Gloucester Crescent

by William Miller

  27

  LIFE IS BUT A DREAM

  After I left for Bedales, it seemed that life in Gloucester Crescent had carried on as if nothing had changed. I did wonder if it might have been like Freddie’s explanation of philosophy – the one about trees falling in forests and whether they made a sound if no one was there to hear it. In the same way, I wondered if my not being at home meant life as I knew it would just stop. No comings and goings, no Alan, Eric, Oliver, Mary-Kay and others sitting around the kitchen table having interesting conversations – everything frozen in time until I came home.

  It was one of those scenarios Conrad liked to debate when we were much younger. One of his favourites, which he liked telling me to freak me out, first came about when I was singing the song that went ‘Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, etc. etc. … life is but a dream,’ when he came back with, ‘You do know life might actually only be a dream and we’re all fast asleep and everything that’s happening in your life is the dream and only happening to you.’ Conrad was full of these philosophical conundrums. There was another when we went on a school trip to the London Planetarium when we were ten. The whole class sat staring up at a galaxy of stars projected across the domed ceiling as the commentator told us he was now going to take us back thirteen billion years to the beginning of the universe. As the man waffled on about the Big Bang, Conrad, a bit too knowingly, whispered in my ear that if we walked out of the Planetarium at that very moment there would be nothing out there. All of London and everything we knew would be gone, replaced with swirling gases and mega-volcanic explosions. I was completely convinced it was true that we’d travelled back in time, until we stepped out onto the Marylebone Road and found it was exactly as we’d left it two hours earlier.

  The kitchen, Gloucester Crescent – Alan Bennett, Mum, my cousin Daniel Miller, Kate (with joke teeth) and Dad getting on without me

  It was abundantly clear that life in the Crescent was carrying on as if I’d never left. I knew this because I could hear it at the other end of the phone whenever I called home: whatever space I’d taken up within our house and in people’s minds had been filled. This idea played into a fantasy I’d had for some time about running away and letting everyone think I’d never come back, and then secretly moving into a room in one of the houses across the gardens in Regent’s Park Terrace. From there I would watch my family getting on with their lives without me and see if my disappearance had made any difference or if they cared.

  When I’d stood on the front steps with my trunk, I remember thinking, ‘This is it. I’m moving on with the rest of my life.’ I knew I’d come back for holidays and the odd weekend, but from this day on my relationship with my family would be completely different.

  I called home most days in those first weeks because I was excited to tell Mum and Dad about school and my new friends, but it was always a challenge and the novelty soon wore off. The boys’ house only had one telephone, a payphone in a doorless cupboard with no privacy, which made any kind of personal conversation impossible. Each night you took your place in the queue and waited your turn. When it came, you had to try to complete the story you wanted to tell before being cut off by the pips and the frantic shoving of coins into the slot. Mum wanted to hear my news and tried her best to take it all in, even though she was obviously distracted by everything going on around her, which sometimes left me feeling like I might as well be talking to myself. If Dad got to the phone first, he only wanted to know if I’d read his books and, finding I hadn’t, lost interest and handed the phone over to Mum. Then there was Tom: if he answered, he was keen to let me know that my place in the family had been filled, that I wasn’t missed by anyone and didn’t need to bother coming home again. I never really minded Tom’s digs as I preferred to stay at school and make the most of my two short years there.

  I found it comforting that the metaphorical trees in Gloucester Crescent kept falling and continued to make all the familiar noises one would expect. I wanted to be more independent from my family, but knowing that life at home was carrying on as usual helped give me the confidence I needed to detach myself from my family. I had no back-up plan other than to return home if it all went wrong, so it was good to know that I could potentially slip back home if I had to, even if Tom had other ideas.

