‘Aunty Margaret wants to know if you’ll be taking anyone to Lucy’s wedding?’ my mum said over the phone one night.
‘Mum, I’ve told you already, if I go at all, I’ll be on my own.’
‘You’ve got to go.’
I sighed, ‘Okay, if I can I’ll come. But I’ll be on my own.’
‘Surely there is a nice barrister you can bring?’
‘Well, I could bring my roommate Amir if you like, but that might cause a bit of gossip though. You know what Uncle Arthur’s like – “they’re all queers down south”.’
She scolded me for being facetious.
This is my mum’s favourite subject: my love life. I have reached an age where she wants to marry me off and she has this image of me meeting a lovely female barrister – probably getting hitched in Gray’s Inn Chapel, before settling down to a lovely life making little barristers.
Which brings me on to the subject of female barristers.
How can I write this without sounding like either a raving sexist dinosaur, the type of man who emits a Sid James type ‘phwoar’ every time a woman comes into view, or a rampant neo-feminist who will not rest until there is equality and harmony between the sexes.
I am neither. But, I do feel sorry for women at the Bar. Especially the Criminal Bar. It’s not easy. The odds are stacked against them.
First they have to deal with the robing room. Robing rooms are bastions of machismo. They are stacked with extremely confident males, many of whom have come from fairly privileged backgrounds, often from all-boys schools where they learned much about many things, but absolutely nothing about women. The atmosphere in the robing room can be boorish, gladiatorial, boastful and ungallant, though, I hasten to add, it can also be gentle, helpful, genuinely funny and collegiate. You have to be confident and thick-skinned to survive and survival is a hell of a lot easier if you’re a bloke. As a baby barrister, I was sent up to a court in the Midlands, to make an application to vacate a trial. I searched for my opponent and when I eventually found him and told him that I was applying to adjourn our case he just took one look at me and told me to ‘fuck off’.
Then there is the overt sexism. And I mean proper 1970s Carry On Up the Khyber sexism. Conversations, in which male barristers will discuss whether a juror, or a witness, or a WPC or another barrister is ‘fit’, are commonplace. And there have been occasions when I have watched as young female barristers walking into a robing room are looked up and down by the men who are clearly making an assessment of their looks rather than their ability.
To survive this, female barristers often become even more masculine than the men. They might not be able to demonstrate the same instinctive boorishness, so they show their ‘machismo’ in court. Some female barristers are the most steely, ballsy operators I know. They will eat you up and spit you out in court because that is how they have been forced to demand respect. They will develop a stare or a pout that they use to put errant Judges in their place and obtain what they want for their clients. It can be incredibly impressive, and a little scary, to see them in action.
Of course, I’m generalising, but only slightly. After all, females were only allowed to practise in the 1930s and there are still far fewer female Judges than there should be.
Am I proud of the fact that my profession is inherently sexist and has forced some women to suppress their femininity? No, I’m bloody not. Do I want it to change? Well, I’m not sure about that either. At least not entirely. Barristers, both male and female are, by definition, a bit odd. There needs to be characters, there needs to be big Silverback gorillas with massive personalities and even bigger egos charging around, because without them, the courts, and I would argue the justice system, would be far more anodyne and much less effective. And, just as importantly, there needs to be the fierce female advocates, because the culture has led to the creation of some truly amazing women barristers – though hopefully over time, as the robing rooms and courts become less chauvinistic, women can be themselves and get on with the job without being hindered by the gender.
But do I want to marry a female barrister?
No, I bloody don’t. The idea of coming home every day to find myself immediately thrust into an argument, which I will lose, about whose turn it is to do the washing up, or to be cross-examined within an inch of my life as to why I leave the toilet seat up, is my idea of hell.
I love my learned female colleagues, and yes, there are actually quite a few I fancy, but I’ve never gone out with one and I don’t plan to change that any time soon. I planned to go to my cousin Lucy’s wedding on my own.