AS FAR AS I REMEMBER


Sir Michael Kerr

Hart Publishing, £23.50

Jeremy Fleming

Another book of memoirs by a former High Court judge? They are becoming increasingly popular - to write, rather than read - and charity shops everywhere will soon have to devote a whole rack to them.

But this one is genuinely worth dipping into. Sir Michael Kerr probably conjures images of just another crusty, dusty, rolled-up piece of judicial carpet, but he has written a witty and pacy book that reveals an extraordinary life.

His father, Alfred Kerr, was a renowned drama critic in Germany before the war who counted Einstein, Zola and Trotsky among his acquaintances. Meanwhile, his grandfather was secretary of state for Prussia in the Weimar Republic.


There are some interesting recollections of Berlin before the war - 'I never experienced anti-Semitism. It was more like class war' - before his family fled 'four days before the Reichstag fire'. His father had been blacklisted by the Nazis and they took refuge first in Switzerland, then Paris - where they were penniless - and finally in London, where they boarded at a Swiss hostelry.


Despite this, the family seems to have been extremely well connected and Sir Michael entered a public school on a scholarship before securing a scholarship to Cambridge. He was interned as an alien during the war - which he says affected him deeply - before taking up a role briefly in a bomber squadron based on the south coast.

The book is well above the usual standard of the genre, chiefly because of its dry, unemotional approach to British institutions.

Of his time in the war, he says honestly: 'The main point was clearly survival.' His descriptions of the bar in the 1950s and 1960s are similarly unvarnished. 'Whenever the subject of women tenants was raised, the senior clerk said that the lavatories were unsuitable.' In those days, he says, 'solicitors and barristers did not mix socially'.


When he had reached the top, Sir Michael, ever concerned about what he called a meagre pension and pay that meant he never became a 'fat cat', considered working in the City for a bank before opting for the judiciary. He describes a bench which was, back in the 1970s, 'like a closed monastic order'.


Highlights of his career included a fact-finding mission to an Austrian salt mine to discover art stolen by the Nazis. He recalls that no paintings were found, 'but the salt mine was fascinating'. Another trip took him to a Basle drugs factory. When he mentioned that he was always trying to persuade doctors to give him Valium, the owner promptly allowed him to fill his pockets from a machine that spat out the drug.

Anecdotes are refreshingly indiscreet. He says that when he was knighted, the Queen's small-talk was about the state of the motorways. Despairing that 'one gets overtaken by Fords and things', Her Majesty wondered to him whether or not - as her nanny used to say - 'one day it will all end in tears'.


For Sir Michael Kerr, at least, it appears that life did not.