Gloucester Crescent

by William Miller

  Whatever Dee is up to she always seems to have time to sit and talk to me, even if she’s working at her desk or cooking in the kitchen. She has all these drawers and boxes where she stores things she’s found or collected, such as a dead beetle with a shiny green body like a mirror, the dried skin of a snake, an old fountain pen or a penknife with lots of blades and tools. She really likes showing me things from her collection, and then we talk about them for ages. Dee is someone I can really talk to about the world and the things I’m interested in. Even if I’m worried about something, I feel I can talk to her about it and she’ll put my mind at ease. She does this in a way that’s so different from how Dad does it, where he wants to give me all the facts, however terrifying they are. My conversations with Dee go something like: ‘Look-it, William, isn’t nature so goddamn beautiful? This little guy has these tiny fuckin’ hairs coming out of his legs to help him grip.’ Then she’ll surprise me by saying, ‘Sometimes that idiot man upstairs does amazing things. The rest of the time he’s an arsehole.’

  ‘Who’s upstairs?’ I ask.

  ‘God,’ she says. Now I’m confused and I tell her Dad is always saying God doesn’t exist, and that when my sister went to church with the next-door neighbours she came back saying, ‘God is Love,’ and Dad was furious. He’s the same about Father Christmas. I totally believed in him until I woke up in the middle of the night one Christmas Eve. I pretended to be asleep, waiting to see him in his big red coat and white beard, but when I opened my eyes I just saw Dad standing there, stark naked, at the end of my bed holding a shopping bag. Out of it he was stuffing presents into my stocking and swearing and complaining to Mum about how it was all nonsense and a waste of money. Dad wasn’t at all guilty when I confessed on Christmas Day that I’d seen him in my room and now knew Father Christmas was made up: a myth I’d busted, like Dad had busted God.

  I might go on to say, ‘Dad says Darwin gave the beetle the hairs on his legs, and probably the green colour too. It’s called Evolution.’ Dee wouldn’t want me thinking she’d gone religious and would come straight back with, ‘For God’s sake, kiddo, I wasn’t speaking literally. I know there’s no fuckin’ man upstairs.’ Then she would point out that Darwin didn’t put the hairs on the beetle’s legs either and how he just had a theory about how things evolved. Alarmed by my confusion over God, she’d add: ‘For God’s sake don’t go telling silly old Freddie about it or you’ll be stuck with him all afternoon.’

  I once asked Dee what Freddie really did at his desk all day. I noticed that he writes with a big pen in one hand and plays with a thin silver chain in the other. And, like everyone else, he smokes when he works. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘whatever silly old Freddie does, it takes him to Oxford for the week and gets him out the house and out of my hair, and that’s good enough for me.’

  Having got bored of the conversation about God and Darwin, we eventually go into the kitchen. ‘Now, milk shake or French toast or both? And let’s see if we can get Prince Nicholas away from that fuckin’ TV?’ Dee always calls Nick ‘Prince Nicholas’ and Gully ‘Princess Gully-Gully’. I don’t think it helps, as it just makes them think they’re some kind of royalty and can get away with their bad behaviour.

  When I first started coming over the garden wall, the Ayers’ kitchen was in the basement. Then Gully came back from Oxford and they turned it into a flat for her. The kitchen was moved all the way up to the second floor, next to Dee’s bedroom and study. Apart from when Dee leaves the house to go somewhere, she spends most of her time on the second floor. In our house the kitchen has always been in the same place and nothing changes, whoever’s coming over to eat with us. Dee likes to completely change her kitchen, depending on who’s eating in it. At lunchtime Freddie stops writing and fiddling with his silver chain and comes up for his lunch. According to Dee, he likes to think he’s in his gentlemen’s club. So she puts out the silver knives and forks, a big ham, a glass jug of celery, a pot of Gentleman’s Relish, which smells like cat sick, and Stilton cheese with the blue mould. In the middle of the table is a round silver box filled with Bath Olivers and water biscuits, which no one is allowed to eat other than Freddie. As soon as he’s finished his lunch he goes back downstairs to work and everything gets put away. Then it goes back to being a family kitchen, which now serves American diner food for Nick and Gully, their friends and anyone else dropping by. Dee starts making pancakes, French toast and milk shakes, followed by ice-cream with lots of toppings.

