Gloucester Crescent

by William Miller

  Dad had that pleased look on his face that said ‘I am winning this argument’, but Mum wasn’t going to be put off by Dad’s dislike of everyone in the countryside, or his fear of distances. She pointed out that, with three children and Jeanie, we were going to take a lot of entertaining over the school holidays. There would be Easters, Christmases and summers as well as half-terms, and she was going to have her work cut out while he ‘buggered off’ around the world or stayed put in London leaving her to look after us. According to Mum, we now needed a lot of space to run around, and she couldn’t wait for friends to invite us to their houses in the country. The next thing she said seemed a bit unfair: she claimed it wouldn’t be long before our family was banned from every hotel in the country. As far as I could tell, it was only the horrid owner of the Rothes Glen Hotel who got cross with our rowdiness and the sliding down the banisters, and I knew Dad was worried he was going to get a bill for repainting the dining room ceiling after we flooded the bathroom above it. He reminded Mum how the owner had liked him before we all turned up. Now he was just the ‘father of that unruly mob’. After a while the whole car fell silent. I knew Mum wasn’t going to let this one go and that this conversation was going to carry on when they were back in their hotel room. Poor Dad, he didn’t look happy about it at all – he knew he was about to lose this argument and that it was going to cost him a lot of money.

  The next morning at breakfast Mum was looking a lot happier, and Dad, for now, had stopped talking about all the people he hated. It was his morning off from filming, and Mum decided we were all going to a town called Elgin. It turned out Dad had run out of excuses and Mum had won her argument about the house, and now they were going to see a man about buying it. Mum looked excited, but Dad looked like a man on his way to prison. He kept saying things like, ‘I’ll be bankrupt’ and ‘It’s going to clean us out.’ Mum wasn’t having any of it and said that they didn’t know how much the house was going to cost yet.

  It didn’t take us long to get to Elgin, and we soon pulled up outside an office in a side-street. Mum and Dad got out of the car and went inside. They were in there for what seemed like hours, but when they came out I could tell Mum was trying her best not to smile, and an old man in a grey suit was shaking Dad’s hand. For some reason Dad was smiling too. When they got back in the car he started to laugh. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, ‘that was less than it cost us to buy this dreadful car.’ That sounded barmy: how could a house cost less than a car? Something had happened in that office, and Mum was about to give Dad an earful.

  ‘Jonathan, negotiating is not offering someone £750 when they clearly said “£650 would be more than sufficient, sir.”’ I was a bit confused by all of this, but Mum carried on having a go at Dad. ‘Negotiating is when someone says £650 and you come back with £550.’ Mum was teasing him now, and he was looking embarrassed. ‘You don’t put the price up in a negotiation, you go down – pushing the price up is his job, but you seem to have done it for him.’

  I was even more confused when Mum said the house wasn’t exactly ours yet. It turned out that they still had to write the number of pounds they wanted to pay on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope. Later, the man in Elgin would open the envelope and if their number was the biggest of all the envelopes, then the house was ours. It would be amazing to come here for our holidays, and I was sure the locals would get to know and like Jeanie, and eventually they might stop staring at her like she was from outer space. Jeanie was also really excited about us all coming to Scotland for holidays, even if, she said, some of the people might be ‘racists’. So we were all crossing our fingers. If the envelope thing worked, we were going to have our own house in the country! It didn’t matter that it was 570 miles from London and you couldn’t get to it on the Northern Line.

  4

  THE OLD MANSE

  It was December 1967 when Mum got the call from the man in Elgin. It turned out that the number Dad had put in the envelope was more than enough, and the Old Manse was ours. Mum was thrilled and, because her birthday is in December, Dad said it could be her present from him. He still went on about being broke and kept telling everyone that it would be quicker to get to New York than Scotland, which turned out to be true. Now Mum can do what so many of her friends like doing – shopping for knives and forks and furniture and curtains and spending hours in antique shops while their children are left sitting in their cars, bored senseless.

