all. Dad said, rather pitifully, that he didn’t know where the cutlery lived. I pointed out that he had been living in the flat for upwards of thirty-five years, which should help to narrow the range of the search.
I warned Dad that if ever he left the table unlaid, I would pour the soup away. He would never see another of my making. Why does this now sound so insulting? In fact Monday evenings were generally enjoyable, and though Dad’s laying was often approximate he never failed to make an attempt. One Monday I accidentally overdid the chilli oil, and Sheila was unable to choke down as much as a mouthful. Dad finished his bowl, and though his face was very red and his voice oddly hoarse said yes to another. It was as if soup was self-evidently such a good thing that the question ‘More soup?’ must always meet a Yes. The logic gates swung open irresistibly and there was no possibility of override.