I knew once I got to New York no one would care about my A-levels: I’d be living on my wits, and on some phone numbers I’d found in Dad’s address book, which included his lecture agent, literary agent and the American publicist for the BBC Shakespeare series. I then went to the travel agent on Parkway and bought a plane ticket to New York. As I sat at the desk and wrote out the cheque my hand was shaking, but I couldn’t tell if it was out of fear or anticipation. As I finalised everything for my departure I had a few moments of complete panic, which I couldn’t reveal to anyone, not even Conrad, who I’d discussed everything with at length. Conrad had triumphed in his A-levels with two A’s and a B, and was returning to Bedales to sit his Oxbridge entrance exams. He was surprised by the hastiness of my decision not to retake my A-levels, but also admitted that he wished he was coming with me.
As the day of my departure approached and my mind raced back and forth between thoughts of ‘I’m going’ and then ‘How can I get out of this?’, I came across a film called Midnight Cowboy, which was on TV the night before I was due to leave. The TV listings described the film as ‘Young man heads to New York in the hope of making his fortune’. This is my story, I thought, and surely it was the perfect film to get me into the right state of mind. That evening I settled down to watch it on my own. It started well with the hero, a Texan dishwasher called Joe Buck, packing his bags and getting on a bus to New York City.
As he makes his way to the Big Apple there’s this fantastic song playing called ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’, which made me think, ‘Wow! That could be my song, and I’m going there too and it’s going to be amazing!’ However, things start to go wrong for Joe very quickly, and before long I was watching the worst film I could have chosen at this particular moment. Almost as soon as he arrives in New York he becomes a male prostitute, who is robbed and ends up living with a con man called Ratso in a slum apartment. New York soon looked cold, lonely and frightening, and Joe becomes so desperate he’s being paid to give blow jobs to strange men in cinemas. I never got to the end of the film as I was so freaked out and confused by what I saw that I had to switch it off. I crept upstairs to bed with my mind spinning. I felt like the ground was being pulled from under me, that I’d naively backed myself into a corner and now had no choice but to go along with Mum and Dad’s rescue plan at Greene’s in Oxford. As I headed upstairs, I stopped outside Mum and Dad’s bedroom door and thought about waking them up to announce my sudden change of heart. I knew they’d be delighted, but I decided to sleep on it and tell them in the morning.
Lying in bed, I couldn’t get out of my mind the images of rundown apartment buildings and the dirty streets filled with dangerous men hanging out on every corner waiting to attack you. My chest started to feel tight and my breathing shortened. My bedroom at the top of our house in Gloucester Crescent felt as safe as ever, and I never wanted to leave it again. I felt drained from all this fretting, but I got up and sat in the dark staring out of the window and thought how different it all looked from the world of Joe Buck. There was something comforting about my neighbours in their houses across the gardens in Regent’s Park Terrace as they settled down for the night. I could see V. S. Pritchett pottering in his study, the Harrisons chatting as they washed up in their kitchen, and the Harrisons getting ready for bed. As life carried on across the gardens I could feel my breathing start to ease and my body relaxing. Would I really be in New York in just over twenty-four hours? Did I really have to go? As my eyelids got heavier, I climbed back into bed and fell into a deep sleep.
I woke with a start at 6 a.m. and rolled over to see my suitcases lying on the floor waiting to be taken downstairs. I’d spent hours methodically packing my life into those two suitcases. The unpacking of those bags and putting everything away would symbolise a colossal failure that I would find hard to explain to friends like Conrad, Stella and Keith. Everyone would think I was a coward with no stomach for adventure. I’d also had that dream again – the one about standing in line at the post office collecting my dole money – and somehow that seemed a lot worse than Joe Buck’s misfortunes in Midnight Cowboy.
As I waited for my taxi to the airport I was trying to remember how many times I’d stood on the front porch of our house about to embark on another phase of my life. There was my first day at Primrose Hill Primary, when Jeanie and our nanny waved me off as I got in the car with Mum. Then my first day at Pimlico and, five years later, hauling my trunk out the door to go to Bedales. The street had been the backdrop for so many transitions in my childhood and happy memories. The races with the Roebers along the pavement and around the block, helping the dads push Miss Shepherd’s van up the road, skateboarding with the Haycrafts and getting the car ready before catching the overnight train to Scotland.
Now I was about to start on another journey that would take me far away from all this. Alan and Conrad had joined my parents, and they were all standing on the front steps to say their goodbyes. I could tell my mother was trying not to cry, while my father, who’d never been good at dealing with tears, was doing his best to make everyone laugh with an amusing story about being in New York with Alan and Mum in the 1960s.
As the taxi slowly made its way up the long curve of Gloucester Crescent, I turned back to take one last look at our house and the small leaving party. Mum was smiling at Conrad while Dad and Alan had turned around and were walking back into the house. I had no doubt that life in the Crescent would carry on without me, but as they disappeared from sight I wondered if I’d ever come back again.