  We had the option of going home at weekends, but I rarely felt the need and ended up not returning to London until the autumn half-term. When it came, I made a brief visit to Stanage to see Stella and then spent the rest of the holiday at home catching up with my friends. Dad was now at the BBC directing The Taming of the Shrew with John Cleese, so I spent a day with him watching the filming at Television Centre. It was part of the BBC’s Shakespeare series, which had become a big project for Dad and one he was actually enjoying.

  The BBC had asked him to take over the running of the series the year before, when he was in Vienna directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Burgtheater. I was staying with him at the time and we were sitting outside a famous old restaurant called the Café Landtmann eating these big creamy pastries. As we sat there in the baking sun, two men, holding their jackets over their arms and carrying briefcases, made their way across the Ringstrasse shouting ‘Jonno!’ For some reason only people in telly call Dad Jonno, which I’ve always hated. These two men came skipping over, sat down and asked him straight out if he’d like to come and work at the BBC and take over the Shakespeare series. He was never one to say no to a big project, and it also happened they’d turned up at the right time. Things had not been going well for Dad in Vienna; the German-speaking cast, who’d been forced on him, got off to a bad start by pretending not to understand a word he was saying. To add to this, the lead actor walked out half-way through rehearsals claiming to have come down with a mystery illness. Dad got the cast together and told them ‘Ich bin Arzt’, which means ‘I am a doctor’, and informed them that this mystery illness didn’t exist. By the time the two men from the BBC turned up he was desperate to get out of the production, although he knew he couldn’t leave until the rehearsals were over. So he said yes to the men from the BBC, and before the curtain went up on the first night we were off.

  Dad rehearsing with John Cleese for the BBC’s The Taming of the Shrew, London, 1980

  When I came home for half-term, I discovered the padlock on the cupboard in my bedroom had been removed and my treasured belongings had all gone. The culprit, it turned out, was the actor Bob Hoskins, who’d been staying in my room when I was away at school. He was playing Iago in Dad’s BBC production of Othello. Dad had been warned by Bob’s agent that he might need a bit of supervision to keep him out of trouble, so he and Mum invited him to stay and gave him my room for the month. Having seen him rob, torture and murder people in The Long Good Friday, Tom had asked Bob if he knew anything about picking locks. It turned out he did, and on his first night he showed Tom how to pick the lock on my cupboard. Tom told me with some pride that it had taken Bob less than a minute to open it. He also pointed out how surprisingly boring everything in the cupboard had been, but that it had been worth it just to see the look on my face when I got home.

  There was one big change in the Crescent that had happened in my initial absence, and it had happened without me being aware of it ever taking place. I only discovered it when I walked up the stairs to my bedroom and looked out across the gardens to Regent’s Park Terrace and noticed something different about the Ayers’ house. From my window I could see that all the rooms and the conservatory on the half-landing were now empty – gone were the marijuana plants, Freddie’s desk, the big ornate mirror in the sitting room and all the pots and pans that hung across the kitchen window on the second floor. The Ayers had vanished, left the Terrace, and I hadn’t had the first idea it was happening. I sat by my window and stared at their empty house for ages. I’d never seen one, but it was what I imagined a dead body would look like: from the outside it looked familiar, but somehow you could tell the person you knew had gone.


  Other than the Mellys, the Ayers were the first of our close friends to sell up and leave. The Mellys had only moved up the road to Gospel Oak, but the realisation that the Ayers had packed up and gone hit me hard. Mum handed me a letter Dee had written for me to read when I came home from school. I pictured her sitting at the typewriter in her bedroom with cigarette smoke drifting from her mouth and into her nostrils as she thought about what to write. In her usual straightforward manner she explained how she and Hylan had finally fallen out of love with England and wanted to return home to America. She described England as ‘a mean and shitty little country filled with snobs, and that includes Freddie’.

