Life with old father William

This intensely written memoir by Adam Mars-Jones about his Welsh father, Sir William, opens with the death of Sheila, Adam’s mother, of lung cancer in 1998: ‘She died with self-effacing briskness in little more than a month.’ Adam too is self-effacing, moving in while his mother was dying, then staying on as his father’s main carer. The second of three brothers, he explains away this generous act: ‘As an under-employed freelance, I had time to spare.’ ‘Dad’, diagnosed informally as ‘demented’, was by then a retired High Court judge granted a low rent for a large flat in Gray’s Inn. Adam lived in the flat’s converted attic.

Adam is thorough and, it appears, fair. ‘Dad’ is depicted as pompous, playful, flirtatious (dubbing certain women ‘sparklers’), ungracious (rejecting Adam’s carefully chosen Christmas present) and occasionally grateful (to Adam, for looking after him). He can be cruel (to a woman guest at his own farewell party at the Garrick) and homophobic — Adam finally disclosed to him, in the late 1970s, that ‘I belonged to the category he hated and feared’. Mars-Jones senior had disapproved of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalising homosexuality but in old age, to his son’s surprise — and consternation at the inconsistency — became indignant about discrimination. By then Adam had had two male partners, one, Michael, dying of Aids, aged 26. ‘After that, Dad slowly lost his horror of my sexual identity, though he never got as far as acknowledging a partner of mine.’

Adam has conscientiously researched the court cases his father was involved in, perhaps a few too many. (I preferred the book’s last third, which is more personal.) Mars-Jones senior bewigged emerges as independent-minded: against the death penalty but also against pornography and the permissive society.