Kid Gloves Read Free Page A

‘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 havinga 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 alcoholicdrink 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