  There was something spontaneous and crazy about the whole thing. Everyone knew Dee and Freddie’s marriage had been a mess for years, but they put up with it by being constantly angry with each other. Now, finally, they were separating and had sold their house in Regent’s Park Terrace. Eventually, they’d get a divorce and Freddie would marry Vanessa Lawson, but for now he was living with her in Fulham, so maybe they’d all be happy. Dee wrote that she and Hylan were about to board an ocean liner (which I thought a rather old-fashioned way to get to America) and were heading across the Atlantic to start a new life in New York, where she would be close to Gully.

  The strangest and least-thought-out part of all of this was that Nick didn’t feature in anyone’s plans, least of all Dee’s. When I asked him about it later, he said he’d come home one day and been told by his mum that the house had been sold and she and Hylan were leaving. They hadn’t asked him to come with them to New York, and he hadn’t been invited to live with Freddie and Vanessa either, though he said he wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. Nick was now seventeen and had been desperate to escape the turmoil of his parents’ fighting, and he saw this as an opportunity to get away from both of them. The more troubling problem was that Nick considered himself to be an adult and, having discovered the freedom of being independent, was now living with friends in squats where drugs were freely available. This worried Mum and Dad, who felt that Dee and Freddie had been somewhat irresponsible in abandoning him in the way they had, although there wasn’t much they could do about it; had they been able to offer Nick a place to live, he wouldn’t have given up the new-found freedom he’d been given by being dumped by his parents.

  At the end of the half-term holiday I got to witness another form of irresponsibility when Dad had a go at taking the law into his own hands. I’d been dragged along with him and Mum to see an unwatchable French art film at a cinema in Bloomsbury. As we filed out of the cinema with the rest of the audience, who were now analysing the brilliance of the film, a woman across the road and screamed, ‘Help! I’ve been mugged!’ When I looked back, Dad had vanished, but then I caught sight of him chasing two very dangerous-looking boys who were holding the woman’s handbag triumphantly over their heads. My only thought was, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to get killed’, so I took off after him. As I ran, I became aware that the disorderly group of intellectual cinema-goers had now joined Dad in his pursuit of the muggers. When we all caught up with him, he was waving a plastic palette over his head which he’d picked up off the pavement and was shouting out the usual abusive lines about how he was going to rip various body parts out of them.

  While Dad was bellowing words like ‘spleen’, ‘oesophagus’ and ‘thyroid’, a small man with tortoiseshell glasses managed to get shoulder-to-shoulder with him and shouted breathlessly, ‘I think we met once at Susan Sontag’s.’ For a split second Dad stopped shouting, looked down at the man and said, ‘That’s interesting, was it in New York or London?’ Then he went back to yelling at the thugs. Eventually, the boys stopped running, and one of them took out a baseball bat from under his coat. The gang of arty corduroys came to a halt behind Dad, who dropped the palette, held up his fists like a boxer and shouted, ‘Come on, then, I’ll have you both!’

  I knew it had gone too far, so I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him back while the boys made their escape. As Dad was patted on the back and led away by his new friends, he turned round and accused me of being a coward. I was shocked and hurt by this accusation – I was more than familiar with boys like that from my time at Pimlico and acutely aware of what they were capable of doing, but for Dad it was as harmless as a scene from one of his Shakespeare plays. I didn’t think I was being a coward – I thought I was being sensible. I knew that if I hadn’t dragged him away they would have cracked his head open like a coconut. It was one of those situations I’ve always dreaded Dad getting into, where, out of naivety, he’d stumble into dangerous territory and wouldn’t know how to reverse out of it without getting hurt.

  28

  GIRLS VS. BOYS

  Having acquired a little confidence from losing my virginity, you might have thought that being at a mixed-sex boarding school would have been the perfect opportunity for me to find a girlfriend. It turned out not to be the case. Every now and then I’d hear about a girl who was interested in me, but I was incapable of doing anything about it. Maybe it was shyness, a fear of being turned down, or maybe it was something else. I certainly spent a lot of time, when I should have been studying or revising, thinking about my ideal girlfriend and the kind of relationship I’d like to have. Sigourney Weaver in Alien came pretty high on my list. She was beautiful, independent, self-possessed, and I’d always wanted to travel through space. Then Blue Lagoon came along and I became obsessed with the idea of being marooned on a desert island with Brooke Shields and swimming naked in the sea with her. To add to this fantasy, there was a girl at school who looked quite like her. Through the grapevine I heard that she liked me too, but before I could pluck up the courage to ask her out she was snapped up by another boy.

