Several days later, after I explained to Mum what had happened, she managed to persuade Dad to calm down and give it another go. Much to his disappointment, it was proved that the seat could be moved back and that there was more than enough room for someone as tall as him. This was a great relief, as it was crucial for Dad to be able to drive our enormous new car. He had to get us to Stanage so he could leave Mum, Kate and me with Stella and get himself back to London for work. Before he did this, he also had to drive Tom to Heathrow and put him on a flight to New York. Tom was spending the summer with old friends of Mum and Dad’s called the Aldriches, who had five daughters, an apartment in Manhattan and a farm in Connecticut.
Stella had done an amazing job getting Stanage ready for Mum, and had prepared one of the nicest rooms in the house for her to convalesce in. It was filled with flowers and had an enormous and very comfortable bed. Mum could sit up in it and look down the drive and across a distant valley towards the Clee Hills. A large handbell had been placed by the bed, which she was told to ring whenever she needed anything. Sue came up for our first weekend, and Kate and I were left to run wild as Mum got better and her strength returned. I knew I would have been happy living at Stanage with Stella for the rest of my childhood, but now I didn’t need to think about that. Hope had won the day, and I had my mum back. By the end of the summer we would all be in Gloucester Crescent and our lives would be back to normal, and Stella and Stanage would always be there.
22
IT’LL BE ALL RIGHT ON THE NIGHT
Sometimes, when something big and brilliant happens, you forget the bad times you went through to get there. I think for Dad The Body in Question is one of those. Once he’d finished making it, and it was finally on the television – with a big a book in the shops to go with it – he forgot about all the bad stuff. Dad’s problem has always been that when people say nice things and ask him to take on a new project or, as Mum calls it, ‘ask him to come out to play’, he always says yes. He never says, ‘Great, but here’s the deal: I’ll do this bit, but someone else will have to do the others.’ In the case of The Body in Question, the man from the BBC flew all the way to Scotland to tell him they were going to give him his own massive television series, which would be as big as Dr Bronowski’s. He would get to talk about all the things he loves and interest him the most. When the man said, ‘Oh, and by the way, you’re also going to have to write the whole thing, and did I mention a book to go with it?’ Dad should have said, ‘Hang on a minute, Mr BBC Man.’ Before suggesting this, the man from the BBC should have come round to Gloucester Crescent, sat in our garden and listened to Dad’s slow and painful typing and watched him lying on the floor of his study telling us all how he was going to kill himself.
Once Dad started making the series, it quickly became clear that he’d taken on far too much and it was all starting to fall apart. He felt that part of the problem was that they didn’t get what he was all about, or the way he wanted to do things. Soon everything was running way behind schedule and the people at the BBC were starting to panic. On top of all this he had the book hanging over him, which he realised he didn’t have time to write, and people from the BBC and his publishers kept calling up to ask how it was going. When Dad feels trapped like this, he gets desperate and just wants to escape. It was made worse knowing how big the whole project was and that jumping ship would let so many people down.
We could all see how much pain he was in. Every night he would come home from the studio and tell us he was living in hell and that he wanted to die. We all found this distressing, especially as there was nothing we could do or say to stop him feeling like this. Before long he was telling Mum the only way out was to kill himself. Although I’d heard this all before, I’d never seen him this low, and it frightened me more than ever. It wasn’t helped by a recurring nightmare I was having where he would try to throw himself out of the top-floor window of our house but it didn’t work and like a madman he would frantically keep running back into the house and up the stairs again to give it another go.
