Chief Inspector Prothero’s marked-up copy of the book was inherited by Arthur, but not the accompanying attitudes. Arthur agreed to represent Peter Wildeblood in a landmark case of 1954, a time when a bargepole’s length was the minimum recommended distance between a reputable solicitor and a sexual scandal. Wildeblood was accused (with two others) of inciting young men to commit indecent acts, and was one of the first to acknowledge his homosexuality in public. He remarks in his memoir Against the Law the ‘there is some truth in the saying that a man’s best friend is his solicitor’ — Arthur was concerned that his client was feeling the cold (it was March), and lent him a pair of long johns to make sure he didn’t shiver in the witness box. He served time just the same.
I wish I could discover what happened to that marked-up copy of The Well of Loneliness. Stanley doesn’t know. The British Library would receive a treasure like that with tears of joy.
I’ve attended social occasions where drink has flowed freely, but nothing to compare with Gray’s Inn Hall in terms of the efficient delivery of alcohol. It was a revelation of what Dad’s social life must have been like, not every night of the week, to be sure, but fairly often. When drink was so plentiful, when it took sustained effort to beat back the tides, sobriety became merely quixotic, a pose and a false economy.
I made the decision to keep close watch on my glass, to be sure that I noticed any sly replenishment. No-one came near, yet the next time I looked the level of wine in my glass had definitely risen. I began to see that Gray’s Inn catering was run on a sort of Harry Potter system, dispensing with human agency. Our glasses were table-top Artesian wells, so that wine bubbled up through enchanted channels in the stems of our glasses every time we set them down.
As I lurched towards the 19 bus that would take me back to Highbury, I was sure that I would wake up with the mother and father of hangovers. Or the Lord Chief Justice, with a severe sentence to pass on my lack of self-control. I woke fresh as a daisy, unaccountably reprieved from the hangover I had earned with honest toil. It certainly seemed that the cellar-masters of Gray’s Inn were wizards of alcoholic immunity. They knew how to conjure congeners into cancelling themselves out, if congeners even exist. If only they’d been able to make the breakthrough in time for Dad to glide through those mornings when his unconfrontational wife told him some home truths.
The slow upheaval in Dad’s thinking about sexual orientation made me feel that our intensive Anglesey session, Prince Charles, Jacqueline Bisset, old Aunty Mary Cobley and all, had been productive, sowing the seeds of enlightenment however long it took them to sprout. Then of course Dad had to go too far. Towards the end of his life he started being grieved by discrimination against gay people, shaking his head over the sheer unfairness of individuals being penalized for a harmless variation they hadn’t even chosen.
I was exasperated. There’s a difference between revising your attitudes and rewriting history. How could he be shocked by dilute expressions of a prejudice that had once been his most heart-felt credo? He was cheating by granting himself an amnesty, even a retrospective amnesia, and obliterating one of the strongest convictions he had ever had, now that it no longer suited him. If pressed, I could come up with more flattering descriptions than ‘cheating’ of Dad’s ideological Great Leap Forward, but to say that he was refusing his own complexity seems to overshoot the target in the other direction.
One of the plays performed most successfully at my school had been N. F. Simpson’s farce One Way Pendulum, which struck me as the funniest thing I had ever seen. I’m sure the mockery of legal language and process, Dad’s moral and professional world, was part of what made One Way Pendulum such a hit with me. In the course of a surrealistic courtroom scene, Simpson’s Judge says: ‘… you remained loyal to your masochism just so long as it suited you … The moment it was no longer useful to you you abandoned it without the slightest compunction. I can find no possible shred of excuse for behaviour of this kind …’
That was how I felt about Dad’s reformed attitudes of the 1990s, with ‘homophobia’ standing in for ‘masochism’. Dad was being disloyal to his perversion. It wasn’t like being lucky enough to skip a hangover after a binge. He had been addicted to those toxins for half a century and more, yet that side of his personality and his history could apparently just fall away.
Horror of homosexuality was an integral part of his identity as a small-town Congregationalist, born in Wales near the beginning of the First World War. It was as much part of his heritage as the leek and the harp, no more optional than bara-brith and How Green Was My Valley. It deserved better than to be thrown over when fashions changed. Doesn’t seasoned bigotry have a proper and permanent claim to make on the bigoted party? It has built up rights over time, so it can be made redundant (with agreed compensation) but not just melt away without a word said on either side.
Barnacles don’t just slip off the hull. They have to be chipped away at, and Dad’s personality barnacles certainly clung, keeping themselves glued in place year after year. Actual barnacles have things called cement glands. I don’t know what Dad used instead.
And then they were gone, and everything had been sanded down around and repainted where they had been, to leave a vessel spick and span, seaworthy for another pattern of tides.
It’s possible that what I really wanted was not an encounter between Dad and his complexity but a soap-opera resolution between the two of us, with him begging to be forgiven for his blindness. That’s not something I can rule out, however often I state as a fact that closure is for bin-bags not for people. It’s even true that Dad had made some progress with his apology technique since my teenage years. He had learned that it was possible to own up to a fault almost without being put under pressure. Admitting to an imperfection could be a strong rhetorical move.
Making an apology needn’t be like walking the plank. It might be more like a rope bridge. The moment of vulnerability could be cut short, and Dad find himself safe on the other side. Admission of weakness might even be redefined as the key to strength.
One example was what he said when I got a good degree in English, after dropping Classics against his advice. ‘Well, boy,’ he said, ‘you were right and I was wrong …’ — rope bridge, dangerously teetering — ‘… and I hope I’m a big enough man to admit it when I’ve made a mistake.’ Back on solid personality rock.
So he could certainly have found a way to turn his change of attitude into a virtue. ‘Well, boy,’ he might have said, ‘your poor old Dad may have been saddled with a lot of backward ideas by the time and place he was brought up, but no-one can say he didn’t struggle against his conditioning. How many men of my generation have come so far from where they started?’ That might have been a good thing to hear, but I’d have settled for him remembering Keith’s name once in a while. Or perhaps I should just shut up and agree to receive what was on offer. Perhaps it was perverse to be refusing of him at a time when he was finally, and in his own fashion, accepting of me, the ‘me’ that he had found so hard to live with.