Gloucester Crescent Read online

  We once had a nanny whose husband built an enormous balsa-wood glider, which he took with me and Tom to fly from the top of the hill. On its first flight I lay in the long grass and watched it soar higher and higher in the warm air. I’ve always wanted to fly, and I lay there imagining what it would be like to be the pilot of this glider as it flew across the rooftops. I would glide silently over the houses and hear the different sounds of each street: children playing, babies crying and grown-ups arguing. Finally, as I cross over Gloucester Crescent, I would hear the familiar comforting sounds of pianos and violins and recorders being played, along with the clickety-clacking of all the typewriters. Then I’d drop between the trees at the back of our house, where I’d see Dad sitting in his study in front of an open window and he would wave at me. As I land gently on our lawn, I climb out of the cockpit to be met by Mum, who gives me a big hug before taking me indoors for lunch. All the usual people would be there – Alan, my grandparents and various other friends. They would all be chatting away, and I would be dying to tell them about my flight but struggle to get a word in edgeways.

  There’s one sound I’ve only ever heard in the gardens of Gloucester Crescent. And it goes on all day, every day of the week: the sound of grown-ups working. Lots of them work at home on typewriters which they sit at with the windows wide open. Dad and Alan talk about the other people in the street who do lots of typing, and how, when they eventually finish, their friends come over and they have a party to celebrate that they’ve stopped.

  Every typewriter in the street sounds different. Some are fast and go on and on for ages, whereas others aren’t fast at all. Some begin really fast, then suddenly stop and it all goes very quiet. After a while it starts up again and the typing goes so fast you think the typewriter’s going to fall to pieces. There are also one or two where the typing is so slow you wonder why they bother doing it at all. Mum says these are the ‘tortured ones’, which I was a bit worried about because I think Dad might be one of those. When you hear all the typewriters going at the same time, from all the different windows, you could easily think they’re having a big typing competition to see who can type the fastest. There are times when the sound of all the typewriters going together is like one of those films where hundreds of people are tap dancing on a stage.

  When I was about four, I was curious to see some of this typing in action. I crawled on my front like a crocodile, working my way across the landing outside Dad’s study. Without him knowing, I half-entered the room and lay on the floor watching him work. I decided he was definitely one of those who hit the typewriter keys slowly and then stop for ages. When he’s not typing, he’s staring out of the window, thinking and smoking. He starts by taking a slow, deep drag on his cigarette and then holding the smoke in his lungs for as long as he can as he stares down at the typewriter. Then, when he’s ready to start typing, he lets the smoke out of his mouth. Sometimes he holds the smoke in his lungs for so long that when he opens his mouth nothing comes out and I wonder where all the smoke’s gone – maybe it’s seeped into his flesh, which might be why he sometimes smells like an ashtray.

  He is definitely one of the tortured ones. I know this because I’ve heard him tell Mum that, whenever he can’t think of anything to write and hates the work he’s doing, he says the best way out of it would be to kill himself. That scares the life out of me. I sometimes think him not being able to type and holding the smoke in his lungs for as long as he can is all part of the trying-to-kill-himself thing. But then suddenly it’s like a light comes on in his head and he stubs out his half-smoked cigarette and everything changes. He starts typing like a madman, poking away at the keys with his index fingers. This is very different from Alan’s way of working, which I know because I’ve seen him typing as well. He sits at a desk in a window on the ground floor of his house, which looks out onto the Crescent. I’ve noticed that he uses all his fingers, like someone playing the piano.

  I think a big part of Dad’s problem is that, when he stops typing, instead of silence and time to think, he has to sit and listen to the sound of all the other typewriters going really fast in the houses next door or across the gardens in Regent’s Park Terrace. Knowing that everyone else is getting on with their writing and having no trouble at all must drive him nuts, and I don’t think he’s alone in feeling this.

  Dad at Sue’s desk, with the window cleaner, 1968

  Whether he likes typing or not, for Dad his study is also a place to get away from all the things he can’t stand about family life. Although it’s on the first floor of the house, I think his study is what a shed at the end of the garden is to other dads. Unless his friends come over for lunch or supper, family meals are his idea of hell. He can’t bear the way Tom, Kate or me sometimes refuse to eat what’s put in front of us. And nothing makes him crosser at mealtimes than all of us shouting over each other or talking about what we’ve been watching on telly as if it’s the most important thing in the world. What he really wants is a family who, if they can’t talk about something intelligent, sit in silence and let him do the talking so he can lecture us about Charles Darwin or what the Germans did to everyone in the war. I really don’t want to hear about Darwin, and Dad’s stories about the war frighten me.

  When he was our age, there was no TV, but he says they had a radio and that he listened to something called The Goon Show. He made me listen to it once, and I didn’t think it was funny at all. He said one of the men on The Goon Show (who I saw in the Pink Panther film) had also been in Dad’s Alice in Wonderland film. He once called Dad up and asked him to fly all the way to Hollywood to talk to him about making a film. He even sent him an aeroplane ticket. Dad got on the plane, flew all the way there, waited in his hotel but the man never showed up. So he got on the plane and came home and told Mum the man was a ‘little shit’. I thought he was pretty funny in the Pink Panther and I was really excited that Dad might work on something like that instead of all his serious stuff he does, but it wasn’t to be.