Then, just when we thought there was no way out, two amazing people came along who made Dad feel like everything might be possible. The first was a nice man called Patrick Uden, who Dad then made the BBC put on the project to produce the series. Patrick changed all sorts of things, but the most important thing was that he understood how Dad’s mind worked. He knew how to bring together all of his wild and crazy ideas about science, art and medicine and make something exciting out of them all. It was Patrick’s idea to make the set like the inside of Dad’s head, and he also knew how to write the scripts so he took that off his hands as well. He could see that letting Dad be himself was going to get the best results. The other person who helped Dad and cheered him up was his friend Susannah Clapp, who’s a writer and an editor. She would meet Dad every night at a Greek restaurant in Camden Town and work with him on the book. Although he was completely exhausted after the day’s filming, he would spend hours working with Susannah over taramasalata and kebabs as they wrote the book together. So, with Patrick and Susannah, Dad was a lot happier, and stopped going on about killing himself as a way of getting out from doing the series.
By November 1978 it was all over; the series was finally coming out on television, and everyone was so relieved that it had turned out so well in the end. Every Monday night, for the next thirteen weeks, people all over the country were glued to their televisions as Dad took them on a journey of both the human body and what was going around in his head. He hooked himself up to electrodes, made himself sick flying in a biplane pretending to be a red blood cell, made himself faint in a pressure chamber and was the first person ever to dissect a human body on television. The newspapers loved him too, with one calling him the BBC’s new Dissector-General – we all thought that was pretty cool. For Dad, it finally gave him the chance he had wanted for so long, to show everyone he could be serious and explain science and medicine to millions of people.
My appearance in the series, talking about my experiences of being delirious, turned out not to have been the smartest idea. I’d been doing everything, over the last year or so, to be as invisible as I could at school, and being on telly only made me stand out. This gave several of the gangs a reason to ratchet up the bullying. Maybe when I agreed to be interviewed I thought they’d all be out mugging people or watching The Sweeney or Cheggers Plays Pop on a Monday night. But I was wrong – everyone was watching The Body in Question, which was great for Dad but not so good for me. For weeks afterwards they would stop me in the corridors at school, waving their hands around, shouting, ‘Oi, Miller, you tosser, let me tell you about my hands – it’s my hands, they’re huge!’ Then they’d turn their thumping great hands into fists and hit me as hard as they could.
The start of The Body in Question also meant we got to have a television back in the house again. The old one had gone a couple of years before when, in a moment of complete fury, Dad unplugged it, took it round the corner and gave it to Arlington House, the place for homeless men. He claimed Tom, Kate and I had stopped reading books because we were too busy watching ‘mind-numbing rubbish’ on the telly. I’m sure there was some truth to this, but Dad had to take some of the blame. The three of us found that whenever we did ‘prise open the covers of a book’ (as Dad liked to put it) he always told us we were reading the wrong book. When he discovered I was reading The Catcher in the Rye, he said if I was interested in American literature I should read The Grapes of Wrath. He’d then ask, every five minutes, if I’d read it. The thing is, I wasn’t interested in American literature but I liked J. D. Salinger and I had to read The Catcher in the Rye for my O-levels. Dad did this with every book we ever read, so the three of us just stopped reading altogether. Getting rid of the TV didn’t stop us watching it, as we just went over the garden wall to the Ayers or the Roebers, where we spent many hours watching theirs.
The week before The Body in Question started, I saw Dad walking up Inverness Street carrying a brand
-new TV he’d bought at Rumbelows on the high street. It wasn’t long before we were back watching endless hours of rubbish and he was furious about the television all over again, despite the fact that he was on it once a week for three months.
Even though we all drove Dad crazy, I was still so proud of him and found it amazing that he could be on the television one day, talking about blood, human organs and chopping up bodies, and the next day be back doing another opera. He was out at the weekends doing book signings for The Body in Question and appearing on chat shows to talk about it, but during the week he was rehearsing The Marriage of Figaro at a big opera house in central London. Then, after Christmas, he went straight to Frankfurt to do an opera called The Flying Dutchman.
