Andrew Lloyd Webber - Unmasked: A Memoir

Before me there was Mimi.

Mimi was a monkey. She was given to my mother Jean by a Gibraltan tenor with a limp that Mum had taken a shine to in the summer of 1946. Mimi and Mother must have seemed a really odd couple as they meandered through the grey bomb damaged streets of ration-gripped Londons South Kensington. South Ken was where my Granny Molly rented a flat that Hitlers Luftwaffe had somehow missed which she shared 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 Mollys three kids Alastair, Viola and finally my mother Jean. Eventually he remarried some migr Russian wannabe Princess Anastasia and thats 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 plumbers 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. Thats why he, Mum, Granny and Mimi shacked up under one roof.

A mere two years after VE Day, this postwar mnage quatre came to an abrupt end. Mum got pregnant. Mimi became horrendously distressed and violently attacked my mothers 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 mnage 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 Prizewinning 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 dont mind about the pianist, he rankled. Its that oboe player I cant stand.

However, as bizarrely bohemian as 10 Harrington Court may have been, I couldnt 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, Grannys 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 wasnt and I adored her. She was my escape valve. Fifty years later I still darent 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 monkeys 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. Its 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 shes seeing you for real.

The story of my life? Maybe this is as good a place to start as any.