Gloucester Crescent

by William Miller

  Everyone was now sitting down at the table and tucking into chicken and baked potatoes. The action on the television kept going back to a man called Cliff behind a desk in a studio. He was trying to explain what was going on at Cape Canaveral, and for some reason he also thought he knew what the three astronauts were feeling up there in the rocket. Ridiculous, I thought, how could he possibly know what they were feeling? But Cliff turned to his friend in the studio and said, ‘Patrick, what do you think is going through Neil’s mind right now?’ How would Patrick know?

  The picture on the TV was now back on the rocket and, judging by the big countdown clock on the bottom of the screen, mission control at NASA were about to say those all-important words I’d used so many times when acting out this exact moment: ‘10-9-8, Ignition sequence start, 4-3-2-1, we have lift off!’

  At last, everyone in the room shut up and we were all staring at the TV in silence as the Apollo 11 rocket rose from the launch pad and climbed into the sky. Just at that moment, Mum said loudly that she’d heard James Burke on the radio talking about how the three astronauts were going to have a breakfast of steak and eggs before heading out to the launch pad. Now all the grown-ups started talking over each other again and making jokes about it.

  ‘Steak and eggs?’ Alan said. ‘You must be joking? Only an American would eat steak and eggs before pulling off a stunt like that.’

  Why do grown-ups always have to make stupid jokes right when the biggest thing ever is happening, and at the very moment we’ve been waiting for all year? There wouldn’t have been any stupid jokes over at the Roebers. They would have been sitting quietly in a row enjoying every minute. Their mum wouldn’t dream of interrupting. Me, Tom and Jeanie were now standing up so we could get closer to the television and have a better chance of hearing what they were saying at the BBC. What I really wanted to know was what the astronauts and the men in the white short-sleeved shirts at mission control were saying to each other as the rocket got smaller and smaller on the screen. It was the same for all the Apollo launches: the soft, calm American voices that always have a little beep at the end of each thing they say.

  ‘We are systems go, Neil – Beep.’

  ‘God speed, Apollo 11 – Beep.’

  ‘Looking good here, Gene – Beep.’

  ‘Clear for main engine shut down – Beep.’

  How could the astronauts remain so calm when right behind their seats all that rocket fuel is exploding and the safety of the Earth is slipping away?

  I had repeated these phrases with my own little beeps so many times when playing Apollo missions in my bedroom or on the climbing frame in the back garden. I even had an Airfix model of the Saturn V rocket with sections that came apart just like the real thing. Now it was happening in front of me on the telly, but I had to fight to hear what was going on. Alan and Dad were now pretending to be two gay astronauts deciding whether they wanted their eggs ‘over easy’ or ‘sunny side up’. Why couldn’t they take this one big event seriously? I love it when Dad and Alan are silly, but not right at that very moment.

  Before long, the astronauts and their rocket were so high that the cameras couldn’t see them any more. All I could think about was how, at that very moment, while we were sitting around the table eating our lunch back on Earth in Gloucester Crescent, Neil, Buzz and Mike had left the Earth and were up there looking down at all of us from space.

  Dad got up and announced that there was only so much of this he could take and switched the TV off without asking any of us if we were still watching it – which we were. This was the big moment, the one we had been waiting for all this time and which was an important thing to us, even if it wasn’t to the grown-ups. Now it was back to being like any old Saturday lunch with everyone talking over each other. Alan had made the pudding – tapioca again, which only the grown-ups like and Tom and I think looks like sick.

  I knew the Roebers would have stopped watching the TV by now and might be out in the garden talking about the launch. I got down from the table and headed into the garden and climbed onto the wall. The Roebers are the ones I play with the most. There are four of them – Bruno, Nicky and James, who are identical triplets and almost the same age as my brother, Tom, and then Conrad, who’s my age and is my best friend. They live two doors away from us. When the triplets were born, they lived above a launderette around the corner on Parkway, and my mum went to visit them because she was interested in identical triplets. She was so surprised to see their mum and dad, nanny and three babies living in such a small flat that she said they should come and live in our house when her and Dad went to live in New York for two years. They moved in to our house in 1962 and then later bought the house two doors from us. I think it was quite hard for their mum because their dad left, came back and then left again and went to live with someone else in Maida Vale who he eventually married. Now though, their mum has married a nice man called Will Camp, who lives with them and does something important for the Labour Party.

  By standing on our wall I could see across to the Roebers’ garden, and sure enough they were all sitting on the garden steps talking. I could hear James explaining to his brothers what was going on right now on Apollo 11. Keen not to miss out on any of this conversation, I did what I’d done a thousand times and jumped over our wall into the Jeffersons’ garden. I ran across their lawn into a big flowerbed with lots of broken plants in it, then down with a bump into the Roebers’ garden. Tom and I had done this so many times that there was now a worn path with no grass right across the Jeffersons’ lawn. Surprisingly, bearing in mind the damage we caused, they never complained. The Jeffersons are quite old-fashioned and not really like the other families in the Crescent. They are the only family who go to church on Sunday, which of course Dad doesn’t approve of.