When the half-term came in February, I flew out to Germany to stay with him and watch his rehearsals. This was the first time I’d ever stayed on my own with Dad and not had Mum there to look after us. I was curious to see how he coped without her, and my conclusion was: not well. He had a small flat around the corner from the Frankfurt opera house, and the only food he’d bought was a box of an inedible cereal called Fru-Grains, a pint of long-life milk and a grapefruit. Dad’s assistant at the opera was a lovely woman called Renate Itgenshorst, who, after asking me one morning what I’d had for breakfast, realised I was going to starve if left with my dad. Renate came over to the flat, packed up my things and took me home to stay with her and her husband in a town outside Frankfurt called Darmstadt. There I would wake up in the morning to a full German breakfast of rye bread, cold meats and cheeses, and then take the train into Frankfurt and watch the rehearsals.
By Easter, Dad was travelling all over America promoting The Body in Question and taking Mum and Kate with him. Tom went skiing with friends, and I went to stay at Stanage with Stella for the holidays. The other person staying there was Stella’s grandson Jonathan, who had inherited the house and the estate when Guy died but was living most of the time in London. I hadn’t met Jonathan before, and although it was obvious Stella adored him, I could see how difficult it was going to be to hand over control to someone else. Guy had always insisted that, when he died, Stella would be allowed to stay at Stanage for ever. Now that Jonathan was taking charge, things were starting to look very different, and none of it was going to be easy for Stella. For over forty years, with Guy’s support, she had done a brilliant job running everything. She had managed this through the difficult years of the war, and when they had plenty of money and when they didn’t. Guy and Stella never spent money on fancy things, preferring to let the faded sofas and curtains become part of the slightly shabby feel that made the whole place so nice. The house hadn’t changed in decades, and even though it was big and grand, one of the things that made it so special was that there was nothing flash about it.
Jonathan is in his twenties and he wanted a place he could fill with grown-up toys and have fun with his friends. He was also talking about spending money on smartening up the house. I could see Stella was going to find this hard to accept. In spite of Guy’s wishes, Stella told everyone that once Jonathan got married, she would move into one of the cottages on the estate. There were plenty to choose from, but the idea of Stella leaving Stanage was unthinkable.
When I first met Jonathan, I thought he was different from anyone I’d met at Gloucester Crescent, or school or anywhere else for that matter. He has a relaxed confidence, which I assumed came from having been to public school. He’d actually been to Eton, the poshest public school ever, and a world away from Pimlico, which was probably why I instantly liked him. I knew Stella wanted us to get on, and fortunately, even with a ten-year age difference, Jonathan seemed happy to take me under his wing and let me hang out with him. As the days went by, he took me to explore every corner of the estate and we helped the men who worked on it to clear the woods and put up fences on the farms.
The peace and quiet I loved about Stanage, along with our happy routine, were soon disturbed when a group of Jonathan’s friends turned up for the weekend. They arrived in their fast cars, had the same cool confidence as Jonathan and, like him, were friendly and accepting of me. The men seemed to know him from Eton, and their girlfriends were like Gully: well dressed, sexy and a bit intimidating. I discovered that some of the men had also inherited big houses and estates after losing their fathers when they were young. I decided never to tell Dad about Jonathan’s friends, as he would have used it to prove one of his favourite so-called theories about the upper classes – that they drink too much and kill themselves driving their cars into trees or falling off their horses. Then, he goes on, their ‘dreadful’ children get everything before they can read or write and sooner or later end up running the country.
Although they were the kind of people Dad despised, during the time I spent with them they opened my eyes and I found I could see things about myself that I now wanted to change. They all knew with absolute certainty who they were and what they wanted to achieve in life and seemed pretty confident that they could have it. I wanted to be like them and to feel happy and confident about my future. Their world was full of opportunities that I didn’t seem to have at Pimlico. I realised I’d been treading water just to survive at school, and that if I stopped I would sink and drown. As I left Stanage and returned to London I knew something had to change. Somehow I had to try again to persuade my Mum and Dad to get me away from Pimlico and send me somewhere else as soon as they could. I had the whole summer to convince them that, when I went back to Pimlico in September, it would be for the last year. After my O-levels I wanted, more than anything, to spend what was left of my school years in a place where I felt at ease, where good things were possible and where I could make anything happen.
