Monsters are often charming. The celebrated High Court judge William Mars-Jones was holding his retirement party at the Garrick Club when a young female guest, a family friend, asked “Uncle Bill” an innocent question about the law, gender and multiculturalism. He told her she had spoilt his party and must leave immediately. She was horrified and apologised for giving offence. “That,” he said, “is something you will have to live with for the rest of your life.”
This vignette captures nicely the mind, manners and marvellous theatricality of William Mars-Jones, father of the writer, Adam, and subject of his memoir, Kid Gloves. To say that Mars-Jones, junior, had a tricky relationship with his formidable, brilliant and mercurial father would be the lamest of clichés. Mars-Jones, a former Times writer, offers us a King Lear-like scenario: the father, wife dead, descends into dementia, while the three sons decide his fate. It’s Adam who (Cordelia-like) moves into his flat to care for his father, a shadow of his former self, spending most of his time listening to the radio.
So it’s a blessed relief to be navigated around the early life and times of the judge, public figure and family man who springs so vividly to life in these exquisitely written pages. From cases as unspeakably vile as the Moors murders to the fascinating story of an Ian Fleming plagiarism lawsuit, William Mars-Jones looms over the narrative like Dumbledore on acid: clever, cruel, funny, exasperating, moral, and never dull.
William Mars-Jones made many famous rulings. When Nezar Hindawi had tried to blow up an Israeli plane by planting a bomb in his pregnant girlfriend’s luggage, he gave him a record sentence of 45 years. He awarded David and Lucille White, a middle-aged Jamaican couple, substantial damages for what he described as “monstrous, wicked and shameful” police conduct. He was described as “fair but firm”.
One of his favourite cases when he was a barrister involved a client on a charge of drink-driving who proved unable to walk in a straight line. The client’s defence was that he suffered from Ménière’s disease, which affected his balance. An expert medical witness was called, Mars-Jones won the case, the driving licence was safe. That is, until the licence was rescinded on the basis that his client’s disease made him unfit to drive. No matter: Mars-Jones got another medical expert to certify that his client didn’t have Ménière’s disease.
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William’s long-suffering wife, Sheila, adored him, while being clear-eyed about his shortcomings. Lawyers can never admit liability. Adam has a party at their home in Gray’s Inn, which ends with a “birthday assault” from his father who pokes his son in the chest and knocks him over. As the guests troop out, party over, Sheila calls over the balcony: ‘It’s all right for you lot. You can leave — I have to live with it.”
The following morning, Adam tries what he knows is impossible: to defeat his father with rhetoric. Rather than what he calls “a non-apology, un-apology, anti-apology” approach, he decides that the best rhetorical move would be to refuse to accept an apology that he knows will never be given. His father, temporarily discombobulated, threatens to call the police and have his son thrown out. Finally, a victory is (sort of) won, when William sends Adam a letter which offers limited liability: a “specific apology but no general admission”.
The battles along the way are in preparation for what will be a major confrontation between father and son: Adam’s coming out as gay to a father who is an unapologetic homophobe. As Adam notes: “If Dad had been a bed and breakfast, he would certainly not have advertised himself as gay-friendly”. Once William has got over the shock, he does what he does best and tries to argue his son out of his sexual preferences. It’s a multi-pronged attack, and it’s hilarious: the Princely parallel, the Auntly Ambush, the Bisexual Fork, the Bisset Surprise. To give just a flavour: father argues that son can’t possibly be gay because he once got an erection when he watched a Jacqueline Bisset film.
Adam Mars-Jones’s prose can be camp and witty: “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”. On his father’s bigotry: “I missed the stamina of his prejudice.” There are a few local slips — the Cambridge University Library does have open stacks (it’s the Bodleian in Oxford that doesn’t) — and one major nuisance: the book does not have any chapter divisions or even section breaks. No chance of nipping out for a cup of tea, then, or reading just one more chapter before turning off the bedside light.
Memoirs of parents are often an act of revenge. There’s a moment in the book, after William Mars-Jones has died, when Adam realises that he didn’t provide the undertakers with a suitable outfit for his father to wear in his coffin. He is haunted by the idea of the sartorially minded judge, fastidious about bespoke double-breasted suits, laid to rest in his pyjamas or a tracksuit. This seems to me a fitting metaphor for the undressing and dressing down he is giving to his father by writing this memoir. But, then again, as Adam Mars-Jones admits: “The Oedipal agenda doesn’t lay itself out neatly, in the style of a PowerPoint presentation.”
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Yet this is a memoir of great beauty and compassion. Adam Mars-Jones writes that “closure is for bin bags not people”, but this book is more an act of reconciliation than of Oedipal reaction. As Evelyn Waugh wrote in Brideshead Revisited, his own paean to homosexuality, “To understand all is to forgive all.”
Kid Gloves: A Voyage Around My Father by Adam Mars-Jones, Particular Books, 288pp, £16.99. To buy this book for £13.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134