MY FAMILY and other authors...
Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad And Other Grown-Ups William Miller Profile Books €16.68
As a child, William Miller would walk down Gloucester Crescent, the road where he and his parents lived in London, and hear a strange, clattering sound drifting out of the open windows. It was the sound of typewriters. Just about everyone who lived in Gloucester Crescent was a writer. There was Alan Bennett, George Melly, V S Pritchett, Angus Wilson, Claire Tomalin and her husband Michael Frayn, as well as the philosopher A J Ayer.
All the typewriters sounded different. Some never seemed to stop while others hardly clattered at all. These, William’s mother told him, belonged to the ‘tortured ones’. No one was more tortured than William’s father, author and director Jonathan Miller, who would periodically emergefromhisstudyandannounce that he was going to kill himself.
At the time, William thought this was normal. It was only as he grew up that he realised Gloucester Crescent was different from anywhere else. Left to their own devices while their parents ‘pursued their glittering careers’, William came to feel that he and his fellow children were part of some grand social experiment – one dictated more by utopian principles than by anything as old-hat as parental care.
The Millers’ neighbours, writer Alice Thomas Ellis and her publisher husband Colin Haycraft, once returned home to find their house being burgled. They promptly invited the burglar to live with them.
Every so often Miss Shepherd, heroine of Alan Bennett’s The Lady In The Van, would command people to push her decrepit transit to another part of the street, watched with agonised anticipation by the residents. ‘These moves always worry everyone because no one knows if the van, with Miss Shepherd inside it, will end up parked outside their house.’
As a child, William Miller wanted a conventional life but slowly he came to see that, for all its absurdity, there was something magical about life on Gloucester Crescent.
Now a TV producer, 10 years ago Miller did something he would once have thought inconceivable: he too bought a house in the street. Just as everyone in Gloucester Crescent was once a writer, now there’s a thriving cottage industry of writers writing about the people who used to live there. Miller’s portrait of his father, exasperated yet tinged with affection, is beautifully drawn. The irony of Miller’s story is that in the end, he learned perhaps the most bourgeois lesson of all – try as you might, there’s no escaping the pull of home.