EPILOGUE
2018 (Age 54)
In the 1990s the Crescent went through a sad and steady decline. It was as if a long-drawn-out play with many acts had finally come to an end. Most of the original residents had moved on, either finding their houses too big once their children had flown the nest (the Roebers, Claire Tomalin, Mary-Kay Wilmers) or, after a divorce or death (the Hay-crafts, V. S. Pritchett), had decided to sell up. There were a few stragglers left to dismantle the sets and switch off the lights. My parents are one of those families who have stoically remained in their house to this day, along with two or three other couples who settled down to a more comfortable and slower pace of life. What was most surprising throughout the 1990s was the complete absence of children in the street. The gardens fell silent, like an out-of-season seaside resort. Gone were the swashbuckling sword fights, the water bombings, tree-climbing and the calling for friends to come and play from across the garden walls.
Out on the street things had changed too, with the regular presence now of young men who would sit in groups on Alan’s garden wall, idly threatening all those who passed. They were members of organised gangs and arrived with the clean-up and redevelopment of King’s Cross, when the drug dealers and their customers where pushed up to Camden Town. The gangs worked for the drug dealers, who employed them to run errands and pick up and drop off drugs around Camden Lock. The Crescent turned out to be the ideal place to hang out as they waited for the next drop, and the ivy-covered walls of the front gardens provided the perfect place to stash their supplies. They stayed for the best part of a decade before leaving, having either been sent to prison or moved on to ply their trade elsewhere.
Then a strange thing happened as the century turned into the new millennium: with the gangs gone, a new generation of families started to take an interest in the Crescent. Over the following years the houses and gardens in the Crescent came back to life. As the newcomers took up residence, did up the houses and settled in, the volume was gently turned up and the sounds of family life and children playing in the gardens returned.
In 1983 I came back from New York for what I thought would be a short visit to London, followed by a month in India with my mother. I’d been in New York for a year, initially living alone and then sharing an apartment with Remy (from Bedales) and then Conrad. I had two jobs: working for a PR firm by day and an assistant maître d’ for Keith by night. My intention was to return to New York at the end of the summer
, settle down and do more of the same. But at some point, over one of my parents’ Sunday brunches, I overheard Dad talking about Patrick Uden, the man who’d so brilliantly turned The Body in Question around. Patrick had just set up his own television production company off the back of the newly launched Channel 4. Something about this new venture made me curious, and I went back to Dad’s address book and looked up Patrick’s phone number. A few days later I went to see him, and he offered me a job as a production trainee. And so, instead of returning to New York, I embarked on what would be a long career in television, of which the next eighteen years would be spent building a large and successful production company with Patrick.
At the end of 1999, on a business trip to New York, I was re-introduced to Nigella Lawson at a dinner held by Keith at his restaurant, Balthazar. She remembered me as an awkward teenager, and this time we hit it off and talked all evening about the old days, the Ayers and our holidays in the south of France. While in New York together we met on several occasions and came up with a plan to work together. On my return to London I quit my job and went into business with Nigella, producing her television programmes as well as creating, launching and running her retail brand.
Over the coming years, as I got on with my life, my father came to terms with the idea that I’d turned my back on ever going to university or getting any qualifications. What he found equally hard to understand was that I’d chosen a career path that neither he nor his friends fully approved of. Although I’d gone into an industry they were familiar with, I’d joined what they felt was the opposing team: the one on the top floor, who wore suits and ran the business – the Establishment. In their eyes this was somewhat grubby and should be treated with an element of suspicion. We were the ones who stopped people like them from getting on and doing the important and worthwhile things. Over family lunches and gatherings I’d argue back that I was, in fact, the person who made their work possible: I kept their shows on the road, closed the deals, fought for them to have bigger budgets and ultimately made it possible to do the work they wanted to do. I don’t think my father ever stopped believing that what I was doing was wrong, but as time passed the discussions became fewer, and I found I felt less of a need to justify myself or please him.
In the meantime I got married, divorced and then married again, and with my second wife who I pursued relentlessly for seven years had two wonderful children. Unlike my father, who’d spent his life circling the fringes of Regent’s Park, I decided to take an altogether different route. Determined to remain as independent of my parents as I could, I moved to places they tended not to visit, like Fulham and Chelsea and then across the river to Stockwell and Camberwell, before settling down in west London.
In an attempt to lure me back, my mother would occasionally mention that one or other house in the Crescent had come up for sale, and casually suggest that I should take a look at it. I’d brush it off each time, fearing a return to the Crescent would undermine the independence that had become important to me. I’d created my own life on my own terms where I could dip in and out of the old one whenever it suited me, and I was in no hurry to return.
Then, in the spring of 2008, another house came onto the market following the death of Ursula, the widow of Ralph Vaughan Williams. She had moved into the street in the 1970s after the death of her husband in the late 1950s, and quickly become one of the Crescent’s much-loved characters. Ursula was a wonderfully elegant woman who, when not entertaining friends, could be seen pruning her roses wearing a straw hat with a colourful Sobranie cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth.