  By the time James finished explaining how rocket thrusters worked, I headed back home over the walls. Life across the Crescent had settled back into its usual middle-of-the-week routine, with all the sounds I found so comforting. Alan had gone across the road to his house and would no doubt be back for tea, and maybe again for supper. I could see Sue wasn’t in the kitchen any more, so she must have gone back to her desk in the sitting room, which meant Dad was most likely in his study on the floor above, staring at his typewriter and smoking.

  I stood in our garden for a moment and listened to all the typewriters starting up again and felt happy the summer holidays had started and life was carrying on in the way it always does in the Crescent. In spite of the chaotic lunch, it had been a great day, and the crew of Apollo 11 were finally on their way to the Moon. There was going to be a lot more about it on the television, and I knew we would be allowed to stay up late and watch the Moon landing on Sunday.

  8

  THE SCHOOL RUN

  Tom’s first school was called The Hall. He hated it so much that after one term Mum and Dad took him out and sent him to Gospel Oak School with Nick Ayer, the Mellys and the Haycrafts. I’m not sure why he went to The Hall in the first place, especially since Mum and Dad had to pay for it, which they always say they think is wrong. He had to wear a smart uniform with grey shorts and a pink and grey blazer. Tom never liked the uniform, but then he didn’t like anything pink. I think I would have liked it. I said this to Tom once, and his response was that I would have liked it because I’m a ‘ponce’. I don’t think I’m a ponce, it’s just that The Hall is a serious school and Primrose Hill isn’t. Maybe the uniform at The Hall made it feel like that. At Primrose Hill we could wear whatever we wanted. If we spilled breakfast all over our clothes or had a hole in our trousers, no one cared. We’ve always worn scruffy clothes. Mum and Dad don’t think they should be spending money on new clothes and that it’s better if we hand them down. I get all of Tom’s old clothes and Kate gets mine, and then there is some swapping with the Roebers too. Most of the time we look like ragamuffins.

  None of my friends or anyone else in the street goes to a private school. Dad always says it’s because everyone in
Gloucester Crescent votes Labour and that only Tories go to private schools. I don’t understand that because Mum, Dad and all their friends went to private school and they never stop talking about how great it was and how important it is to get a good education. But I don’t think anyone in the Crescent is properly rich, and most of them only seem to have money when they’ve just written a best-selling book or a play in the West End or do something on the television.

  Me and Kate, Gloucester Crescent, 1969

  The Roeber triplets were at Primrose Hill School with me but have now left to go to secondary school. Conrad’s in the same year as me, and we’ve been in the same class together ever since we were five years old. I like most of my teachers, but there are a few who think it’s funny to make jokes about me and Conrad being posh. It’s a bit confusing as we’ve never thought of ourselves as posh or upper-class, and neither do the other kids. There’s one really annoying teacher who thinks it’s hilarious to imitate how me and Conrad speak, which she does in front of the whole class and enjoys making us look stupid. She’s called Miss Crosby, and for some reason she’s had it in for the two of us from the start. When she tries to imitate us it sounds nothing like the way we speak; in fact, it’s more like Derek Nimmo from the telly. It gets a laugh from everyone in our class, but I don’t think they know why they’re laughing.

  Miss Crosby is angry most of the time. She’s very big and wears T-shirts and bad trousers that are too small for her, so she often looks like Humpty Dumpty. She’s the only teacher who looks messier than the children. One Christmas she found another way of making me and Conrad look stupid in front of the rest of the school. We did a play about the Queen and Princess Anne switching on the Christmas lights, and instead of choosing Janet and Melissa or Emily and Zoe to play the Queen and Princess Anne, she made me and Conrad do it. We had to wear make-up, dresses and jewellery and carry handbags. Annoyingly, Mum and Dad came to see the play and thought it was brilliant and talked about it with their friends all the time over Christmas, and they thought it was hilarious too. Me and Conrad felt completely humiliated, and we knew that for Miss Crosby it was just a cruel joke that she would get to laugh about in the staff room.

  Getting everyone in the Crescent to school in the morning was like an army exercise. It involved several cars and nearly all the mums and dads. Although you could walk to Primrose Hill, for a long time we were all packed into cars and taken there. The kids in the street who didn’t go to Primrose Hill went to Gospel Oak, which you couldn’t walk to as it’s up near Parliament Hill. On weekdays there might be a couple of cars going to Primrose Hill and a couple going to Gospel Oak, and all that has to be worked out so the mums and dads can take it in turns. Dad didn’t drive us to Primrose Hill to begin with, as he didn’t have a driving licence. It took him ages to get one because every time he went for the test he failed it. I think the driving examiner must have made a mistake when he did finally get his licence. Soon after he got it he nearly crashed into a van on Regent’s Park Road. The man driving the van looked very tough and scary and shook his fist out of the window. Dad pulled up next to him at the traffic lights and rolled down his window, but the man got in there first.

  ‘Learn to drive, you idiot!’ the man shouted.

  ‘Bugger off or the next time I will rip your fucking thyroid out,’ Dad shouted back.