  In the school library was an enormous scrapbook, or School’s Record, for everyone to browse through, which was put together by a group of sixth-formers who called themselves the Records Committee. Their job was to create an amusing record with photos and cuttings of the big things that happened over the school term: plays, concerts, events and the overall fun parts of school life. On the final page for each term was an ‘official’ list of who was going out with who, which could then be compared with the lists from the previous terms.

  Top of the list were the couples who’d been together for years and appeared on it without fail term after term. I always thought those relationships were far too serious and grown up, but what alarmed me most was the way their friends treated them like surrogate parents. Personally, I didn’t have time for any of them and wondered if they weren’t heading for a massive fall. It had to happen sooner or later: school would end, off they’d go to their different universities, and then what? On the rare occasions that one of these couples did split up I couldn’t believe how everyone got dragged into the politics of their separation. Wherever you went, there were people in mourning or dealing with some crisis the breakup had inflicted on everyone. You’d come across groups of their friends consoling one half of the couple, who would be sobbing uncontrollably in the back of the library or a common room. A girl in my year was even sent up to London to see a shrink because she’d been traumatised by the break-up of her two friends, who’d been together since the third year. Like the parents in a family, this couple were the glue that held her world together, and once they’d split up nothing seemed worth living for.

  Next on the list were the short-term relationships. These started with a fanfare – everyone had to know about it, watch them snogging in inappropriate places around the school, and it would be very boring for everyone else. Then there’d be tears as they said goodbye on the last day of term. When they came back the after the holidays, it was like it had never happened, which made it easier for everyone else: there was nothing like the clean break of a holiday to stop the rest of the school getting caught up in someone else’s messy liaison. This was the kind of relationship I most aspired to have, but for some reason it never happened.

  I did go out with one girl, but it only lasted two weeks,
which was long enough to get myself on that list. I was encouraged by her best friend to ask her out, even though I wasn’t entirely sure about it at the time. Before I knew what was happening we’d become this boyfriend-girlfriend thing: I stopped functioning as William and we were suddenly an official couple with everyone getting involved, including the bloody Records Committee. The thing is, my fantasies about having a girlfriend were all about being alone with her, stuck on a spaceship or a desert island, and they didn’t involve other people sticking their noses into our affairs all the time.

  The final nail in the coffin of our flightless relationship came with the awkward ritual of walking one’s girlfriend back to the girls’ house at night. There was something I couldn’t bear about the knowing look another boy felt he had to give you as you passed on the footpath with your girlfriend. Then there was the inevitable kiss at the front door, except my girlfriend insisted on dragging me into a yew hedge, where she would French kiss me with so much force I thought I was going to choke on her tongue. I began to dread these walks, and after two weeks I put an end to it. I’d never had to end a relationship before and spent the entire night and the following day torturing myself over what to say and when would be the best time to do it.

  I played out several scenarios in my mind. I could do it over lunch, but then I pictured everyone in the dining hall dropping their cutlery and turning to stare at us as she broke down in tears. Then there was her study during prep time: I’d wait for her to be alone and then saunter into the room, sit down, ask her what she was working on and casually come out with it. Then I remembered she had one of those studies near Conrad’s, where everyone could look in – if my plan didn’t go well, she might start shouting or crying and a crowd would gather at the window like they do at the zoo. In the end I opted for the most obvious – the yew hedge outside the girls’ house. I would time it for the exact moment when she started to lunge at me for the kiss, then I’d stop her and make my announcement before it went any further. If things became difficult, I would have the hedge to hide in.