This may be a memoir of my father but I didn’t set out to write one, more of an account of a particular time, though necessarily having shreds and slabs of the man scattered across it. I informally moved in with my parents while my mother was dying of lung cancer, something she did with self-effacing briskness in little more than a month. After she was dead, in January 1998, it made sense for me to stay in place to look after the survivor.

My father had been casually described by medical authority as demented, though not officially diagnosed. He was likely to lose his bearings if he had to adjust to a new environment. In fact this was never really something I considered. As an under-employed freelance I had time to spare. Dad had a good pension and his rent for a large flat in Gray’s Inn Square was low, thanks to the oligarchic machinery of the Ancient and Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn. As a retired High Court judge, ex-Treasurer and bencher his status in its rankings was high. There was money to pay for a certain amount of care, so that I could continue to be present from Tuesday to Friday at the school gates in Dulwich Village when my daughter Holly, six, finished her proto-academic day.

I didn’t feel I had a duty to look after Dad, or if I did I preferred to hide it behind a more libertarian formula. I had a right to look after him. I had first dibs, I could play bagsie. It wasn’t that I was bounden, merely entitled. My brothers might play a part, but Tim (the older) lived in Gloucestershire and was tied to Dad mainly by the bonds of rejection – a phrase I found in Richard Sennett’s book Authority and tried to persuade Tim was a productive way of describing his experience. Matthew (the younger), though based in North London, had a fuller workload than I did. I was free to look after Dad and no-one could override my claim. If I was going to end up doing it anyway, it was sensible to surround myself with the most selfish possible arguments. Then I could never make out I had somehow been railroaded into filial duty.

Dad’s mental state seemed, to us laymen, closer to withdrawal than any lamentable state of confusion, delusion, vacancy. He could follow conversations without taking an active part, in the time-honoured, head-swivelling fashion of the tennis spectator, happy to watch the interplay with no presumptuous thought of raising a racket himself.

There had been a time when he would smash back everything that came over the net towards him, but he must have forgotten it. Dad had retired as a judge at seventy-five, and in the five years-plus since then he had done nothing remotely active, unless you count listening to Rachmaninov’s symphonies. He was a half-serious Celtic fundamentalist who would adopt anyone or anything he admired into the ranks of the faithful, and even lugubrious Rachmaninov (described by Stravinsky as a six-and-a-half-foot scowl, and hardly an obvious candidate for recruitment to the ranks of undersized charmers) could be made over as an honorary Welshman.

Dad wasn’t professionally Welsh, if that means any sort of caricature, but he was serious about his Welshness. His English intonation was standard, perhaps modelled on the radio voices he heard in his childhood, before regionalism was a virtue rather than an obstacle to progress. It’s true that he deviated from the received pronunciation to say ‘sandwich’ as ‘sangwidge’, making it sound like ‘language’, but that was his only deformation of spoken English. When he spoke Welsh, though, there was an extra vitality detectable, almost a roguishness, as if the character that expressed itself in his first language was less thoroughly moralized than the public figure and even the family man.

Welsh people were better – or maybe they just had better names. Osian Ellis the harpist. Caradoc Evans the writer. William Mathias the composer. Clough Williams-Ellis the architect of Portmeirion. Kyffin Williams the painter (rhymes with Puffin). Every sound was firmly enunciated by Welsh speakers, taken care of at both ends, launched and landed.

Welsh tongues held on to every part of the word, even in the case of a straightforward place name like Bangor, separating the syllables but somehow leaving the g on both sides of the chasm, rolling the final r. Welsh speakers didn’t positively give it two stressed syllables, they just couldn’t bear to cheat either part of the emphasis that was its birthright. It was as if the natives, unable to defeat the saesneg invader on his own appropriated turf, him with his second homes and his gleaming Range Rovers, became interior emigrants, finding a refuge in the living rock of the language, and clung to every craggy inch.

Even when speaking English Welsh speakers pronounced words lingeringly. Dad remembered a preacher from his youth whose version of the word ‘phenomenon’ was like a four-gun salute. ‘A cow in a field,’ he said, ‘is not a phe-no-men-on, and nor is the moon in the sky. But when the cow jumps over the moon … that is a phe-no-men-on.’

In retirement Dad could seem vague because his attention tended to be de-centred. His hearing was very acute, and even his vision (despite alleged macular degeneration) could be disconcertingly sharp, picking out window-cleaners at work on the far side of Gray’s Inn Square when he wasn’t near the window himself.

He might comment on something on the radio that no-one else was listening to, which could give an impression of disconnection. A couple of years earlier, when he had been mildly feverish with a kidney infection, I had slept in his room for a couple of nights so as to help with the management of the pee bottle in the long watches of the night. Once I was drifting off to sleep, with the World Service dimly on the radio in the background. The programme was about mountain climbing. I was woken by his voice softly calling out to me. ‘Adam?’

‘Yes Dad, what is it?’

‘Have you ever worn … crampons?’

If I hadn’t made the connection with what was on the radio, I would have thought he was away with the fairies, not up on the peaks with the alpinists of the airwaves.

It hadn’t even seemed certain that he’d be able to take in the fact of Mum’s death. His routine the morning after she had died was standard, with a carer arranged by the council helping him along the corridor to the bathroom, but from that moment on the day’s routine would be taken apart. I had the feeling, hearing the splash of water in the bathroom and the chatty coaxing, that he was being prepared for execution.

I didn’t know what I would do if at some point he asked, ‘Where’s Sheila?’ once he’d been told. Would I have to keep on breaking the news, or would it be better to come up with a story about her being out shopping – away on holiday, even – and hope he wouldn’t ask again?

In fact, once he was installed in his bedroom chair and the carer had left, he took in the information fully and cleanly. He said, ‘Oh God,’ but then after a deep intake of breath turned the exclamation into the beginning of a hymn, singing, ‘Our help in ages past, our hope in years to come.’ He wept and I held his hand. He never lost sight of the fact of her death, never deluded himself. When, weeks later, I apologized for the fact that he had been given no warning, he seemed surprised, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for his wife of fifty years to slip away without a word.

Sheila had said that she didn’t want him to know what was happening. I had just finished telling her that her dying belonged to her and that she shouldn’t consider anyone else’s wishes, so I could hardly overrule this decision even though I disagreed with it. She said that she could cope with everything except the thought of his life without her, and so we kept him in the dark.

They had stopped sharing a bed when he came home after his stay in hospital with the kidney infection, and his lack of mobility meant that they wouldn’t run into each other. They would each call out, ‘Good morning, darling,’ when the carer was helping him along the corridor to the bathroom. Sheila did her dying only a few yards away from him, but towards the end their connection had dwindled to this ritual exchange. She had uncoupled the marital train and left her husband behind in a siding.

Her last public appearance had been on my birthday, in late October. We had gone to the ENO to see Janáček’s From The House Of The Dead. It’s an uplifting piece of work, if you like your uplift very bleak indeed. My taste rather than hers, though she seemed to enjoy the evening. Her illness hadn’t shown itself, still wore the mask of health. She had a cough, but nothing out of the way in a late-October audience. In fact her discreet style of coughing, never disrupting the music, was more like the stylized enactment of symptoms the heroine gives on stage, in an opera of a lusher type, to give formal notice that she is mortally ill. Sheila, on the other hand, had enough energy to walk most of the way home, up St Martin’s Lane and then Monmouth Street to where we intersected with the bus routes running along New Oxford Street in the direction of our homes.

Dad took in the fact of Sheila’s death cleanly, but didn’t ask for details. He may not have realized that her body was still in the flat at the time. When the undertakers came to collect it later in the day there was a potentially awkward moment. His bedroom (not the marital bedroom but what had once been his study) lay immediately inside the flat’s front door, and it wasn’t usual for his door to be closed. But it wasn’t too artificial a piece of behaviour for me to slip into his room and distract him with chat, keeping the door closed behind me, while the undertaker’s men passed in through the hall and then back out with their load.

Dad’s days were more or less the same before and after his widowering (if that word exists). After his assisted shower he would be based in his room for the morning, with the radio on. Towards lunchtime he would move to the sitting-room and watch television. There was a convention in force that Dad was strongly interested in the news, a fan of rugby no matter who was playing and involved almost on a cellular level when a Welsh squad was on the pitch, but in practice the gaze he turned on the screen was neutral, if not slightly mystified.

I could leave Dad on his own for a couple of hours with a clear conscience, long enough to go to the gym or meet a friend for coffee. I’d tell him when I’d be back, and he was never anxious. I don’t know that he actually remembered when I’d be back on such occasions, or even who it was that would be returning. Dad’s egotism was deep, though not cold, and he didn’t need an acute short-term memory to know that he was Sir William Mars-Jones, and therefore the sort of person who would in the natural order of things be looked after. It would never have occurred to him that he might be restricting my life, and this was as it should be. If family history had played out differently and I had been looking after my mother, things would have been much more difficult, although her personality was much more open and tender, in fact for that very reason. She would have worried obsessively that there were other things I would rather be doing, actually should be doing, and would automatically have characterized herself as a burden. Dad could never be a burden, in his own mind, which was a factor in allowing him not to be one. He didn’t obsessively enter other people’s thoughts.

It’s part of my psychology, not perhaps the deepest part but part of what I work up and perform, to take things in my stride, to make out that nothing slows me down or drags me off course. I tell people that as long as I have ten minutes to myself at some stage, the day feels as if it belongs to me, and saying so makes it more likely. Nevertheless there are hazards to behaving in this way. Like any other policy of believing your own publicity, it can invite the collapse it refuses to consider.

On the other hand, I gave up remarkably little. There was for instance a piano in the flat, an upright Monington & Weston, lacquered in a Chinese style, which my parents had seen on the pavement outside a music shop and decided they had to have. This was the instrument I had learned on, and Dad had learned to blot out the sounds I made in my earliest, most ham-fisted years. I remember him inspecting the sheet music, when I was about thirteen, and asking politely what the marking ‘pp’ meant. ‘It means very quiet indeed,’ I explained. ‘Fancy that,’ he said neutrally, but I was slow to take the hint. I was having a Debussy phase at the time, but the Cathédrale Engloutie from his first book of Preludes wasn’t going to stay submerged for long while I was on hand to pump it up.

Now that I was in the full flower of semi-competence, he was tolerant and even appreciative of my playing, though in a rather codified way. He would wait for the end of the first piece and then applaud heartily from wherever he was stationed in the flat, expressing warm approval for a job well done and a hope that the recital was now over. This hint I understood. My taste in music was not his.

It seemed to me that an electronic keyboard would, with its headphone option, enable me to spare Dad any disturbance. I would also be able to play in the late or early hours if I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know why I didn’t ask Dad if he minded me using his money for this purpose. He wasn’t likely to refuse. Perhaps I wanted to spice up my virtuous persona with a little high-minded embezzling. What sort of person abuses his power of attorney to steal from his helpless father? I bought an ex-demonstration Clavinova from Chappell’s, its price reduced by a third but still amounting to a couple of thousand pounds. It enormously increased my sense of psychological space. It was like having an extra room built onto the flat, where nobody went but me.

I also had access to the organ in Gray’s Inn Chapel, by triple permission of Dean, Preacher and Organist. The organist, Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, had actively encouraged me, giving me my only actual piece of advice on how to manage the instrument, though it sounded like something from an old manual of etiquette for lady travellers. Keep your knees together, and don’t look down.

My sleeping quarters were upstairs in a converted attic. There were small skylights of clouded glass but no windows, and no plumbing. The ceilings were a lot lower than the ones downstairs, and sometimes I hit my head on the lintels despite my long familiarity with the spaces. The flat was built after the war to replace what had been bombed, approximating to the Georgian pattern but making no claim to elegance. My parents had been the first tenants, moving in at about the time I was born, and they had converted the flat ahead of time by installing a spiral staircase to the attic, which would more normally be accessed from a trap door above the shared landing outside the front door.

My love life wasn’t hampered by my new role as carer. Dad knew my partner, Keith, well enough, though he had never felt it necessary to remember the name. It certainly wasn’t hard to have Keith over for a meal on a Saturday, for instance, and then to say, ‘Dad, Keith’s going home now,’ while in fact running him a bath.

Many of Dad’s old friends lived nearby. Emlyn Hooson lived across the landing, Henrietta Wilson was next door at number 5, the formidable Edith Wellwood lived at number 1 (a building dating from 1695 that had dodged the bombs responsible for so much damage to the Inn). The Lewises, Esyr and Elizabeth, lived in South Square a hundred yards or so away. Anything beyond that, the distant purlieus of Raymond and Verulam Buildings, qualified in Edith’s eyes as the ‘suburbs’ of Gray’s Inn, though she had the demanding and unstable perspective of the socialist snob, embarrassed that the address given on her birth certificate was Caledonian Road and painfully conscious of being the poorest resident. When she had first seen the Gray’s Inn in the 1930s, looking down into its gardens from the top deck of a bus, she had wondered what this place could possibly be. A posh lunatic asylum seemed to be the likeliest answer, and now she was an inmate of it.

Gray’s Inn was a little legal parish, though increasingly a plutocratic monoculture, much less diverse than it had been in my childhood, when such bohemians as architects and accountants might have their homes there. Earlier in the twentieth century it accommodated without apparent effort an even more wayward, literary type of inhabitant, as exemplified by Edward Marsh and Maurice Baring. Successive Rent Acts have weakened the position of residents, so that only the longest-established can feel themselves secure. Newcomers can hope for nothing better than an assured shorthold tenancy, and must accept that widows have no right to remain. Even in the late 1990s, Gray’s Inn was mainly deserted at weekends and outside legal term. The flats are mainly on the top floors of the buildings (the third), with offices on the lower levels. Outside the working week most of those upper windows were dark.

It felt entirely natural to invite Dad’s friends to dinner since they were my friends too. And not just dinner: a couple of times I took on the duty, which had been part of my mother’s routine, of giving ‘the gentlemen’ breakfast on a Sunday. The gentlemen in question were the Preacher of the Inn, the Revd Roger Holloway, and the Dean of Chapel, Master (Tony) Butcher. I apologize for a form of words which makes him sound like a card from a Happy Families pack, but this is correct usage within the Inn when referring to benchers.

Roger Holloway was a man whose faith co-existed with a formidable worldliness – while living in Hong Kong in the 1980s he had appeared every day on each of the colony’s two television channels, in the morning contributing the equivalent of Thought for the Day, presenting a claret-tasting programme on the other channel in the evenings. There can’t be many preachers who have used Lady Diana Cooper as an authority for a point of doctrine (the impossibility of repentance as an act of will), quoting her as saying that when she met her Maker she would only be able to say, ‘Dear God, I’m sorry I’m not sorry.’

Roger claimed to have a list of names that were guaranteed to kick-start Dad’s dormant desire to hold the floor. The one I remember is ‘Goronwy Rees’ (not a name I knew). Accusations of Cold War-era betrayal and double-dealing would follow. A Welshman who turned his coat was not to be forgiven, even if there was no proof of his treachery. I can’t say I ever tried my luck with this Open Sesame. I accepted the new Dad, who was so different from the old one that any flashback would be jarring. He became exasperated from time to time but there were no outbursts.

Dad didn’t seem to have religious faith so much as religious confidence. Every morning he woke with the expectation of having fine things shown to him by life or its executive officers. It seemed obvious that God would turn out to (i) exist and (ii) put in a good word. Round His omnipresent neck he might wear a Garrick Club tie.

It was strange to see Dad take so little interest in food after Sheila’s death, and even in drink. Gray’s Inn was, and perhaps is, very male socially, certainly at the higher levels. Students eat a certain number of dinners in the Hall, while benchers like Dad are well looked after at table. The cellars of the Inn are grandly stocked. When I made arrangements for a reception after Sheila’s funeral service in the Chapel, it was proposed that we serve the Inn’s ‘quaffing wine’. I agreed to this without asking for more detail, though it would have been interesting to know how many grades there were below this, and how many above.

There’s a gesture people make in social settings like weddings where drink flows freely, and glasses are discreetly topped up without an enquiry, so as not to interrupt conversation. The gesture involves placing the hand palm down over the glass, symbolically blocking access to the vessel. It’s not an elaborate gesture, not a difficult thing to get right, but I never saw Dad make it.

Dad’s background in Congregationalist Denbighshire was teetotalitarian – his own father drank only one alcoholic drink in his life, and that was (fair play) a glass of champagne at Dad’s wedding reception. I imagine him choking it down as if it was sparkling rat poison. The early prohibition left traces: not having a taste for beer, Dad rather disapproved of pubs, but had no objection to drinking at home or on classier premises.

He had joined the RNVR (Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve) before the War and served on a number of ships, having particularly fond memories of HMS Euryalus. The custom of ‘splicing the mainbrace’, the distribution of a tot of rum daily, was still in force. This Nelsonian beverage was not just a ritualized perk but a form of currency. Favours could be secured or acknowledged by pledging all or part of one’s tot.

The smallest possible subdivision of the ration was ‘sippers’. When you were taking sippers, everyone would be watching your Adam’s apple to make sure it didn’t move. The spirit was admitted to the mouth by a subtle suction amounting to osmosis. A larger share was ‘gulpers’. When it came to gulpers the Adam’s apple was allowed a single movement. When the whole tot was being offered up, the cry was ‘Sandy bottoms!’.

Not much remained in Dad’s vocabulary of naval lingo, though he did hang on to the expression ‘belay the last pipe’, used to indicate that an order has been countermanded. I absorbed it unthinkingly, so that it has become my normal way of saying ‘Forget what I just said’ or ‘Ignore my last e-mail’ – but then I have to explain what the phrase means, and its advantages as a piece of shorthand disappear.