  The Old Manse has lots of bedrooms, and Mum didn’t want to be spending holidays making beds or running around with a Hoover. To help look after the house she found a really nice housekeeper called Mrs Thain, who lives in a house on the village high street, just past the sweet shop. It turns out she lived in the Old Manse when she was a little girl. Dad thinks Mrs Thain looks like the wife of a duke as she’s tall and grand-looking, with a kind face. I think she’s more like a saint as she’s so nice to us and makes the house warm and cosy when we arrive at the beginning of every holiday. Some mornings she comes up to my bedroom at the top of the house, leans on her broom in the doorway, wags a finger and tells me off for still being in bed at ten o’clock. I always write to her when I get back to London and tell her about my friends and school. She writes back with the village gossip, news about her family and how the house is getting on without us.

  The Old Manse has a big garden, and since Dad was never going to mow the lawn, plant trees or grow vegetables, Mum had to find someone who would. The gardener she found used to work in a distillery and is called Willie Moggach. He and his wife live in a white cottage along a little back lane from the Old Manse. He has a wonderful garden where he keeps bees, which means we also have all the honey we can eat. Mrs Moggach is very small, with snow-white hair, and speaks as if her voice-box has been crushed and she is choking on water. Mum takes us to visit her at the beginning and end of every holiday. She is usually sitting in an armchair beside the fireplace, where she likes to burn chunks of peat. We sit there listening to her wheeze and gurgle, and we nod politely, pretending to understand what she is saying when we clearly don’t, but we try our best not to show it.

  Willie seems to find Tom, Kate and me amusing and spends hours helping us fix our bikes or find the things we need to build camps in the garden. One of our favourite games is to pinch his cloth cap (exposing his shiny bald head) and then take it in turns to run around the garden wearing it. I think it’s really interesting that he has a full set of false teeth, which he takes enormous pleasure in removing for us. He throws them in the air and then pops them back in his mouth with a big smile.

  Kate, Willie Moggach, Tom and me at the Old Manse, 1969

  Mum bought Willie a big green lawn mower with blades that spin on a barrel on the front. To start the engine you have to pull a rope on the side really hard. If you lose your balance, you could fall straight into the spinning blades and die, which was why it is a good thing Dad didn’t want to mow the lawn. Alan nearly chopped his foot off with his Flymo when he was mowing his lawn in London. He came straight over to show us what he’d done and he looked very pale. He was still wearing the Wellington boot that the mower had sliced through. There was a large hole right over his toes. You could see them wiggling around in a grey sock – any closer and there wouldn’t have been any toes for him to wiggle. Alan was quite shaken and had to sit down while Mum made him a cup of tea. When he recovered, he went back across the road and carried on mowing. Alan was lucky – if it had been Dad with Willie’s new mower, he would have lost an entire arm or a leg or even his head. Alan eventually decided having a lawn was too dangerous for him, bricked over his garden and threw the mower away.

  The view from Mum and Dad’s bedroom across the garden to the hills beyond the Old Manse, by Nicholas Garland

  5

  YOU’LL BE DEAD BY THEN! – 1968

  I pushed the full weight of my body against our heavy front door. It swung open, crashing against the wall as I fell forward onto my hands and knees. Picking myself up, I went b
ack to slam the door shut. All the doors in Gloucester Crescent have their very own sound when they’re being slammed shut. Ours closes with a big thud, and you can hear bits of the house shaking. Next door, at the Thackers’, I think the door must be thin as it rattles like it’s going to fall to pieces. The Roebers’ door is heavy, like ours, but has more of a shush and then a thud. From our house, if you close your eyes and listen, you can tell who’s coming and going just from the sound of the front doors opening and closing.

  I stood very still in the hallway, trying not to breathe so I could listen to the sounds of our house. I could tell someone was in the house on their own as I couldn’t hear the usual voices and laughing when Mum and Dad have visitors. Our nanny, Cathy, had collected me from school and was heading down to the kitchen and I could hear her shoes on the wooden stairs, but I was much more interested in following the sound of a typewriter coming through the half-open door of the sitting room.

