Starry, effervescent but not so pleasant crescent
Gloucester Crescent
Profile, £14.99
Reviewed by David Herman
IN 2013, Nina Stibbe wrote a hugely successful memoir, Love, Nina, about working as a nanny for the journalist MaryKay Wilmers at 55 Gloucester Crescent, which runs between Camden Town and Primrose Hill in North-West London.
The street became famous in the 1960s and ’70s as an extraordinary group of writers, journalists and media figures moved there.
Along with Wilmers and her then film-director husband, Stephen Frears, other residents included George Melly, Alice Thomas Ellis, Claire and Nick Tomalin (and later, Claire’s second husband Michael Frayn) and, perhaps best-known of all, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller. Round the corner on Regent’s Park Terrace lived celebrities like A J Ayer, Shirley Conran, Angus Wilson and VS Pritchett.
And if you add regular visitors like Oliver Sacks, Beryl Bainbridge and Martin Amis, it was an extraordinary constellation.
Now, Miller’s second son, William, has written a memoir about what it was like to grow up among all these famous names but, above all, what it was like to be the son of Jonathan Miller, at the height of his fame as TV presenter, theatre and opera director, and author (not to mention neurologist). At his best, William captures the atmosphere of “competitive typing”, as books and scripts poured forth, garden parties and people popping in and out of each other’s houses.
Alan Bennett, a friend from
Beyond the Fringe days, had his own key to the Millers’ home and was a frequent guest. He also conveys the mood of the times. Gloucester Crescent was more than just a street. It became a symbol of progressive, bohemian London in the ’60s, immortalised by Mark Boxer’s strip cartoon, The Stringalongs, in which Bernard Goldblatt bore more than a passing resemblance to Jonathan Miller.
Parents had open marriages, sent their children for therapy to the nearby Tavistock Clinic and to comprehensive schools, often (as with William) with disastrous consequences. In Gloucester Crescent, the fathers come across as a pretty hopeless lot, none more so than Jonathan Miller, moving between temper tantrums and serious depression, self-absorbed, always finding fault with his children.
According to William, the three children were never good enough. William lives completely in the shadow of his brilliant father, always trying to please him, always failing. He takes science A-Levels to satisfy his parents, both doctors, and it all goes wrong.
Even now, when William, in his mid50s, has had a hugely successful career, well-off enough to buy his own house on Gloucester Crescent, he senses his father disapproves of what he does.
At times, his book is a desperately sad read. He recently told an interviewer that Miller Senior hasn’t read the book. I’m sure he’s right.
Worse still, is the suspicion that, if he has, he will have found nothing in it to please him.
David Herman is a senior JC reviewer