It doesn’t seem likely that Dad got another of his standard phrases – ‘Rally buffaloes!’ – from his time at sea. It was the very unwelcome phrase he used in our teenage years to tell us to get out of bed.

The staple adult drink that I remember from my childhood was gin and bitter lemon. No-one has been able to explain to me the vogue for this mixer, with a taste both caustic and insipid. Was tonic water rationed in some way?

Sometimes I wonder how anyone of that generation got home safe after a party, at a time when refusing an alcoholic drink was bad manners and the breathalyser didn’t exist. Of course the roads were emptier then.

One of Dad’s early cases, and one of his favourite anecdotes, involved a charge of drink-driving from that ancient time, the period in a barrister’s early professional life when he borrows briefs from his fellows in chambers in advance of a conference with a client, piling them up on his desk to give the necessary impression of a thriving practice.

Dad’s client had been charged on the basis of his poor performance walking a straight line. This was the period’s low-tech guide to intoxication, a white line drawn on the floor at police stations. Urine tests? Blood tests? Not relevant to the story as he told it.

The client’s defence was that he suffered from Ménière’s disease, a problem of the inner ear which affects hearing and balance. His was a severe case, making it impossible for him to walk a straight line. Dad marshalled an expert witness to testify to his medical condition. The Crown did the same. The outcome of the case depended, as it so often does, on which of these carried more weight, whether Tweedledum or Tweedledee excelled in authority and gravitas. The expert witness called by Dad gave evidence that the accused did indeed suffer from Ménière’s disease, and could not therefore be expected to walk a straight line. The Crown’s counterpart testified that he did not in fact suffer from the disease. His inability to walk a straight line amounted only to a confession by the legs that unlawful quantities of alcohol had been admitted to the mouth.

The verdict went in favour of Tweedledum, with Dad’s client acquitted. His driving licence was safe – but then it was officially rescinded, on the basis that his severe Ménière’s disease rendered him unfit to drive. This was the aspect of the story I liked best, the irony of the trump card turning into the joker. The law is not mocked! Except that Dad’s client asked if there was a mechanism for getting his licence back. Yes there was – but he would need to get a medical expert to certify that he didn’t have Ménière’s disease. A phone call to Tweedledee, and Dad’s client was on his way to the swift reissue of a driving licence. The law is mocked on a regular basis, perhaps most heartily by those who make a living from it.

In his free-drinking social circle Dad rarely came up against abstainers, but the parents of Peter Rundell, a schoolfriend of mine when I was ten or eleven, turned out to be fierce advocates of Moral Rearmament. Dad learned this at an evening event that turned out to be governed by the statutes of Prohibition. The discovery gave him a hunted look, and his small talk was unusually small. Though the deprivation hit Dad hard I didn’t much care how adults carried on, and I even enjoyed being the Rundells’ guest at plays put on at the Westminster Theatre, then a stronghold of Moral Rearmament. I was theatrically naive, but sophisticated enough, even so, to feel uneasy when we in the audience were issued with white sticks during the interval of a play called Blindsight. I tapped my way across the lobby with my eyes shut, making broad gestures with my free hand, hoping it would close round an ice cream.

Dad the raconteur, in full flow at the dinner-table, was a very different creature from Dad the solemn upholder of his profession, though he was always confident of his own consistency. I don’t think he noticed that the view of the law as an amoral game, which he could pass on with such relish while telling a story such as the one about the alleged Ménière’s disease, was the same one that he so violently objected to in the event that other people advanced it and he wasn’t in the mood to laugh along.

When he was a beginner at the Bar Dad was able to acquire a wig second-hand, and so was spared the effort of ageing a new one, by dusting it with ash or soaking it in tea. Heavy smokers have an inbuilt advantage when it comes to achieving the yellow tint desired, but the effect isn’t immediate.

Those who go shopping for barristers’ wigs in long-established shops on or near Chancery Lane, such as Ede & Ravenscroft or Stanley Ley, are offered two tiers of quality, but they aren’t all that far apart. They don’t correspond to the economy and luxury own-brand lines in a supermarket, since the price differential is hardly more than 10 per cent. If you ask what the difference is, you’ll be told that although both are made from horsehair, the more expensive ones are made from the tail hair, the marginally thriftier ones from the mane.

And is tail hair so much better as wig material than mane (which would seem to grow in smaller quantities)? Does that account for the difference in price? If you ask these supplementary questions, and are alone in the shop, and have happened on the right sales assistant, you may be told: ‘To put it bluntly, sir, we need to wash the shit out of it.’

After the gin-and-bitter-lemon years, in the 1970s, Dad took to drinking whisky and ginger ale, which he described as a ‘whisky sour’ though it bears no real relation to the drink of that name.

Alcohol amplified something Dad also felt in full sobriety, a sense of disappointment with the way his sons were developing. This was especially true in the mid-1970s, when we were all coming to the end of our education. Where was our drive, our ambition? We seemed to be coasting at best. He wasn’t so much disappointed as incredulous. We seemed to think the world owed us a living!

There was some truth in this, of course, though it could hardly be otherwise. Our circumstances were so different from his. He had tunnelled through rock to make his way in the world, while we had been accustomed from an early age to using the tube, with Chancery Lane station just round the corner from our childhood home.

Dad’s ideal was that we would all become lawyers, which would be following his footsteps in one sense, except that his drive and ambition had taken him very far from the paths trodden by his farming ancestors. To follow him would be very different from being like him, would mean in fact that we were very unlike him. The more we were like him the less we would follow him. All this tangle needs to be kept distinct from the common-sense awareness that we would most likely never emerge from his shadow and be assumed, even if we went on to ‘great things’, to have got our start thanks to his eminence. It was understandable that he wanted us to soar, but how could we do that if we used him as a launch-pad?

We confidently diagnosed Dad in the popular-science terms of the day as a ‘Type A personality’, unable to relax, likely to suffer from strokes, heart attacks and other forms of stress-related condition, the self-inflicted wounds of an oppressive character. When he developed a stomach ulcer it seemed to prove us right, though that particular line of punitive pseudo-medical reasoning has since been discredited and retired.

Dad always called sherry ‘sherry wine’ with a slightly lah-di-dah pronunciation, though I didn’t know what nuance of pretension was being identified. Sherry wasn’t classified by Dad as a women’s drink – it was associated with the young man who had saved my parents’ lives in Spain the year after they were married, when they had got themselves into difficulties swimming. On special occasions we might toast his name. ¡Xavier Cremades!

When the time came, Sheila organized a retirement party for him at the Garrick. She decided to serve champagne cocktails, the only such drink she herself liked. She also decided to do things properly, improving on the standard catering protocol whereby the drink is topped up with champagne but the other ingredients (a little brandy, a few drops of angostura, a sugar lump) are not reinforced. On this special occasion, there would be no mere top-up but the provision (expense be damned) of a whole new drink.

Surely she knew she was playing with firewater? Even the angostura raises the alcohol content. Only the sugar can enter a plea of not guilty, and even then can be suspected of aiding and abetting by disguising the potency of the drink with sweetness. Dad had a strong head for alcohol in those days, which is only a way of saying that it distorted him less on the surface than in the depths. In the second hour of the party a woman of my generation, known to him since her birth, exercising perhaps unconsciously the double privilege of good looks and long intimacy, made some mild enquiries about the ideological assumptions of the judiciary – the sort of thing that might be aired on Start the Week without setting the switchboard alight. She asked Bill (as she called him, having graduated to that intimacy from Uncle Bill) if he thought judges as a group had really taken on board the recent upheavals in society, such as multiculturalism and the transformed position of women.

This was never the sort of speculation that Dad welcomed, but perhaps the champagne cocktails played a part in making him so grandly cold, coldly grand. He told her that she had spoiled his party and must leave immediately. She was horrified and did what she could to make amends, saying that casting any sort of shadow on his special day had been the furthest thing from her mind. She was terribly sorry if she had given offence. Again it may have been the influence of the cocktail, multicultural in its own right, combining champagne and brandy from the Old World, sugar and bitters from the New, which gave Dad’s verdict its austere force. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is something you will have to live with for the rest of your life.’

This was a dismal own goal, to send a guest away, taking all the shine off the occasion, and a warning that some of Dad’s less appealing behaviour patterns were still some way from retirement.

There were times after he retired when Dad would have to be helped the two hundred yards home from Hall, more or less to the point of being carried by Inn staff or fellow benchers. This was hideously embarrassing, for my mother having to receive this stumbling procession of dignitaries, for me if I happened to run into them as they tried to negotiate the steps outside number 3 Gray’s Inn Square, but it was nowhere as bad as it might have been if he had felt any shame himself. Hangdog wasn’t his style, or it wasn’t until the next morning. He was serene, as if this was the way he always came home, or as if these nice fellows had wanted to give him a treat and he hadn’t liked to say no. The whole charade made it surprisingly easy to play along.

Sometimes he would remain roughly vertical until he reached the bedroom, then topple slowly sideways without distress to the floor, perhaps pulling some bedclothes with him in what was more a slide than a fall, a controlled descent with a touch of the maladroit grace of the performers he most admired, Max Wall, Tommy Cooper, Ralph Richardson.

Moderation didn’t come naturally to Dad, and self-discipline needed reinforcement from outside. At various points in later life Dad went to a luxurious health farm, his favoured being called Champneys, to lose a few pounds. The regime also required abstinence from alcohol. These expensive bouts of self-denial could be redeemed if he happened to coincide with a woman who shared his taste and talent for flirting. Flirtation without possibility made the hours speed by. Age didn’t disqualify such compatible women, but nor certainly did youth. The word he used of them was ‘sparklers’.

Flirtation as he practised it wasn’t any sort of rehearsal for infidelity but a formal vocal display, lyrical rather than heroic, little Wigmore Hall recitals rather than opera house tours de force. When a woman friend of mine paid a visit to the Gray’s Inn flat, Dad called her ‘darling’. My mother was only marginally piqued, but decided to patrol the marital perimeter by asking sweetly, ‘If Frances is Darling, what then am I?’

In general Dad imposed himself on company by force of personality rather than brute quickness of wit. His preferred style was the polished story (‘Did I ever tell you about the time …?’), not the dazzling improvisation. It helped that from his perch among the higher ranks of a hierarchical profession he didn’t often meet the Challenge Direct. But now he had to exert steady pressure on the charm pedal if he was to accelerate safely out of danger. ‘Sheila is Darling One,’ he said, ‘Frances is Darling Two.’ This formula not only smoothed any ruffled wifely feathers but passed into currency. If Frances was visiting, or if Dad answered the phone to her, he would greet her as Darling Two, and be rewarded, as we all hoped to be, by her throaty smoker’s laugh.

In the absence of sparklers Champneys could be a bit of a martyrdom, forcing his thoughts inward. Once I received a postcard from him at that address, saying: ‘No sparklers here this time. You have always been a rewarding son.’ The lack of a logical connection only added to the touchingness of the message. Except when in exile from bibulous normality, this was a vein of intimate introspection that he preferred to leave alone.

From quite early on in his career, perhaps even before he became a judge, Dad had told us about how he was looking forward to retirement, to all the things he would set his hand to when he only had the time, although he undertook hobbies (such as painting in oils or french-polishing) only in brief unrestful spasms. As a family we had once built a Mirror dinghy, and this was a hobby he organized and delegated. The Mirror dinghy was a kit, though of a full-sized craft, a flat-pack yacht, ordered through the Daily Mirror. There were red sails to match the Mirror’s masthead, though I’m not sure I had seen the newspaper then (ours was a Times and Express household). We were all dragooned into doing some of the work in the garage of our holiday house, attaching the prefabricated pieces to each other with twists of copper wire before waterproofing the seams (caulking them, even, in an amateurish way) with a strong-smelling resin paste. His actual hobby wasn’t building a boat, more being the clerk of works, project manager of a small family boat-building business.

After about a week of supervised labour it was time to join the assembled parts into something close to the finished shape, except that it turned out we had been making, with our different teams working on different sides of the garage, two starboard sides instead of mirrored twins. Our Mirror dinghy failed the mirror test. The two halves might snuggle up to each other, nestling together like spoons, but they would never mate. We had proved the advertisers wrong when they had claimed the instructions to be foolproof.

Dad paid a local handyman to unbodge our bodging and put the dinghy together properly, though it would probably have been cheaper to buy another kit and make two port sides this time. Then we could have had the beginning of a fleet. But the holiday was already almost over, and there was a factor of humiliation involved. It can never feel good to hire a third party to do your DIY. The finished dinghy – finished by other hands – was seaworthy and serviceable but never quite smelled of success, and that was perhaps Dad’s real addiction, the resinous perfume he needed to have in his nostrils.

Still, he was positive that there would be memoirs and radio plays, there would be songs – he was handy with a guitar, not practising much but reliably energized by an audience.

Even after I had been published he was confident he would put me in the shade. He had no doubt that he would be able to blast his own work over the makeshift crossbar of my slight success as effortlessly as Barry John converting a try in front of roaring crowds. He seemed to think that my psychology was robust enough to cope with being superseded when his own books started appearing, but he did worry about how Matthew, whose business was music and recording, would handle the blow to his confidence when Dad’s first single stormed all the way to Number One.

If he had doubts he kept them to himself. Anxiety wasn’t for public consumption, and if he worried then he did it on his own time. Yet he held on tight to his job and didn’t retire before he had to, in 1990, at seventy-five. Not so long before, retirement had been something for judges to choose for themselves without an imposed schedule, but that system too had its drawbacks, and even Lord Denning, influential Master of the Rolls and Dad’s hero as a prose stylist, was immortal a little too long.

Dad continued to work part-time after technically retiring, presiding over the elaborate arguments of a litigant-in-person named Petch, who was suing his employers in the civil service. Amateurs in court require careful steering. They’re likely to be long-winded, often nervous, sometimes even truculent, and they aren’t attuned, the way professional counsel are, to shifts in a judge’s body language, the little signals meaning that a line of argument is finding favour or should instantly be abandoned. Dad was patient and generous with such solo pilots of litigation, though his brother judges tended to have less respect for their erratic though predictable manoeuvres.

He always called them that, his brother judges, often adding the name, ‘my brother Elwyn’ for instance, as if this was a blood relation. Mightily he was teased by his sons for this, as they pretended to believe these were new discoveries on the Mars-Jones family tree, a job lot of stuffy uncles emerging from the woodwork.

In the case of Petch, though, the proceedings meandered on to the point where Dad lost confidence in his ability to pull everything together with a lucid summing-up. He lost some sleep over that. Then the case was finally settled before he was called upon to give judgment. He was probably as pleased as the plaintiff.

In retirement Dad was presumably not under as much stress as he was used to, but he could still come up with the odd explosion, so perhaps stress wasn’t a factor in the first place. One detonation was on a birthday of mine, which I had decided to have in the Gray’s Inn flat. This was a calculated risk, and it might seem as if I was asking for trouble, but there were reasons: a family friend had embarked on her travels but cut them short after dysentery, and was recovering in the flat – I didn’t want her to miss out on the event. My parents were out that evening themselves, so there seemed no reason not to celebrate demurely on the premises. In the end the convalescing friend went home to Brighton, though by then the arrangements had been made, so she missed an event that turned out to be memorable.

My parents came home from their party in time to overlap with mine. Sheila socialized for a little while, then started making preparations for bed. At first Dad was genial. Then he took offence at an innocent remark made by one of the guests, and told him to leave. I pointed out that he could only logically order out people he had himself invited, and that my guests were welcome until such time as I expelled them – but the mood was no longer festive, and we beat a massed retreat. As I was gathering together the presents I had been given, Dad came up to me and poked me in the chest. I could have dropped the presents and stayed upright, but like a game-show contestant I was determined to hang on to my trophies. I knew there was a sofa behind me and chose to topple backwards onto that.

This was not the birthday present I would have hoped for from Dad. As we trooped out of the flat and made our way downstairs, Sheila appeared on the landing above us in her nightie, wringing her creamed hands and saying in social agony, ‘It’s all right for you lot – you can leave. I have to live with it.’ She had left the sitting-room for ten minutes, the way people do in films about poltergeists, and the next thing she knew her furniture was arranged on the ceiling. ‘It’ was Dad’s bad behaviour, his short fuse, unless it was actually a wick that drew rage from his glass by capillary action.

The birthday assault was so out of proportion as not even to be properly upsetting. I decided to make an experiment in apology studies. Better in the circumstances to steer clear of any non-apology, un-apology, anti-apology. If demanding redress from Dad never seemed to work, perhaps I should try a new approach, to see if he was vulnerable from a different angle. The best rhetorical move (against a master of rhetoric) might be to say that I didn’t need an apology. Dad knew the martial arts of argument supremely well, and could turn almost any throw against an opponent, but if I stepped smoothly away he might topple backwards in his turn, from sheer surprise.

The day after my birthday I went round to Gray’s Inn and explained that I wasn’t expecting an apology. I explained that this was because Dad was a loose cannon when he had drink inside him. If I put him and my friends together in the same space then I had to accept the risk and not bleat when things went wrong.

I knew from long experience that Dad’s apologies weren’t worth having anyway. In our teenaged years we were incensed by the forms of words that Dad would come up with after family rows. They seemed designed to wind up the tension rather than soothe it in any way. They were strange cocktails of amnesia, shoulder-shrugging and indirect accusation. If I had to name a specific cocktail I’d nominate the boilermaker, with its bright and murky liquor floating in layers. An example might be: Sheila tells me that you were upset by something I said last night … I don’t remember what it was, but all I can say is … you can be very annoying.

Perhaps this was what is known as professional deformation, as much as individual difficulty with the idea of being at fault. Lawyers will never be in a hurry to admit liability. For them it must always be a last resort. A. P. Herbert makes a semi-serious point along these lines in one of his Misleading Cases. A describes B as lacking even the manners of a pig. B demands an apology. A capitulates to the demand, saying that B does in fact have the manners of a pig. Does this count as an apology or as an aggravation of slander?