23
A VISIT TO AMERICA – JULY/AUGUST 1979
Two of the Aldriches’ five daughters had been to visit us in London in the past, and Tom had been to stay with them in New York and Connecticut the summer before. Now, finally, it was my turn to go to America. For me, it was a massive adventure as I hadn’t been back to New York since I was born there, fifteen years earlier. I’d always longed to go back and see it for myself – the place of my birth, which Dad talked so much about.
As I was staying for a month, Nelson and Anna-Lou Aldrich decided I’d go to their farm in Connecticut for most of the holiday, and would be with their daughter Nonny, who is my age. Nelson and Anna-Lou would return to New York during the week, leaving me and Nonny with an au pair they had hired to look after us. We would all then come back to New York for a few days at the end of my trip.
Tom had told me a little bit about Nonny from the summer before, so I thought I knew what to expect, although girls at that age can change a lot in a year. One day they’re a bit pathetic and immature and they drives you nuts. Then you don’t see them for a while, and when you do, they’ve changed into a woman and you’re the one looking pathetic and immature, left behind waiting for your voice to break. So, using this theory, the Nonny that Tom got to know last summer was likely to be very different from the Nonny I was about to meet. The thought that we were going to be thrown together for a month, and that we might become friends, made me both nervous and excited. What’s more, I’d be able to get to know her without having other boys, like the Roebers, Simon Elms, Nick Ayer or Tom, breathing down my neck. I wouldn’t have them undermining me or pushing me to the back of the room. The trouble was, I still wasn’t that confident with girls my own age. I knew I’d have my work cut out, with the first challenge being to keep my cool and show her I was different from American boys and someone worth getting to know.
As I pushed my trolley through customs towards the big metal doors leading to the arrivals hall, I knew Nelson and Nonny would be on the other side, standing by the barrier waiting for me. This was going to be my big arrival moment, and I needed Nonny to think I was everything she’d hoped I’d be. I’d worked out the details of my grand entrance and played them back over and over again in my mind. The automatic doors swung open, but to my surprise
Nelson was the only person standing waiting at the barrier and he was grinning back at me. As we made our way through the crowd I tried to show I wasn’t bothered and to hide my disappointment at Nonny not being there. For one awful moment it dawned on me that the plan could have changed without me knowing; Nonny had gone elsewhere for the summer and it was going to be just me, Nelson and Anna-Lou in Connecticut. Trying not to show my horror of the possible situation I casually dropped the question: ‘Where’s Nonny?’
To my relief, Nelson informed me that she was on her way from Los Angeles and flying into the same terminal an hour later. A thought crossed my mind: if I was the one now casually waiting at the barrier, the roles would be reversed and I would be the one looking cool and relaxed. I seriously thought this plan might work, until Nelson and I settled down in an airport café to wait for Nonny’s flight to land. I’ve always liked Nelson, with his Robert Redford film star looks, but the picture he painted of Nonny’s trip to Los Angeles did not look good for me, and he was enjoying telling me about it: it turned out she’d been to visit her big sister, Bibi. That’s nice for Nonny, I thought at first – sisters together sightseeing and swimming in the sea. Then Nelson went on: ‘Those Californian boys will have thought Nonny a real sweetie.’ He followed this with a forced laugh then a hard suck on his cigarette and raising of an eyebrow to say ‘you know what I mean?’ I did, and my heart sank with this news. How was I ever going to compete with Californian boys? I’d seen them in a documentary about skateboarders and I didn’t stand a chance. I’d just flown in from a hotbed of corduroy-wearing intellectuals in Gloucester Crescent and she was flying in from one of the coolest cities in America, where she’d been hanging out with tanned skateboarders with muscles where every other word would have been ‘Cool, Man’ or ‘Dude’ and they would have all had sun-bleached long blond hair. Nelson must have seen my fear, and he carried on. According to him, it was more than likely Bibi would have taken Nonny out clubbing and introduced her to older boys with jobs and cars and cool tastes in music.
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