Respect seems such a meagre currency, so unsatisfying if you’ve ever been paid in brighter coin. In the pre-history of the family it seems likely that Dad wanted transactions of love rather than duty. His moral fixity made him hard to please, of course, and we became wary of him, consciously inadequate. I’m speaking for myself here, though reaching for the shelter of a first person plural. In his turn he registered distance and defiantly claimed it, saying to Sheila that she had spoiled us, would do anything to be popular with us, while his was the stern love that refuses to fawn. Finding his soft feelings rejected he rejected them too.
I see myself as taking after my mother, but then he had the same idea about himself, and if Dad was a judge with a fixed objection to the death penalty then in the world of book reviewing I’m presumably regarded as a proponent of capital punishment. Not just a hanger but a flogger too. Possibly even an actual hangman, measuring a book for the drop. Pulling the lever with professional slickness and a pride, à la Pierrepoint, in my work rate.
There are some odd secondary symmetries in our professional lives. By writing ‘Bathpool Park’ and suggesting that Dad’s court failed to understand what happened to the kidnapped teenager Lesley Whittle, I opened up his workplace to the methods of mine, and treated the case as a verbal construct that could yield results if subjected to practical criticism of a wayward sort. In his turn, a few years later, Dad was called upon to adjudicate on how far critical comment could go before it attracted potential penalties in law.
The TV critic of the Sunday People, Nina Myskow, had written a catty review of a programme in which Charlotte Cornwell played a rock star. She remarked that Cornwell’s bottom was too big to belong to such a person. The title of the programme was No Excuses, which might have whispered caution to the indignant performer. But Cornwell wasn’t incensed by lack of invention — it was the personal nature of the comment that struck her as outrageous. She sued. The case came up before Dad, who ruled that although the comment was highly disagreeable it fell within the limits of free speech.
Returning to the question of suits in the sense of clothing rather than cases in court: let’s assume that the alarm has been properly set, the gas turned off and that A. France & Sons did the decent thing as regards Dad’s wardrobe. There was only one definite respect in which the firm let us down as clients. We had stipulated that Dad’s ashes be put in a casket like Sheila’s, since they were to be interred together. It’s the word ‘like’ that let us down, I imagine, with its spread of possible meanings. Dad’s casket was indeed like Sheila’s, in the sense that it was an elongated wooden box of modest size. What it wasn’t was identical. Why would an undertaker’s think that rough resemblance was all that was required? It seems doubtful that the firm was making an elegant demonstration of the fact — it was indeed a fact — that our parents, though a couple, were very far from being a pair. By the time we had discovered the error it was too late to ask.
The ceremony of double interment in Llansannan, Denbighshire, was given an awkward undertone by our self-consciousness about the mismatching caskets that were to be carried out of the chapel, at the end of the service, and conveyed ceremoniously to the tidy hole prepared for them. The graveyard at Llansannan always seemed a peaceful place, the baa-ing of sheep from the hill more restful even than bells or birdsong.
We invited Bamie to attend the ceremony. It would have seemed wrong to leave him out, after the large contribution he had made to Dad’s last year. There was a slight element of embarrassment about his attending, just the same, and we didn’t press him to make an extended visit. The ethnic diversity of Denbighshire has presumably come along a certain amount since Dad’s childhood, but it seemed painfully obvious that the only non-white face in the community, the only possible candidate to keep him company, was the inn sign of the smoky pub where the family group was billeted, the Saracen’s Head.
After the ashes of our parents, though asymmetrically canistered, had been safely stowed away in a single billet, Tim took on the task of commissioning a gravestone for them. The task seemed appropriate not because he was the eldest but because he had a strong interest in layout, design, typography, which extended naturally enough to the medium of stone. The inscription finally agreed on was the one adorning Dad’s coat of arms. It’s in Welsh and means Justice The Best Shield.
Having your own coat of arms is undeniably grand, though in Dad’s case this was grandeur acquired along the way. It’s the custom for Treasurers of Gray’s Inn to be honoured after their term of office with a portrait and a coat of arms. The Treasurer is the figurehead of the Inn, and benchers occupy the position in order of seniority, so that it is possible for distinguished benchers to see their eminence approaching, mortality permitting, year by year. Sometimes of course mortality not only permits the appointment but shortens the wait.
Dad’s turn came in 1982. There’s little scope for glory in a Treasurer’s tenure — if a new building or the renovation of an old one is accomplished during your time, then your initials will be incised on it, but Gray’s Inn is a compact parish and major works are needed only at considerable intervals. Perhaps Dad was trying to sneak his way into this marginal immortality with his decision to install lead planters on the steps leading up to the Benchers’ Entrance to Hall in South Square without consulting the governing body. He had a good relationship with the Inn’s gardener, Malone, thanks to the years he had spent in the position of Master of the Walks (the Walks being the true name of the fine gardens, originally laid out by Francis Bacon), and they had dreamed up this pretty scheme together. His fellow benchers were not pleased to be left out of the decision-making process, and ordered the removal of the planters. Not quite Watergate, but the kind of thing that stirs strong feelings in a small community.
I remember Dad dropping into conversation that he’d had a useful meeting with the Garter King of Arms. He certainly seemed to get a kick out of the fact that the Inn would stump up for the expense of researching a suitable blazon. Presumably some of the Inn’s Treasurers are snugly pre-escutcheoned by the time they ascend to the office, but Dad’s modest origins ruled that out.
His village background, neither privileged nor deprived, had left him with a few thrifty foibles. He loved getting things through the post, and would enter any competition the Reader’s Digest thought fit to offer him. Once a compendious book arrived at the Gray’s Inn flat, a complete guide to gardening with all the basics for the beginner but plenty of tips to satisfy the expert. Sheila proposed sending it back with a stinging letter. How dare they demand money for an unwanted, unsolicited compendium of anything? Dad was looking rather sheepish, a milder version of the expression he wore with a hangover, when his whole body was like a dog that knows it has done wrong and wants to be forgiven without meeting his master’s eyes.