In this case Dad didn’t exactly topple. He was outraged at my patronizing and manipulative manoeuvre, and responded with one of his own. He told me to leave at once, and when I didn’t move he made to pick up the phone, saying he would call the police and have me thrown out. This was low-grade bluster by his standards, as was the demand that I should surrender my keys and pay no further visits to the parental home. Sheila overruled him the moment he said so. I stayed long enough to establish as a matter of record that I wasn’t being thrown out, then left him to simmer.

I hoped that my destabilizing tactics would enable Sheila, who didn’t enjoy the rooted place, even the ascendancy, of alcohol in the household, to make some demands of her own. This was a lot to hope for, given that she hated any kind of ‘atmosphere’ and had never made much headway when it came to influencing Dad’s behaviour. The morning of a hangover was one of the few opportunities she was able to turn to her advantage, reinforcing the self-disgust of Dad’s every lurching cell with a little tender chiding. At other times Dad had a blithe resistance to the virtues he had married, something that I’ve seen in other men of his generation.

For a week or so I paid visits only when she would be alone. Did I wear him down? Not quite. I got a letter that combined different elements of his most characteristic manner: rueful charm and now-look-here-laddie-enough-is-enough. The letter was much closer to an apology than anything I could remember, in speech let alone in writing. It broke precedent in that respect, which is never a step a lawyer takes lightly. In fact precedent was holy to him, but now, unprecedentedly, fault was being admitted.

The rueful charm emanated from the address given at the top of the page: The Doghouse, Gray’s Inn. The note of enough-is-enough was struck by a passage which made clear that Dad did not accept there was a pattern of behaviour attributable to drink. I could have a specific apology but no general admission. It was a lawyerly way of proceeding after all, an apology ‘without prejudice’, as if he was agreeing to make a payment to an injured party without technically admitting liability. He would accept chastisement as long as he wasn’t expected to abase himself. It was the most favourable settlement I was going to get.

Dad the widower wasn’t much tempted by alcohol, though he still liked champagne as an idea, essence of spontaneity and celebration. He enjoyed orange juice as part of breakfast, and this was one of the few deeply rooted pleasures that I could continue to administer. Though the kitchen of the flat was relatively short on labour-saving devices we could boast a small electric squeezer, whose ageing engine ground away not very effectively when the halved fruit was pushed down on it, its automatic-reverse mechanism cutting in from time to time with disconcerting abruptness.

At a certain point I changed Dad’s routine, and my own, preferring to see Keith on Mondays at the Highbury flat and letting Matthew take charge of Dad. Shopping on a Monday I saw a wide variety of types of orange on display in a supermarket, and bought large quantities. I thought it might be fun to have a taste test, to establish which variety Dad liked best. Matthew was happy to be master of ceremonies for a blind tasting.

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.

Dad was christened William Lloyd Jones, with the second barrel added to the surname only at his father’s urging when he was on dangerous duty (Russian convoys) during the War. The thinking seemed to be that the enhancement of his name would protect him in some way. It was a life raft launched by deed poll. Dad was proud of the distinctive compound form that resulted, and I’ve mildly enjoyed inheriting it, though I can’t say I would go to war to defend my hyphen. The last of my film reviews to be published by the Independent, in 1997, appeared under a version of my name with the hyphen inserted in the only other place that is anatomically possible without rupturing tissue (Adam-Mars), which seemed a low blow, after the hundreds of pieces I had filed over the previous decade, but the injury, though curiously literal, was only symbolic. The component letters seem intractable for anagram-making purposes but can be persuaded to yield the pleasing nonsense of As Modern As Jam.

Though in two parts, the surname isn’t cumbersome, hardly taking any longer to pronounce than (say) Markham or Johnson. The schoolboy nicknames it made possible (Mars Bar, Marzipan) carried no great sting. Names can function as shields in a school setting, protecting the bearer from the more personal assaults of Fatty, Spotty, Speccy.

Dad himself experienced a little public teasing on the basis of the name, when his great friend Peter Thomas appeared against him in a case of sheep-stealing, and had fun with the formal introduction of counsel by saying, ‘My Lord, in this case I represent the Crown, while my learned friend Mr Ma-a-a-a-s-Jones … appears for the defence.’ Meh-eh-eh-ehs-Jones? I don’t know which transcription best conveys the fondly jeering bleat. It’s the massing of syllables that counts against Hedgepinshot-Mandeville-Pickwort (a minor character in The Apes of God) and even against Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, the organist of Gray’s Inn. When I read my first Guinness Book of Records as a child – I was slow to understand that reference books don’t have to be read from cover to cover – my eyes filled with tears when I imagined the schoolboy teasing that must have been meted out to the bearer of the longest surname in history: Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. Yes, that was all surname, every bit of it, according to the Guinness Book of Records, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of questioning any such authority (in fact any book, at that time). It seemed a pity, though, that the name lacked the full complement of hyphens to give its freight-train length a proper set of couplings.

It bothered me that the British record was always smaller than the world record, less impressive, unless of course they happened to be the same thing. To my mind, over-instructed and under-informed as it was, pickled in the jingoism of ignorance, the British record should always be bigger than the world record, or what was the point of being British? My dogmatism would have made me a good little Red Guard, though in practice I didn’t join the Scouts or even the Wolf Cubs.

I should have kept firm mental hold of the British billion with its dozen zeroes, a thousand times larger than what the Americans had to offer. Our billion was the biggest in the world until 1975.

A year or two after the steam-engine cutaway another super-toy arrived, a meticulous balsa-wood model of a railway bridge, about four feet long. It must have been built as a visual aid for another case of Dad’s, but if I was ever told about the human disaster that led to the litigation I soon forgot it. This mighty piece of engineering did eventually find its place in our world. The model railway layout in the attic, mounted on trestle tables, had reached its maximum size until someone realized that it could extend beyond the awkward area (too narrow for a table) that limited it, by the installation of the providential bridge, which happened to be to scale, more or less. The model railway was already rather elaborate, so that the gala displays we gave for other Inn children required typed programmes and a lot of choreography if all our gadgets were to be properly shown off. After some bravura shunting to get the audience warmed up, a mailbag would be magically collected by a train that didn’t need to stop to pick it up, the giraffe sticking out above the carriage marked ZOO would lower its head in obedience to a concealed magnet inches before striking a low bridge, and (when pop culture had started to colonize and contaminate the Tri-ang Hornby arcadia) rockets fired from one train triggered the destruction of a carriage on another, the panels leaping apart from the impact of a spring-loaded arm whose final act was to detonate a cap, leaving a little wisp of acrid smoke to hang in the air of the attic. Applause.

Dad always told us when we were little that he could tell when someone was lying. With children this is a safe, self-fulfilling prophecy, and it certainly worked with us up to a certain age. But he also made out that his divination was just as effective outside the immediate context of family.

Dad was proud of having sized up a potential client called Kevin McClory as being honest, though McClory’s narrative had the odds stacked against it. He had taken it to a number of lawyers already, according to Dad, and none of them had thought there was any substance in his claims. This was the early 1960s. Kevin McClory’s story was that Ian Fleming had stolen work he had done for a James Bond screenplay and incorporated it without payment or credit into a James Bond novel, Thunderball. It wasn’t an easy claim to believe. Successful authors attract allegations of plagiarism as fine wool sings to the moth.

Was it likely that a writer with a reputation and a following would stoop to stealing another man’s ideas? Much more probable, surely, for a nonentity to be searching for a payoff in return for not making any more trouble. Nevertheless Dad looked him in the eyes, decided Kevin McClory was telling the truth and agreed to represent him.

In the fantasy I somehow absorbed of what happened in court Dad cross-examined the snooty Fleming, who of course drawled through his cigarette holder throughout, then finally broke down and admitted iniquity. The patient intellectual abrasion of cross-examination is the forensic equivalent of those mills of God which grind slow but grind exceeding fine. It was Dad’s special skill, thanks in part to a subtly aggressive instinct and in part to the hundreds of hours he put into mastering the material in all its aspects, and this was a complicated case, heard in front of Mr Justice Ungoed-Thomas, whose magnificent name makes him seem half Welshman and half mushroom.

In fact the case was settled, on humiliating terms for Fleming, without his going under Dad’s forensic dentist’s drill. McClory received damages and also the film rights to the contested story, which meant he could now make his own James Bond film, although he didn’t own film rights to the character of ‘James Bond’ outside a narrowly defined context.

Even so it was a tremendous result. Kevin McClory had suits made on Savile Row with ‘007’ embroidered on the inside breast pockets, now that he had a licence to make a killing. It must have been quite a payday for Dad too. A colleague of his remembered his fee for the case as being £10,000, not in today’s money but in 1963 pounds. And not in fact in pounds but guineas – the extra shilling over each twenty would go to his clerk. Dad loved to pronounce the abbreviation for guineas that appeared on chambers invoices (‘Guas’) the way it was written, as ‘gwahs’, and no wonder.

If the sum is accurate, then its vast size must reflect both the importance of the case and the fact that this was a client with deep pockets and access to his wealthy wife’s capacious handbag.

Dad was proud of the result he had achieved for his client and took the family to a gala preview of Thunderball. At ten, I was not yet at the age when boys long to see the films from which their parents want to protect them. I was at an age when I longed to be protected from the film my parents wanted me to see. The underwater battle which provides the film with its climax (very much Kevin McClory’s idea, as was established in court) horrified me with the grimness of its violence. I kept my eyes closed as much as I could while the harpoon-guns did their worst, and managed not to develop any overwhelming fetish for scuba gear.

Courtroom advocacy is just as much a performing art as dance or theatre. A courtroom is routinely described as being a sort of theatre itself, but it’s a small one – closer to a rehearsal studio than a stadium – and the performance is never repeated. You have to be there. It leaves no traces except written ones, though we’re so used to seeing court cases on film and television that the evanescence of the real thing gets forgotten. It’s easier to form a direct impression of Anna Pavlova’s skills than F. E. Smith’s. Even if Dad had been given his chance to flay Ian Fleming in the witness box there would only be circumstantial evidence to show how he went about it.

The closest thing I can get to a display of Dad’s expertise as a barrister in the Thunderball year of 1963, when he must have been at his most formidable, is the cross-examining of witnesses he did during the Vassall tribunal, as transcribed in the eventual report. Even so it’s like looking at a musical score that lacks expression marks, tempo indications, dynamics. I suppose it’s obvious that the spoken word is elusive even when it has the power to win or lose people money – or freedom – but I had never really thought about it.

John Vassall was a civil servant who had been sent to prison for eighteen years in 1962 after being convicted of passing secrets on to the Soviets. While working at the British embassy in Moscow during the 1950s he had been invited to a party, drugged and photographed in compromising positions with a number of men. The question for the tribunal to decide was whether he had been shielded by his superiors during his miserable career of espionage, the implied motive being a shared sexual secret if not necessarily ideological common ground, though the two were generally thought to converge. Was there in fact (as press coverage of the case had broadly hinted) a nest of perverted traitors at the Admiralty? Why had T. G. D. (Tam) Galbraith, a Conservative Party politician and Civil Lord of the Admiralty, sent letters to a junior civil servant, one who was apparently known in his department as ‘Aunty’, and had even visited him in the Dolphin Square flat that was so obviously too luxurious for a junior’s income such as his?

I remember Dad referring to Vassall at the time, and my confusion about whether this was a name of a person or a role. I knew that to be a vassal was to be an underling, though I don’t know how I knew. Perhaps despite my imperviousness to history I had learned something about feudalism at school, though it was too early for the celebrated Jackdaw series put out by Jonathan Cape, reinforced folders of documents in facsimile that made the past come alive, to my myopic eyes, by making it shine on the level of stationery. From Dad’s grim tone when he said the word ‘Vassall’ I knew not to ask questions, and osmotically absorbed the message that submissiveness was always culpable, though for some people an inescapable destiny.

The Vassall tribunal was Britain’s mirror-image of the Stalin-era show trial, not a charade of manufactured guilt but a masque of questionable innocence. Some sort of whitewash took place under floodlights. If there had been actual evidence against Galbraith, his resignation would long since have been offered and accepted. Instead the ranks had closed behind him, and being examined in public on the eleventh day of the tribunal, Thursday, 31 January 1963, was an ordeal for him but not a hanging matter. It was his job to get through the day somehow, and Dad’s job was to trip him up.

It wasn’t likely that an experienced politician like Galbraith would be broken down by cross-examination, assuming that such breakdowns are anything more than a convention of courtroom scenes in films and plays. Mars-Jones QC wasn’t going to land a knockout blow, nor was it his job to, but he could do something entirely appropriate for counsel retained by the Beaverbrook press, by inflicting paper cuts.

Mars-Jones QC puts it to Galbraith that he is conceding some degree of friendship with Vassall. Galbraith ties himself in knots trying to resist that impossible formula ‘some degree of friendship’.

‘I tried to be friendly with everybody,’ he says, ‘but it is not the same thing as being a friend of anybody’s … It is impossible to say one is an enemy. I think one is therefore presumably a friend.’

Mars-Jones QC presses the point: ‘… there was no degree of friendship between you and Vassall at any time?’ ‘If friendship implies affection, no. I do not know what friendship means, you see, it is such a wide word.’

He claimed to see no difference between Dear Vassall and My dear Vassall as forms of address in correspondence. (How glad he must have been not have written Dear John or My Dear John, leaving the smoking gun of a Christian name in Vassall’s possession.) Under pressure from Mars-Jones QC he says, ‘I am therefore going to eliminate the word “my” from my vocabulary.’ Any impossibility of retrieving Dad’s tone applies equally to Galbraith. The last sentence could be delivered with an attempt at dismissive lightness or with real exasperation.

It was being formally established at a public hearing that Beaverbrook’s papers had printed only responsible innuendo, a nod and a wink in the public interest. From the transcript I get an impression of chilly sparring, a needling cross-examination with an undertone of disrespect.

At some point Galbraith complains about there being no mention in the newspaper coverage of visits paid to Vassall’s Dolphin Square flat of his wife being present. Mars-Jones QC suggests that if he wanted the fact mentioned he should have brought it up himself. Galbraith maintains that it was up to the journalists to ask him. He wasn’t obliged to volunteer the information. This seems rather contorted logic, and Mars-Jones QC points out that journalists asking such a question would seem to be making an indelicate suggestion (never mind that the whole coverage in the press had been suggestively indelicate).

At one point in the cross-examination Mars-Jones QC says, ‘But you still have not answered my question. I have asked it twice.’ ‘Perhaps you will be third time lucky.’ ‘I will try.’ After another bit of skirmishing Dad says, ‘That is not an answer to my question, Mr Galbraith, but I am not going to ask it again.’ This seems more or less rude, in that more deferent era, when speaking to a government minister not charged with any offence.

Mars-Jones QC argues that the edition of the Express that circulated in Galbraith’s Glasgow constituency omitted material printed in the first edition that he later objected to, so that there could be no question of the paper conducting any sort of campaign against him. A major part of Galbraith’s objection attached to the headline, and Dad points out that sub-editors make those decisions. He replies, ‘I am really very ignorant on the make-up of newspaper work. So far as I can see, everybody is able to shuffle off his responsibility to somebody else.’

Dad begins to treat him like a child. ‘Is that a fair answer to give, when you do not know anything about it?’ ‘No, I said that is what it appeared to me, but I do not know.’ The slight slippage of grammar in this answer may indicate flusterment.

Dad continues to strike the infantilizing note. ‘But you do not know who is responsible for the format of the front page or for the headlines?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know why headlines are prepared? Do you know what the function of a headline is?’ Dad could hardly go further in this line of calculated humiliation if he told Galbraith to stand up straight or to take the chewing-gum out of his mouth.

A little later, seeming to take advantage of his psychological ascendancy, Dad asks, ‘And the answer to my question is a simple “No”, is it not?’

‘Will you repeat your question?’ Not an unreasonable request in the circumstances, since there has been a fair amount of intervening by-play. Dad is almost toying with him by this time, saying, ‘No. I am sorry, Mr Galbraith, but I will not,’ before returning to a crucial point. ‘Do you now agree that reasonable persons of goodwill might quite properly take the view that the relationship between you and Mr Vassall was one which was too familiar between a minister and a junior civil servant?’ ‘I certainly do not.’

This exchange by itself may have earned Dad his fee, with Galbraith showing the soft white underbelly of any future libel case, and Mars-Jones QC refraining for the moment from sinking forensic teeth into it.

Galbraith sometimes made some odd choices in his correspondence – something in which the tribunal took a keen interest, in fact, since he had sent John Vassall a chatty postcard while on a family holiday in Belgium. But it seems safe to assume he sent no Christmas card that year to W. L. Mars-Jones QC.

Kevin McClory, though, kept in touch with Dad. They were on good terms, as was only right if McClory had benefited in a strong material way from Dad’s taking the case. If I don’t remember Dad going to a preview of Never Say Never Again when it was released in 1983, it doesn’t mean he didn’t go. Kevin McClory was executive producer, and Sean Connery returned to the role of James Bond after twelve years. Film critics found it disappointing that the film was so clearly a new version of Thunderball, not realizing that it couldn’t be a fresh story without exceeding the rights McClory had won in 1963 and rendering him liable to be sued in his turn.

When my first book was published McClory passed on an invitation through Dad for me to spend some time with him in the Bahamas and to write the real story of the Thunderball affair. I wasn’t really tempted. There might be a wetsuit waiting with my name on it, but there might also be a harpoon-gun whose bolt had the same inscription. ‘The real story’ I was supposed to tell wouldn’t be an independent account but Kevin McClory’s version. Mars-Jones père had helped bring him prosperity, and now Mars-Jones fils would add a little polish to his reputation. McClory wasn’t known for being open-handed – perhaps the idea was to pay me in daiquiris and sun cream.

