I was more at home with the Dad who only gave ground when he knew he was about to lose, who tracked the shift of an argument on a pre-verbal, almost olfactory level. Every now and then Dad would sniff the wind and realize he was about to be defeated in argument, and then he immediately stood down his troops. In the aftermath you could have a relatively low-key conversation.
In family conflict these moments felt like breakthroughs, but it was never possible to tap back into that mood of truce without going through a fresh round of exhausting confrontations. I remember that in about 1980 Dad gave me a hard time about the ridiculous baggy jeans I was wearing. What a stupid waste of cloth! I had nothing to fall back on but appeals to their fashionability, a poor line of defence since it reproduced his line of attack (you’re only wearing them because you’ve been brainwashed).
Those baggy jeans had always been controversial items. When I was wearing them on East Main Street in Charlottesville, Virginia, an elderly black stranger did a double-take and then shouted after me, ‘You’re wearing girl pants!’, divining a transgressive element in my style statement of which I was unaware. His tone was pure astonishment rather than hostility.
Dad, then, was not my first critic. Luckily I remembered seeing a photograph of him as a young man walking jauntily along the front at Colwyn Bay with his aunts Bessie and Minnie, and wearing a pair of trousers so wide they could have given shelter to a pack of hunting dogs under their hems. He wore them with a tight jacket and a tie tucked in between the buttons of his shirt. With a little delving in his study I unearthed this incriminating image.
Now I couldn’t wait for him to slander my jeans again, and to produce the evidence of double standards. But there must have been a change in my body chemistry, a pheromone that made him realize I had somehow acquired a trump card. He wouldn’t be drawn into repeating his indictment of my dress sense. I could have worn those baggy jeans to a funeral and still he would have said nothing, somehow knowing that I had the goods on him. Suddenly he was unprovokable, and when I lost patience and drew the photo out of its envelope at last it wasn’t any sort of ambush but a meeting of old friends. He reminisced fondly about the thirty-six-inch bottoms of those Oxford bags, and after that my baggy jeans were exempted from stricture. Of course they continued to look ridiculous, but that had never been the linch-pin of the argument.
When I had been expelled from the Inn, and more to the point after I had written my article for The Times denouncing the hypocrisy of the governing body, I had guaranteed my status as persona non grata, high on the list of the Inn’s Least Wanted. I might visit family friends still living there, but it would have been silly to expect an actual welcome. Nevertheless an invitation came from the Treasurer, the next year, to dine as his guest in Hall. The new Treasurer was Tony Butcher, who as the Dean of the Chapel had been one of the three polite Cerberoid heads guarding the organ from molestation by unauthorized fingers and feet. He was also someone whom I had invited to breakfast once or twice after the early communion I didn’t attend.
Breakfast was being repaid, with interest, in the form of dinner, and this was a personal rather than an institutional gesture. It wasn’t quite a matter of the Inn saying, in effect, just because we chucked you out doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Nor was my accepting the invitation a way of saying: just because I told you to fuck off in print, making hay with the hypocrisy of your homey Domus motto, it doesn’t mean I won’t come to eat your food and drink your wine.
The motto on the Gray’s Inn badge is actually Integra Lex Aequi Custos Rectique Magistra Non Habet Affectus Sed Causas Gubernat but that’s a bit of a mouthful, particularly late on in a bibulous evening, and Domus is the standard, very self-congratulatory toast. Yes, badge, not coat of arms. The Inn only lays claim to a badge, or else Bluemantle Pursuivant would be after them for misprision of blazonry.
The revelation of that evening in Gray’s Inn was the drink. Normally when I’m nervous in company I abstain from alcohol, but on this occasion I was too nervous to stick to that decision. There was champagne before the meal, or a good imitation, then white wine, Sauternes, red wine and port. After the meal, in one of the Combination Rooms, there was brandy or champagne again for those who preferred it. By this time most of the benchers were developing a distinct lean to one side or the other, some supporting themselves on the furniture.
I don’t remember a great deal of the evening myself. If we drank a toast to ‘Domus’ I hope that at the least I made a face. Another guest was Stanley Prothero, a family friend of Dad’s generation, who was invited at least partly, I feel sure, to give me a familiar face to talk to. Stanley had been one of the guests at my parents’ golden wedding celebration in 1997, held at Browns restaurant on St Martin’s Lane. It’s a chain that specializes in refurbishing grand premises, and this particular branch had been the home of Westminster County Court, over which Stanley had presided for many years as Registrar. He seemed entirely unfazed by the way his workplace had been turned into a sort of theme park, with courtrooms for hire and all the appropriate regalia provided. I wondered how Dad would cope with reality-melt on a similar scale, but Protheros are built to last.
Stanley’s brother Arthur (born 1905) was also present at that golden wedding celebration, spryly taking photographs of the gathering, bending his knees to capture the shot he wanted. Those knees seemed unaware that they were entitled to go on strike, after ninety-odd years of work. They’re the knees everyone wants to have, the ones with the extended warranty. At dinner in Gray’s Inn Hall I asked after Arthur, and Stanley put on a bit of a show, entertaining the company with one of his brother’s moments in the spotlight.
Solicitors like Arthur, being backroom boys, don’t normally become well-known by association with famous cases, as barristers do, but Arthur gained some notoriety when he represented the accused in the Towpath Murders in 1953. Arthur had been paid out of public funds, and the case, though apparently open-and-shut, took up a lot of court time. The junior barrister he instructed (Peter Rawlinson) interviewed a police officer with what at the time amounted to great and sustained hostility, strongly implying that the confession obtained from Alfred Charles Whiteway was a work of fiction. There were no bent coppers in the national awareness, so hammering them could hardly be seen as a virtuous activity. Whiteway was convicted and hanged, but Arthur didn’t take it personally (perhaps another difference between solicitors and barristers), describing Whiteway as an ideal client, regretting only that they worked together just the once.
General laughter. One of the occasions when a lawyer mocking the system that has filled his pockets gets an appreciative hearing from his fellows. Did I contribute a chestnut of my own to the game of anecdote-conkers, by trotting out the old story of Dad’s client with Ménière’s disease? It seems horribly likely.
If Dad and I can’t help tracing the alteration of attitudes to sexuality, exhibits in a museum of social history, then the same is true of the Prothero family. Chief Inspector John Prothero of Scotland Yard, the father of Arthur and Stanley, was the only witness to be called in the successful 1928 prosecution of The Well of Loneliness for obscenity, after a typically temperate campaign against the book by the Sunday Express, whose editor recommended that healthy boys and girls be given prussic acid — cyanide — rather than be allowed to read it. The Chief Inspector testified that the very theme of the novel was offensive, since it dealt with physical passion, a passion that was described by the presiding magistrate as abnormal. There was no need to establish any culpable explicitness of expression for the book to be condemned (and destroyed). Theme did the trick unaided.