  Once the food is on the table, Nick comes up from watching TV and is usually in a bad mood with everyone. He’s often cross with me for ignoring him and spending so much time with his mum. The trouble is, I feel like I have to try to explain myself to get back on his good side, but the more I do, the deeper I seem to dig myself into a hole. Somehow, I hope that saying something friendly like ‘Your mum’s been showing me that green beetle with the hairy legs and now we’re having French toast’ will break the ice. It doesn’t, and now both me and his mum are in trouble.

  ‘No shit, William, the fucking beetle again?’

  ‘French toast, Nick, or would you prefer arsenic?’ Dee asks. Nick’s usual response to his mum is ‘Fuck off,’ followed by a dig at her. His favourite one is to tell whoever’s in the room how, when Dee is really old, he’s going to have all the counters, the oven and the sink raised up so she can’t reach anything from her wheelchair. This is a game Nick and Dee play to see who can be the nastiest to the other. Dee’s response will be something like, ‘That’s a Brain-of-fuckin’-Britain idea. Then you can get your hopeless father to do the cooking and washing up,’ or ‘Then Princess Gully-Gully can take you to restaurants with one of her rotten boyfriends who you hate so much.’

  Sooner or later Gully comes up to the kitchen so she can have a gossip with her mum. She’s thirteen years older than me, very beautiful and can be just as mean as Nick and Dee. When you get the three of them in the same room, you start to wish you’d stayed at home. Gully acts like she doesn’t have time for boys like me and Nick and only wants to tease us or talk about herself. When she comes into a room, she has this way of walking where she slinks and sways her hips from side to side so her whole body moves like a snake. She has thick blonde hair which is all perfect and she wears perfume that smells lovely. She wears glamorous dresses with high-heeled shoes or boots that make her look taller. The trouble with Gully is she knows that men think she’s beautiful – all she has to do is that slinky hip and bum thing and they’ll do anything for her. She also knows how to annoy Nick and embarrass me. Every time it’s the same and I never know what to do.

  As she slinks into the kitchen, she walks over and gives me a big hug with a sloppy kiss. It would be nice if she did this because she liked me rather than to show me up in front of everyone else. ‘Ohhh look, it’s Freddie’s favourite person, that “bloody William Miller”,’ which she says in a deep, Freddie-like voice. I can feel my cheeks going red and for a minute I can’t speak. She then goes over to Nick and starts sniffing his hair.

  ‘Mmmm, what do you think, Mummy? Something tells me our little Prince Nicholas has been smoking his daddy’s cigarettes.’ At this point the sparks start to fly and Nick responds with, ‘Get off, you bloody bitch,’ and then he has a go at Gully about one of her boyfriends and calls her a stupid tart. Gully’s had a lot of boyfriends, and Nick hates all of them apart from her first one ever, Martin Amis. Everyone likes him, and he still comes over to Regent’s Park Terrace to visit and chats with us.

  Gully is right about the cigarettes, which is one of his worst-kept secrets, but Nick hates it when Gully is being a snitch. He was only ten when he started stealing Freddie’s cigarettes. When he does, he sneaks back to his bedroom, where he lies on the bed smoking and reading comics.

  Nick’s mood changes the minute Gully turns her attention back to me, which she does with one of her favourite jokes, which is that Miss Shepherd is my grandmother. Gully never misses a chance to bring this up whenever I’m in the hous
e. I don’t know why it makes me so cross, but I always feel helpless when everyone laughs along with her. I also don’t like it when she tries to make Mum seem bad by saying something like ‘The smell from the poo your granny leaves in those shopping bags under the van is terrible,’ followed by, ‘Why doesn’t your nice mummy invite her in to use your loo? I think the Millers are all very mean to their poor old granny.’