  When Mum and Dad bought our house, the whole area, including our street, was shabby and run down. Only a few years before, there were steam trains in the freight yard a few streets away. These trains filled the air with black smoke that covered the houses in soot and left a stink in the air. Some of the houses, like ours, had always been family homes, but most of the others were boarding houses for Irish labourers or divided up into bedsits. Everything changed around the time Mum and Dad moved in: the steam trains went, as did the soot and the smell of the smoke that came from them, and the Crescent became somewhere people wanted to live. Along with Regent’s Park Terrace, the houses in our two streets started to fill with either Mum and Dad’s friends or people just like them. Before Alan even moved into the street he wrote a comedy series for the BBC called On the Margin, which had a bit in it called Streets Ahead: Life and Times in NW1. This was all about a family like ours and all their friends, who lived in a street that was just like Gloucester Crescent. Then a friend of Dad’s made a cartoon called ‘The Stringalongs’ for a magazine that my uncle Karl was the editor of, and in the cartoon there was a man called Bernard Goldblatt, who looked just like Dad.

  ‘The Stringalongs’, by Mark Boxer, The Listener, 1968. Bernard Goldblatt is on the right.

  Gloucester Crescent is the only place we’ve ever lived as a family, apart from New York. A year after Mum and Dad bought the house, and not long after Tom was born, they went to live in America for a few years. I was born there, just before they came back to London, which makes me an American and a little bit different from the rest of my family. Mum says I was born in the same hospital that the lady in the film Love Story dies in. We saw it on TV a few years ago and Mum shouted out, ‘Look, there’s the hospital William was born in!’ I thought that was pretty amazing, but Tom just rolled his eyes and said maybe I could die there too. He says that sort of thing a lot.

  Alan Bennett

  The reason they went to New York was because Dad went to do Beyond the Fringe on B
roadway with Alan, Peter and Dudley. Alan lived in our basement before they all went to New York and now lives in his own house across the street from us. He still has a key to our house, and Mum invites him to meals almost every day, so it feels very much like he’s part of the family.

  All the mums and dads are friends, as they either know each other through work or they went to university together. One way or the other, everyone seems to be connected. I know they all grew up in a time when things were very different from the way they are now. They were all born before the war, and they talk a lot about what it was like back then. Dad told me that when he was my age everyone was expected to look up to important people like politicians, army generals and the royal family. Then, when he became a grown-up, lots of people like him thought these people were out of touch with what was going on in the world. When Alan and Dad did Beyond the Fringe, they made jokes about them that made everyone think they might all be a bit backward-looking, which Dad says was really easy to do.

  Gloucester Crescent children, 1969: left, Tom; front, me

  Apart from Alan, all of Mum and Dad’s friends went to private schools, which they now think is wrong. So they decided to try something completely different with their own children. They said that’s why we all go to the local schools, which they don’t pay for, and we get to mix with all sorts of children and it’s fairer. They also want us to be free and independent, because their childhoods were too strict and organised, which is why we’re left to do what we want for most of the time. When we’re not at school, we’re running wild and climbing over the garden walls and crashing in and out of each other’s houses to play – and that feels like freedom.

  2

  THEY ARRIVE AND NEVER LEAVE

  I used to think all the coming and going, the crashing in and out of each other’s houses, the competitive typing and all the other stuff went on everywhere else too. Then you go and stay at a friend’s house in another street and you can’t believe how quiet and calm everything is. Gloucester Crescent houses are filled with people all the time. They come and go, night and day, and in some cases arrive and then never leave. Colin and Anna Haycraft live opposite us and have six children – Will, Joshua, Tom, Oli, Arthur and Sarah. Their house is full of all sorts of people who don’t live there but drop in and stay all day. They even had a real-life burglar who lives with them now. Colin’s office is in an old piano factory at the top of the Crescent that publishes loads of books and is called Duck-worth. His writers come over to the house and hang about in the basement chatting, smoking and drinking.

  Anna Haycraft is a writer, but on all the books she’s written she calls herself Alice Thomas Ellis. I don’t know why, as I’ve never heard anyone call her Alice. Her best friend is a writer called Beryl, and she comes round to hang out at the Hay-crafts’ house too. Whenever I go over there, Anna is sitting with Beryl at the kitchen table with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. I’ve never seen Anna get up from that chair. When she wants one of her children to come down to the kitchen she just screams their name at the top of her voice. You can hear her doing this from our house across the road. Anna seems to spend a lot of time at the table talking to other people about their books. I don’t know when she gets time to write her own, but I know she does as I’ve seen them on the shelves in our downstairs loo, and they’re always having parties at their house for them. We’re sometimes allowed to go to the parties with Mum and Dad, even when they’re for someone else who’s written a book for Colin.

  Beryl Bainbridge and Anna Haycraft

  At one point Anna and Colin decided not to send any of their children to school, and instead teachers would come to their house. I’m not sure that idea worked very well as it wasn’t long before they were all sent back to proper schools.

