There have been a couple of other occasions when I’ve been told an anecdote about Dad since his death, without being in a position to confirm its authenticity, as I could in the case of the Sanford Bros Saturday boy. A quantity surveyor who had learned the basics of Building Contract Law from Dad’s lectures at Brixton School of Building in the late 1940s told me that he was popular with his students, unpopular with other members of staff, who complained about the gales of laughter emerging from his classroom. One of the funny stories that caused the trouble concerned the court-martial of an officer who had been intercepted more or less naked, chasing a woman in a similar state through the public spaces of Shepheard’s Hotel. The disciplinary authorities had trouble deciding exactly what the charge should be, and settled on his being improperly dressed. Dad, defending, combed through the King’s Regulations and found that there was an exemption in place for sporting activities — you counted as properly dressed if you were appropriately dressed for the sport you were pursuing. Not a defence that would pass muster for a moment nowadays, but supposedly that was the argument Dad pursued and his client reaped the benefit.
Except that Dad never mentioned it, and I never heard the anecdote from family friends, many of whom were lawyers. It’s not so salacious an anecdote as to be impossible, revealing nothing more disreputable than roguishness, so perhaps his prudish side led him to be discreet by the time he had children, children whom he wanted brought up in the belief that a wedding night was an encounter between two trembling virgins. Or perhaps the story has been misattributed. It sometimes happens that an anecdote becomes detached from its original subject, and either melts away or migrates towards a new owner, someone deemed to be larger than life.
In the case of another story I can immediately declare its falsity, though its source is an ex-registrar of Westminster County Court who knew Dad at the relevant period. If Dad had appeared as an extra in the film of Thunderball, thanks to the intervention of a grateful Kevin McClory, if it had even been mentioned as a possibility, over one drink or twenty, we would have heard all about it.
There were times in his lifetime when Dad’s exporting of his vitality seemed actively preposterous. I remember returning to the Gray’s Inn flat one evening in my teens when a small parental drinks party was breaking up. I used the stairs, slowing down as I heard the social hubbub above me on the third floor, so that I hung back instead of showing myself and joining the group of half-a-dozen guests gathered on the landing, putting on their coats.
Dad was presiding over the dissolution of the party. He pressed the button to summon the lift and then pinched his nose with his fingers to give his voice a grating Tannoy quality. Oh my God, I thought, he’s not going to do that old routine, surely! The lift-operator routine, so embarrassing, predictable and out of date. ‘Third floor, going down …’ he intoned. ‘Ladies’ lingerie, hats and gloves …’ Was he going to find some new twist to freshen up the whole cringe-making performance? No he wasn’t. He didn’t need to. Still holding his nose, he bent his knees so as to give a poor impression of someone sinking out of sight … and everyone copied his stance, laughing helplessly. Sophisticated grown-ups seemed to be entirely under his spell, though admittedly with alcoholic help.
I might have been watching footage of some strange cult. Dad was some sort of hypnotist, and his audience was well and truly under. It was like the children’s game of ‘Simon says’, except that Dad was Simon, and so he didn’t need to say ‘Simon says’ to get his way. He just said things, and people surrendered all resistance.
How do I measure up to Dad? I’m a taller make of man than he was, so wearing his trousers would be out of the question even if I had them taken in. Any shirt of his would leave my wrists to dangle, but I keep his singlets of sea island cotton (‘Sunspel for Austin Reed’) in circulation, and for quite a time wore his Japanese Burberry knock-off fawn raincoat, which was almost long enough in the arms.
The splendid Preacher of Gray’s Inn, Roger Holloway, was about the same height and build as Dad (though trimmer) so it was to him I offered first refusal on his clothes. I’ve really only seen agitated clergymen jumping up and down wearing nothing but their underclothes in Ben Travers farces, but Roger was powered by wild joy rather than panic as a succession of velvet smoking jackets came to light. It turned out also that some ceremonial items of judicial wear were indistinguishable from what clerics are supposed to wear on similar occasions. Perhaps some buttons needed to be altered, but from that day forward Roger didn’t need to visit Westminster, in the run-up to gala events, to pester minor canons of a suitable size for their finery.
Dad’s cheap-looking wardrobe wasn’t itself a coveted piece of furniture, and even desirable items like the dining-table went off to auction — in Yorkshire, since we had been advised that larger pieces sold better there.
The little utility chest of drawers, though, from the bedroom I shared with Tim (where the comic that showed me the instructively tender men lurked) now sits immediately next to the desk where I write, as if it had followed me patiently around with its message of reassurance, wagging its tail, waiting for this moment of acknowledgement. Its bottom drawer no longer contains anything that might challenge the patriarchy.
In fact the chest, as well as its cargo of not quite Gatsby-grade underwear, is now the home of miscellaneous patriarchal souvenirs, such as a pair of white kid gloves trimmed with gold braid. These are relics of the old assize system — it was traditional in various towns to present a judge with such gloves when there were no criminal cases needing to be heard, symbolizing and celebrating the innocence of the populace. Dad received three pairs in his early years as a judge, before the assize system was replaced. I wore my pair in public just the once, at a party with an eighteenth-century theme on Coldharbour Lane, teamed with a loose white shirt, aiming for a dilute Byronic effect. It felt exhilaratingly unwise to be dressed so fancily on a street where you could get into enough trouble wearing clothes of the current epoch.
There’s also a gleaming cigar box lined in green felt, with a dedication inside: ‘To Mr William L. Mars-Jones, Q.C. In appreciation of the preservation of my stainless character. Swansea Assizes July, 1958.’ Stainless steel, of course, though the effect is slightly undermined by the message merely being typed on a piece of paper and stuck inside the lid of the box. This was from a client who was charged with stealing scrap metal and then trying to sell it back to the people from whom he had stolen it, accused of both law-breaking and idiocy. Considering the way he had been delivered from disgrace, the client might have stumped up for silver, if not platinum, and suppressed the little joke — except that, as Dad tended not to mention, he didn’t work for free.
There’s also a grey jewellery box (covered with a material vaguely mimicking either velvet or suede) containing another of Dad’s treasures, swathed in cotton wool although the object in question isn’t actually delicate. It looks like a bookmark, about two inches wide, four and a half long, and it’s made of silver. There’s a dove engraved on it, flying downward with a scroll and ribbon in its beak. This is Sheikh Yamani’s Christmas card from 1984. The message in flowery script runs, ‘Ahmad Zaki Yamani / Wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’, then an engraved imitation of the sheikh’s signature in English script, and finally ‘25 December 1984’. The em-phasis on the date of Christmas seems excessive and awkward, as if the sender thought it might vary from year to year. On the other side is engraved a calendar for 1985.