The verdict went in favour of Tweedledum, with Dad’s client acquitted. His driving licence was safe — but then it was officially rescinded, on the basis that his severe Ménière’s disease rendered him unfit to drive. This was the aspect of the story I liked best, the irony of the trump card turning into the joker. The law is not mocked! Except that Dad’s client asked if there was a mechanism for getting his licence back. Yes there was — but he would need to get a medical expert to certify that he didn’t have Ménière’s disease. A phone call to Tweedledee, and Dad’s client was on his way to the swift reissue of a driving licence. The law is mocked on a regular basis, perhaps most heartily by those who make a living from it.
In his free-drinking social circle Dad rarely came up against abstainers, but the parents of Peter Rundell, a schoolfriend of mine when I was ten or eleven, turned out to be fierce advocates of Moral Rearmament. Dad learned this at an evening event that turned out to be governed by the statutes of Prohibition. The discovery gave him a hunted look, and his small talk was unusually small. Though the deprivation hit Dad hard I didn’t much care how adults carried on, and I even enjoyed being the Rundells’ guest at plays put on at the Westminster Theatre, then a stronghold of Moral Rearmament. I was theatrically naive, but sophisticated enough, even so, to feel uneasy when we in the audience were issued with white sticks during the interval of a play called Blindsight. I tapped my way across the lobby with my eyes shut, making broad gestures with my free hand, hoping it would close round an ice cream.
Dad the raconteur, in full flow at the dinner-table, was a very different creature from Dad the solemn upholder of his profession, though he was always confident of his own consistency. I don’t think he noticed that the view of the law as an amoral game, which he could pass on with such relish while telling a story such as the one about the alleged Ménière’s disease, was the same one that he so violently objected to in the event that other people advanced it and he wasn’t in the mood to laugh along.
When he was a beginner at the Bar Dad was able to acquire a wig second-hand, and so was spared the effort of ageing a new one, by dusting it with ash or soaking it in tea. Heavy smokers have an inbuilt advantage when it comes to achieving the yellow tint desired, but the effect isn’t immediate.
Those who go shopping for barristers’ wigs in long-established shops on or near Chancery Lane, such as Ede & Ravenscroft or Stanley Ley, are offered two tiers of quality, but they aren’t all that far apart. They don’t correspond to the economy and luxury own-brand lines in a supermarket, since the price differential is hardly more than 10 per cent. If you ask what the difference is, you’ll be told that although both are made from horsehair, the more expensive ones are made from the tail hair, the marginally thriftier ones from the mane.
And is tail hair so much better as wig material than mane (which would seem to grow in smaller quantities)? Does that account for the difference in price? If you ask these supplementary questions, and are alone in the shop, and have happened on the right sales assistant, you may be told: ‘To put it bluntly, sir, we need to wash the shit out of it.’
After the gin-and-bitter-lemon years, in the 1970s, Dad took to drinking whisky and ginger ale, which he described as a ‘whisky sour’ though it bears no real relation to the drink of that name.
Alcohol amplified something Dad also felt in full sobriety, a sense of disappointment with the way his sons were developing. This was especially true in the mid-1970s, when we were all coming to the end of our education. Where was our drive, our ambition? We seemed to be coasting at best. He wasn’t so much disappointed as incredulous. We seemed to think the world owed us a living!
There was some truth in this, of course, though it could hardly be otherwise. Our circumstances were so different from his. He had tunnelled through rock to make his way in the world, while we had been accustomed from an early age to using the tube, with Chancery Lane station just round the corner from our childhood home.
Dad’s ideal was that we would all become lawyers, which would be following his footsteps in one sense, except that his drive and ambition had taken him very far from the paths trodden by his farming ancestors. To follow him would be very different from being like him, would mean in fact that we were very unlike him. The more we were like him the less we would follow him. All this tangle needs to be kept distinct from the common-sense awareness that we would most likely never emerge from his shadow and be assumed, even if we went on to ‘great things’, to have got our start thanks to his eminence. It was understandable that he wanted us to soar, but how could we do that if we used him as a launch-pad?
We confidently diagnosed Dad in the popular-science terms of the day as a ‘Type A personality’, unable to relax, likely to suffer from strokes, heart attacks and other forms of stress-related condition, the self-inflicted wounds of an oppressive character. When he developed a stomach ulcer it seemed to prove us right, though that particular line of punitive pseudo-medical reasoning has since been discredited and retired.
Dad always called sherry ‘sherry wine’ with a slightly lah-di-dah pronunciation, though I didn’t know what nuance of pretension was being identified. Sherry wasn’t classified by Dad as a women’s drink — it was associated with the young man who had saved my parents’ lives in Spain the year after they were married, when they had got themselves into difficulties swimming. On special occasions we might toast his name. ¡Xavier Cremades!
When the time came, Sheila organized a retirement party for him at the Garrick. She decided to serve champagne cocktails, the only such drink she herself liked. She also decided to do things properly, improving on the standard catering protocol whereby the drink is topped up with champagne but the other ingredients (a little brandy, a few drops of angostura, a sugar lump) are not reinforced. On this special occasion, there would be no mere top-up but the provision (expense be damned) of a whole new drink.
Surely she knew she was playing with firewater? Even the angostura raises the alcohol content. Only the sugar can enter a plea of not guilty, and even then can be suspected of aiding and abetting by disguising the potency of the drink with sweetness. Dad had a strong head for alcohol in those days, which is only a way of saying that it distorted him less on the surface than in the depths. In the second hour of the party a woman of my generation, known to him since her birth, exercising perhaps unconsciously the double privilege of good looks and long intimacy, made some mild enquiries about the ideological assumptions of the judiciary — the sort of thing that might be aired on Start the Week without setting the switchboard alight. She asked Bill (as she called him, having graduated to that intimacy from Uncle Bill) if he thought judges as a group had really taken on board the recent upheavals in society, such as multiculturalism and the transformed position of women.
This was never the sort of speculation that Dad welcomed, but perhaps the champagne cocktails played a part in making him so grandly cold, coldly grand. He told her that she had spoiled his party and must leave immediately. She was horrified and did what she could to make amends, saying that casting any sort of shadow on his special day had been the furthest thing from her mind. She was terribly sorry if she had given offence. Again it may have been the influence of the cocktail, multicultural in its own right, combining champagne and brandy from the Old World, sugar and bitters from the New, which gave Dad’s verdict its austere force. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is something you will have to live with for the rest of your life.’