For several months after Ursula’s death a lodger lived in the house and was given the task of sorting out her papers. It was this lodger who came to the door one spring afternoon, when, without me knowing, my wife rang on the bell to enquire about the house. She fell in love with it the minute she entered the hall, and persuaded me to come over and see it for myself later that day. I did this with a certain amount of trepidation, alarmed by the idea of returning and putting myself in such close proximity to my parents and the life I’d worked so hard to get away from. Over the last two decades I’d watched the Crescent’s slow decline and the era of my childhood become a distant memory. I couldn’t imagine there being another era like it. But I was also curious, and ready to play the game of ‘What if?’
The last time I’d walked up the front path of this house was to visit its previous owner, old Mr Pavlovich, with my father when I was six or seven years old. Back then the front garden was completely overgrown but now, after thirty-five years of Ursula’s love and care, it was filled with white tulips, hellebores and fragrant flowering bushes that lined the path to the front steps. The house was one of the few in the street with a hall that runs all the way from the front door to the back. When the lodger opened the door, the first thing I noticed was the intensity of the light reflecting off the lush green jungle of the back gardens at the other end of the hall. This drew me straight through the house and into the back garden. There I wandered around taking in the alternative perspective of the gardens and the backs of the houses that I knew so well.
I was used to standing under my parents’ magnolia, but from where I stood now, three gardens away, I could see the full scale of the tree my parents had planted forty-five years before and was now as tall as the house. It was in full bloom and dominated the surrounding gardens with its long branches heavy with pink flowers. Through it I could still make out my father’s study and his books on the shelves. Above that was my old bedroom, which had brought me so much comfort later in my teens. There were familiar noises like a distinctive door slamming which I knew instantly to be from the Roebers’ old house, and for a moment I could have sworn I heard their mother calling them in for supper. The sound of manual typewriters had disappeared, replaced by the barely audible tapping of computer keyboards. I craned my neck to look over the walls to locate the sound of children playing a few gardens away. Then, when I looked back at my parents’ house, I noticed my father had entered his study and was reaching up to take a book from the shelves. He then sat down at his desk and started to read. As I scanned the back of the houses and reminded myself of who’d lived in each one and wondered where they were now, I felt an overwhelming desire to be part of it again. This was where I wanted to be and where I wanted my two daughters to grow up. I would always be independent of my parents, wherever I lived. I realised there was a new generation in Gloucester Crescent and a community that I wanted to be part of.
We made an offer on the house, with the belief that it would probably never happen. In the months that followed, as the lawyers got to work, I would frequently ask myself if I had lost my mind. Then one day the call came to say the deal was done and the house was ours. I put the phone down and sat there trying to comprehend the magnitude of what I’d done – after all these years I was really moving back and returning to Gloucester Crescent.
For the first few months I walked around in a daze, bewildered by my decision. Curious to see what had changed, I would take a walk each evening with my wife heading up the Crescent then along Regent’s Park Terrace and back down the other side. As we did this, I would peer through people’s windows and stop and chat to other residents in the street. I noticed how many of the houses had been smartened up and enlarged, with many having been scrubbed of a century’s worth of soot. Even the old piano factory had been cleaned up. Colin Haycraft’s publishing company, Duckworth, was gone and the five-storey rotunda was now occupied by architects, film production companies and various designers.
With our evening walks we soon got to know the new neighbours and before long established a circle of friends in the Crescent and the surrounding streets. It’s still a close-knit community, but the new generation is subtly different from the old. Like my parents and their friends, we get together around our kitchen tables and make each other laugh and cry. We talk endlessly about what we want for our children and encourage them to roam free over the walls, climb tr
ees, share meals and cross the same invisible boundaries of the community. The big difference is the approach we take towards our children’s education; unlike the laissez-faire attitude our parents had, we go in and talk to the teachers and get involved with the schools; we go to every meeting on offer and would like to think we have a plan. We sometimes wish we could be as carefree as our parents had been, but we find it hard to let go: we’re concerned about our children’s safety, their use of the internet and social media and worry endlessly about their loss of innocence.
On returning to Gloucester Crescent I realised how very young my parents and their friends were when they first arrived in the ’60s. It’s easy to forget that the current generation is almost twenty years older, and perhaps this is the reason why we are more circumspect. Perhaps the magic and charm of the Crescent has evolved into something more grown up and responsible.
But then, of course, there are times when I realise I’ve said or done the exact same thing my father would have said or done to me as a child, and then I wonder how like him I’ve become. My study, like his, is the equivalent of my garden shed, and there are undoubtedly times when I find myself retreating to it to avoid the arguments, discussions about social media and the general noise and chaos of family life.
Living so close to my parents has meant I see more of them than I did before, but we’ve set our boundaries and the conflicts and oppressive expectations I feared never materialised. When we get together for afternoon tea or a meal, I go with the knowledge that my father’s opinions no longer affect me in the way they used to. I’ve never stopped loving him or my mother and have come to the conclusion that living cheek by jowl with my parents at this time in their lives is a privilege which has brought us closer together at a time when it probably matters the most.
Gloucester Crescent Page 25