Ian Fleming was in poor health during the court case and died the next year, but the Thunderball affair rolled on. Jonathan Cape, publishers of the novel, and having every reason to know that Kevin McClory watched fiercely over his interests, brought out a biography of Fleming by John Pearson. McClory wasn’t satisfied with the account it gave of the legal action and its findings, so once again the lawyers were whipped out of their kennels and sent across the fields baying for redress.

Pearson’s tone had been misleadingly breezy:

As [Fleming] sat in court day after day, swallowing the nitroglycerine pills prescribed to prevent another heart attack and listening to all those old arguments again, he must have told himself how unnecessary it all was, how easily it could all have been avoided. A little thoughtlessness, a great deal of impatience, a lifetime’s habit of taking too much on trust – they were all to blame.

Again McClory won the point, so that the first edition of Pearson’s book had to have a statement from the publisher bound in (with the promise that the alterations would be included in subsequent editions and reprints), setting the record straight and apologizing for inaccuracy. ‘Since these pages were written,’ went the statement from Jonathan Cape,

certain facts have come to the notice of ourselves and the author which enable us to amplify passages in Chapters 24 and 25 which, whilst published by us in good faith, do not fully reflect the events leading to the High Court action in which Ian Fleming was concerned …

If you have an aversion, as I do, to the prissy form ‘whilst’, feeling that it carries a note of insincerity wherever it goes, then the word will seem perfectly at home in a passage of forced apology.

After two such successes, it was always likely that Kevin McClory would overreach himself. In the 1990s he proposed a second remake of Thunderball, to be called Warhead 2000 A.D. and possibly starring the Bond du jour Timothy Dalton. He then joined forces with Sony with plans to open up a whole rival franchise, having at this late date decided that he had been shortchanged by what had been thought in 1963 a highly advantageous settlement. Now he put in a claim for a proportion of the total profit from the whole roster of Bond films, on the basis that the work he had done on that early script had provided a template for the entire catalogue. He didn’t get his way in court this time. It seems pretty clear that his ownership of rights to the one film was easier to establish than any claim to the whole series. If he had scaled down his demands, instead of trying to go nuclear, he might have got his way with Warhead 2000 A.D.

Kevin McClory died in 2006, to muted mourning, but the disputes didn’t die with him. In 2007 there appeared a book called The Battle for Bond by Robert Sellers, not from Cape but from Tomahawk Press, which reproduced court documents from the Thunderball trial. This time it was the Fleming forces on the attack, with the Ian Fleming Will Trust contesting that these documents were not a matter of public record and therefore an infringement of copyright. Tomahawk’s position was that the documents were indeed public – but a small publisher must think twice before taking on a rich estate. Unsold copies of the first edition were surrendered, presumably to be pulped, and the second edition, though bearing the traditional defiant slogan ‘The Book They Tried to Ban’, leaves out the disputed material.

In compensation it has a foreword by Len Deighton, who felt confident that he knew Fleming well enough to speak in his name in opposition to the Fleming Will Trust. He writes: ‘How Ian Fleming would have hated to know that this book had been censored … As a gentleman he would have felt that harassing a fellow author to be the ultimate demonstration of bad taste.’ I don’t know much about cricket but I can recognize a sticky wicket when it swallows the batsman whole. Fleming’s gentlemanliness has to be assessed as part-time, and when he was off the clock he wasn’t above appropriating another writer’s work and passing it off as his. If Ian Fleming’s gentlemanliness had been uninterrupted, there could have been no book for him to rise up in hypothetical righteousness to defend.

The dispute over Thunderball, with lawsuits erupting over so many years, resembles a small volcano in its alternation of activity and periods of dormancy, or perhaps a cold sore brewing up every few years a fresh batch of litigant virus. Dad stuck around for one cycle of infection and then moved on.

Perhaps even now the dispute isn’t dead and buried but merely dozing. I imagine the McClory Estate and the Ian Fleming Will Trust as the last organisms to survive on a ravaged and blistered planet, periodically serving writs on each other.

The instructing solicitor in the 1963 case, Peter Carter-Ruck, attributed the successful outcome of the case to Dad’s performance, though it was also clearly important (and perhaps not expected by the other side) that Kevin McClory stood firm in the witness box. There were complications, with two plaintiffs initiating the proceedings (though McClory’s business partner, Jack Whittingham, withdrew, in poor health and worried about the financial risk involved) and two defendants throughout, Fleming and Ivar Bryce, which makes it harder to separate out individual motives from the swirl of courtroom manoeuvres.

Apart from Whittingham the three principals were well funded. McClory had recently married an heiress, Fleming’s earnings from the Bond books were colossal and Bryce was not only a rich man but had married an heiress of his own. According to The Battle for Bond it was Bryce who decided to settle the case, but logically it was Fleming who was vulnerable. It would be a huge blow to his standing if he was found by the court to have plagiarized McClory’s screenplay, and it was strongly in his interest to accept any terms before such a judgment was given.

The settlement allowed him to say, after the hearing, ‘I am glad that the whole expensive misunderstanding has now been disposed of’, though this was just the sort of blurring of the issue which got Jonathan Cape and John Pearson into trouble with the Fleming biography three years later.

There were those who said that Bill Mars-Jones loved the sound of his own voice (this group occasionally included members of his immediate family), that he talked for the pleasure of hearing himself speak. On this occasion his vocal performance was close to heroic. His laying out of the case against Ian Fleming lasted twenty-eight hours and eight minutes. As court time is measured out, Dad spoke for more than a week.

A full performance of Der Ring Des Nibelungen lasts fifteen hours, just over half the length of Dad’s opening speech in the Thunderball case, and even Wagnerian roles aren’t continuous. It’s true that Dad didn’t need to hit specific notes, but he will have needed to pay attention to vocal variety. Vital to avoid the sing-song intonations which can tug a judge’s eyelids downward in the long watches of the afternoon.

What was the point of so extended an opening? It can be a way of dramatizing confidence, indicating the wealth of evidence on offer, by saying in effect: ‘My client’s case is not made of straw, My Lord, nor of sticks, nor even of stoutly bonded bricks, bricks so well laid and soundly mortared that no huffing and puffing on the part of Mr Fleming’s advocates (my learned friends) could make the slightest impression on its solidity of structure, but of concrete. Reinforced concrete.’ Putting pressure, hour by endless hour, on the defendant. This sounds like overkill, but Dad was well known for the obsessiveness of his preparation, insisting on seeing every piece of paperwork rather than relying on someone else’s selection of what was important. I wonder if he hadn’t been scarred by an early case, caught out when he hadn’t been quite so meticulous and getting a nasty surprise in court. In any case the combination of flair and attention to detail amounts to a formidable armoury for a courtroom lawyer.

It’s conventional to blame the case for the deterioration in Fleming’s condition, though his health problems were of long standing. Only Ann Fleming, Ian’s wife, seemed to feel that the trial had a beneficial effect on his physical well-being. ‘Goodness I miss the Old Bailey,’ she wrote in a letter to Evelyn Waugh in December 1963, though in fact the case was heard in the Royal Courts of Justice, ‘the case did Ian a power of good, no smoking in court and one hour for a simple lunch.’

Of course anyone writing to Waugh did well to keep the entertainment level high and to point up any possible irony, but perhaps she really did feel that the Chancery Division of the High Court stood in for a health club of a particularly exclusive kind, a judicial Champneys whose mortificatory element (sitting on hard wooden benches hour after hour to hear yourself characterized as profiteer and cad) was only an aspect of its efficacy and its prestige.

I don’t know why Dad felt the need to dress up his involvement in the Thunderball case with the fairy story about his inbuilt lie detector. It’s obvious that Kevin McClory didn’t come to Dad direct, and that Peter Carter-Ruck took McClory on as a client not because success was guaranteed but because payment was assured either way. Dad was the right man for the job, with a methodical approach that ran no risk of being dry, thanks to the whiff of danger he gave off in court. Why be embarrassed about that? But perhaps he disliked any idea of being a hired gun, and cried up the moral standing of his line of work accordingly. The traditional costume of the barrister – wig, gown and bands – is designed to produce the same effect, lending to a mercenary some of the dignity of a priest. Stylized battledress and a bandolier, even one made of horsehair, would attract the wrong sort of client.

Dad didn’t have anything as coherent as a philosophy of the law, and his personal principles could be strongly polarized without adding up to a standard opinion-poll profile. He was against capital punishment, for instance, and strongly opposed to pornography. These are common attitudes individually but the combination is mildly anomalous. Displayed as a Venn diagram, the two relevant circles would show little overlap. Admittedly the overlap between those in favour of capital punishment and those opposed to censorship would be smaller still, but Dad still has to count as something of a free-thinker.

This was very much the point made by Geoffrey Robertson in The Justice Game: that when the first ABC trial (the nickname came from the surnames of the defendants, two journalists and their source being prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act) was abandoned due to the ill-health of the judge, and Mr Justice Mars-Jones was named to preside over a new one, Robertson – representing the three – did not have high hopes of his fair-mindedness in court. Knowing that Mars-Jones J (this is how judges are styled in law reports) was a great upholder of law and order, and moreover that juries ‘ate out of his hand’, he told his clients they could expect to spend their Christmas in prison.

Instead Mars-Jones J dismissed the charges, saying that the Official Secrets Act had never been intended to be used in such a way. When told that the Attorney General had authorized the prosecution, he said (I must go to slow-motion here, it’s such a wonderful moment, a Clint Eastwood moment), ‘Then he can un-authorize it.’ Is that a cheroot clenched between Dad’s teeth, or possibly a toothpick? He has slung a dusty poncho over the ceremonial scarlet. To throw out a case in this way is a permanent possibility of judicial procedure, but it takes a strong judge to make it happen, particularly if the result will be to nullify a case that the government has set its heart on. The jingle of spurs is rarely heard in the courtroom these days.

His independence of mind was partly protected by the fact he didn’t want to rise any higher in the law. He was content to be a judge of first instance. Occasional stints in the Court of Appeal, sitting with two judges who seemed to gravitate towards points of law with a mystical certainty, convinced him that he lacked the rapid analytical processing required to excel in that arena.

I was studying in the States at the time of the ABC case, and heard only the vaguest rumblings about it. I didn’t need to know more, as I thought then, since it was so obvious that Dad would be on the wrong side. If no man is a hero to his valet, then certainly no judge is a libertarian to his son. In the ABC affair I had the excuse of geographical distance, but even when I was much closer to his professional life I ignored its possible element of idealism. There was a case in 1982, for instance, presided over by Dad, in which a Jamaican couple sued the police for assault, wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution. Dad seemed to find it mildly amusing that a black couple should have the surname White. He gave a wouldn’t-you-just-know-it shrug when he mentioned it, though he would never have thought it strange that a white couple should have the surname Black. There was nothing odder about a black person being called White than for a person called Smith not to work in a forge, or for someone called Mars to be living right here on Earth. He would have given the same sort of shrug and raised his eyebrows, mock-indulgence, mock-exasperation, if the couple in his case had been surnamed Black, though if a third party had pulled a wry face at a white person being called White he would have been puzzled about where the element of humour lay.

Of course my friendship group wasn’t the delirious funky mix my attitudes implied. Even so, I could take up anti-racist attitudes with a suavity that left Dad in the dust – it’s just that it wasn’t me who awarded David and Lucille White £51,392, describing police conduct as ‘monstrous, wicked and shameful’ and giving the plaintiffs some assurance, finally, that not every part of the system was contemptuous of their rights.

Fifty thousand pounds was a substantial sum in 1982. I had a friend who started work at Faber that year on a salary of £2,000 odd, in an economy and a publishing climate that seems in retrospect lustily, even obstreperously vital. (Admittedly that sort of job was always close to being an internship with pocket money thrown in, and was a respectable work environment for educated young women before they got married, even perhaps actively in search of a husband.)

There were less newsworthy cases that Dad mentioned with quiet satisfaction. One was a case of arson in the 1970s, proved by an unusual exhibit. The malefactor, against whom there was no other evidence, and who denied ever being on the premises, had eaten an apple before setting the fire, and had foolishly left the core in a desk drawer before he left. The apple core survived the blaze, and a conviction was obtained on the basis of the arsonist’s bite matching the marks that had been left on it. Almost a biblical incident – he had eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whereof his legal representatives would certainly have advised him not to eat. Or, if he did, to dispose of the core.

By CSI standards this was fairly elementary forensic science, but it got the job done and the criminal put away. Not a case with very wide implications, admittedly. Even a handbook of Arson for Dummies might not feel the need to warn its readers against writing their names in wet cement before torching a factory, or leaving behind photographs of themselves – in the act of striking the relevant match – locked in a fireproof safe.

Dad’s non-standard convictions were strongly engaged by one of the most famous cases of his career, the trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in 1966. He was only junior counsel for the prosecution, with the Attorney General, Elwyn Jones, leading, but Dad made the opening speech (in a cleared courtroom, as requested by the defence) at the hearing in front of magistrates at Hyde in Cheshire the previous December. Technically he spoke the first words in the proceedings against Brady, twenty-seven, a stock clerk, and Hindley, twenty-three, typist, of Wardle Brook Avenue.

The death penalty for murder had only been abolished the previous year, and for many people this case with its specific horrors (sexually charged cruelty, a woman delivering children up to torture) annihilated the arguments for liberalization. Myra Hindley must have driven quite a few supporters of the reform back into the hangman’s arms. It didn’t take Dad that way, even though he was presumably in court when the tape-recording Brady and Hindley made of Lesley Ann Downey being killed was played. He never mentioned it.

I remember him forbidding us to read about the trial in the papers. From an eleven-year-old’s point of view, this was being warned off something that wouldn’t have occurred to me in the first place, and the prohibition didn’t breed curiosity as it might have done in someone older or more rebellious.

The trial had its effect on me, but not in any direct way. I was a studious boy, though there were some subjects for which I felt no affinity (history and geography). I’d always enjoyed maths. I remember when I realized how many zeroes were needed to represent a billion (an old-guard British billion of a million million) and how this thrilled me. I was sitting on the lavatory at the time that the realization struck, but this was not an earthbound moment.

Now I was having trouble, not so much with maths as with a maths teacher who had taken against me. In some way this was tied in with Dad and his frequent appearances in the press. In class I became ‘Mars-Jones, whose clever father is never out of the papers’. I didn’t understand why this was shameful. I doubt if my classmates did either, though they had no difficulty in understanding the invitation to laugh along.

I had already noticed that some of my classmates, the rough boys, talked to Mr Waller out of lessons in a way I thought was somehow disturbing. Since this was Westminster Under School in Eccleston Square, London SW1, my viewing some of my fellow pupils as ‘rough boys’ indicates that I was in a class of my own as a milksop.

At lunch one day Mr Waller had charge of our table. The chief ‘rough boy’ took a drink of water, pretended to notice something at the bottom of his glass and said, ‘Sir? Do you see what’s written on the bottom of these glasses?’

We all looked. All I could see was a word written there (well, stamped really), the name of the manufacturer. Duralex. The boy went on, ‘Funny that they make glasses as well, eh, sir?’

I knew that something dirty was being insinuated, but not what it was. O happy days before Internet porn, when an eleven-year-old could be so much in the dark. The trade name Durex meant nothing to me. I had a vague knowledge of the existence of the contraceptive sheath, though I knew it under the name of the ‘rubber johnny’. I had also acquired some spectacular misinformation on the subject along the way. Was my unworldliness so obvious that other boys got a kick out of telling me fibs? I knew, or thought I knew, that there was a hole in a rubber johnny and that sometimes the man’s ‘stuff’ (another vagueness, but made authoritative by Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea, which was a true book about the War) took a whole day to pass through it. Perhaps I had been told the old myth about the government insisting on a pinhole being made in one protective in a hundred, to safeguard the birth rate, and had got it turned round. I had only the vaguest idea of what the man and the woman did, and none at all about why they would want to. I seem to have thought there was some sort of filtration involved, or a slow drip process as with coffee made by the Cona method, a feature of dinner parties at the Gray’s Inn flat.

How did Mr Waller react to this transgressive and smutty line of chat? Clearly his professional response should have been to kill the conversation without making too much of a fuss. Instead he gave a complicit snigger.

He had his favourites and his unfavourites, and it was no mystery where I fitted in. At one point I was unwell and missed a few days of school, and when I went back it felt as if maths lessons had been purposefully accelerated so as to leave me behind. The equations had turned ugly. The numbers were no longer on my side.

Mr Waller didn’t seem to want me to catch up. I wasn’t used to academic failure, and went to Dad for help. I don’t remember confiding in my mother, but I expect that’s because I so often did. Sharing my worries with Dad was the memorable event, though I’m sure she smoothed my way to him.

He took action, not making the fuss I had feared but tracking down a suitably diligent classmate and having the relevant pages of his exercise book photocopied. In those days domestic photocopying was an exotic venture, and he emphasized its fantastic cost. I’m sure his surprise was genuine, but it can’t really have been a significant drain on the family budget, so perhaps he was guarding against the possibility that I would come to expect the mechanical reproduction of schoolwork as a matter of course.

In fact the photocopied pages were only a limited help. The results of the process were far from crisp, with dark lines superimposed, and I couldn’t reliably make out the handwriting. Dad asked me if I was on my way to recovering my rightful place at the top of the class, and I recognized this from Latin lessons as the type of question that expects the answer Yes. I tried to make out that it was only a matter of time.