  I really like going to the Haycrafts’ house because there’s always something going on. Oli Haycraft is a year older than me and also friends with Nick Ayer, my friend in Regent’s Park Terrace. Oli knows everything about the war and tanks and uniforms. There’s a shop in Euston called Laurence Corner that sells army surplus clothing. Some of Oli’s older brothers went there and bought all these Japanese uniforms from the Second World War. Oli and Nick then decided that they would go to Laurence Corner and get themselves German uniforms. When they got home, they put them on and went up and down the street, goose-stepping like the Nazis in a war film. They stopped old Mr Pablovich in the street – he lives at number 66 and came here from Yugoslavia after the war – and when Nick and Oli asked him for his identity papers he was furious. Mr Pablovich marched them back to the Haycrafts’ and gave Colin a telling-off too.

  Oli was so keen on the whole German thing that his parents got him a tutor, Mr Knox, who came on Sunday afternoons to teach him German. Mr Knox would then come across the road to teach me, but that didn’t last very long. He gave me a book called Sprich Mal Deutsch, but in the end he told Mum and Dad I was unteachable as I just wanted to chat in English about my train set or something I’d seen on the television. I don’t think I was really that interested in learning German but liked having Mr Knox come and chat.

  The only problem with visiting the Haycrafts is that they have a bulldog, who, like Anna’s best friend, is called Beryl. Beryl (the dog), a lot like Beryl (the friend), likes to sit next to Anna in the kitchen all day. Beryl (the dog) doesn’t like visitors much and tries everything to get them to leave before they’ve even got through the basement door and into the laundry room to get to the kitchen. If you get any further than that, she goes completely berserk and tries to bite your ankles. Beryl (the dog) once trapped me in the corner of the laundry room and was bouncing up and down barking at me so much I thought she was trying to bite my neck. It’s amazing how high so much blubber and fur can jump when it really wants to. For a second or two I was screaming like a girl. I didn’t think I could scream like that, but I did and had to be rescued by their nanny, who dragged Beryl off me so I could escape up the stairs to look for Oli. After that I discovered the trick was to creep through the basement door and then make a run for it up the staircase to Oli’s bedroom before Beryl wakes up. For some reason, she never goes upstairs. Oli says it’s because she’s frightened of Colin, who has a study on the first floor and hates Beryl (the dog).

  Anyway, back to the burglar! One day Colin, or maybe it was Anna, caught a boy breaking into their house. This was before they got Beryl (the dog), so the burglar could go anywhere he wanted in the house. I say ‘breaking in’, but it wasn’t really. To make it easier for their friends, and Colin’s writers, to come and go, the Haycrafts never lock their basement door, so the burglar just walked in like everyone else. Instead of calling the police, Colin and Anna felt sorry for him and invited him to stay, and he’s been like their seventh child ever since. He’s called Alfie and fits in pretty well, even if he is, or was, a burglar. Alfie now works for Colin up the road at Duckworth, and you see him all the time bringing packages to Anna from the office.

  As well as all the other people who hang around the Crescent, there are the drunks and old men who live in a big red-brick building around the corner in Arlington Road. Everyone in the street calls it the Doss House, but it’s actually called Arlington House. The men who live there get chucked out in the mornings, so they spend the day getting drunk on cider before being allowed back in the evening. They drink their cider sitting on milk crates by the back doors of the cinema on Arlington Road. The dads in the Crescent are always saying that if they can’t get any work or if their books don’t get published or their plays are a failure, they will end up in Arlington House and will be found drinking cider round the back of the Odeon cinema. Maybe seeing all those men standing around drinking and peeing against the doors or down their trousers is what makes the dads do all that typing.

  Some of the men from Arlington House like to wander up to the Crescent and ring on the doorbells asking for money. I think they choose our house because Dad always gives them something and likes talking to them,
or at them. They know he’s a soft touch, but Mum or anyone else in our house never gives them a thing. If one of us comes to the door they say, in a drunk voice, ‘’ello, young man, is Dr Jon in by any chance?’ like he was their best friend. Dad comes down from his study and often knows them by their first name and stands on the porch talking to them about something or other and then gives them some money. I think most of them get pretty fed up with Dad’s talking and his long lectures and just want him to hand over the dosh. He comes back in and says to Mum things like, ‘That was Michael and he was really interested in what I had to say about the government’, or ‘John is really quite a fan of Tolstoy, so I gave him your copy of Anna Karenina.’ Mum just rolls her eyes and tells Dad that the last thing they want is one of his lectures, but it never stops him giving them.

  Another person who turned up one day and never left is Miss Shepherd, who lives in a van parked in the street. According to Alan, she was on the run from the police and her van broke down when she was trying to escape. She saw Gloucester Crescent and thought it would be a good place to hide. She’d managed to get some men to help push her van into the street and she never left. That was years ago, and she still thinks the police are looking for her. Miss Shepherd believes that if she keeps changing the colour of her van the police won’t recognise it. This is why she’s always painting it, which she does with little pots of paint and a stiff old paint brush. The van was brown when she first arrived in the Crescent, but it’s now custard yellow and looks like one of those bad paintings Dad showed me when we went to see Jackson Pollock at the Tate Gallery.