  Gully with Martin Amis

  This is when I hope Dee might tell Gully to back off and leave me alone. But she doesn’t – she thinks Gully’s jokes about Miss Shepherd being my granny are the funniest thing ever. I wish I knew not to argue with Gully, but I can’t help it. The more I try to explain that Miss Shepherd isn’t related to me, the deeper she sticks the knife in. In the end, whoever’s getting it in the neck from Gully, Nick gets bored with it. He also knows that, as soon as she’s stopped making me look stupid, she’s going to turn on him again. After feeding half his French toast to Jane and Gucci under the table, Nick orders me to come downstairs to play.

  ‘Right, now that you’ve finished stuffing your face and sucking up to my mother, let’s go downstairs and play Commandos, then Gul’ can bore mum about all the men she’s been shagging.’

  Gully is the only person I know who talks about all the sex stuff in front of other people. Dad might sometimes say something silly about sex as a joke, but Gully does it because she knows it will annoy Nick, embarrass Freddie and impress Dee. Whatever it is that she’s doing, she certainly likes to make out she’s doing it all the time. Me and Nick sometimes stand just outside the kitchen and listen to Gully banging on about it with her mum, hoping to get clues as to what all this sex stuff actually is. I’ve heard Dee making jokes about sex too, but I don’t really understand them.

  Commandos is a game Nick and I play a lot. We crawl around his house on our stomachs, trying not to be seen. The aim is to take things from rooms with grown-ups in, or play a joke on them without them knowing. It’s usually Dee or Freddie we do it to. We did it to Gully once, but that was a completely different mission. We managed to crawl all the way down to Gully’s basement flat in search of evidence that she was having all this sex she talked so much about. There was one major problem with the mission – neither me nor Nick knew what to look for that would count as proof. But it felt exciting, and so much more interesting than stealing candlesticks, books or paintings off his mum and dad.

  Sir A. J. Ayer at work

  Playing Commandos on Freddie was a pretty stupid thing to do as it only made him dislike me more. He works at a large round table at the back of a drawing room on the first floor, where he sits for hours with his back to the window. Me and Nick pull ourselves across the floor until we get under his desk. Then Nick starts tying Freddie’s shoelaces together, and I have to try not to laugh. We make our way back across the floor, disappear behind a sofa and wait. Freddie is either a brilliant actor or thinking too hard about philosophy to have noticed us. From our hiding place we don’t have to wait long before he stands up, shoes tied together, and pretends to fall over, shouting and cursing at us. Nick is the worst kind of traitor and jumps up, points at me lying on the floor and shouts, ‘It was William, he made me do it!’

  And there he goes again: ‘It’s that Bloody William Miller! Get out of here now!’ Nick howls with laughter, and Freddie, having taken off his shoes, stomps over in his socks, grabs me by my arm and marches me onto the landing. Then Dee comes out to the landing above and shouts down the stairs, ‘Jesus H Christ, Freddie, don’t be so goddamn anal. They’re kids having fun.’ She tries to get me to come back upstairs, but I feel awful and can’t bear the look of anger on Freddie’s face. It’s obvious he thinks I’m the ringleader. I know running to Dee would only make everything worse. So I slip quietly through Freddie’s bathroom, out of the back door and over the garden wall.

  11

  HYPOCHONDRIA

  When I was really young – like, five or six – I never saw Dad working anywhere else except at home in his study. He went away quite a bit to America and to places outside London, so I guessed he was doing something else. He talked a lot about working in theatres with actors and making films for the television, but I hardly ever got to see him doing any of these things. When I was really small, we would sometimes walk across Regent’s Park on Sunday mornings to the BBC, where he would be on a radio programme. As far as I could tell, that wasn’t actually work because he sat in a room with other people who just talked and laughed together.