  As quietly as I could, I crossed the loose tiles in the hall and then stretched a foot across the old floorboards in the doorway of the sitting room. I stood there, holding my breath. I was right, there was a new person, a woman, who carried on typing as she sat very straight at the little desk in the window looking out onto the street. She had long blonde hair swept over one shoulder and she was looking down to one side at something on the desk and she was typing without looking at the keys. Not the sort of typing I was familiar with, having, at the time, only ever watched Dad and Alan doing it. This was real typing like I’d seen on TV. I moved forward slowly until I was only a few feet away. I could now smell her scent, which was really nice and new and different from Mum’s or Cathy’s. Without stopping typing she coughed and said, with a laughy sort of voice, ‘I think there is someone very small and quiet behind me.’

  I froze on the spot as she turned round and reached out to shake my hand. ‘Hello, I’m Sue Coltman-Rogers. Who are you and what, may I ask, is under the plaster on your forehead?’ ‘My eyebrow,’ I informed her, which seemed fairly obvious to me. Mum had put the plaster on after I’d had a fight with a sharp toy before breakfast. Although there wasn’t any blood, Mum decided having a plaster might stop me whining and it would impress my friends at school. I could see that the plaster was going to come in pretty handy if I could use it to get some sympathy from this lovely-smelling and beautiful new person in our house.

  I asked what she was typing, and she said it was letters for my dad, and that there were an awful lot of them. ‘That’s what my dad usually does.’

  ‘What does your dad do?’ she asked.

  ‘Typing – that’s what my dad’s work is – smoking, typing and getting paid for it.’ I thought that was a pretty good response and would show her that nothing went unnoticed by me in our house.

  Sue Coltman-Rogers

  I knew Dad had started writing a book. Not a story book but one about a real man called Marshall Something-or-other, who was a philosopher, just like Nick’s dad, Freddie Ayer. I don’t think anyone other than Dad and Freddie had ever heard of this man, which might be why Dad was having so much trouble writing about him. He would come down to the kitchen and read what he’d written to Mum, then walk off screwing the bits of paper up and throwing them on the floor, saying, ‘It’s all hopeless.’ He’d go back to his study and sit for hours, smoking and staring at his typewriter. Then he’d come back down again and say to Mum, ‘I have got to get myself out of writing this dreadful book or I’m going to have to kill myself.’

  Dad reading his work to Mum, Gloucester Crescent, 1965

  There it was again, the killing himself thing. Every now and then there would be lots of activity from his study, followed by long periods of getting nowhere, and the idea of him killing himself would be very much on my mind and everyone else’s. Mum told him he should speak to his agent, Elaine Green, and explain why it was taking him so long to write the book. When Elaine came to see Dad, she always seemed clever, so I was sure she would know what to do – and she did. But there was another problem: along with his book, there were piles of unanswered letters lying around the house. One of the many things Dad hated was writing letters. He loved writing them to Mum and some of his friends when he was away, but he hated doing them for work. There is one other kind of letter he really likes writing and that’s the angry ones to people he doesn’t like. Tom showed me one Dad had written that was printed in a magazine (Private Eye), which he kept with lots of others in a drawer. Tom and I really liked reading this letter because it was full of swear words that we knew made Mum cross. This is what his letter to the magazine said:

  You stupid bloody irresponsible cunts!! You had no permission and therefore no right to use my medical title as a heading to the article. Are you all so completely frivolous and insensitive as not to be able to understand that such a fucking stupid blunder could well mean me being struck off the register? God rot the lot of you!

  Jonathan Miller

  The piles of letters around the house were getting bigger, and someone had to sort them out. Elaine was always quite calm about these things, but I could tell she was worried that Dad would never finish his book and that staring at his unanswered letters might be stopping him from getting on with writing it. She spoke to a friend of hers called Deborah Coltman-Rogers, who is an agent too (as Deborah Rogers), and she said her younger sister had just finished at a school for secretaries. Mum and Dad liked Sue the minute they met her and gave her the job on the spot.

