Adam Mars-Jones - Kid Gloves - A Voyage Round My Father

There were some exceptions to his typecasting — the elderly Einstein sticking out his tongue in a famous photograph somehow qualified as a Munchkin — but I certainly wasn’t a Munchkin, and Tim didn’t come significantly closer to that ideal.

It occurs to me now that Mike, as an admirer of Iris Murdoch’s fiction, may have felt that her deepest intuitions about British life were being confirmed in this welcoming environment laced with threat. In theory my father was the target of the machinations — but would Mike really have been surprised if my elegant, quietly anxious mother had entered the guest bedroom one morning bearing not a cup of tea but a samurai sword, like Honor Klein in A Severed Head (his favourite Murdoch novel, and his favourite moment in it), to banish all obliqueness of dealing and force a resolution of some kind? Perhaps not.

It made sense of a Murdochian sort, the warrior being offered as a sacrificial victim, exposed to danger and enchantment beyond anything the Viet Cong could devise (though his tour of duty pre-dated the worst of the war) by the shores of a bleak sea.

Even without weaponry, Mum can’t have been an entirely relaxing hostess. Part of her concern was to do with whether the two of us were well matched — and if so, whether it even mattered, bearing in mind that Mike was returning in a matter of months to his city and his career, his real life outside the parenthesis of Cambridge. She was also bound to be anticipating the impact on her family of the little piece of psychodrama I had set in motion.

So after I had made my sexual declaration to Dad as best I could (having so little to declare), I told him about Mike. He put on a fair show of neutrality, not exploding at the deceit and immorality involved in smuggling my bit of fluff (a very sturdy bit of fluff, admittedly) into the family home. He played the waiting game, knowing that sooner or later I would have to ask him for his verdict on Mike. I had given him back some power, I suppose, by showing that I cared what he thought.

Eventually he produced his assessment. ‘Small beer,’ he said.

I felt we were making progress here. Who would have thought that Dad was capable of dismissing the same-sex partner of one of his sons with such a light touch? No reference to the Bible or the vileness of physical acts. It was never on the cards that he would say, ‘You two seem to be good together,’ and I wouldn’t have believed him if he had, since it didn’t seem particularly true. But it had to be encouraging that Dad huffed the threat of Mike away like so much thistledown.

As Dad understood homosexuality, there was always an abusive seduction at the root of it. A person of power or glamour cast a spell on an insecure male, then turned fascination into sordid exploitation. In a strange way, the earlier in life this atrocity was perpetrated the better, since then there could be no question of meaningful consent, let alone desire. Ideally, from his point of view, I would have been turned, even sexually assaulted, by a scoutmaster in full make-up. This Vietnam-vet-architect scenario was far less easily rewritten as pathology. Still, if Dad had wanted me to be corrupted over mugs of cocoa round a campfire, he might at least have sent me to Scouts.

Male bonding had hardly begun to work its magic on the culture in those early days of 1978, and a father — son sojourn had an artificial, self-conscious feel even when there were urgent matters of sexual dissidence to be thrashed out. In the aftermath of all those disputes over princes, great-aunts and actresses we were probably both relieved when it was time to go back to London, with a more or less satisfactory deadlock in place. In the car Dad expressed a lowered tension by sucking — then wolfishly crunching — Tunes, his preferred courtroom lozenge and vocal lubricant, rather than the gnawed twin stems of his disused pipe.

It’s standard practice when dealing with people implacably opposed to homosexuality to propose that they are themselves in denial. It always seems a cheap manoeuvre, not just cheap but dull, to insist that homophobes are sitting on top of a volcano of disavowed desire. If Dad had a man-loving component it was easily bought off, with male social company (endlessly on tap in Gray’s Inn) and the ritual worship given to Welsh rugby players, colossal of thigh.

Dad summed up the whole of homosexual life with the phrase ‘wallowing in faeces’, and I wonder what made him think in those terms — what made his disgust take that particular form. I’m not saying Dad had more knowledge of anal intercourse than I did, but he can’t have had less, since I had none.

With Mike I was embarrassed about my defective sexual experience, almost as embarrassed as I was of never having seen The Wizard of Oz . I lived in my body very approximately. Sensuality was one more thing I experienced mainly through books.

My childish body was strangely tuned. I remember soothing myself to sleep (aged four? five?) by playing with my right nipple, an action that transmitted a high feathery tickling to the roof of my mouth, referred pleasure like referred pain, experienced in a different place from where it was generated. This was the high-water mark of my self-awareness before latency dragged me back down into the dark.

As for my awareness of other bodies, I had known from an early age that I was different from my brothers. This wasn’t existential angst but statement of fact. They made wee-wee from a different thing. They did a stream but I did a spray and sometimes I felt sore. My part was different from theirs, looked different, was different. (How I made the comparison I don’t exactly remember, but bathtime was the obvious opportunity for playing spot-the-difference.) When I was transfixed by an infantile erection aged six or seven I went down on my knees, my plump and dimpled knees, to give thanks to the God who had clearly intervened with a miracle to correct the anomaly, but my willy looked no different afterwards.

Our parents hadn’t had a policy about circumcision but asked for professional advice as each son was born. The experts at the Welbeck Nursing Home, where we were all brought into being, gave their opinion. A ‘snip’ was felt to be necessary for Tim and then for Matthew, but not for me. No thought had been given to the possibility that a cavalier among roundheads (to use a jaunty slang I know only from books) might feel disagreeably set apart.

Technically I was intact while they had been wounded, but being the odd man out has in itself some of the quality of a wound. Then persistent infections of the foreskin showed that medical advice wasn’t infallible, and I was circumcised at the age of eight or nine. I got a proper wound of my own, and riding my bicycle was something of a penance for a time. Memory tells me that it was actually a sort of tractor-tricycle with a bucket seat and satisfying deep treads on the tyres, but I’m hoping memory has got it wrong. Poorly co-ordinated or not, I was old enough to be riding a bike and a bike it shall be.

A year or two later I learned the facts of life from a Latin play — a statement that makes me seem even more the tragic casualty of an expensive education than I feel the evidence supports. Westminster School had a tradition (recent, I dare say, and probably emulating another school) of putting on a Latin play in the original, not every year but at regular intervals, usually with one gimmicky touch, such as a character arriving in a car — a Mini driven through the Abbey cloisters. When I was still at the Under School, and so perhaps eleven or twelve, I attended a performance. The transition between the Under School and what we called the Great School was smooth. In Latin lessons at the Under School, Mr Young (pink and white colouring, wet of lip, Bill Haley cowlick innocent of any pop-culture reference) would wince at blunders and say, ‘Don’t let Mr Moylan catch you doing that.’ In turn Mr Moylan, when he took over (a being without moisture, fastidious, invariably making a dog-leg across Little Dean’s Yard to avoid exposing his leather soles to the wear-factor of gravel), would say, ‘I hate to think what Mr Young would say about that.’