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By Root 7474 0

days—they were about as bohemian as you could get. Gus encouraged a kind of irreverence and nonconformity, but it was in the genes too. One of my aunts was in repertory, into amateur dramatics. They were all artistically inclined in one way or another, depending on their circumstances. Given the times we’re talking about, this was a very free family—very un-Victorian. Gus was the kind of guy that, when his daughters were growing up and they’d be called on by four or five of their boyfriends and their boyfriends would be sitting down on the sofa opposite the window and the girls would be sitting across from them, would go up to the john and unload a piece of string with a used rubber on it and dangle it in front of the boys, and the girls couldn’t see it. That was his sense of humor. And all the boys would be going red and cracking up, and the girls wouldn’t know what the hell for. Gus liked to make a little commotion. And Doris said how horrified her mother, Emma, was by the scandal that two of Gus’s sisters, Henrietta and Felicia, who lived together in Colebrook Row, were—she would say it in a whisper—“on the game.” Not all Doris’s sisters were like her—with such a spicy tongue, you might say. Some of them were upright and proper like Emma, but no one denied the fact of Henrietta and Felicia.

My earliest memories of Gus were the walks we took, the sorties we made, mostly I think for him to get out of the house of women. I was an excuse and so was the dog called Mr. Thompson Wooft. Gus had never had a boy in the house, son or grandchild, until I came along, and I think this was a big moment, a big opportunity to go for walks and disappear. When Emma wanted him to do household chores, he invariably replied, “I’d love to, Em, but I’ve got a hole in my bum.” A nod and a wink and take the dog for a walk. And we’d go for miles and sometimes, it seemed, for days. Once on Primrose Hill we went to look at the stars, with Mr. Thompson, of course. “Don’t know if we can make it home tonight,” said Gus. So we slept under a tree.

“Let’s take the dog for a walk.” (That was the code for we’re moving.)

“All right.”

“Bring your mac.”

“It’s not raining.”

“Bring your mac.”

Gus once asked me (when I was about five or six years old) while out for a stroll:

“Have you got a penny on you?”

“Yer, Gus.”

“See that kid on the corner?”

“Yer, Gus.”

“Go give it to him.”

“What, Gus?”

“Go on, he’s harder up than you.”

I give the penny.

Gus gives me two back.

The lesson stuck.

Gus never bored me. On New Cross station late at night in deep fog, Gus gave me my first dog end to smoke. “No one will see.” A familiar Gusism was to greet a friend with “Hello, don’t be a cunt all yer life.” The delivery so beautifully flat, so utterly familiar. I loved the man. A cuff round the head. “You never heard that.” “What, Gus?”

He would hum entire symphonies as we walked. Sometimes to Primrose Hill, Highgate or down Islington through the Archway, the Angel, every fucking where.

“Fancy a saveloy?”

“Yer, Gus.”

“You can’t have one. We’re going to Lyons Corner House.”

“Yer, Gus.”

“Don’t tell your grandmother.”

“OK, Gus! What about the dog?”

“He knows the chef.”

His warmth, his affection surrounded me, his humor kept me doubled up for large portions of the day. It was hard to find much that was funny in those days in London. But there was always MUSIC!

“Just pop in here. I’ve got to get some strings.”

“OK, Gus.”

I didn’t say a lot; I listened. Him with his cheesecutter, me with my mac. Maybe from him I got the wanderlust. “If you’ve got seven daughters off the Seven Sisters Road and with the wife it makes eight, you get out and about.” He never drank that I can recall. But he must have done something. We never hit pubs. But he would disappear into the back rooms of shops quite frequently. I perused the merchandise with glowing eyes. He’d come out with the same.

“Let’s go. Got the dog?”

“Yer, Gus.”

“Come along, Mr. Thompson.”

You had no idea where you’d end up. Little shops around the Angel and Islington, he’d just disappear into the back. “Just