Gloucester Crescent in north London has been celebrated ever since the 1970s: Mark Boxer’s String-Along cartoons satirising the affluent liberal intelligentsia were followed by books and films such as Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van and Nina Stibbe’s Love, Nina. From the 1960s to the 1980s, it was home to a constellation of intellectual celebrities who, like the Bloomsbury group, combined talent, idealism and luck with adultery, rivalry and a sense of entitlement. All that has been missing from the mix is a worm’s (or child’s) eye view. This memoir, written by Jonathan Miller’s son William, provides this in spades.
Told in a naive prose that shifts between past and present tenses, Gloucester Crescent (subtitled Me, My Dad and Some Grown-Ups) is stuffed with hilarious literary gossip and anecdote. The philosopher and snob Freddie (AJ) Ayer and his American wife, Dee, already appearing this summer, thinly disguised, in the Patrick Melrose TV series, are major characters complaining as “that bloody William Miller” runs uninvited past Ayer in his bath to see their son.
Open marriages and adultery were commonplace: Dee enjoyed a long affair with fashion designer Hylan Booker before Freddie married Nigella Lawson’s mother, Vanessa Salmon. Watching from his bedroom window, young William is privy to all life in his street including the late VS Naipaul wandering around naked and Beryl Bainbridge’s frequent visits to best friend, fellow novelist and love rival Anna Haycraft (Alice Thomas Ellis).
Almost everyone in Miller Jr’s life (as in his father’s) was famous, well connected, well educated and very local. His closest friends tended to be children of neighbours such as the Tomalins, the Garlands, the Haycrafts, and the Ayers. Bennett, Stephen Frears, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Michael Frayn, Oliver Sacks, Max Stafford-Clark, Shirley Conran, VS Pritchett, Lawson and Martin Amis make an appearance.
I must confess that although I too knew and liked many of these people (especially the hospitable Haycrafts), also had a family house nearby and went to Bedales four years before Miller, my experiences were radically different. I loathed the progressive public school that he loved, precisely because it was so full of the children of celebrities and toffs who took him to their bosom. The irony of his parents approving of the school because it had a prewar history of accepting Jews is striking, for it was the only place where I have ever experienced overt antisemitism.
But before this, William was repeatedly mugged by pupils – and mocked by teachers – as a “posh” music scholar at Pimlico comprehensive. He scraped five Cs at O-level (the minimum requirement for entry to Bedales) and took science A-levels in the hope of becoming a doctor like his father. When his mother opened his exam results, she misread them as three As and was overjoyed. In fact, they were all Os.
His father is affectionately portrayed, though his tirades and tendency to lie on the floor moaning after each new commission that he’d “have to kill myself” must have been alarming. Yet this same middle-aged Jonathan Miller waded in when some thugs tried to steal a woman’s handbag in Camden Town.
And if he is the sort of loving parent who is impossible to live up to, Miller’s doctor mother is more than a match for him. The author’s self-deprecating honesty about his feelings, delusions and humiliations are part of what makes his story engaging and amusing, even as his conscious and unconscious privilege sticks in the throat. He’s clearly a charming chap. Even Princess Margaret, who dominates an evening out with her shy, sweet daughter Sarah, a fellow Bedalian, seems (briefly) to have warmed to him.
Having ploughed his A-levels, Miller was rescued by the American passport Dee Ayer had insisted he retain and a new focus that allowed him to forge a career in television. His connections clearly helped, but there is talent here, too. Altogether, it’s hard not to be glad he flourished enough to be able to buy a house just three doors up from his parents’.
• Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad and Other Grown-Ups by William Miller is published by Profile Books (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
