One day Dad and his film crew came to Gloucester Crescent and interviewed me. He wanted to ask me about what I’d felt when I was ill and became delirious with a dangerously high temperature. This had happened a few times, and when it did, I’d have these waking nightmares where my hands felt enormous, even though I could see they were normal. Dad thought this was fascinating and wanted to use me to talk about how your brain can feel different things from what you see. I was a bit nervous at first as the idea of talking about something that only happened when I was delirious, and which I didn’t fully understand, might make me look like I was mad or talking rubbish. Dad assured me people would find it interesting and I’d get a day off school and it would be exciting to have a film crew come to the house just to film me. In the end I wasn’t sure what convinced me: the chance to be in one of Dad’s television programmes and seen by millions of people, or getting a day off school.
For the last few years at Pimlico the white gangs continued telling me that they knew where I lived and that they would come and get me when I was least expecting it. They never did, but I carried on believing they were outside the house, hiding in the shadows. I was worn down and stressed out from worrying about it, and every night I would switch off the lights so I could check outside to see if anyone was out there. For me, this meant Gloucester Crescent stopped feeling like the place where I felt safe and in my head was split into two different zones: there was out front on the street, which was as dangerous and frightening as school, and then the back, with its safe and protected gardens where no one could get to me and where I felt I could relax and breathe. In the end, the obvious thing to do was to plead with Mum to let me move to a room at the back of the house. When Jeanie moved out to live with her boyfriend, Robert, Mum let me have her room. It’s a quiet and sunny room that looks out across the gardens of the Crescent. It’s also identical to Conrad’s room two doors down. Being on the same floor, we were able to run a wire between our two houses so we would talk to each other on a radio and send coded messages.
The view from this room opened up a whole new world and often feels like the Hitchcock film Rear Window. It’s calm and peaceful, and I can spend hours watching life go on in the houses in Regent’s Park Terrace. I can see the back of Freddie Ayer as he works at the large round table in his sitting room. A few doors from the Ayers’ is the writer V. S. Pritchett, who I occasionally see wandering around naked before getting dressed and settling down at his desk. Next door to him are the two Harrison sisters, who’d been at Primrose Hill School with me and would occasionally wave from their house. This is without doubt my favourite side of Gloucester Crescent, and I felt calmer, safer and happier once I’d moved to the back of the house.
The other thing I look straight into from my room is a small conservatory that comes off the back of the Ayer’s house. One weekend Dee asked me to help plant a small bag of marijuana seeds that Hylan had given her. We sat in the kitchen and chatted while she carefully laid the seeds out on damp tissues. By the following weekend the seeds had sprouted with these little green shoots, and we moved them one by one into pots of earth and placed each one in the conservatory. Every day from my bedroom window I could see Dee in the conservatory watering and looking after these little plants. Within a few weeks the seeds had grown into small bushes, and by the following month they were enormous and completely filled the conservatory. Every now and then Dee would appear between the bushes, clip off a few stems and disappear back upstairs. It was around this time, on a visit for French toast and milk shakes, that Dee presented me with one of these plants. ‘Here,’ she said, handing me a pot with a four-foot marijuana plant in it. ‘You helped me plant this little guy. Take it home and enjoy it.’ More excited by my gardening skills than the fact that I was now the owner of an illegal drug, I carefully carried it over the garden wall. I took it up three flights of stairs and placed it on the table by my bedroom window. The smell, I noticed immediately, was overpowering, but I liked the way this enormous plant added colour and life to my bedroom. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, other than let it grow bigger, as I had no desire to chop it down, hang it up to dry and smoke it.
As it turned out, I wasn’t given the chance to do any of these things. As soon as Mum walked through the front door, I heard her yelling my name from two floors below. I ran onto the landing and innocently called down the stairs. There was no fooling my mother. ‘I can smell that plant from Inverness Street,’ she said. ‘Take it straight back to Dee’s before the police show up.’ My plant and where it came from clearly needed no introduction. Everyone on our side of the Crescent, including my mother, knew about Dee’s marijuana plantation as it was right there in the conservatory for everyone to see. So that was that – back across the garden wall we went, and the plant was returned and put back with the rest of Dee’s crop.