However much Dad tried to help me with my maths problem, he was part of it himself. His appearances in the papers, associated with a shocking court case, seemed to inflame my teacher. Mr Waller would ask me a difficult question, already grasping the piece of chalk he would throw at me if I got it wrong. The pressure he applied made it more likely that I would fail, and I duly acquired an incompetence when faced with mathematical operations. I don’t think Mr Waller explicitly aimed at this effect. A week or two of cringing would have satisfied him. Of course I didn’t know the exact source of his resentment and badgering, but it seems obvious that I was really only a stand-in for Dad, unlucky enough to be within range of flung chalk.

I was fitfully aware of Dad’s public status. At one stage we went on a family holiday to Ireland, taking the ferry to Dun Laoghaire and hiring a car for further exploring. The tune I pounded out on the piano in any hotel unwise enough to leave one unlocked was ‘A Walk In The Black Forest’. I did my best to duplicate the ersatz bounce of that exemplary, laboratory-designed earworm. Horst Jankowski’s instrumental was a big hit worldwide in 1965, which suggests (unless I was criminally behind the times) a time roughly contemporary with the trial of Brady and Hindley. I remember us getting as far as Galway. We went fishing and caught some pollack, though Mum said we wouldn’t be asking the hotel kitchen to cook them for us, since (as everyone knew) pollack tasted of blotting paper. If I’d been able to make the leap from precociousness to actual prescience, I would have sung out, ‘But Mum, they’re sustainable!’

At the hotel there was a swimming pool with a tricky name, the Fuchsia Pool. The word had to be said very carefully to avoid embarrassment, though it turned out that ‘fuchsia’ was only the name of the pinky-red ballerina-like flowers that grew round the pool. The book in which I eventually saw the word ‘fuck’ in print for the first time, Mark Rascovich’s The Bedford Incident, was already in existence (published 1963) but I hadn’t come across it yet.

The Bedford Incident is a Cold War reworking of Moby-Dick, ending with the mutual destruction by warhead of a Russian submarine and a US destroyer. I couldn’t altogether blame the American sailors for their use of foul language. They were about to be blown to atoms, by an atom bomb no less, and as I understood it ‘fuck’ was the equivalent of the nuclear option in conversation.

I had assumed, though, that this supremely taboo four-letter word was so beyond the pale as to resist the normal conventions of English spelling. I imagined specialized characters being necessary to transcribe it, lead-lined ones perhaps. Even so it might cause mutations in neighbouring words.

In the Welsh language, of course, mutation is a fact of consonantal daily life, and doesn’t indicate the presence of background radiation, though it certainly helps to deter visitors.

It was disappointing that ‘fuck’ was spelled no differently than ‘buck’, ‘duck’, ‘luck’. Even ‘fuch’ would be some sort of homage, however half-hearted.

The Fuchsia Pool itself was shaped like a stylized fish, with the tail section being a shallow area safe for toddlers. I was a confident swimmer and nervous diver, but the hotel pool had, instead of a diving board, a white metal slide. I climbed up the ladder to the top of it and then became paralysed. After a while Dad came over and suggested that I hold on tight to the edges of the slide on my first ride down, so as to control my descent. There was a bucket of water next to me at the top of the ladder, and he volunteered to slosh it liberally over the slide so as to make it easier for me to hold on. Not bothering to examine the logic of the proposition, I agreed to it.

Only when I had committed my body weight to the slippery metal, and the world slid out of control, did I understand that I had been betrayed, lied to by someone who maintained that only the truth would set you free. It was wonderful, not the betrayal as such but the accelerating joy it forced me to feel. I didn’t bother him with protests, in fact I hardly noticed him as I rushed back to the bottom of the white metal ladder. Dad had found a way to nudge me brusquely free from the deadlock of my milksop psychology.

I remember we travelled under assumed names. It was felt unwise for Dad to visit the Irish Republic after having sent so many of its irregular affiliates down. That’s what I remember, but of course it makes no sense. In 1965 Dad wasn’t yet a judge, and even if he had been, no Troubles had arisen for him to get the wrong side of. I hope at least that the confusion in my memory doesn’t mean I was, say, sixteen and trembling at the top of the slide beside a hotel swimming pool, rather than eleven.

I must be mixing up two holidays – except that we only went to Ireland the once, and no other destination would call for precautions of even this rudimentary kind. I don’t have a memory, not even a false one, of the name we travelled under, though I find it hard to imagine not being interested. Perhaps I was reading a book. I’ve always been able to read without queasiness in cars, on trains, in planes, on roller-coasters. Nice to think we might have gone under some name rich in associations, travelling perhaps as the Melmoths. Did we have false passports, even? The existence of the Common Travel Area may have made such elaborate preparations unnecessary, but the whole business of travelling incognito suggests the murder mysteries played out in country hotels off season.

Later on, in the 1970s and ’80s, there were definite security concerns. Dad had some firearms training and was even issued with a gun, though it was kept locked up in the safe of the Gray’s Inn Treasury Office where there was no risk of its being useful. Certainly if the weapon had lived in the flat, I would have wanted to see it and Dad would have wanted to wave it about with all due solemnity.

Before terrorism put judges at risk, there was the old-school underworld. The High Court Judge Edmund Davies, who lived at number 1 Gray’s Inn Square, received threats after he passed controversially severe sentences on those responsible for the ‘great’ train robbery of 1963. Precautions were put in place. Cynthia Terry, wife of the Under-Treasurer (and also my godmother, ‘Aunty See-See’ as we called her), was asked to give up her normal seat in the Chapel and position herself upstairs in the gallery. There she would be well placed to deter, by screaming or lobbing a hymn book, any intruder devious enough to walk into the Inn from High Holborn and enter the Chapel during morning service.

I feel sure that if Aunty See-See was combat-ready in any marked way she would have mentioned it.

Dad was certainly advised, once terrorism was a real force, to check the underside of his car for explosive devices. I didn’t ever see him do it. In fact my mind’s eye shows me him very much not doing it: leaning over to one side a little way from the car, as if that would give him the necessary visual access. By this time his Jaguar days were over and he drove sensible estate cars with automatic transmissions. Then I see him going halfway down on his knees for a better view before realizing he would risk sullying the excellence of his suiting with dirt if he allowed his knees to touch down on the road surface. He considers the use of newspaper to protect the cherished cloth and then understands that ink-smudges are at least as much of a threat to his turn-out as tarmac-scuffs … of course none of this amounts to a memory. On a television screen these images would be accompanied by a caption warning of RECONSTRUCTION, though why anybody but me would want to watch I couldn’t say.

If the national shock delivered by the Moors Murders had led to the restoration of the death penalty, Dad might have found himself in difficulties. He not only disapproved of the death penalty, implicitly on religious grounds, but said, after the event, that he would not have accepted appointment as a judge if he was required to pronounce it. Technically capital punishment was retained for a few specialized offences, such as treason, piracy with violence, and arson in naval shipyards, but it would be a scruple too far to expect him to decline preferment in case these virtually hypothetical crimes materialized in his court.

His principle wasn’t tested, since the black cap remained a historical item (he became a judge in 1969), but that doesn’t make his moral position unreal. It’s true that I never saw Dad undergo a real crisis of conscience, and his ambition seemed to lie close to the core of him, though I saw enough discrepancy of temperament in the last phase of his life not to be so sure. What’s the appropriately judicial phrase? To reserve judgment.

What Dad felt he learned from the Moors Murders case was that pornography was an actively corrosive force. The books Ian Brady read, the images he saw, inflamed and released an underlying inhumanity. It’s doubtful that even before 1966 he was in favour of sexual material being made freely available – I can’t see him approving of a world in which copies of Reveille and Titbits were brazenly displayed where minors could see them – but after that case his opposition became definite.

If conversation turned in that direction he would maintain that the last word on the subject had been spoken by Pamela Hansford Johnson in her book On Iniquity, which describes her change of heart on this issue from a liberal to a conservative stance, the catalyst being Ian Brady.

There was a sort of troubled open-mindedness in our household, the product I suppose of slightly different attitudes between my parents. I remember one evening when the BBC broadcast some footage of Oh! Calcutta! There was debate over whether we should watch it. We did. The images were of naked bodies frozen every few frames and allowed to overlap, producing an effect that soon became abstract (particularly on a black-and-white television) and we uneasily agreed they were beautiful.

I never got around to reading Hansford Johnson’s book in Dad’s lifetime. Perhaps he was only using it as a sort of barricade, to keep dissension at a distance. If I had read it and taken issue with its arguments, he might only have withdrawn behind another obstacle, though his withdrawals were usually feints and it was never safe to assume a lasting retreat.

The tone of On Iniquity is sometimes impossibly quaint:

Not so long ago, I raised a little storm by suggesting, in a letter to the Guardian, that it was not desirable for Krafft-Ebing [who wrote Psychopathia Sexualis, intended as a serious study] to be available in relatively cheap paperback edition on the bookstalls of English railway-stations …

Class seems to dog the discussion of censorship, just as it had at the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, with Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC asking the jury: ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?’ The cheapness of a book, and consequently its availability to the lower orders, seems to be an important element in discussion of the issue.

As Hansford Johnson visualized it, ‘The walls of the police storerooms are almost bulging outwards with the pressure of tons upon tons of dirty books.’ Dad had a similar mental picture, but at least there were buttresses in place to keep those storerooms from exploding. Dirty books were being kept out of circulation by the proper authorities.

Everyone assumed that the smut was safe in its silos, the general public screened from contamination by thick bulkheads of probity. It was because Dad had such a high opinion of the police force in general that he regarded corruption there as the ultimate betrayal of trust.

In 1964 he had been commissioned to write a report investigating a particular set of allegations, that confessions had been extracted under duress. He found there to be some substance to the allegations. Dad was particularly proud of his report, in which he had tried to match the terse clarity of Lord Denning’s prose style, and felt vindicated when it was held up as a model of its kind. One newspaper suggested he would make a good candidate for Ombudsman, defender of the individual against the injustice of institutions. That office didn’t actually exist, but he was on some sort of spectral short list.

His 1964 report is another example of a publication that I didn’t read in his lifetime, and I have to admit I was disappointed when I did. It’s not impressive as a piece of writing, the language flat without being particularly correct (‘fortuitous coincidence’ turns up twice), but that’s hardly the problem. The whole thing seems an elaborate exercise in fence-sitting, stating that ‘allegations of violence, threats of violence and the “planting” of offensive weapons are not established beyond reasonable doubt’, before conceding that ‘the bulk of the evidence so disclosed tends to support’ the allegations made by the men in the case ‘and points to their innocence’. Perhaps because I heard Dad talk with such pride about his report, at a time when he loomed large over my world, I expected great things from it. I wanted to think he had laid down some definitive glory to mature over time, like the cellared ‘pipe of port’ he referred to from time to time, supposedly waiting for our twenty-first birthdays but never materializing. It may be that in historical context he was relatively open-minded about the possibility of the police going wrong. I feel a bit flat, that’s all.

It’s just the opposite of what went on in the ABC trial, where Dad, far from knuckling under, took a tough independent line. His report seems all too tepid and cautious. But why am I bothered? I passed from childish worship through disillusionment to fixed prejudice, and nothing could be more normal. It shouldn’t be hard at this stage to unearth a bit more nuance, except that the states of mind date from different epochs and exist on different scales. They don’t want to work together. It’s only in cop films that the clueless rookie and the hardbitten old-timer turn out to make a good team.

As a judge Dad became known, rightly or wrongly, for ‘hammering bent coppers’, a phrase whose separate parts come together to form a harmonious visual image. It was inevitable that his emotions would be deeply engaged when he was called upon to preside over the trial of members of London’s Obscene Publications Squad on corruption charges in November 1976. He found it appalling that those whose only function was to root out filth might choose to wallow in it.

As he described it, a newcomer to the squad would find an envelope full of money on his desk in the first week. When he asked what it was for, he would be told it was for moving expenses. The next week there was another envelope, after the contents of the first had been spent, and there was no longer any pretence about what it was for.

It happened that I was in the Gray’s Inn flat on the day after the trial ended. Commander Wallace Virgo and Detective Chief Superintendent William Moody had been convicted, and Dad was jubilant, in a mood to celebrate. He produced his wallet and slid out a ten-pound note. For a moment it looked as if he was about to give me some pocket money, except that I was twenty-two and receiving a small allowance from the Department of Education and Science (I remember that the postal address of my benefactors was Honeypot Lane) to pursue a PhD that I never caught up with.

The ten-pound note wasn’t for me. Instead Dad handed it to Sheila, saying, ‘Darling, I want you to go down to Soho and buy some pornography.’ She looked a little dazed as she took the money.

‘What is it exactly you want me to do, Bill?’ she asked.

‘Go to Soho and buy some pornography.’

‘But why?’

‘Because you won’t be able to get any,’ he told us. Then he took the tenner back and returned it to his wallet. As perhaps Sheila had suspected from the start, if only because the scene was played out in my presence, it was just a piece of theatre. I don’t know if she was surprised that Dad should imagine such a direct connection between a decision in law and the life of the streets, but I certainly was.

Virgo appealed against his conviction, and won. I don’t remember Dad making any comment on this setback, but years later I found an unfamiliar cassette recorder with a tape in it. Might this be the famous memoir, which Dad had found impossibly difficult in the end to get started on, so that he decided that speaking aloud was the solution, with a stenographer typing up the material for him to tidy later? I pressed the Play button. It was Dad’s voice all right, but he was singing rather than speaking, and accompanying himself on the guitar. ‘Virgo – Virgo,’ he crooned, ‘I’ll follow you … just an old sweet song keeps Virgo on my mind.’ He was casting a spell of voodoo justice on the villain who had escaped him, to the tune of Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Georgia on My Mind’.

Having a master of argument in the family doesn’t necessarily make for a quiet life, particularly if he sees himself not as a user of rhetoric but as someone who speaks his mind. In family arguments Dad was like a professional tennis player who doesn’t even realize how much spin he’s putting on the ball, going for devastating shots even in what is nominally a knock-up. Except that a tennis pro will admit to having a racket in his hand.

It was part of Dad’s constitution that he wanted to win, but I’m not sure he ever realized how much he wanted it. He could be relentless, though he could also be wily in a way that was endlessly frustrating. He could improvise.

This was particularly maddening when I was old enough to feel that I could mount an argument myself on a reasonably sophisticated basis. After I had changed my Cambridge course from Classics to English, a change he reluctantly supported, he asked me at the end of one particular term what I’d been studying. American literature, I told him (an option that hadn’t been on the syllabus for long), with special reference to Melville, Hawthorne, Pynchon and Nabokov. ‘Nabokov?’ he asked. ‘The man who wrote that dirty book Lolita? The one who likes little girls?’

I could see there was no point in arguing that Humbert’s entanglement with Lolita recreated Nabokov’s love affair with America, or that it was an allegory of beauty, or even a novel that refused to address the moral issues it seemed to insist on raising. Dad had watched the last ten minutes of the film and hadn’t read so much as a page, while I knew both book and film fairly well. He might hate to be underprepared in court, but now, somehow, lack of knowledge gave him a crushing advantage.

I made the decision to keep things extra-literary, shifting my ground to face an adversary who wouldn’t be drawn into skirmishes over aesthetics or formal questions but would keep pounding away with the big guns of traditional morality. I pointed out that Mrs Nabokov, Véra, had rescued the manuscript of Lolita when her husband was trying to burn it, and that the book, like all the others he published, was dedicated to her.

Dad answered by reflex. I’d love to have an MRI of his brain at that moment, to see which parts were being used, and (almost more fascinating) which were not. A tiny flare of combative instinct in the limbic system, a few neurones firing in the linguistic cortex. I dare say that was all it took. ‘And I think she’s a wonderful woman …’ he said, leaving a pause long enough for me to wonder if I was losing my wits – did Dad know Véra Nabokov? How had this come about? Had they shared quaffing wine in Gray’s Inn Hall? – before he delivered the judo throw that used my weight against me, ‘… to accept the dedication of a book which proves that her husband really likes little girls.’ Part of the frustration of the moment was my sense that Dad could never have riffed so freely if he was really engaged in a question of morals. He was showing off, he just didn’t know it.

If Dad was a driven athlete in argument, he was also a chess grandmaster. Sometimes, like a resourceful player, he would establish a gambit over the course of several games and then vary it in a way that was completely destabilizing. I had become used to one form of non-apology, which ran along the lines of ‘I’m not a young man … I’m getting to be an old man … we must try to get along better.’ This was in theory a no-fault approach to the family peace process, but one which made clear just the same where the faults lay. Then one day, shortly before his retirement, he successfully ambushed me with a variation: ‘I’m not a young man … I’m getting to be an old man … you have only so much time to make it up to me.’

Over the years he had changed his spots, from the man who had stood as a Labour candidate after the War, even if he succeeded only in splitting the vote and letting the Tory in. He never actually admitted helping the Tory cause more directly, by voting for Mrs Thatcher in the years when it was possible to do so, but I’d be surprised to learn that he never did.

His support for liberal causes may have started and finished with the abolition of the death penalty in 1965. He certainly hadn’t approved of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalized homosexuality, and by the 1970s had become alarmed by a general culture of permissiveness and the particular anomie of his sons.

In soft cultural terms, as distinct from actual politics, he could boast of having an open mind, or certainly open ears. Dad had been an unlikely but fervent first-generation Beatlemaniac. This was a shared taste in the household, though I have to admit when I first heard ‘She Loves You’ on the car radio in 1962 I thought in my infant élitism that it was a bad joke. Oh dear oh dear, I thought, have we really come to this? I was eight. A little later, when Tim and I were given record tokens by our grandfather (Sheila’s father, the only grandparent we knew) we made highbrow choices of EP, at least partly, I’m sure, to impress each other, with him choosing Finlandia while I cast my vote for Gieseking playing the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. I wonder who won, and how we knew.

