Dead Now Of Course. Phyllida Law

tin baths of shrouding – the cheapest material in the world – being dyed some glorious colour for costumes on the gas stove, yards of shrouding, furnishing fabric and old vests. Cutting and sewing occurred upstairs in the office by the telephone, where we kept a pile of coins to call the police from the local phone box when we had indecent phone calls. They were quite frequent.

      The doll we made for Coppélia frequently sat at table with us. One of the boys used to dangle her on the end of a rope from his bedroom in the attic so that she arrived at the window and tapped for attention. We were monitored by a Collie dog that drank beer and a Siamese cat that could open the fridge.

      On one particular occasion, we forgot to apply for the right to use a particular piece of music. The new ballet was choreographed, complete and costumed, and we couldn’t use it. We ditched the original idea and composed our own music. It was known to us then as ‘Musique Concrète’. First we ran the cold tap in the bath very fiercely and recorded it backwards. Then we interfered with the rhythm, adding a few plangent notes from an empty beer bottle. It went perfectly well.

       MILDEW

      The most notorious landlady in London was a Mrs Miller. For years I only knew her as a legend. She seemed always to be lunching with her bank manager – I never even had a cup of tea with mine. Norma Sheila Peta Miller was her name, NSPM – it sounded like a government department and she’s now known worldwide as ‘Mildew’. When I first heard of her she was landlady of a tall terraced house in Montague Street. The sort of residence Dickens would have walked past on his way to darker districts. Demolished now, of course.

      I remember passing the open door of a new kitchen as this glamorous woman put the largest joint of meat I had ever seen into her oven. It was a Wednesday. She always had an ‘Open Day’ on Wednesday. Sitting in a high chair was a tousle-haired boy waving a tablespoon, who favoured me with a dazzling smile. He was the youngest of three sons and called Adam. The middle son, Lee, was seriously disabled in every way. When he was a baby, Mil and her lodgers used to carry him upside-down by his feet to straighten his scoliosis. Against all medical predictions, he lived till he was seventeen and would have lived longer had he not been passionate about cars. One of his similarly afflicted friends was sitting in the driving seat of a parked car and Lee put his head through the window to look at the gear lever. His friend wound the window up. The eldest son, Nick, was twenty-five when he died. Cancer. He lived until his very last ounce of time on the sofa, and his best friend set up home on the windowsill. I think he’s still there.

      Somehow, she knew everyone, even the Kray brothers. She said they had the cleanest fingernails she’d ever seen. Odd. I’d always heard that they cemented their enemies into those huge pillars that hold up motorways. I don’t know how she knew them. I didn’t ask. She also knew assorted aristocrats. I asked about that. Her husband, Able Seaman Dusty Miller, was a prisoner of war, who had escaped so regularly they’d had to put him in the worst prison to be found, and that was Colditz. And everyone in Colditz had connections at the Court. Interesting people with terrifying voices and no money. Dusty didn’t have any either. By trade, he was a heating engineer and Norma Sheila Peta helped finance his workshop with her property deals. One never knew where she lived from one moment to the next, but there were always a couple of out-of-work actors living with her. The one I knew best used to do a bit of work for Dusty. When they were installing air-conditioning in a big hen-house, he dropped his spanner from a great height. The noise was so shattering that the hens fainted. Dusty didn’t bear a grudge.

      Her house had a shifting population, composed of actors in the attic, a couple of criminals, several dogs, an alcoholic monkey and a prostitute. They were all gay, except the prostitute, though I fancy monkeys bat both ways.

      I used to call in order to visit the actors on the top floor. If N.S.P. Miller wasn’t in, they threw the key down to me in an old sock. If she was in, and answered the door, she looked like Marlene Dietrich from the waist up and an unreliable charlady from the waist down, wearing socks and sordid pink mules.

      I was fascinated by the stories the boys used to tell me when I called. I wanted so much to meet the monkey, which N.S.P. Miller had bought from Harrods. There used to be a zoo in Harrods. You could, apparently, order a camel and get it delivered. Mildew bought Chico because he looked so utterly miserable and took him home via the vet, where he was diagnosed with ‘borderline pneumonia’. ‘Give me your hand,’ the vet said to Mil, and when he took it, he snipped a three-inch cuff off her cardigan and made two tiny holes at each side, thus creating a Chico-sized jumper. He survived on a regime of port and brandy. He even had his place in the local pub. In time, he became famous for his hangovers and his ability to escape to the roof. Mildew had a very close relationship with the local firemen.

      Chico lived in a huge cage in the bathroom with a tiny duvet, where he used to retire, red-eyed, from the pub. His favourite friend was a mild-

      mannered mongrel called Mick the Greek, on which he would ride round the house, side saddle, holding onto his collar with one hand, and waving at his fans with the other.

      Finn McCool, the Irish Wolfhound, was huge. He used to glare at people through the letterbox with his golden eyes. He was epileptic, and if he took a turn on the top landing, his descent was epic.

      I never met Bitos, the Afghan hound, now known as The Flying Duster.