Help! Dad’s a Leftie intellectual – and it’s making my life hell
The brilliant polymath Jonathan Miller brought up his family in a gilded enclave, surrounded by London’s literati. But his right-on principles meant sending his children to a local comp where, as his son reveals in a stinging memoir, he was mercilessly bullied . . .
The year is 1975 and I’m aged 11, listening to the rhythmic clatter of manual typewriters coming from open windows along Gloucester Crescent.
This goes on all day, every day of the week: the sound of grown-ups working from home. When you hear all the typewriters going at the same time, you could easily think they’re having a big typing competition.
But listen more carefully, and each one sounds different. Some go so fast you think the typewriter is going to fall to pieces. There are also one or two where the typing is so slow, you wonder why they bother at all.
Mum says these are the ‘tortured ones’, and Dad’s definitely one of those.
I know this because I’ve heard him say, whenever he can’t think of anything to write, the best way out would be to kill himself.
I think a big part of Dad’s problem is that, when he stops typing, he has to sit and listen to the sound of all the other typewriters. Knowing that everyone else is having no trouble at all must drive him nuts. To The outside world, Gloucester Crescent — in Camden, North London — was a community that seemed to operate as if it were a closed society. It became the focus of much mockery in the media. But it was my home.
My parents, Rachel and Jonathan Miller, bought it in the Sixties for £7,000. At the time, Dad was doing a comedy show in the West end called Beyond The Fringe with Alan Bennett and two other friends called Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
The houses in the Crescent — and in Regent’s Park Terrace, which joins it at one end — soon started to fill with either Mum and Dad’s friends or people just like them.
over the next three decades, great friendships were forged and professional rivalries were fuelled as the celebrated occupants allowed their lives to become entwined.
Relationships occasionally became strained when they either wanted to sleep together or kill each other.
My closest friends had parents much like mine: most had been educated at the same small collection of public schools and knew each other well from either oxford or Cambridge and then through their work.
You’d often hear them complaining about someone or other being upper-class or a Tory. If you ask me, I think they were all a bit confused.
They didn’t realise that most people probably thought they were all upper-class. I once heard an old recording of Dad talking on the radio, and he sounded even posher than Prince Charles.
For the most part, the Crescent parents were Left-leaning, idealistic as well as anti-establishment, and had a strong distaste for the old-school approach to authority and power. That’s why they decided to give their children a radically different childhood from their own.
So we were sent to state schools, where we could mix with children from every walk of life. And because our parents’ childhoods had been too strict and organised, we were encouraged to be free spirits — which meant we were left to do what we wanted. DAD couldn’t be more different from Mum, who, for starters,
doesn’t think the whole world is against her.
In his world there are two kinds of people — the ones he likes, who are good, and the ones he hates, who are bad. The good ones are people like his close friends and the drunks who come to the door and anyone who votes Labour.
Since Dad finds it easier to hate people than to like them, there are quite a few on his bad list, which includes people such as Idi Amin, hitler and his generals, the upper classes — because they ‘hate Jews’ and vote Conservative — and all theatre critics.
he used to like Peter Sellers. But Sellers once called him up and asked him to fly all the way to hollywood to talk about making a film. he even sent him an aeroplane ticket.
Dad got on the plane, flew all the way there and waited in his hotel — but Sellers never showed up. So Dad got on the plane and came home and told Mum the man was a ‘little s***’.
My father also hates television. he hates it more than he hates the people on his long list of those he hates most.
everything on TV is ‘rubbish’, and he claims it’s stopped us reading. But he has to take some of the blame: whenever my brother, sister or I open a book, he always tells us we’re reading the wrong one.
When Dad discovered I was reading The Catcher In The Rye, for instance, he said if I was interested in American literature I should read The Grapes of Wrath. he then asked, every five minutes, if I’d read it. The thing is, I wasn’t interested in American literature, but I did have 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.
Much of the time he’s far too busy with work and his big ideas to think about family life and lets Mum — who’s a hard-working GP — deal with all that. If it was left to Dad, we’d stay up past midnight, never get to school on time and probably starve.
he’s always writing, travelling, directing plays and operas and having to go on the telly. Before I was born, he was a doctor, but he gave that up and never stops telling us how much he wishes he hadn’t.
Unless Dad’s friends come over