Dad worked out the chords of ‘Michelle’ on the guitar, and Sheila acquired the sheet music for ‘Eleanor Rigby’ for trying out on the piano. She had the advantage of being able to read music, though from his Chapel childhood Dad was at home with tonic sol-fa notation for hymns, and could with a little effort decode the little grids studded with black dots, like wiring diagrams for transistors, which represented guitar chords in the tablature used for popular sheet music. On songs without a piano part Sheila might find herself relegated to that unglamorous not-quite-instrument made from a comb and pieces of tissue paper.

Dad bought us The Beatles’ albums when they came out, as far as The White Album, anyway, whose experimentation displeased him (and many others) so that the capital for Abbey Road had to be raised by private subscription.

There was always a worry, since records could only be played in the public spaces of the flat (we were too young to have our own record players), that Dad would find something objectionable coming out of the grand Decca television-cum-radiogram. It was a relief, for instance, when he pronounced ‘Lady Madonna’ essentially reverent in its appropriation of biblical imagery, though he must have expressed himself less pompously. He could be touchy about anything that mocked holy subjects, though he did enjoy telling one high-class joke with just a touch of blasphemy about it:

Jesus (addressing the crowd gathered round the woman taken in adultery): Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

(A stone flung with great force strikes the woman on the forehead. Shocked silence.)

Jesus: Really, mother, sometimes you can be impossible.

The White Album, which came out shortly after my fourteenth birthday, was a particular embarrassment. I was extremely prudish at this stage, though my prudishness was of a particular kind. It was a matter of social context. I could listen to dubious lyrics on the White Album perfectly calmly, though with disapproval, as long as neither parent was around. My mother’s presence, even if she was moving in and out of the sitting-room with other things on her mind, would make me nervous, and Dad’s presence brought on a much more intense agitation. So it was only the conjunction of all three elements that was unbearable: the offensive record, the paternal presence and the confused son. I had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but it stuck in my throat. I could no longer be a child and had little idea of how to be an adult, but adolescence was the role, of the three, that I found hardest to inhabit. I disliked surliness as a characteristic, and it repelled me just as much when it was my own. All this had little to do with puberty as a physical fact, news of which reached my body rather later.

My solution was as desperate as I felt the problem to be. As the offending moment of the White Album approached, I would walk casually over to the radiogram and either turn the volume dial all the way down or lift the needle from the record. Turning the volume down worked well enough for scandalous individual moments, such as the cursing of Sir Walter Raleigh (‘he was such a stupid git’) on ‘I’m So Tired’, but lifting the stylus out of the compromising groove was called for when the outrage lasted for longer than a few seconds, as it did for instance on ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’. I cursed the Beatles in my turn (without using bad language) for their disobligingness in leaving no visible division between tracks, selfishly advancing their credentials as makers of a unified artwork and ignoring the needs of those who might want to skip the needle lightly across a trench of filth. It was difficult to guess exactly where to put down the needle again. It might happen that the upsetting lyrics sounded out all over again, if I’d underestimated the distance, so it was better to play safe.

The result was that I’d end up skipping whole tracks that had done nothing wrong, so it seemed better to revert to the volume-down method of censorship. I would sit on a patchwork leather pouffe (for yes, we followed trends) near the radiogram until I could hear, from the tiny unamplified sound made by the needle, that we had safely come to the end of ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ or ‘Sexy Sadie’. Would I have been less vigilant if I had known that ‘Sexy Sadie’ was originally called ‘Maharishi’, and was Lennon’s bitter farewell to the guru he’d outgrown, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi? Probably not.

I hate to think what my parents felt about my purity campaign focussed on the White Album, my attempt to make the two-LP set live up to its name (a name that didn’t appear anywhere on the cover or label). No-one ever said anything about it, which was probably for the best. I don’t think I was making a cry for help but something a little more contradictory, a cry to be left alone, not to be required to think about certain things.

Early and mid-period Beatles were genuinely things the whole family could enjoy, a category that seems stable until one day it’s gone. Late Beatles were already divisive, opening up a rift between us or perhaps just a rift in me. Then there came a point when we would have lost face if Dad liked any of our chosen music, though he was always waiting for us to come around to his choices, just as he assumed that in due course we would abandon Monty Python and join him in front of Dad’s Army.

If we didn’t want to share the experience of music then it followed that we needed our own means of mechanical reproduction.

By the time the Mothers of Invention released Over-Nite Sensation in 1973, my brothers and I had a record player of our own and could shut ourselves safely away in our bedrooms to be dazzled by the toxic jewels of the counterculture. In the years between 1960 and 1981 there was a holiday home by the seaside on Anglesey, and it was there that Tim and I listened in shock and wonder to the album, which I had bought in Bangor’s only forward-looking record shop.

My hands went instinctively in such premises to the racks labelled New Wave & Progressive (that’s the old New Wave, of course, not the one that succeeded punk). I was an anti-connoisseur of most popular music. Dance music, in particular, I didn’t understand at all. Music was to be listened to in stillness, with a little tapping of the foot if there was no avoiding it. Both feet might be called on in the case of polyrhythms.

It seems very plausible that we kept Matthew out of the room, theoretically to protect his innocence but really to reinforce our feeling of being a corrupt secret society. Almost every lyric on the album was filthy in a way that left the Beatles in the dust. Sometimes the words were witty, like these from ‘Camarillo Brillo’: ‘She stripped away / her rancid poncho / An’ laid out naked by the door / We did it till we were un-concho / An’ it was useless any more …’ But usually not.

The doors in the house had 1930s-style locks which only worked from the inside, little depressed recesses about the size of a thumb that could be slid across to engage a catch. We were safely locked in. Dad tried the door and when it failed to yield he gave the knob a theatrical rattling. ‘Tim? Adam? What are you doing in there?’ We weren’t doing anything – we weren’t smoking cigarettes, for instance, let alone dope. We were giggling at smut. But by great good fortune Dad entered the room just at the point when Frank Zappa’s relentless campaign of obscenity was taking a break. It was the long fade-out on a disgraceful song called ‘Dinah-Moe Humm’, in which the song’s narrator – which doesn’t seem the right word – accepts a bet of forty dollars from a defiantly unresponsive woman that he won’t be able to give her an orgasm. She (the Dinah-Moe Humm of the title) has in turn bet her sister, also present, an unspecified number of dollars that she (D-M H) can prove that men are scum. The whole song glories in its woeful crassness. The only lyric I could make any sort of claim for is ‘Kiss my aura, Dora – it’s real angora’. Not Cole Porter, to be sure, but creditable in the cultural context.

The song winds down at last from its disgraceful efforts, with Zappa crooning smugly ‘Dinah-Moe … and a Dinah-Moe’ on a long fade-out. This was the point at which Dad entered the room. The air must have been awash with late-adolescent relief, as well as a trace of our disappointment that no showdown had taken place. Matter and anti-matter had come within a micron of achieving each other’s destruction. Our buried hunger for confrontation had been thwarted, and the puritan had entered the room just as the smut-hound was leaving. They hadn’t recognized each other.

Even Dad’s canny forensic nose couldn’t reconstruct the outrage he had just missed. He joined in with the song on its slow fade-out, murmuring ‘Dinah-Moe … Dinah-Moe’ in his turn and nodding his head in time. As the track finished he conceded that the song had ‘got something’, then left without fuss.

It’s a shame he didn’t stay for the next track, ‘Montana’, the last on the album, with its daffy lyrics about making a fortune from raising dental floss. (It added to the song’s amusement value that in 1973, along with most of our compatriots, we had no idea what dental floss was, what benefits it was supposed to confer.) This at last was filth-free, close to family entertainment – if it hadn’t been, of course, some instinct would have led Dad to stay and we would have had that longed-for, long-avoided barney after all.

Would we have listened to Over-Nite Sensation so much if Dad’s values hadn’t been there in the background, begging to be affronted? Yes, probably, since in those days an album was quite an investment. A new record was something to be listened to intensively. The lurking suspicion that you had wasted your money was no excuse for tucking it away behind something you liked better. A new album must have pride of place on the turntable, played over and over again until it wore a groove in your mind whether you liked it or not.

Now I’m going to pull back and take a broader view of this theme of differences of musical taste, somehow sexually charged, between the generations in the 1960s and ’70s. Putting it another way, I’m going to lean on this theme until it suddenly gives way, rather as engineers test a structural element for tensile and compressive strength by subjecting it to increasingly powerful forces. The pioneer in this field is the Kirkcaldy Testing Works, now a museum on Central Street, Southwark (it opens to the public on the first Sunday of the month). The main testing machine at the museum is close to fifty feet long and weighs more than a hundred tons, so massive in fact that it was installed first, with the works then built round it. I’ll be working on a smaller scale.

The backing vocals on Over-Nite Sensation were by Zappa’s standards both elaborate and well-sung. Normally such vocal tracks on Mothers of Invention records were done in-house, with band members contributing cheerfully raucous falsetto. This was the equivalent in sound of the matter-of-fact dowdy cross-dressing of the Monty Python troupe, hardly intended to convince or confuse.

Even when Zappa recruited a pair of vocalists who had previously sung mellifluously enough with The Turtles, Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, the results were on the scrappy side. Since Zappa was such a perfectionist about other aspects of performance, this must have been the way he liked it. The pair of ex-Turtles were billed as ‘The Phlorescent Leech & Eddie’ (later ‘Flo & Eddie’), not so much a musical development as a legal requirement, since they had signed away the right to put their real names on marquees or album covers. It was legitimate for them to be credited in the small print.

If Dad and I had unstable layers in our sexual ideology at this time, areas of painful inconsistency, which we may not have admitted to ourselves, then perhaps the same was true of Frank Zappa also, however fierce his commitment to a cynicism as rancid as the lady’s poncho in ‘Camarillo Brillo’. The Mothers of Invention catalogue is defiantly short on the love song, so much a staple of popular music that popular music could hardly exist without it. Even song titles – ‘My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama’, ‘Penis Dimension’, ‘Uncle Meat’, ‘Penguin in Bondage’ – seem to jeer or snarl.

Zappa includes wholesome feelings only to travesty them, and yet he can’t seem to leave them alone. There comes a time when even the most sympathetic listener must start to doubt his bad faith. A year or two before Over-Nite Sensation the Mothers released, and I bought, a live album called Fillmore East – June 1971. I was baffled by the grubby artwork, not realizing (never having seen a bootleg disc) that this authorized recording was pretending to be one. It’s the last record I remember having to listen to on the sitting-room stereogram at Gray’s Inn, before the first tentative step towards the privatization of music represented by the record player in the bedroom. Up to this point music had been social and shared, for better or worse, but now it became individual, or conspiratorial, as a matter of course, and any overlap between listening groups became problematic.

The only music of mine that I remember Dad being unable to stand, even when played at low volume as far away from him as the small size of the Anglesey house would allow, was Steve Reich’s Drumming. He said he couldn’t think or do any work while it was playing. It disrupted analytical brain function at an almost neurological level. It’s possible that Reich would be pleased with this experimental result.

Much of the material on Fillmore East – June 1971 is continuous with its predecessor 200 Motels, meaning that the obscenity is wearing and relentless, but Zappa is too much of a showman to stake everything on the sourly grubby. So to balance ‘Bwana Dik’ (sample lines: ‘My dick is a Harley / You kick it to start’) comes the Turtles’ ‘Happy Together’, played for laughs by the original vocalists, Kaylan and Volman, but still offering the sweetness of a pop tune and a couple of choruses sung a cappella. The album ends with a Zappa original, ‘Tears Began To Fall’, whose up-tempo jauntiness is at odds with the self-pitying lyrics: ‘Tears began to fall and fall and fall / Down the shirt / ’Cause I feel so hurt / Since my baby drove away …’

One version of the lyrics available on the Internet gives the trajectory of those tears as ‘down the church’, but although being left at the altar is a hardy trope of the heartbroken ballad, I go with ‘shirt’, which makes better sense and even rhymes. The poor sap is so pole-axed by sorrow that he doesn’t have the nous to wipe his eyes.

How many times can you parody sentiment before you admit that it affects you? A whole lot of times, if you’re Frank Zappa. In 1968 he released an entire album of doo-wop, Cruisin’ with Ruben and the Jets, which may have been poking fun (at a genre long out of fashion, and what’s the point of that?) but also committed to vinyl some of the earliest songs he had written. On Chunga’s Revenge the most attractive music is the instrumental ‘Twenty Small Cigars’, but the most beguiling song is certainly ‘Sharleena’, expressing the emotions of another goofy dude amazed to be deserted by a woman, asking her friends for news of her and crooning in pre-feminist cluelessness that he would be ‘so delighted’ if they ‘sent her back’ to him. Just as Fillmore East was a pseudo-bootleg, ‘Sharleena’ is a pseudo-parody, really just a homage in denial about its own sincerity.

I realize that conversations between Dad and Frank Zappa, who never met, were never likely to be intimate or sparkling, but knowing what I know now I feel I could have steered them onto safe territory. Dad may not have been a fan of doo-wop as such, but he was mad keen on the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers, vocal groups of the previous period who had a certain amount of influence on the genre.

Male vocals are one of the genre requirements of doo-wop (along with nonsense lyrics, close harmony and the prominence of falsetto), so it could be taken as a step away from the disputed territory of parody and pastiche for Zappa to hire women to sing on Over-Nite Sensation. But I’m not sure it worked out that way.

The singers booked weren’t exactly small time. They were the Ikettes, Ike Turner’s backing singers, and Tina Turner was part of the package. The vocal parts were tricky and took time to master. She may not have been the quickest learner (compared to Linda Sims and Debbie Wilson), but Tina was proud of her work on these tracks and wanted Ike to hear them.

He wasn’t impressed, asking ‘What is this shit?’, and took the Ikettes’ name off the album credits. Ike Turner’s reputation hasn’t exactly soared over the years, and it seems uncontroversial to say he was not the helpmeet and business manager most people would choose.

His negotiating position when approached by Zappa was strange in itself, since he didn’t want the singers paid more than $25 a track. Most negotiators with their eye on profit stipulate a floor rather than a ceiling to the auction, but he clearly considered it important to keep Tina’s status in the marketplace low, throwing her in as a bonus with the backing singers who were presumably recruited in the first place to back her. The deal between Turner and Zappa, Ike and Frank, was a strange confluence of negativity. A businessman who didn’t want his wife to know her true worth was signing a contract with another who prided himself on his cheapness in everything. Zappa aimed with the help of a world-class vocalist, her services acquired well below market rates, to give vocal depth and lustre to songs about the low inherent value of women, though this was not of course what I heard in 1973.

Danger! The heavy rhetorical superstructure is bringing this conceit close to collapse. It’s all going a bit Tay Bridge. Time to underpin the whole ramshackle edifice with stanchions of properly reinforced personal material.

If Dad had confronted me, or us, with this scatological wallowing, pointing out how sickening it was, with its reliance on our complicity in its degradation of women, what would I, or we, have said? Never mind that he lacked a feminist vocabulary. He was by generation a sexist but hardly misogynistic. Family life didn’t require him to show his ideological colours more clearly by calling on him to shape the future of a female child – there are adjustments that fathers without daughters don’t have to make. The sensible thing would have been to play for time, pointing out that the two of the Mothers’ albums from the previous year, Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo, came as close to big-band revivalism as avant-garde progressive rock could reasonably be expected to get.

Then I would probably have said, ‘You just don’t get it,’ delivered with an attempt at scornful finality – so much easier to pronounce, as a sentence, than its more truthful cousins, I just don’t get it. I don’t get how free speech and censorship can both be so … nasty. If I didn’t want to be protected, then it was a mystery how I was going to avoid being degraded myself.

When arguments of this sort loomed with Dad I held tight to my trump card, which was probably why relatively few of them were fully played out. Dad had an acute tactical sense of when an opponent had a secret weapon, so that it might be wise to hold his fire. And what was my secret weapon? Only that Dad had a copy of The Godfather on the bookshelves in his study, which fell open at a grotesquely sexual passage on page 26. Cheap paperbacks blab, they spill every secret. Only a respectable quality of binding keeps its counsel, discreet about which pages have been most urgently consulted, exactly where the reader’s lowest self has been worked on. I was armed against any attack from Dad. Let him who is without smut cast the first stone.

I could imagine arraigning Dad in some sort of family tribunal.

Mars-Jones Jr: Perhaps the clerk of the court will be good enough to read aloud the passage marked. There by my thumb. Speak up, man! You’re mumbling.

‘Her hand closed around an enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle.

It pulsated in her hand like an animal and almost weeping with grateful ecstasy she pointed it into her own wet, turgid flesh.’

Prisoner in the dock, you there, judge of first instance – Is that something you would wish your cleaning lady to read? I hardly think so. Small wonder you are unable to meet my eye. Yet you left it in plain sight on your bookshelves, where it might cause any amount of distress to impressionable young people, tender-minded homosexuals among them, who might stumble upon it. I put it to you, judge in the dock, that you are no more than a whited sepulchre, yea a whited sepulchre, full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness …

For all I know, Dad had the same conflicted feelings about passages like that as I did about pages from Burroughs and Genet, which disgusted me but gave me a jolt of nihilistic arousal just the same. If we’d had that confrontation I was so well armed against, he might have admitted that this was his objection to the availability of pornography, not the fear that Psychopathia Sexualis might be bought by the lower orders from station bookstalls but the fear that he might buy something viler than The Godfather himself. Before this conversation could take place, of course, he would have had to start cultivating the habit of admitting doubts and vulnerabilities.

