with Mimi, Mum and Dad.
My dear Granny Molly came from the Hemans family, one of whom, Felicia, wrote the poem “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,” a dirge which every British schoolchild was force-fed a century ago. Granny was an interesting lady, not least for her strange political views. She was a founder member of the Christian Communist Party, a short lived organization that arguably was rather a contradiction in terms. She had a sister, Great-Aunt Ella, who married a minor Bloomsbury Set artist and ran, I kid you not, a transport cafe for truck drivers on the A4 outside Reading in which she kept hens.
Granny had got married to some army tosser and divorced him asap, which was not what a girl did every day in the 1920s. She told me that she threw her wedding ring down the lavatory on her honeymoon night. But the military deserter must have lurked around enough to sire Molly’s three kids Alastair, Viola and finally my mother Jean. Eventually he remarried some émigré Russian wannabe Princess Anastasia and that’s all I know about him.
Unquestionably Granny had a raw deal. Her only son Alastair drowned in a boating accident near Swanage in Dorset after he had just left school at eighteen. I have a photo of the man who would have been my uncle on my desk as I write. It affected Granny hugely but it particularly traumatized my mother. Mum had a complete fixation on Alastair and was forever proclaiming psychic contact with him. Curiously I think she did have contact with him, although her promise to “get hold of me when she discovered how” made in a letter just before she died has so far failed to deliver.
In 1938 Granny found herself bereft of her beloved son and a single mum supporting two daughters. The army tosser had never properly supported her, so she was forced to sell a big house on Harrow Hill and move to the South Kensington rented flat on Harrington Road, SW7. When Mum met a plumber’s son named William Lloyd Webber, a young scholarship boy white hope of the pre-war Royal College of Music, love blossomed. Soon, despite the Second World War, nuptials could not be put on hold. Dad had close to zero income. That’s why he, Mum, Granny and Mimi shacked up under one roof.
A mere two years after VE Day, this postwar ménage à quatre came to an abrupt end. Mum got pregnant. Mimi became horrendously distressed and violently attacked my mother’s stomach with bloodcurdling cries. In short, Mimi was the first person to take a dislike to Andrew Lloyd Webber.
A decision was taken that Mimi had to ankle out of the South Kensington ménage on the urgent side of asap. On March 22, 1948, I brought the number of residents up to four again.
CUT FORWARD TO THE 1960s and 10 Harrington Court, Harrington Road redefined the “B” in bohemian. At its 1967 occupational peak it housed Granny Molly, Mum, Dad, plus his huge electronic church organ, Tchaikovsky Prize–winning pianist John Lill, Tim Rice, my cellist brother Julian and me. No. 10 was on the top floor of one of those Victorian mansion blocks where the lift occasionally worked but most of the time you used the stairs. The traffic noise was deafening, but I doubt if the neighbours heard it, such were the sounds of music emanating from our household.
One afternoon, Tim Rice and I were descending the stairs out of the menagerie. Julian was practising the cello. A bloke from the flat below leapt out and accosted us.
“I don’t mind about the pianist,” he rankled. “It’s that oboe player I can’t stand.”
However, as bizarrely bohemian as 10 Harrington Court may have been, I couldn’t wait to get out of it, particularly as Mum from time to time threatened my brother and me with jumping out of the fourth-floor window. This got boring after a bit, so enter into this narrative my aunt – my impossibly, adorably, unrepeatably politically incorrect Auntie Vi, Granny’s eldest daughter. She was married to a slightly pompous doctor called George Crosby for whom Granny had worked as a secretary when she was really down on her uppers. Vi had a brief career as an actress. She was hilariously funny and a great cook with several serious recipe books to her name. She knew a few glamorous names in theatre. She was everything my family wasn’t and I adored her. She was my escape valve. Fifty years later I still daren’t print her sayings. In the 1960s she was the author of the first gay cookbook. A chapter monikered “Coq & Game Meat” is headlined:
Too Many Cocks Spoil the Breath.
FRANKLY I WAS FALSELY CITED as the cause of Mimi the monkey’s behavioural setbacks. Surely 10 Harrington Court was no place for a simian bent on swinging around the community? However, my mother stood by her initial stance. Ten years later she took brother Julian and me to Chessington Zoo. On entering the monkey house she let out a great cry of “Mimi!,” more than worthy of her limping tenor. The simian turned its head, puzzled.
“Look, she recognizes me. It’s Mimi,” said Mum triumphantly as the monkey leapt across its cage and climbed the wire in aggressive fashion uttering the most fearsome sounds.
“I told you it was Mimi.” Mum looked at me pointedly. “She always hated the thought of you, now she’s seeing you for real.”
The story of my life? Maybe this is as good a place to start as any.
I was born on March 22, 1948 in Westminster Hospital with a huge birthmark on my forehead that Mum said was cured courtesy of a faith healer. Others said it faded of its own accord, but Mum’s graphic details had me convinced that it might recur at any time if I was a bad child. My first memory is of being in hospital aged three with acute appendicitis. This Mother told me was undiagnosed until it was just about to burst. My case was presided over by Uncle George, now Auntie Vi’s “partner” (they hadn’t married yet) who had undiagnosed the appendicitis in the first place. As my relationship with dearest Auntie Vi bloomed whilst I staggered into my teens, the saga of the undiagnosed appendicitis would be often recounted to me in increasingly distended detail. Mother also had a serious footnote about my being chucked out of hospital way too early due to my screaming which Uncle George found embarrassing to his standing in the medical profession. Mother was seriously pregnant with Julian at the time, so the saga must have been a pain to her to put it mildly.
Being told that I had a brother is memory number two. It was a bright spring day and I was playing in Thurloe Square gardens, to which my family had a key. I remember not quite understanding what having a brother meant, but here my memory goes blank. I can’t remember anything about Julian as a baby at all, perhaps because Julian’s popping onto the planet also saw the arrival of Perseus the cat. Perseus was a wonderful square faced, seal-pointed Siamese boy, not one of those angular faced jobs so beloved of today’s breeders. I fell in love with Perseus instantly. Dad was also completely devoted to him. But I realize now that the family really shouldn’t have had an animal like that cooped up in a flat. His incessant cries to get out still give me nightmares.
Such was Perseus’s deafening low Siamese miaowing that when I was around seven I asked if I could take him on a lead to Thurloe Square when I wasn’t at school. Both Mum and Granny said yes. How trusting parents were in those days. You wouldn’t let a kid loose with a cat on a lead around South Kensington today – unless you were after a million hits on YouTube. So I became a regular spectacle walking Perseus like a dog across the old zebra crossing that led to the train station and the only bit of greenery Julian and I knew, at least in school termtime. One day Perseus escaped. Five hours later he was found among the pedestrians on the zebra crossing returning from the only piece of greenery that he, too, knew. Percy’s kerb drill was impeccable.
Years later I had the job of looking after Percy when he was dying. The old cat raised himself tortuously from his basket and started miaowing in a manner all too reminiscent of his incarcerated cries. The poor old boy scrabbled at the front door as if there were a rabbit to catch outside. So I put his lead on. He didn’t want to walk so he sat on my shoulder, a mode of transport which he always liked.
A year or two earlier the traffic at South Kensington had been reorganized into a fearsome one-way system. At the time it was claimed