Kid Gloves (5 page)

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'.