I had unwittingly bought an album to which Tina Turner and the Ikettes contributed backing vocals, but I wasn’t yet ready to buy actual black music – my breakthrough came at long last with Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up’ in 1977. Can it really be true that Dad was more open to black music than I was as a teenager? There’s a certain amount of evidence to support the suggestion, and in our family we’re crazy for evidence. We can’t get enough of it, either to strengthen our hand or to inform ourselves about the high cards the opposition is likely to play.

Dad bought only two singles in 1968 and both of them were MOBO, as it’s called now, Music Of Black Origin. In fact they book-ended the range of what the culture had to offer at the time. There was The Edwin Hawkins Singers’ ‘O Happy Day’, gospel at its most submissive and serene. And there was Pigmeat Markham’s raucous novelty record ‘Here Come The Judge’. I thought ‘O Happy Day’ was soupy, and I was not the one in the family who habitually ordered soup. I thought ‘Here Come The Judge’ was infantile, and I was embarrassed that Dad got so much pleasure from it (‘This judge is hip and that ain’t all / He’ll give you time if you’re big or small’).

Pigmeat Markham was as much a comedian as a musician, almost a vaudeville act insisting on a bygone stereotype – it was only a few years since he had been appearing at the Apollo blacked-up, with his lips painted white. Of course Dad didn’t pay attention to the racial angle. ‘Here Come The Judge’ was cashing in on the popularity of Markham’s appearances on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. And naturally it was the catch-phrase itself that appealed to Dad.

For a while he used the song as his theme tune, entering a room (‘Here Come the Judge, Here Come the Judge’) to his own accompaniment of rhythmic speech. It seemed a bit amateur, somehow, even self-defeating. The Queen doesn’t blow her own trumpet. She has heralds for that. Dad was a one-man band.

Gloriously, we had the last laugh. We listened to the B-side, billed as ‘Here Come The Judge (Part 2)’, which amounted to an extended smutty joke of exactly the sort that Dad hated. A defendant is up in front of the Judge on a charge of indecent exposure. Eventually it turns out that he has twenty-seven children. The case is dismissed by the Judge on the basis that the defendant hasn’t had time to put his pants on. We knew how appalled Dad would be if he realized what he’d subsidized with his six-and-eightpence.

So we had the last laugh as far as ‘Here Come The Judge’ went. Unfortunately Dad had the laugh after that. The song’s place in the history of popular music has been reassessed, and it’s now sometimes described as the first rap record. Oh God. It’s official. Dad was ahead of his time, while I was barely keeping up with mine.

When for example a record like Dave and Ansell Collins’ ‘Double Barrel’ made an appearance on Top of the Pops, I was sincerely mystified, waiting for an actual song to appear, something properly equipped with verses and chorus. Lyrics too, please. It didn’t occur to me that a groove might be enough in itself, more than enough – but now I’ve redoubled the fogey factor just when I was trying to make it go away. I should just punch the Gieseking button on the juke-box one more time, and give my rocking chair a stately nudge.

The counterculture embraced sleaziness pretty much whole-heartedly, but there were things in it that helped me just the same. Tim was more adventurous than me, a little more than can be accounted for simply by the twenty-month age difference. He had been given tickets to a preview of Flesh while queuing with a girlfriend to see Klute. Flesh! Girlfriend! Klute! He was seizing the day, seizing both the day and the night.

He also kept various underground magazines in the little chest of drawers between our beds in the attic of the Gray’s Inn flat, through which I would guiltily rummage. In one of them there was a strip cartoon of two men in bed together. They weren’t getting up to anything, except amusing each other by reading aloud from Dr David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, published in 1969.

I knew about this book without having read it, making paranoiac use of my peripheral vision, flickering towards a headline and flinching away (still perhaps the perceptual mode of the closeted teenager, unless the Internet has made it obsolete) to absorb its dismal message from the attendant newspaper coverage. David Reuben was a doctor, and if he said that public sex was the supreme expression of attraction between men, and that quarrels between cohabiting men had a bitchiness beyond anything known in the normal world, who was I to doubt it?

I absolutely did not want to explore my sexuality, even before Dr Reuben told me that it was a territory of undifferentiated debasement.

The men in the cartoon, though, with their long hair and narrow chests, had a different reaction. When they had reached their favourite bit (‘homosexual encounters are always about the penis, never the person’), the biggest joke in the whole hilarious book, they laid it aside and moved into a tender embrace. That stayed with me as an image, bigotry refuted with a smooch.

I wonder if the echo of Dante’s Paolo and Francesca was intentional, with the morality reversed. Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante. That day we read no more … In Paolo and Francesca’s case a book inflamed adulterous desire, but for Mike and Ralph (to give them names) a single kiss was enough to quench the calumny of print.

I hadn’t actually read Dante, but was familiar with the passage by way of an eccentric source. Tim and I got a kick out of reading The Plain Truth, an eccentric religious magazine to which Dad subscribed. Possibly ‘subscribed’ is too active a verb, failing to convey his helpless struggles to escape the flypaper of a fantastically adhesive mailing list.

The Plain Truth once ran an article deploring sexual explicitness in literature, in which Canto V of the Inferno was cited as an example of good practice. No specifics of the adulterous act, something more along the lines of three tactful dots on the page or a cinematic fade, with no detail to pass on arousal by contagion. Hard to see, all the same, how this particular strategy, however admirable in its tact, could be rolled out across modern culture, displacing The Godfather and any number of other books from their places on the shelf.

There was particular pleasure, for disaffected sons leafing through their father’s copies of The Plain Truth, in reading the columns written by its founder’s son, Garner Ted Armstrong. What a toady to follow in the moralizing trudge of his father’s footsteps! Except that as time went by there was trouble in televangelist heaven, with Garner Ted described by his father as being ‘in the bonds of Satan’ and relieved of his role in the church. There were allegations of adultery, gambling, even assaulting the stewardess of his personal plane.

Dad didn’t have a radio station or a magazine to promote his views, but he didn’t go short of lionizing. The only accolade a judge is unlikely to receive in court is an actual ovation. Dad hungered for that, and luckily there were opportunities to put himself in applause’s way. He had been playing the guitar since his teens, and sometime in the 1930s had made a non-commercial recording, with a band, of a tune he had written himself (‘Fellow Take the Floor’). He sang as well as played. The 78-rpm record was still in his possession, though his tenor voice, surprising light in his young days before his vocal cords developed the authority necessary to command a court, hardly made its way through the surface noise and scratches.

Twice during the 1970s he put on a show in Gray’s Inn Hall after dinner, to an audience that included students as well as his fellow benchers. The programme was announced as ‘Master Mars-Jones Makes Music’, and Dad played a handful of pieces by Sor and Tárrega. He put in a certain amount of practice before the show. A certain amount, but perhaps not enough.

The drawback about having a career in a hierarchical profession (and actually living in its parochial stronghold), in terms of self-awareness, is that the hierarchical element, being constant, becomes invisible. It was never on the cards that he would be booed or slow-handclapped by the company of colleagues, but an acute ear for the timbre of applause might have detected something perfunctory and even resentful about it. Sheila to her sorrow, inconspicuous in the audience, saw and heard a student give a little shake of the head and murmur to a neighbour, ‘power mad’.

The concert was successful enough for Dad to repeat it the following year, but on this occasion the response was more perfunctory, the rapture very moderate. Dad was presenting himself, after all, not as a guitarist among others but as a guitar-playing judge. This was essentially a novelty act, and novelty dare not risk repeating itself. He would have needed to raise the stakes somehow, to swap his Spanish guitar for a more crowd-pleasing instrument, assaulting the crowd with shards of feedback or pouring lighter fuel, to cries of alarm, onto his beloved vintage Gibson, which though not electrified from birth had been fitted with a pick-up in its early adulthood.

On the bench, the unstuffiness of an amateur guitarist was a more dependable weapon. One of Dad’s proudest moments presented itself during a case involving some Hendrix tapes that had been remastered for posthumous release. I think the original bassist and drummer (who would be Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell) were suing for a share of royalties on the basis that they had been part of the recorded performance, co-creators who couldn’t be cut out of the financial side of things just because a later decision had been taken to get other musicians to redo their parts. At one point a barrister started to explain to him the function of a particular piece of kit, and Dad (mindful of the ubiquitous myth of the judge as being all at sea in the modern world) was able to interrupt him with a plausibly tetchy ‘I know perfectly well what a wah-wah pedal is!’ It was no bluff – he had bought one for Matthew the previous Christmas.

It wasn’t clear that Dad admired Hendrix’s playing. He didn’t have much time for gadgetry or electronics. Hendrix would certainly never depose Django Reinhardt, let alone Segovia, in his personal pantheon. He admired the way Django overcame the disadvantage (to put it mildly) of having two fingers paralysed as a result of a caravan fire when he was eighteen.

Dad’s tip for the future of a truly popular music was always the return of that swinging, big-band sound. Nevertheless he had admiration and sympathy for singer-songwriters, creators as well as performers, even if he would pause by the television during Top of the Pops just long enough to mark Kris Kristofferson or John Denver down for using a ‘capo’, which allowed them to transpose music without refingering. According to Dad this was a cheat, and the sure sign of the dabbler. If I’d known more at the time about musical history I might have pointed out that the ‘capotasto’ was already in use early in the seventeenth century, with the word itself attested from 1640, so that this cheat’s device can claim to be older than the guitar in its modern form – but perhaps on the whole it’s a good thing that I didn’t.

He presided over one significant case, O’Sullivan & Another v. Management Agency & Music Ltd & Others (1982), in which a downtrodden singer-songwriter took on his oppressive management company. It seemed to Dad that Gilbert O’Sullivan’s innocence had not just been taken advantage of by MAM Ltd but positively mocked. At one point in early 1974, O’Sullivan was advised by his manager, Gordon Mills, that he must leave the country at once for tax reasons. He went to Portugal, a poor choice since revolution broke out there almost at once. He took refuge successively in Spain, Italy, Spain again and finally Holland. In October he was told it was safe to return to British soil. How much had these complicated manoeuvres saved him? Not a penny. They were pushing him around in the most obvious way, pushing him around the map.

It had been shrewd of O’Sullivan to project a gormless image at the start of his career – like an overgrown Bash Street Kid with his flat cap, pudding-basin haircut and long grey shorts. It had certainly got him noticed. But that was as far as his shrewdness went. He had signed a management contract without taking independent advice, and was being exploited in any number of ways. He was being paid a very modest allowance even after becoming a successful recording artist. For a long time he idolized Gordon Mills, occasionally even acting as babysitter for his daughter Clair, whose name he commemorated in one of his best-selling songs. An emotional dependence made him slow to act on his suspicions even when evidence of wrongdoing began to pile up around him.

The question for the judge was whether it was right to compensate this innocent for his self-inflicted financial wounds. He had signed a contract, and if he was foolish enough not to read it or ask for it to be assessed by a qualified third party then you could argue that he had forfeited the right to any intervention by the law. It could almost be a proverb: the tightrope walker who cuts up his safety net in order to make a string vest should not be surprised to hit the ground with great force.

O’Sullivan couldn’t get out of his obligations as neatly as a much cannier musician, Arthur Lee of the 1960s’ San Francisco group Love, who was able to flourish his birth certificate and instantly invalidate the contract he had signed as a minor.

All that seemed to invalidate Gilbert O’Sullivan’s contract was its monstrous unfairness, which doesn’t necessarily have legal force. An agreed set of operations must be carried out before a resolution can be reached. A judge is a sort of weaver bird, picking through the twigs of statute and precedent offered by the advocates for the parties involved, masticating them intellectually then gluing them together to build the nest in which he will lay the egg of his judgment.

The aspect of the law which seeks to ‘mitigate the rigour’ of common law is equity, and this was the paper in his Bar Finals that had won Dad his highest marks. As far as I understand it, which is hardly at all, common law and equity are like the complementary cerebral hemispheres of legal decision-making, with right-brain equity continually modifying the inhumanely precise discriminations of left-brain common law.

For his judgment in O’Sullivan & Another v. Management Agency & Music Ltd & Others Dad relied heavily on Lord Denning’s codification, in Lloyds Bank Ltd v. Bundy (1974, reported 1975), of the various exceptions to the rule that signatories to a contract can’t just walk away.

There are cases in our books in which the courts will set aside a contract … when the parties have not met on equal terms – when the one is so strong in bargaining power and the other so weak – that as a matter of common fairness, it is not right that the strong should be allowed to push the weak to the wall.

This seems both promising and slightly empty. When does the individual ever meet an institution on equal terms? Whether it’s a customer approaching a bank or a writer signing up with a publisher, bargaining power is so unevenly distributed that the word ‘power’ itself seems comical, even if this crazy-golf playing field goes by the name of ‘the ordinary interplay of forces’.

Nevertheless Denning proposed that there was such a thing as an ‘unconscionable’ transaction. An individual so placed as to be in need of special care and protection might in the event be exploited by stronger agencies. Undue influence might be a consideration in deciding whether this was so. He was careful to stipulate that undue influence was possible without active wrongdoing. Self-interest was enough. In deciding whether a transaction was unconscionable it would be relevant to determine whether independent advice had been sought. Independent advice can’t guarantee a balanced transaction, but the lack of it offers unfairness an opportunity.

It was a poignant moment to be recapitulating Denning’s defence of the individual against institutional pressure. The day Mars-Jones J gave reasons for his judgment in O’Sullivan & Another v. Management Agency & Music Ltd & Others, 22 July 1982, was only a week or so before the near-legendary Denning’s own last day in court. He had announced his retirement as Master of the Rolls, not exactly a voluntary departure from office but a political necessity after the Society of Black Lawyers took exception to questionable assertions in his book What Next in the Law. There was no question of his retirement going unmarked. He made a farewell speech to a court full to bursting with his colleagues (there were three hundred of them). A historic stepping-down, ripe in honours, with a hint of slow-motion defenestration.

Despite his reputation as the people’s judge, Denning faced two ways. He was both liberal and illiberal. Perhaps the office has this Janus element inherent in it, there being no consistent way of resolving the conflict between individual rights and the imperatives of polity.

That’s why I have my doubts about Geoffrey Robertson’s full-throated paean to Dad (‘a red-robed angel of mercy’) in The Justice Game, however much I welcome it personally. As he sees it:

A, B and C were free, not as a result of their own courage (which was a precondition) or of their campaign (which gave them courage, but did not help the courtroom battle): they owed their release to a judge robustly indifferent to the State. Other judges, it is true, might not have recognized the oppressiveness of the indictment, or have called a halt to the case in the same way or at all. But for an era which is remembered for wrongful convictions and the liberties taken by the security services, the action of Mars-Jones is worth remembering, and worth celebrating. It says something for a system when the State, with all its power bent on conviction, cannot intimidate the courts or make prosecutors flinch from the duties of fairness.

I feel the need of a ‘necessarily’ before ‘intimidate’ in that last sentence, at the risk of taking some of the shine off it.

It’s true that Denning could be very concerned with the protection of ordinary citizens, but he was also capable of arguing (in 1980) against those imprisoned for the Birmingham pub bombings being allowed to challenge their convictions. His reasoning was that if an appeal failed, a lot of money had been wasted, while if it succeeded,

it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous … That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.’

No mention of individual rights accompanied either outcome. There was just a calculation of the damage done to the public balance-sheet and the public confidence. It would be bad for the national mood if malpractice was exposed – but this was not Dad’s view in matters of public probity.

By the same ignoble logic, it would have been wrong to prosecute the Obscene Publications Squad in 1976, since the proceedings would reveal they had been bought by the smut-merchants they were paid to keep down. It was as if rats had taken over the board of Rentokil and replaced the poison in traps across the country with multivitamins. This news might very well upset the company’s shareholders, but how was that an excuse for keeping them in the dark?

When giving judgment in O’Sullivan & Another v. Management Agency & Music Ltd & Others, Mars-Jones J relied on Lord Denning for the chords (so to speak), but he had to make sure the tune of this particular case fitted them. In what sense was Raymond O’Sullivan, professionally known as Gilbert O’Sullivan, ‘an individual so placed as to be in need of special care and protection’? (There exists no general duty of care, and no general principle of enforceable fairness, just a special dispensation in exceptional circumstances.) A standard type of this individual would be the ‘expectant heir’, someone who has assets he or she is unable to realize in time of need, but can transfer to someone else – greatly below their eventual value, as it may be – in exchange for ready money. O’Sullivan’s talent as a writer qualified him as an expectant heir, entitled to be rescued from the consequences of his own decisions.

O’Sullivan was certainly unworldly, happy just to be making music, to be selling records, to be getting a reputation. He was given £10 a week spending money and lived in a cottage on the grounds of a substantial property owned by his manager. Somewhere in all this lurks the idea that Gilbert O’Sullivan was the child-man of his early image-making, not yet ready for long trousers, technically old enough to sign a contract but still a minor in psychological terms. He was being treated more like a ward of court than an autonomous adult.

The Bash Street Kid image actually seemed to suit him, certainly in terms of his bony face, better than the approximation to a hunky look that followed it. Fluffed-out hair doesn’t work for everyone. He alternated unconvincingly between cosy jumpers and shirts open to the waist. No-one seemed to know if he was cuddly or sexy or not much of either, as he went through the available permutations of styling.

Having determined that the contracts should be put aside as void and unenforceable, Mars-Jones J directed that the master recordings be delivered to the plaintiff. Then he assessed the appropriate damages, and here he was in danger of going too far. He had already said that O’Sullivan had been ‘fleeced’ by Gordon Mills. Now he ruled that MAM should pay back all the profit made from the singer and his songs, with compound interest. A. J. Bateson QC, counsel for the plaintiffs, referred him to a ruling of Lord Denning’s from 1975 (it’s Wallersteiner v. Moir, if you’re hungry for a reference) in which he stated that ‘in equity, interest is never awarded by way of punishment. Equity awards it whenever money is misused by an executor or a trustee or anyone else in a fiduciary position …’ Mars-Jones J accepted this, saying, ‘I have found there was a fiduciary relationship here’.

