Free Kid Gloves by Adam Mars-Jones

Fuchsia Pool. The word had to be said very carefully to avoid embarrassment,
though it turned out that ‘fuchsia’ was only the name of the pinky-red ballerina-like flowers
that grew round the pool. The book in which I eventually saw the word ‘fuck’ in print for the
first time, Mark Rascovich’s
The Bedford Incident
, was already in existence (published
1963) but I hadn’t come across it yet.
    The Bedford Incident
is a Cold War
reworking of
Moby-Dick
, ending with the mutual destruction by warhead of a Russian
submarine and a US destroyer. I couldn’t altogether blame the American sailors for their use of
foul language. They were about to be blown to atoms, by an atom bomb no less, and as I
understood it ‘fuck’ was the equivalent of the nuclear option in conversation.
    I had assumed, though, that this supremely taboo
four-letter word was so beyond the pale as to resist the normal conventions of English spelling.
I imagined specialized characters being necessary to transcribe it, lead-lined ones perhaps.
Even so it might cause mutations in neighbouring words.
    In the Welsh language, of course, mutation is a
fact of consonantal daily life, and doesn’t indicate the presence of background radiation,
though it certainly helps to deter visitors.
    It was disappointing that ‘fuck’ was spelled no
differently than ‘buck’, ‘duck’, ‘luck’. Even ‘fuch’ would be some sort of homage, however
half-hearted.
    The Fuchsia Pool itself was shaped like a
stylized fish, with the tail section being a shallow area safe for toddlers. Iwas a confident swimmer and nervous diver, but the hotel pool had, instead of a diving
board, a white metal slide. I climbed up the ladder to the top of it and then became paralysed.
After a while Dad came over and suggested that I hold on tight to the edges of the slide on my
first ride down, so as to control my descent. There was a bucket of water next to me at the top
of the ladder, and he volunteered to slosh it liberally over the slide so as to make it easier
for me to hold on. Not bothering to examine the logic of the proposition, I agreed to it.
    Only when I had committed my body weight to the
slippery metal, and the world slid out of control, did I understand that I had been betrayed,
lied to by someone who maintained that only the truth would set you free. It was wonderful, not
the betrayal as such but the accelerating joy it forced me to feel. I didn’t bother him with
protests, in fact I hardly noticed him as I rushed back to the bottom of the white metal ladder.
Dad had found a way to nudge me brusquely free from the deadlock of my milksop psychology.
    I remember we travelled under assumed names. It
was felt unwise for Dad to visit the Irish Republic after having sent so many of its irregular
affiliates down. That’s what I remember, but of course it makes no sense. In 1965 Dad wasn’t yet
a judge, and even if he had been, no Troubles had arisen for him to get the wrong side of. I
hope at least that the confusion in my memory doesn’t mean I was, say, sixteen and trembling at
the top of the slide beside a hotel swimming pool, rather than eleven.
    I must be mixing up two holidays – except that we
only went to Ireland the once, and no other destination would call for precautions of even this
rudimentary kind. I don’t have a memory, not even a false one, of the name we travelled under,
though I find it hard to imagine not being interested.Perhaps I was reading
a book. I’ve always been able to read without queasiness in cars, on trains, in planes, on
roller-coasters. Nice to think we might have gone under some name rich in associations,
travelling perhaps as the Melmoths. Did we have false passports, even? The existence of the
Common Travel Area may have made such elaborate preparations unnecessary, but the whole business
of travelling incognito suggests the murder mysteries played out in country hotels off
season.
    Later on, in the 1970s and ’80s, there were
definite