  I liked Sue too, and the day after I met her I was certain I had fallen in love with her. She was so different from the other women in my life. At the time there was one other grown-up woman I really liked, and her name was Miss Laing. She was the teacher in the next-door classroom at Primrose Hill Primary. She was beautiful too, and I thought she looked like a princess in a painting. Since the beginning of the year I’d wished Miss Laing could have been my teacher. On the first day of the school year everyone has to stand in the playground as the teachers call out the names of the children going into each class. Miss Laing was standing waiting with a clipboard and was looking so beautiful, then she stepped forward and started calling out names. I was holding my breath, with my fingers and toes crossed, hoping she would call mine. The names stopped, and off she marched to her classroom with all her new pupils following her. It felt like the world had suddenly come to an end and none of this school stuff would be worth doing any more. Conrad came over and shoved me. ‘Come on, William, wake up, we’re off to Mr Connor’s class’, which just made the situation worse. Mr Connor was small and chubby and nothing like Miss Laing. I carried on thinking about her every day, wondering what my life would be like if we were married. I decided that we’d probably live on a farm in Scotland and go on holidays to France or America and have beautiful children – maybe a girl who would look like a miniature version of Miss Laing.

  With the arrival of Sue at Gloucester Crescent my thoughts about Miss Laing seemed to have gone away. Now I was thinking about what life would be like when I married Sue. They both had lovely blonde hair and blue eyes, and Sue wore that nice perfume. More importantly, Sue was in my house and not in the classroom next door with twenty-five other children.

  Tom didn’t get how lovely Sue was, but as far as I was concerned this was a good thing – I didn’t need any more competition. She would have already met Alan, who would have been around for elevenses. This happens every weekday at eleven o’clock, when everyone stops working for an hour and they meet in the kitchen for coffee. If Dad is home, he comes down from his study and Alan comes from across the road. I knew Sue would like Alan. Most people do, and what’s more, he doesn’t have a girlfriend.

  When I got back from school, I decided I had to let Sue know how I felt. But before I did that I thought it would be a good idea to get Tom to be a witness, though I didn’t tell him what it was all about. At some point I would need to bring Conrad in on it too. That was going to be trickier as the two of us had a made a plan of our own, and if Sue said yes I wou
ld need to get out of that. I found Tom and took him into the sitting room, where Sue was busy working on a pile of Dad’s letters. Marching straight up to her desk, we stood waiting for her to stop typing. It did cross my mind that this could go horribly wrong, but before she started on the next letter I came straight out with it.

  ‘Sue, I’ve been thinking and I thought you should know that when I’m older there are three people I would like to marry.’

  ‘Three?’ she asked with surprise.

  ‘There were two who I’ve actually asked. First there’s Louise.’ This was a girl who lived three doors away. ‘And then me and Conrad have been talking about getting married too, but now I’m not sure. And since you turned up in our house I’ve decided I would really like to marry you, so that makes three.’ I didn’t mention Miss Laing, as I hadn’t had the chance to tell her how I felt, so she wasn’t on my list. Conrad and Louise were, and I knew I’d have to get out of the marriage thing with them if I was going to marry Sue.

  Sue tilted her head and smiled at me, but I could see she was trying not to laugh. Tom didn’t know where to look. He tried staring at the pattern in the carpet then over at me to see if I was serious, then back to Sue to see if she thought I was as mad as he did. Then Tom burst out laughing and said, ‘Don’t be stupid, Sue will be dead by then!’

  There was another silence as I glared at him with my I’ll-kill-you stare. Then Sue burst out laughing too. When she recovered, she took my hand and said, ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Tom, I think it’s a lovely offer.’ Well, she hadn’t said no, which had to be a good thing. She thanked me and said she would bear it in mind. She also felt I should talk to Louise and Conrad, as they might have something to say about all of this.