He seemed to be equating a management company with a trustee, who would not be entitled to profit from the monies he handled. MAM, though, was in business to make money from the representation of its clients (who included Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck). Mars-Jones J’s directions did not recognize any legal element of profit. If the damages awarded weren’t explicitly punitive, it wasn’t easy to understand them in any other spirit.

N. A. Strauss, representing the First to Fifth Defendants, tried to protest: ‘My Lord, I accept that your Lordship has jurisdiction to order interest on that basis, but I submit that it is inappropriate in the circumstances …’

He tried to spell out the flaw in the judge’s reasoning, but Mars-Jones J was, as he said, ‘not attracted’ by his proposition. He wouldn’t budge. After another couple of attempts, Mr Strauss could only say: ‘My Lord, I have made my submission. I do not think I can take the point any further.’

I can find some sympathy in my heart for Mr Strauss. When there was something Dad didn’t want to hear he could generate quite a force-field of negative interest. If he was ‘not attracted’ by a proposition there was a low hum in the air and the fitments began to rattle.

Mr Strauss’s argument would have to wait for a hearing in a higher court. In 1984 there was an appeal in O’Sullivan & Another v. Management Agency & Music Ltd & Others, heard before Lord Justices Waller, Dunn and Fox. In their representations the defendants, or the relevant lawyers, found fault with absolutely everything that had been decided in Dad’s court. That’s one advantage an appeal against judgment enjoys over a family argument – nothing is lost by saying ‘And another thing …’ They objected to the notion that there was a fiduciary relationship between Gilbert O’Sullivan and his manager, to the voicing of personal criticism, to the transfer not just of copyrights but of master tapes, and above all to the fixing of compound interest as the appropriate mechanism for returning MAM’s profits to the man who had generated them.

There was a certain amount of routine legal to and fro. Counsel for the plaintiffs proposed that the proper approach was that adopted in Peter Pan Manufacturing Corporation v. Corsets Silhouette Ltd [1964]. Counsel for the defendants felt rather strongly that the plaintiffs could not rely upon the support offered by Peter Pan Manufacturing Corporation v. Corsets Silhouette Ltd [1964].

The legal term for returning profits after the event is rather lovely. MAM was being required to ‘disgorge’ the money, a word that suggests a snake unhinging its jaws and yielding up some half-digested goat.

The disgorgement required of MAM was drastic. By making two changes to the system of repayment (factoring in past Corporation Tax and calculating simple rather than compound interest) the appellants sought to reduce the amount due by over four million pounds.

The original hearing had been long and intricate, the appeal brief but formidable in the intensity of its reasoning. The judge of first instance, sitting alone, had ruled that the contracts were void. The higher court was in effect an incandescent tube powered by three Lord Justices wired in parallel, legal luminaries whose individual wattage was already formidable. They disagreed with Mars-Jones J, defining the contracts as not void but voidable, being unenforceable so far as unperformed.

Sitting alone, like my father before me, I must huddle round the faint glow thrown by my little layman’s Anglepoise and struggle to make sense of the shapes I see. I take this to mean that a void contract – void ‘ab initio’ – would be one that could never have been performed. A voidable contract is one that can be set aside if its terms are not implemented, and this is the category to which the appeal judges decided Gilbert O’Sullivan’s agreements with Gordon Mills and MAM properly belonged. They could be set aside because the obligations laid on the defendants had not in fact been discharged.

The emphasis here seems to shift from an unconscionable contract (and one in which Mars-Jones J detected not just inequality of bargaining power but ‘plain, unvarnished deceit’) to one that was acceptably framed but defectively discharged. Even so, the effect was not to let Mills and MAM off the hook. The Lord Justices accepted that there was a fiduciary relationship, and that the defendants were in breach of it. They were therefore not entitled to profit by their wrongdoing. There was discussion about how amends might be made.

It turns out that you can’t have rescission without the possibility of restitutio in integrum. Translating roughly: there’s no point in saying a contract never happened unless you can restore the status quo as it was at the moment of signing. It’s meaningless to turn the clock back if everything has been changed by the contract itself.

The use of Latin in legal argument and judgment has been drastically reduced since 1982. The effect is to make the proceedings less opaque, but they will always be opaque to some extent by virtue of being governed by past decisions, and hinging on distinctions foreign to daily life.

A legal system based on precedent is a monument to creative rot, a sort of cultural compost heap dating back, notionally, I suppose, to the Conquest. Not everything rots down into principle at the same rate, so that the decisions of a Denning, say, can resist the process in the same way that eggshells and avocado stones do, retaining their integrity and withholding their nutrients from the rich millennial mulch of insight and vested interest.

Just as the terminology of the early 1980s now seems very stiff, so the language of earlier cases referred to during the appeal proceedings has an additional fustiness that can sometimes be beguiling. Dixon, CJ, in Alati v. Kruger (1955) refers to the disaffirmance rather than rescission of a contract.

Purely as a word, I prefer ‘disaffirmance’ to ‘rescission’ (which sounds like bad news you might hear at the dentist’s), and I’ve been disaffirming things like mad since I learned it, though made uneasy by not knowing if there’s a shade of meaning involved. Does it make a difference that Dixon was Chief Justice of Australia? I know Australian law derives in some way from English, but how does Australian precedent impinge on English case law? My ignorance seems to increase with every moment of enlightenment. I’ve written with more confidence about Japanese cinema than I do about English law.

I do feel qualified to assess rhetoric, and the award for the most stirring utterance of the appeal must go to Michael Miller, QC, for the plaintiffs, who said:

He who seeks equity must do equity. In the present case it is inequitable that the first plaintiff should seek to recover the whole profit made by the defendant companies as a result of the agreements, without being prepared to permit them reasonable remuneration for the very valuable services they have rendered in turning him from a relatively unknown song-writer to an internationally famous star.

(O’Sullivan had been working for the Post Office when he signed the contract.) Strongly put. What’s sauce for the plaintiff must be sauce for the defendant.

Or as Lord Wright put it in Spence v. Crawford (1939), ‘Though the defendant has been fraudulent, he must not be robbed, nor must the plaintiff be unjustly enriched, as he would be if he both got back what he had parted with and kept what he had received in return.’ Yet this is more or less what the court of first instance had ruled, and even on appeal the defendants were held to be entitled only to ‘a reasonable remuneration including a small profit element’. The underlying idea seems to be that someone who has been defrauded should sue for damages rather than relying on equity to make everything good. There’s a grey area here, though, since in equity the term ‘fraud’ embraces not only actual fraud but certain other forms of conduct falling below the standards demanded by equity. Conduct of this sort is known as ‘constructive’ fraud. One of the examples of such a fraud would be a transaction procured by undue influence, or where one party is in breach of a fiduciary duty to another. Exactly what was held to have been the case here.

The judgment in the lower court was neither upheld in toto, nor comprehensively overturned. Instead it was upheld in part and the judge’s order ‘varied’, with significant adjustments made to it. Mars-Jones J ‘fell into error’ when he accepted counsel’s argument about the appropriateness of compound interest. (Excepted from this were the secret deductions made by MAM (Music Publishing) Ltd from monies taken in Germany and New Zealand. It was right that these sums be repaid with compound interest.)

One of the cases referred to in the appeal was Erlanger v. New Sombrero Phosphate Co. (1878). There isn’t enough poetry in the law for me to risk leaving it out. Might that be a guano enterprise? The market value of birdshit has lessons for us all.

Dad would rather have had his order ‘varied’ than thrown out, I’m sure, but he can’t have enjoyed the experience. If I’ve battled through the case and the appeal in as much detail as I can manage, and with as much clarity, it’s partly to confront for my own benefit how different his world was from mine. In fantasy he would annex the world of books in his retirement. He also encouraged me to think of myself as a potential lawyer, but it isn’t so. My wheels grind differently, and my ego is hungry for a different food.

The case of O’Sullivan & Another v. Management Agency & Music Ltd & Others was a significant one, though it hardly dominated the headlines. Dad would have listened respectfully to submissions made on behalf of a writer or an artist, but un-justice done to a musician, a performer moreover who wrote his own material, somehow struck him more forcibly and may have been part of what caused him to ‘fall into error’.

Possibly there was an element of spurious underdog identification at work. Gilbert O’Sullivan had arrived in London by way of Waterford and Swindon, Dad by way of Llansannan and Aberystwyth. They had both come from nothing. After the death of our neighbour Os(wald) Terry, Dad would reminisce about his own early life using the phrase ‘When I were a little lad …’ which had been Os’s trademark. Dad seemed not to realize that he was advertising the inauthenticity of his remembered struggles with the use of a borrowed tag, though I’m sure that Os picked it up somewhere too, just as the monologue of his we enjoyed so much as children, about Albert and the Lion, turned out to be Stanley Holloway’s really.

Counsel for the defendants were working hard during the appeal to argue down the large sums whose disgorgement had been ordered by the court of first instance. They stated their objection to the master tapes being returned to O’Sullivan, but concentrated their efforts, understandably, on arguments that could save money right away.

It may be that the real importance of O’Sullivan & Another v. Management Agency & Music Ltd & Others was the precedent it set in the matter of master tapes. An anomaly of the case seems to be that Gilbert O’Sullivan ended up in possession of these valuable items, though if he had taken independent legal advice and signed a much more advantageous contract he would have enjoyed no such benefit. This is more or less a technicality in the case itself, because O’Sullivan had since signed other contracts that meant he then yielded up the master tapes to other record companies, but perhaps it expanded the possibilities for others. A singer/songwriter in an oppressive contract who only stood to win back his copyrights might think twice, but the prospect of getting ownership of master tapes would exponentially increase the attractiveness of a lawsuit.

There were musicians who took their cue. Sting sued over inequitable contracts (before the appeal in O’Sullivan & Another v. Management Agency & Music Ltd & Others, I think), with Mars-Jones J presiding. This was in the early days of the soundbite as an art form, and I imagine Dad must have wished he had worked harder on a truly quotable dictum when he remarked, after the defendants had finally capitulated to Sting and settled, ‘This has been a very trying trial.’ Elton John also sued Dick James Music, though before a different judge.

In all this I am feeling my way, humiliated by an inability to distinguish the core issue from the contingent circumstances, the steak from the parsley garnish. It has been a Socratic process, to learn how much I don’t know, and I fully understand the feelings of the ancient Athenian citizenry, who might acknowledge that Socrates was a cultural treasure without equal, but would cross the road or remember a previous engagement rather than be drawn into dialogue with him.

From the dawn of pubescence if not before, my assigned role in the family was peacemaker, a not uncommon casting for a middle child, but Dad further characterized me as dreamy and unworldly, only too likely to be exploited by more savvy folk. Watching me as a child flitting from the piano keyboard to a book and the television, then back again, he would tell me that I had a butterfly brain. I wish I had had the wit to tell him I had something much more useful, a bee brain.

In many areas of life he simply ignored evidence that contradicted his fixed ideas, but this wasn’t one of them. After the moment in 1980 when he learned that I had a book contract with Faber for the book eventually titled Lantern Lecture, he never seriously questioned my judgement. Did I start riding a motorbike (in 1988) when I was too old to be classed as a boy racer, too young for it to qualify as a midlife crisis with handlebars? Dad was confident I’d ride safely. Did I venture into an unconventional family life (in 1991) by having a daughter with a friend? Dad was delighted. He would have preferred a grandson but was prepared to wait for a further instalment of this pleasing twist in the family saga. He didn’t imitate the ritual cry of his beloved Fred Flintstone – Yabba-dabba-doo! – but that may have been because he was too busy calling for champagne.

His earlier idea of me as dreamy simply fell to the ground, and he decided that I must have been planning the Faber coup more or less from the egg. Useless to say that good luck and social contacts – thank you, Rosemary Hill – had led me first of all to a magazine editor (Craig Raine of Quarto) and then, thanks to Craig’s urgings, to a publisher, with the ragbag of fact-based fictions that was pretty much all I’d ever attempted. My dreamy side was still there, though I took care to defend it behind intellectual barricades, topped with all the razor wire I could rustle up.

The problem area was my sexuality, something not touched on in that first book, since Dad had always had such a horror of men who were attracted to men. He was more than a standard-issue homophobe, not far from a homophobe’s homophobe. If there were Annual General Meetings of the Homophobia League then he would be an honoured guest if not keynote speaker, guaranteed any number of brief manly pats on the back.

Part of this was an unworldliness of his own. He was one of the very few judges of his day who hadn’t gone to public school. He had studied at St John’s, Cambridge, but only for a year after the end of his time at Aberystwyth. He didn’t enjoy talking about sex of any sort, and wasn’t comfortable when anyone else raised the subject.

It seems obvious that his metropolitan colleagues, once he had moved to London and started to practise as a barrister, were more relaxed, meaning more hypocritical, about such things, not unduly distressed when some of those funny people, who as everyone but Dad agreed could be highly entertaining, hairdressers and so on, were silly enough to get caught. Dad became every inch a Town Mouse, in his Church’s handmade shoes and bespoke suits, but in this one respect he reverted to Country Mouse type.

I only know of one person who tried to alert him to the unreliability of his ideas on the subject of homosexuality, and that was Ronald Waterhouse, a junior colleague who sometimes worked for Dad as a ‘devil’ in his days at the Bar, working informally on aspects of a complicated case and being paid directly by Dad.

Working with devils was an arrangement that suited Dad very well. Perhaps it was a way of buying in the raw analytical power he felt he lacked, the X-ray vision of the natural lawyer. It was an intensive but also convivial system, not exactly democratic but not quite formally structured either. They all worked hard, in bursts, and Dad napped hard too. (Napping wasn’t part of a devil’s job description.) If he was in court and it was a matter of preparing the next day’s material then he would have a nap after the afternoon session, before meeting the devil (or devils) for a drink and a briefing. They would meet again for dinner, when Dad would receive a progress report. Drinking at dinner would be moderate, by the standards prevailing. Dad would fix a deadline, perhaps for midnight, when the devil(s) would bring him comprehensively up to date. In the meantime Dad would have another nap.

I imagine all these lubricated parleys taking place in the Grosvenor Hotel, Chester, an institution I’ve never visited but one that seemed somehow to be Dad’s spiritual home. Perhaps as the hub of the Wales and Chester circuit in his glory days as a barrister, neither Wales nor London, it was where he had the most seductive combination of ease and prestige.

Dad was a great exponent of the Churchillian Nap, a form of refreshment that has since been rebranded the Power Nap or the Disco Nap. He felt that you should play fair with the god of sleep by getting into your pyjamas and sliding between the sheets even if you only aimed for the replenishment of five brain-charging minutes offline. When the late-night pressure was too relentless for him to risk another nap he would keep going on cigarettes, putting his head under the cold tap every half-hour or so if the nicotine alertness began to fade.

He smoked every step of the way to the bench, and when he was told to give the habit up in the 1970s had to learn a different pattern of working. His brain needed to acquire the ability to walk again without the crutch of a cigarette, and Dad’s solution was to move the intensity of his work life into a different sector of the day, not the late-late night but the early-early morning. He would set the clock for five or even four. When a long and complicated case was over he might still get up without fully waking and sleepwalk his way to his study, where Sheila would find him and coax him back to bed.

By suggesting to Dad that he was prejudiced, Ronald Waterhouse risked making an enemy who outranked him in a hierarchical profession, and also cutting off a useful stream of revenue. There’s no more efficient way of killing goodwill than letting a friend know he’s a bigot.

Of course he ‘wrapped it up a bit’, as advocates are always being urged to do … Bill, you have a bit of a bee in your bonnet about these people. They are not as you suppose them to be. Even so, this seems a case of File Under Moral Courage. I can’t think of another category that would fit it.

Ronald Waterhouse didn’t lose Dad’s allegiance, and later he became a judge himself. He’s perhaps best known for the painstaking inquiry he conducted, after his retirement, into the abuse of children in care in North Wales. There should be a special mention, though, for the question he asked during the proceedings against Ken Dodd for tax evasion in 1989. He asked, ‘What does £100,000 in a suitcase feel like?’ to which Dodd replied, unsatisfyingly to my mind, ‘The notes are very light, M’Lord.’

Dad didn’t forget that Ronald had tried to change his attitude, but he held on to the contested attitude as well as to the friendship with Ronald. He wasn’t ready to be influenced, to entertain new thoughts. As far as he was concerned the subject was as exempt from renegotiation as a birth certificate.

Did he have any personal experience of homosexuals and their ways? He was once, as a young man, on the receiving end of a clumsy pass, though it was more apocalyptic than that in the telling. Unfortunately he gave few details, and didn’t encourage questions. Any actual information value has disappeared under the build-up of competitively distorted versions Tim and I exchanged and found funny. Our final reworking went something like Wallah at the Club bought me a few drinks between chukkas. Seemed a nice enough chap till he tried to slide his filthy paw into my dhoti – laid the blighter out with a chota peg. (Sometimes ‘polo mallet’.) Quite where the Anglo-Indian colouring comes in I have no idea. The incident took place, I think, in Geneva before the War, though Dad never otherwise referred to being in Geneva. The fact that our version ends with violence isn’t part of the distortion. Dad said with a certain amount of righteousness that he had broken a bottle on the man’s head, as if no other form of RSVP was possible.

Dad wasn’t even sufficiently at ease with the existence of homosexuals to tell jokes about them. In fact he hated such jokes more than any other. Even an anti-gay joke gave perversion the oxygen of publicity, when by rights it should be smothered in the sulphur of oblivion.