In fact Dad derailed the format with his response to the first sample. He gave it 10 out of 10, making it unlikely that even the most gifted statistician could extract meaningful information from his subsequent scores. In any case he gave full marks to all the other juices he was offered.
Had he detected the patronizing children’s-activity-time element in the evening planned for him? I’d actually like to think so, though I imagine he was just in an appreciative mood. Maybe he enjoyed seeing two sons in one day, even if his pet name for Matthew in this period was Nogood Boyo, a Dylan Thomas reference which Matthew took in good part but which nettled me on his behalf.
During this late phase of his life the drink which meant most to him, more even than orange juice, was buttermilk, a taste from his childhood which could be catered to by visiting any large branch of Sainsbury’s. Despite his sweet tooth in other areas he would drink it as it was, straight from the glass.
In his Denbighshire childhood, on his way to school, he would dip his finger into the milk churn waiting for collection at the side of the road. His finger would break into the creamiest layer of the top of the milk, and convey its unique flavour to his mouth. This was a taste that was beyond Sainsbury’s power to reproduce — Taste the Difference 1920s Denbighshire Farm Top-of-the-Milk Fresh from the Churn — even at the chain’s largest and most cosmopolitan branches.
A book came out that year called The Justice Game, by Geoffrey Robertson, with a very favourable mention of Dad. Sir William Mars-Jones was offered as proof (though this was the only example given) of the argument that civil rights and press freedom are safe in the hands of the judiciary, on the basis of his handling of the ABC trial of the late 1970s, in which two journalists and their source were charged under the Official Secrets Act.
Dad was still living at the heart of the legal community, and sometimes colleagues would call in on him. I left Robertson’s book on display by Dad’s chair, having inscribed it For Dad on Father’s Day 1998 / see pages 128–32, whenever you need a lift. The idea was that distinguished legal visitors would pick up the volume and be led to the relevant passage by this inscription, though of course they might resort directly to the index, in search most urgently of their own names and then their host’s. Dad had never been uncomfortable with applause, and now he could receive the book’s accolade any number of times, with a wondering pleasure that could never go stale. I imagined him after a visitor had left, ringing like a lightly struck bell with the reverberation of recent praise, unsure whether he had really only dreamed it.
When we were children Dad would tell us that the noblest profession was the preacher’s, the second noblest the teacher’s and third the lawyer’s. I don’t know why doctors didn’t get a look in, but it was obviously important for Dad’s chosen profession to make the top three. When someone once quoted the maxim ‘suffer any injustice rather than go to law’ in his hearing, he was greatly offended. This cynical notion struck at the roots of his vocation. Perhaps he realized, as I have only just done, that it was a worldly paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 6:7 — ‘Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?’ In his capacity as preacher St Paul might have the luxury of pulling rank over teachers and lawyers, but he could certainly be a pain in the neck.
As Dad explained it to his young family, it was his job to decide who was telling the truth. This sounds rather more like the jury’s job, but Dad always held on to the idea of a necessary connection between law and the truth of things. He would never have agreed that a barrister is someone who wins arguments for a living, though that might be an outsider’s way of putting it.
There were trophies from successful cases on display in the Gray’s Inn flat which fascinated me as a child, since they occupied an intermediate state between toy and self-sufficient adult object. One was a model of the internal workings of a steam locomotive’s engine, made of wood in muted shades of green, yellow and red. There was a sheet of perspex over the assembly, but a wheel on the side could be turned to demonstrate the action of the piston. Children’s toys of the period, the late 1950s or early ’60s, didn’t do a great deal, but they could do a bit more than that, and this object was somehow more precious than a toy although less satisfying.
It was of course an exhibit from a case of Dad’s, used by him in court to demonstrate how a careless train driver, leaving the cab and for some reason venturing onto the rails, could be run over by a locomotive he had confidently assumed was stationary and would remain so. I don’t know who it was that retained Dad’s services, possibly an individual railway line or else the British Transport Commission — the National Railways Board if it was after 1962. Presumably, too, Dad had been hired to argue against compensation, or at least to limit it.
As a sensitive child (is there any other kind?) I should by rights have been haunted by the image of this terrible event, with its resonance of the heartless rhymes I found so hard to get out of my head (Lucy met a train / the train met Lucy / the rails were juicy / the juice was Lucy).
In those days my sympathies went most readily to animals or to suffering mothers. In any case sorrow reached me most reliably through books. I haunted the Holborn Public Library and soon graduated from the children’s shelves in the basement to the adult holdings. My mind wanted to grow up as soon as possible, though there were areas of experience that I shrank from.
The nearest bookshop to Gray’s Inn was Her Majesty’s Stationery Office on High Holborn, whose stock in trade puzzled me since it contained nothing remotely readable. Her Majesty’s interests seemed very specialized. I was determined to find something worthy of my book token just the same, and eventually found a small volume with an enticing cover, illustrated with colourful birds. There were no pictures inside, but that was a challenge I was used to. It wasn’t easy to become emotionally involved with a book about Scottish game bird populations, statistically analysed, but I managed to break my heart over the inexorable decline of Tetrao urogallus urogallus, the capercaillie.
Precociously reading a Balzac novel (I was perhaps thirteen by this stage), I came across a passage where the hero borrowed his mother’s life savings so as to launch himself in the world. I couldn’t bear to read any further, knowing that he was going to ruin her. I could imagine nothing worse. A steam locomotive would have weighed lightly on me compared to the dreadfulness of impoverishing a mother.
Connected with the model of the locomotive’s inner workings was another trophy, more obviously dazzling but equally far from the possibility of play — a locomotive name plate, with raised gold lettering against red, mounted at an angle on a stand and given pride of place on the room divider that lived inside the front door, breaking up the space of the hall (a piece of furniture that has since outlived its own naffness and become not only evocative but collectable). The name on the plate was MARS. The locomotive in Dad’s successfully argued case had been in the same class (the Planet class). Having done well by his employers, he had asked to be notified if the time came for MARS to be scrapped and in due course had been presented with its name plate. It too is collectable, though unfortunately the value of locomotive name plates is assessed according to the number of letters, and MARS is about as skimpy a plate as exists. There’s no equivalent of the scoring system in Scrabble. There are no triple word scores, nor even extra points for rarer letters (in which case the M would push the total up a little). So what you want to find in your shed is the SIR TRAFFORD LEIGH MALLORY. The value of the MARS plate shrinks still further when a prospective buyer discovers it was only ever attached to a goods train. It’s a blue-collar plate, not worth much more than the metal it was cast from.