  ‘Fuck off, big nose,’ the man said as the lights changed.

  When we drove off, Dad had a look on his face that said, ‘That told him.’ I don’t think it told him anything, and I think it was a really stupid thing to do.

  A couple of times a week there’s a minicab that takes a few of the children to the Tavistock Clinic in Swiss Cottage and then, after an hour with their therapists, they go on to school. Dad says it’s all to do with a man called Freud, and they make them sit in a room with a grown-up (called a psychotherapist) who waits for them to say something interesting. Then they write it down in a notebook. I know this because the boys who went made a pact to sit there and say nothing to the therapists, which only made the parents worry even more. The more they worried, the longer their children had to keep going. It crossed my mind that it was probably the parents who needed the therapy. I was quite curious about the Tavistock as I think I would have liked to go somewhere like that. It sounded like a place where you could have a proper talk with a grown-up and they would give you all their attention and be really interested in listening to you. Sometimes I wish Dad would listen to me like that.

  9

  SHOOTING AND FISHING

  Since Mum and Dad bought the house in Scotland we’ve been going there almost every holiday. Mum has the whole journey worked out pretty well now, and Dad either goes along with it or doesn’t come at all. We usually leave on the night that school finishes and take the car on the Motorail sleeper train. In the summer it goes from a station called Kensington Olympia, which opens specially for all the people going to Scotland for the shooting and fishing. I really like this station as the shooting and fishing people remind me of Guy and Stella at Stanage and they’re all very friendly and jolly. The men wear tweed jackets and funny-looking trousers called plus-fours and the women wear tweed skirts and headscarves. I think for the tweedy people the train to Scotland is like a big party. When we get to the station, Dad scowls at them and says they’re the kind of people he loathes most of all.

  One summer Jeanie’s sister Esther came with us to Scotland. Apart from Dad getting cross with everyone on the way to the station, it all seemed to be going well, until we got to Kensington Olympia and someone shouted at the top of their voice the one word that Mum and Dad told us no one should ever use – the ‘N’ word. Dad says only really racist people use that word. We heard it yelled again, and we all stopped. I’m not even going to use the whole word here, but I think you’ll know the word I mean. In the middle of the station there was this man standing in his plus-fours shouting the word over and over again, and everyone around him had just frozen and stared at us. He kept shouting it, and getting louder. No one knew which way to look except at Esther and then at this man. She looked shocked and hurt. Dad looked like he was going to explode. Then, the man yelled ‘Heel!’ and ‘Sit!’ and we realised he was shouting at his dog. Through the crowd we saw a black Labrador run up to the man and sit down in front of him. Mum hurried us along, pushed us all onto the train and locked us in the sleeper compartment. If Mum hadn’t pulled Dad onto the train at that moment, I think he would have gone up and strangled the man.

  I love going on the sleeper to Scotland. Once the train has left the station I like to sit on the lid of the basin in our compartment and watch as we pass all the houses and gardens and factories as we get further out of London. When I can’t stay awake any longer, I get into my bunk and the rocking of the train sends me to sleep. When it’s still dark, the train stops at Edinburgh and I get woken up by people shouting with Scottish accents and train doors being slammed and then a whistle blowing as the train pulls out of the station. I open the blind at the end of my bed and wait for the train to go over the Forth Rail Bridge. When it does, I can see the sun coming up over the sea. As it gets lighter, mountains start to appear and I know I’m really in Scotland and it’s the beginning of a wonderful long holiday.

  When we arrive at Perth, Mum and Dad take us to the station hotel for breakfast while we wait for the car to be taken off the train. When we finally get to the car and climb in, it smells delicious from the coffee beans Mum buys for the holiday. I don’t think Mum and Dad and their friends can live without their coffee beans: their elevenses happens whether they’re in London or France or Scotland.

  The road from Perth to Archiestown is the longest and twistiest I’ve ever been on. One time, somewhere near Balmoral, we had to pull over to let a line of cars go by. There were lots of them, as well as police cars, and then a really big car with the Queen and Prince Philip in it. Dad always gets irritated when anyone says anything about the royal family. He says they don’t serve any purpose and
that they ‘enforce our terrible class structure’. So he was pretty annoyed when we had to wait for them to pass on the road. I quite like the royal family and saw a television programme about them that said how much they like coming to Scotland and that they do lots of shooting and fishing.

  One of Alan’s favourite stories is about a lady who was fishing on the River Spey. He said there was another lady fishing there too. They were standing in the middle of the river in those rubber waders that go right up over your tummy. The first lady started shouting at the other one, ‘Private waters, get oorf!’ It always makes me laugh when Alan tells this story and shouts ‘Get oorf’ like that. Anyway, the lady was getting crosser and shouting up the river at the other lady. Eventually, the other lady turned round and it was the Queen Mother! The shouting lady was so embarrassed when she realised who it was that she curtsied in the river. She curtsied so low that her waders filled with water and she couldn’t stand up again. In the end the gamekeeper had to jump in the river and save her before she drowned.