  Afterwards, we would walk back home across the park in time for lunch. A few times we dropped in to see Grandad, as he lived in a flat around the corner from the BBC. He once gave me some horrible mint chocolates from a drawer in his desk, which I think had been there since the war because the chocolate had gone a bit white and the mint was really dry. One time, after a visit to the BBC with Dad, we took Grandad up the Post Office Tower for lunch. It had a brilliant restaurant right up at the top that went round and round and you could see all of London. It was so high up that the planes were almost at the same height as us and the people on the streets looked like ants. Not long after we went there the IRA put a bomb in the restaurant and blew the windows out, so they shut it for ever.

  When I was a bit older, Dad starting taking me to the other BBC, where they make television programmes. It’s called Television Centre, and you have to drive there, but Dad is allowed to park his car right outside the front door and a man then parks it for him. I really like going there, as I get to see people I know from the telly. It’s a huge round building with lots of studios where you can see the programmes being made. The first time I went, Dad was on The Parkinson Show. They were also making Top of the Pops in one studio and Doctor Who in another. There are rooms with windows where you can look into the studios and see everything that’s going on. A lady who was supposed to be looking after Dad took me off to a café to buy biscuits. It was next to the studio where they were making Doctor Who, and there were all these men dressed as green monsters. It felt sort of out of place because I knew all these monsters from watching them on the TV, but here they were at the table next to me and instead of trying to kill the Doctor they were drinking cups of tea and talking about how to get home from Shepherd’s Bush.

  My favourite programme on television is Blue Peter. The next time Dad was on Parkinson I went with him and they were making Blue Peter in the next-door studio. I was taken to the room with the windows to see what was happening, but none of the presenters were in the studio. I was really hoping they would have Lulu the baby elephant back, because last time she peed all over the studio floor and pulled John Noakes through it. They didn’t, but later, when we were leaving, someone shouted, ‘Hold the lift.’ Suddenly, there they were, standing right next to us – Valerie Singleton, Lesley Judd, Peter Purves and John Noakes. I’d met famous people with Dad before, but no one as famous as the four presenters from Blue Peter. I saw them every week on television and it felt like I knew them as close friends, and now they were standing next to me in a lift. They really wanted to talk to Dad, who they were strangely excited to meet, and asked him loads of questions about what he was doing. They were looking up at him like he was their hero, which really surprised me as they’re so much more famous than him. Then the lift stopped, and they were gone. At that moment I decided I would write and introduce myself to them properly and say that I’d met them in the lift at the BBC with Dad and how much I’d wanted to talk to them.

  They wrote back, or rather someone called Biddy Baxter did, who was the editor of Blue Peter, and sent a picture of all four of them sitting on a sofa. When I showed the letter and photo to Conrad, he thought maybe, if I wrote enough times, they would give me a Blue Peter badge. So I did, and I sent them a drawing to go with each letter. I had to wait ages for a reply but when the letters arrived they were always from Biddy Baxter, and she started every letter with: ‘Sorry for taking so long to reply. As you know, we get over 4,000 letters a week. We thought you might like a photo of
Jason this time.’ That was Valerie’s Siamese cat. Other times it might be a photo of Peter’s Alsatian, Petra, or John’s sheepdog, Shep. Then, finally, a brown envelope arrived, and in it was the Blue Peter badge I’d waited so long for. I wrote straight back to thank them, and they sent me another photo of Shep.

  After struggling for several years with his book on the philosopher man, Dad actually finished it and was spending more time out of the house or was away directing plays. One time he went to Los Angeles to do a Shakespeare play. He seemed to be gone for ages, and when he came back he had all these presents from a cowboy shop for me and Tom, and a ridiculous sheepskin coat for himself that made him look like he’d been searching for gold in the Klondike rather than directing a play.

  I’m not sure if anyone read Dad’s book, but I was sad when he finished it because Sue then went off to work for someone else. Although she came back so see us a lot, the house felt empty without her. She carried on taking me to Stanage to see Guy and Stella, and one time, when Mum and Dad went on a trip to America, she moved in to look after us. That was pretty amazing as it was like having Sue as a mum. She made our breakfast, took us to school and was there when we got home, and she read to us when she put us to bed.