Dee called later to apologise to Mum, who seemed more concerned that our family could have been arrested than that I might have spent all summer off my head. But things soon settled down and Dee went back to pruning, drying and giving cuttings from her plants away to friends as presents. Nick managed to pilfer a few stems for himself and spent much of his time lying on his bed smoking joints and reading comics.
The Miller family at the wedding of Gully Wells and Peter Foges, 1978
While Dee was busily attending to her marijuana plants, Gully had finally found herself a boyfriend she considered worth marrying. He’s called Peter Foges, and he works as a producer at the BBC. Dee wasn’t at all sure about Peter, believing he wasn’t good enough for her daughter. I think she had this fantasy that Gully would marry an Austrian prince with a castle in the Alps, and she and Hylan, or even Freddie, would get to spend Christmases drinking schnapps, dressed in Lederhosen and schmoozing with royalty. But Gully was certain Peter was the right man for her, and within months of meeting they were married. The wedding party was at a restaurant in Chelsea. With the film of Grease having just come out, I’d learned a bad version of rock ’n’ roll dancing and spent the whole evening on the dance floor making a fool of myself in front of Gully’s somewhat alarmed girlfriends.
A few months later Peter was offered the job of running the BBC’s offices in New York and they left London for ever. I don’t know what it is about New York, but it seems to have this effect on people. When they get tired of Gloucester Crescent, they just pack their bags, go to New York and never come back.
21
HOPE – SUMMER 1978
I’ve never seen Dad cook anything other than coffee or tea, and that doesn’t really count. The only time I’ve seen him near the cooker is when he’s reading something to Mum while she’s making supper. So I was quite surprised to see him standing over the cooker, alone, trying to boil peas in a saucepan. It also seemed to be the only thing on the menu for lunch. Mum had gone into hospital that morning, and up until this point no one had told us why. I knew she’d had a pain in her stomach for some time and was going to see someone about it, but I never thought it would mean she would actually have to stay in hospital. Tom, Kate and I sat quietly watching Dad as he stared down at the peas.
The silence was broken by him shouting ‘FUCK!’ The saucepan had tipped over, and the peas were now rolling in every direction across the kitchen floor. I couldn’t bear to see Dad’s hopelessness and frustration as he crawled around the floor trying to pick up the hot peas with his hands. I ran over and joined him and, having grabbed the dustpan and brush, made a better job of clearing them up than he did.
‘I don’t know how we’re going to cope without your mother,’ Dad said. At that moment my body went completely cold and I felt sick.
‘Mum’s coming back, isn’t she? She’s not that ill?’ I asked.
‘I’m afraid she’s very ill and I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but either way it’s a disaster.’
Tom and Kate hadn’t moved from the table and were now looking down at both of us on the floor. They started to cry as they talked over each other,
asking Dad for any information. Picking himself up off the floor, all Dad was prepared to tell us was that they’d found a large lump in Mum’s stomach and they weren’t sure what it was. Unlike most people, Dad always prefers to err on the side of catastrophe than caution. At this moment I was trying to decide which one he was going for. If he was right, it was more than a disaster; it was curtains for our family and everything that was steady and stable in our lives. My head was spinning as a million thoughts ran through it. Mum was not the sort of person you ever expected to die. At least not until I was a grown-up with my own children and she was a grandmother. As much as I dreaded it happening, with his smoking and talk of killing himself I always felt I’d be ready for Dad’s death. Mum, however, was the rock in our family: always there, always well, and she’s a doctor. Doctors didn’t get sick.
My next question came with the answer I had most dreaded. ‘What do they think that lump in her tummy is?’
‘Cancer,’ Dad said without a pause.
