Beth Bonini's Reviews > Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad and Other Grown-Ups

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.

The first chapter of William Miller's memoir is called, appropriately, "Competitive Typing" and it recounts - from a child's point-of-view - the extraordinary literary culture which was concentrated on Gloucester Crescent in 1975. (As Miller explains, depending on what end of the street one lived on - and one's personal biases and pretensions - Gloucester Crescent was located either in Camden Town or Primrose Hill.) This particular street, this particular era (1960s to 1980s were its heyday), was the home of a cluster of famous friends - people who were very much at the centre of the cultural/literary life of London at the time. Some of the notable names include: the author's father Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, A.J. Ayer and Dee Wells, Claire and Nick Tomalin, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Beryl Bainbridge, Alice Thomas Ellis (Anna Haycraft), George Melly, Shirley Conran, Angus Wilson, V.S. Pritchett, A.N Wilson and Ursula Vaughn Williams. Unsurprisingly, Gloucester Crescent has been mined for story material before this memoir. In the last ten years, Nina Stibbe has written about her stint being a nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers in the early 1980s (Love, Nina), Alan Bennet has written about one of the most eccentric inhabitants of the street in The Lady in the Van and Claire Tomalin has touched upon this era in her recent biography: A Life of My Own. As Miller says, it was a unique conglomeration of Oxbridge-educated, left-leaning intellectuals who pursued their careers whilst having a fairly laissez-faire attitude towards child-rearing. William Miller was one of those children.

I was completely charmed by the first few chapters of this book, which mostly focus on the golden years of William Miller's childhood (ie, before he went to secondary school). The way he peers through the curtains of these famous homes - his studiedly naive perceptions of the familial and friendly dynamics of the adults on the street - is fascinating. At least it is fascinating to me, and probably to other people who like that sort of thing. But when I described this book to my boyfriend, who grew up in Hampstead - and knew lots of people with famous parents - he was totally dismissive about the interest value of this sort of memoir.

If the book is taken as a whole, it is really about William Miller's relationship with his difficult but brilliant father. It is about how children live in the shadows of their larger-than-life parents, and how they live up to the expectations set for them. It is also very much about William Miller's frustration with the education he was given.

We were sent to the local state schools, where we could mix with children from every walk of life, and were encouraged to be free spirits. They frequently left us to our own devices while they went off and expanded their utopian vision and pursued glittering careers. We all looked up to our gifted parents and hoped that one day we might be like them, but as we got older many of us found ourselves left behind and struggling to keep up. It began to seem that we'd been part of an experiment driven by their principles, rather than their care.

As it turns out, William Miller grew up to have a successful career in television as a producer. He may not have been given an Oxbridge caliber education, but he did grow up seeing creative geniuses at work - and of course he was supremely well-connected. I didn't not feel empathy for some of his struggles - especially with having such a self-entered and neurotic father - but the truth is that much of his "coming-of-age" story is really not that interesting. His teenage years were almost boring, and I felt like the writing in this part of the book was not as strong as in the opening chapters. This book is most definitely a memoir of the growing-up years of William Miller. Unfortunately, his calling card - living in this extraordinary time and place - is the only thing that really makes his story interesting to read.