Gray’s Inn was a little legal parish, though increasingly a plutocratic monoculture, much less diverse than it had been in my childhood, when such bohemians as architects and accountants might have their homes there. Earlier in the twentieth century it accommodated without apparent effort an even more wayward, literary type of inhabitant, as exemplified by Edward Marsh and Maurice Baring. Successive Rent Acts have weakened the position of residents, so that only the longest-established can feel themselves secure. Newcomers can hope for nothing better than an assured shorthold tenancy, and must accept that widows have no right to remain. Even in the late 1990s, Gray’s Inn was mainly deserted at weekends and outside legal term. The flats are mainly on the top floors of the buildings (the third), with offices on the lower levels. Outside the working week most of those upper windows were dark.
It felt entirely natural to invite Dad’s friends to dinner since they were my friends too. And not just dinner: a couple of times I took on the duty, which had been part of my mother’s routine, of giving ‘the gentlemen’ breakfast on a Sunday. The gentlemen in question were the Preacher of the Inn, the Revd Roger Holloway, and the Dean of Chapel, Master (Tony) Butcher. I apologize for a form of words which makes him sound like a card from a Happy Families pack, but this is correct usage within the Inn when referring to benchers.
Roger Holloway was a man whose faith co-existed with a formidable worldliness — while living in Hong Kong in the 1980s he had appeared every day on each of the colony’s two television channels, in the morning contributing the equivalent of Thought for the Day, presenting a claret-tasting programme on the other channel in the evenings. There can’t be many preachers who have used Lady Diana Cooper as an authority for a point of doctrine (the impossibility of repentance as an act of will), quoting her as saying that when she met her Maker she would only be able to say, ‘Dear God, I’m sorry I’m not sorry.’
Roger claimed to have a list of names that were guaranteed to kick-start Dad’s dormant desire to hold the floor. The one I remember is ‘Goronwy Rees’ (not a name I knew). Accusations of Cold War-era betrayal and double-dealing would follow. A Welshman who turned his coat was not to be forgiven, even if there was no proof of his treachery. I can’t say I ever tried my luck with this Open Sesame. I accepted the new Dad, who was so different from the old one that any flashback would be jarring. He became exasperated from time to time but there were no outbursts.
Dad didn’t seem to have religious faith so much as religious confidence. Every morning he woke with the expectation of having fine things shown to him by life or its executive officers. It seemed obvious that God would turn out to (i) exist and (ii) put in a good word. Round His omnipresent neck he might wear a Garrick Club tie.
It was strange to see Dad take so little interest in food after Sheila’s death, and even in drink. Gray’s Inn was, and perhaps is, very male socially, certainly at the higher levels. Students eat a certain number of dinners in the Hall, while benchers like Dad are well looked after at table. The cellars of the Inn are grandly stocked. When I made arrangements for a reception after Sheila’s funeral service in the Chapel, it was proposed that we serve the Inn’s ‘quaffing wine’. I agreed to this without asking for more detail, though it would have been interesting to know how many grades there were below this, and how many above.
There’s a gesture people make in social settings like weddings where drink flows freely, and glasses are discreetly topped up without an enquiry, so as not to interrupt conversation. The gesture involves placing the hand palm down over the glass, symbolically blocking access to the vessel. It’s not an elaborate gesture, not a difficult thing to get right, but I never saw Dad make it.
Dad’s background in Congregationalist Denbighshire was teetotalitarian — his own father drank only one alcoholic drink in his life, and that was (fair play) a glass of champagne at Dad’s wedding reception. I imagine him choking it down as if it was sparkling rat poison. The early prohibition left traces: not having a taste for beer, Dad rather disapproved of pubs, but had no objection to drinking at home or on classier premises.
He had joined the RNVR (Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve) before the War and served on a number of ships, having particularly fond memories of HMS Euryalus. The custom of ‘splicing the mainbrace’, the distribution of a tot of rum daily, was still in force. This Nelsonian beverage was not just a ritualized perk but a form of currency. Favours could be secured or acknowledged by pledging all or part of one’s tot.
The smallest possible subdivision of the ration was ‘sippers’. When you were taking sippers, everyone would be watching your Adam’s apple to make sure it didn’t move. The spirit was admitted to the mouth by a subtle suction amounting to osmosis. A larger share was ‘gulpers’. When it came to gulpers the Adam’s apple was allowed a single movement. When the whole tot was being offered up, the cry was ‘Sandy bottoms!’.
Not much remained in Dad’s vocabulary of naval lingo, though he did hang on to the expression ‘belay the last pipe’, used to indicate that an order has been countermanded. I absorbed it unthinkingly, so that it has become my normal way of saying ‘Forget what I just said’ or ‘Ignore my last e-mail’ — but then I have to explain what the phrase means, and its advantages as a piece of shorthand disappear.
It doesn’t seem likely that Dad got another of his standard phrases — ‘Rally buffaloes!’ — from his time at sea. It was the very unwelcome phrase he used in our teenage years to tell us to get out of bed.
The staple adult drink that I remember from my childhood was gin and bitter lemon. No-one has been able to explain to me the vogue for this mixer, with a taste both caustic and insipid. Was tonic water rationed in some way?
Sometimes I wonder how anyone of that generation got home safe after a party, at a time when refusing an alcoholic drink was bad manners and the breathalyser didn’t exist. Of course the roads were emptier then.
One of Dad’s early cases, and one of his favourite anecdotes, involved a charge of drink-driving from that ancient time, the period in a barrister’s early professional life when he borrows briefs from his fellows in chambers in advance of a conference with a client, piling them up on his desk to give the necessary impression of a thriving practice.
Dad’s client had been charged on the basis of his poor performance walking a straight line. This was the period’s low-tech guide to intoxication, a white line drawn on the floor at police stations. Urine tests? Blood tests? Not relevant to the story as he told it.
The client’s defence was that he suffered from Ménière’s disease, a problem of the inner ear which affects hearing and balance. His was a severe case, making it impossible for him to walk a straight line. Dad marshalled an expert witness to testify to his medical condition. The Crown did the same. The outcome of the case depended, as it so often does, on which of these carried more weight, whether Tweedledum or Tweedledee excelled in authority and gravitas. The expert witness called by Dad gave evidence that the accused did indeed suffer from Ménière’s disease, and could not therefore be expected to walk a straight line. The Crown’s counterpart testified that he did not in fact suffer from the disease. His inability to walk a straight line amounted only to a confession by the legs that unlawful quantities of alcohol had been admitted to the mouth.