Jonathan Miller by Nick Garland

As a boy, the late Jonathan Miller had a gift for mimicry, comedy and inspired fantasy, says his schoolfriend, cartoonist Nicholas Garland

In 1942, Jonathan’s family and mine were neighbours in Hertfordshire. Our mothers were friends. Jonathan and I attended a Rudolf Steiner school in Kings Langley. We wore green blazers and were taunted by the village kids who called us Green Grubs and threw stones at us.

Jonathan, aged eight, was pretty much the same as he was in later life. He was tall, had red hair and was kind of gangly; not at all sportive, and a very good companion. He saw more or less no barrier between real life and the world of myths and stories. He pointed out silvery trails criss-crossing the trunk of a fallen tree in Bucks Hill wood and reckoned they were left by ghosts that haunted an old hunting lodge nearby, decorated with the nailed-up skulls of game, killed many years before. The humps and bumps in the playing field at school were to Jonathan ‘probably the graves of King John and some of his knights’.

We looked for treasure buried under the fruit trees. Any old rock was evidence we were standing on an ancient fort. I didn’t exactly believe Jonathan, but I wanted to. He made the wood, fields and even the playground more exciting. He did convince me that our headmistress was a witch: she was incredibly old, all hunched over, and she walked with a stick. The evidence was overwhelming.

He had a museum in the greenhouse of his garden. He let me see it for free but he intended to charge the public. The best exhibit was a live .303 cartridge. I was allowed to hold it but was warned to be careful in case it went off. It had been given to him by an uncle in the army, who swore him to secrecy and explained it was a secret weapon that would win the war. It was made of wood, so that when it hit a German all the splinters would kill him.

He was very good at noises. He could do cars, chickens, horses and waves. He worked up whole sequences.

‘Jonathan,’ called my mother. ‘Do your air raid for us,’ she said.

Jonathan went straight into the performance. It started with the quiet sounds of a village street: a passing car, a horse clip-clopping past and birds twittering. Suddenly, there came the piercing whine of an air-raid siren, rising and falling. There followed a dramatic silence, broken by a deep, throbbing rumble. German raiders, Heinkels and Dorniers were approaching. Ack-ack guns opened up and the tack-tacktacktack of Spitfires’ cannons and the crump and boom of high explosives hitting the ground. Through a crescendo of engines, dynamite and crashing masonry, you could hear the ting-a-ling of ambulances. Gradually the noise began to fade as the retreating bombers headed home, and into the silence came the single sustained note of the all-clear.

I felt proud of my friend. I had heard the air raid before. But this time he had astonished the grown-ups. I can see him now, uncertainly accepting the praise of my mother’s friends.

Such memories form the filter through which I always saw Jonathan while we grew up and grew old. Some memories don’t fade.

Jonathan frequently expressed doubts about his swerve from science to the theatre. He once likened himself to a beautifully proportioned Georgian house, full of books, paintings and comfortable furniture. But, he said, up in the attic of this quiet house, there lived a vulgar music-hall comedian. Every now and again this awful man, wearing a loudchecked suit, would come swaggering downstairs, waving his cigar and making suggestive remarks at the top of his voice.

This simile does not do him justice. He directed most of the greatest productions of Shakespeare I ever saw, and the greatest Chekhov, Mozart and Verdi. I constantly find myself quoting him. He was an enormous influence on me. Although he could be assailed by gloomy, dark moods, he was always on the lookout for the joke that was, he said, ‘skittering around somewhere behind the skirting boards’.

I miss him.

‘He saw more or less no barrier between real life and the world of myths and stories’