Other than the gangs at school, who might or might not be outside waiting to kill me, there were two other scenarios that really scared me. They were ones that I knew I had no control over and which could take me or those close to me without any debate: nuclear war and cancer. Both had been described to me in detail on many occasions by Dad. Nuclear war was terrifying for all the obvious reasons and, as Dad liked telling us, would create panic everywhere, and there would be nothing we could do to stop it. It would be the end of the world and we’d all be dead, which, in a strange way, seemed better than the second scenario – cancer. Cancer could creep up out of nowhere and grab one of us at any time. With cancer, we would all be left to grieve and deal with that one person having gone. Now it was about to come and take my mother. I asked Dad if there was any good news, but he said, at the moment, no.
He at least had the good sense to call Jeanie, who by teatime had come over, so there would be proper food for supper and we weren’t going to starve. When Dad was out of the room, Jeanie explained that no one knew what the lump in Mum’s stomach was, and until they did, it could be anything.
The hospital Mum was in was the National Temperance, a somewhat shabby Victorian building on Hampstead Road. This happened to be on the 24 bus route from school, and there was a stop right outside the front door of the hospital. The next day, without telling anyone, I made a plan to get off the bus and see if I could find Mum and hear about it from her.
She had her own room, which looked out over Hampstead Road and the side of Euston Station. The whole place smelled of boiled cabbage, sick and disinfectant. I had only ever seen Mum lying in her own bed, so seeing her pale and ill in a hospital bed was really frightening. I did everything I could not to cry as I came out with what I’d been waiting to ask all day: ‘Dad told us what you have is serious and that you might die.’
‘Oh God, did he? Silly arse, that wasn’t how I suggested he put it.’
‘He told us when he was trying to make us lunch when he dropped the peas all over the kitchen floor.’ I don’t know why I told her this detail and I immediately regretted it. She now looked concerned about what was going on at home, and what Tom, Kate and I were being told, and fed.
I could barely bring myself to ask the next three words, which had been screaming in my head since the peas incident. ‘Is it cancer?’
‘I don’t know. And the doctors won’t know anything until they remove the lump and take a proper look at it.’
‘So you mean it might not be cancer?’
‘That’s right, it might not be, and we can only hope it’s not.’
At this point I couldn’t hold back any longer and burst into tears. I think I was partly crying with relief that cancer wasn’t a definite but also because I hadn’t thought about anything else all day and had struggled not to cry at school. As I rested my head on Mum’s side, I sobbed into the covers on her bed. She stroked my hair as she tried to soothe and comfort me. The word ‘hope’ was comfort enough. It was the word I’d been waiting for and that I could hang on to. I couldn’t pray, as I don’t believe in God, but I could at least hope.
I couldn’t bear the idea of leaving Mum on her own in this awful, lonely hospital room, but I could see she was tired and trying to stay awake for me. In the end, it was the nurse who told me I needed to leave and let her sleep. At home, Jeanie would be doing what she could to hold things together. Dad would be on the phone calling their friends to tell them everything he knew about the worst possible scenario. If Mum was going to die, we would need someone to look after us who could do a better job than Dad. There was no way he would ever be able to cope – not unless he married someone else, and right now that idea was unthinkable. I’m sure there were plenty of women waiting in the wings, but no one could ever replace Mum.
Back on the 24 bus, in spite of the hope, I started to think about which of Mum and Dad’s friends or families could take us all in: the Garlands might be good, or Uncle Karl and Aunt Jane. Now that Gully was married and living in New York there might be room at the Ayers. Then again, I wasn’t sure how having that ‘bloody William Miller’ living in his house would go down with Freddie. Another possibility crossed my mind: the three of us could all be split up and we might each be sent to live with a family of our choice. If that was going to happen, I would need to choose someone who really loved me and would look after me as well as Mum did. That evening, when Dad left the house to visit Mum, I called the only person I knew who would fill the role: Stella Coltman-Rogers.
