Free Kid Gloves by Adam Mars-Jones Page B

being Ian Brady.
    There was a sort of troubled open-mindedness in
our household, the product I suppose of slightly different attitudes between my parents. I
remember one evening when the BBC broadcast some footage of
Oh! Calcutta!
There was
debate over whether we should watch it. We did. The images were of naked bodies frozen every few
frames and allowed to overlap, producing an effect that soon became abstract (particularly on a
black-and-white television) and we uneasily agreed they were beautiful.
    I never got around to reading Hansford Johnson’s
book in Dad’s lifetime. Perhaps he was only using it as a sort of barricade, to keep dissension
at a distance. If I had read it and taken issue with its arguments, he might only have withdrawn
behind another obstacle, though his withdrawals were usually feints and it was never safe to
assume a lasting retreat.
    The tone of
On Iniquity
is sometimes
impossibly quaint:
Not so long ago, I raised a little storm by
suggesting, in a letter to the
Guardian
, that it was not desirable for Krafft-Ebing[who wrote
Psychopathia Sexualis
, intended as a serious study] to be
available in relatively cheap paperback edition on the bookstalls of English railway-stations
…
    Class seems to dog the discussion of censorship,
just as it had at the
Lady Chatterley
trial in 1960, with Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC
asking the jury: ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?’ The
cheapness of a book, and consequently its availability to the lower orders, seems to be an
important element in discussion of the issue.
    As Hansford Johnson visualized it, ‘The walls of
the police storerooms are almost bulging outwards with the pressure of tons upon tons of dirty
books.’ Dad had a similar mental picture, but at least there were buttresses in place to keep
those storerooms from exploding. Dirty books were being kept out of circulation by the proper
authorities.
    Everyone assumed that the smut was safe in its
silos, the general public screened from contamination by thick bulkheads of probity. It was
because Dad had such a high opinion of the police force in general that he regarded corruption
there as the ultimate betrayal of trust.
    In 1964 he had been commissioned to write a
report investigating a particular set of allegations, that confessions had been extracted under
duress. He found there to be some substance to the allegations. Dad was particularly proud of
his report, in which he had tried to match the terse clarity of Lord Denning’s prose style, and
felt vindicated when it was held up as a model of its kind. One newspaper suggested he would
make a good candidate for Ombudsman, defender of the individual against the injustice of
institutions. That office didn’t actually exist, but he was on some sort of spectral short
list.
    His 1964 report is another example of a
publication that I didn’t read in his lifetime, and I have to admit I was disappointedwhen I did. It’s not impressive as a piece of writing, the language flat
without being particularly correct (‘fortuitous coincidence’ turns up twice), but that’s hardly
the problem. The whole thing seems an elaborate exercise in fence-sitting, stating that
‘allegations of violence, threats of violence and the “planting” of offensive weapons are not
established beyond reasonable doubt’, before conceding that ‘the bulk of the evidence so
disclosed tends to support’ the allegations made by the men in the case ‘and points to their
innocence’. Perhaps because I heard Dad talk with such pride about his report, at a time when he
loomed large over my world, I expected great things from it. I wanted to think he had laid down
some definitive glory to mature over time, like the cellared ‘pipe of port’ he referred to from
time to time, supposedly waiting for our twenty-first birthdays but never materializing. It may
be that in historical context he was relatively open-minded about the possibility of the