Obviously it was much too early to come out with my plan, and, should the worst actually happen, then the suggestion would have to come from Stella rather than me. I told her everything Mum had told me in the hospital, as well as Dad’s less positive take. In Dad’s scenario there would be months of brutal cancer treatment, followed by inevitable death. Stella’s immediate response to this was ‘Rubbish. Your mother will get through this and everything will be fine.’ Stella’s optimism gave new life to the word hope. She also made a suggestion that added a layer of icing to this cake and would be something to look forward to. Mum had told me that if she was all clear after the operation she would need to convalesce for several weeks. This would coincide with the beginning of the summer holiday. There was no way we could get Mum to Scotland, but she would need fresh air and a lot of looking after. Stella suggested that the best place for this would be Stanage – and I could hardly have agreed more.
A few days later they operated and removed the lump from Mum’s stomach. And to everyone’s relief, not least Dad’s, they confirmed that it wasn’t cancer and Mum was given the all-clear. After everything we’d been through over the last week or so, it was as if we’d all been given a second chance. I felt like I’d been taken right to the edge of a cliff and forced to look over the edge at what life would be like without Mum and the safe and secure world we’d grown up in.
Now I knew she wasn’t going to die I longed for life at Gloucester Crescent to return to normal. There would be a summer of Mum convalescing and then we would go back to school and Mum to work. She would always be there when we got home, and meals would be cooked effortlessly, with Alan coming over to eat them with us. Dad would come and go and finally finish making The Body in Question.
Before Mum went into hospital I’d gone with her to a garage in Euston to buy our new family car. She’d chosen an enormous brand-new estate car, which we’d seen advertised on television. In the advert there was a woman in a flowing blue dress throwing herself over the car and running her hands over its body. An unseen chorus kept singing ‘Peugeot 504’, followed by the woman in the dress looking into the camera and whispering words like ‘Luxury’, ‘Ultimate’ and ‘Refinement’. I wasn’t sure if it was the ad that swung it for Mum or the salesman, who was going overboard with his pitch. We’d driven to the showroom in our beaten-up Volkswagen Variant, and the man did his best to impress Mum with the things he could see we’d never had before: a built-in radio-tape player (brilliant), an electric aerial a
nd three rows of plush velour seats (also brilliant, though I didn’t know what plush velour was). Mum wrote a cheque and we left to go home with her half-joking that Dad was going to kill her. At the time she probably didn’t think she’d live to see the car anyway and thought she’d be doing him a favour by at least leaving him with a reliable family car to drive us around in when she’d gone.
Now Mum wasn’t going to die, but she was still in hospital recovering from her operation when the garage called to say the car was ready to be collected. This meant I was the only other person who knew where the showroom was, so I went with Dad to collect it. With the house in Scotland and weekends at friends in the country, a large family car was essential. In spite of this, Dad thought buying any kind of car was foolish and unnecessary. Getting him to collect our brand-new car from the showroom would only be a terrible reminder that money had left his bank account. Dad wasn’t a miser, but he had a constant fear of ending up broke, and he was determined to prove that Mum had bought this car in a moment of madness. This time he was in luck, and his theory was about to be helped by the man in the showroom.
Being very small, the man had moved the driver’s seat as far forward as possible so he could reach the pedals when he drove the car to the front of the showroom. He then forgot to move the seat back when it was time for Dad to get in. When Dad tried to get in the car, he could barely get one leg behind the steering wheel, let alone the rest of his body. He got out and tried again, but whichever angle he tried to position his legs at, he just couldn’t get in the car. Stepping back out again, he slammed the door shut. ‘That’s it. Another waste of bloody money. Your mother has managed to buy the biggest car in the world, and it was built for a midget.’ The salesman was trying to apologise for leaving the seat forward, but Dad was having none of it. He’d been delivered a gift on a plate and was clearly thrilled to have it in order to prove that this car was a complete waste of money. He told the salesman that Mum would be in touch for a full refund, and we walked off leaving the car where it was.
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