To remember times past, I took a trip down memory lane – literally

When Mark Piggott realised how many events and places that were important to his family lay on a 20-mile trail from the outskirts of London to Soho, he decided to walk the whole route in a single day…

Nan holding my father (top left) at a Unity Estate VE tea party in 1945

3 November 2018. At six I wake in the box room bedroom at my grandparents that I’ve claimed as my own since coming to Cheshunt as a baby. Suddenly I’m 51: this is the last time I’ll ever sleep in this three-bed former council house on an estate on London’s northern edge. My paternal granddad Leslie died in 2014 and for over a year my nan Eileen has languished in a care home with worsening dementia, which means never again will she return to the house that for all those decades was the family home.

After my grandfather returned from war, he, Nan and my infant father moved into a two-bed semi on a large estate being built for heroes called Bury Green: one of Nan’s ways to make ends meet was to clean the newly completed houses after the workmen had finished, walking the plank across muddy foundations, my father in her arms. When a larger, three-bed place came up further in they moved, the neighbours mucking in with hand carts.

Empty houses are depressing, and this house has lain empty for more than a year; it smells dank, there are cobwebs, and half the family photographs have been removed from the wall leaving a patchwork of anachronistic memories. Soon, when Nan dies, or her savings run out, this house, the sole childhood home of my dad, uncle and auntie – which my grandparents agonised over buying due to their socialist principles – will be sold. After half a century, I look round for a final time, and close the door.

Recently I realised that dozens of places important to my family stretching back 100 years took place along the A10/New River layline between Cheshunt and Soho. The birthplace of my father, two of my grandparents and my two children; the places where I, my parents, and grandparents, met our partners and where we married; several of my former homes, plus the ones in which my mum, dad and grandparents grew up; schools and universities where me, my kids, my parents and grandparents studied and worked, are all strung along a 20-mile route which I have decided to walk in one day: a long trek into my past, back to the warm heart of my city.

The November sun is rising over “New” River (dating from 1613) at the end of the street, the same street on which Cliff Richard was raised and whose forged autographs my father sold round school as a kid. Cutting through the alley where I learnt to ride my bike and where louts often linger with flickering lighters, I leave the estate, passing the graveyard where my great-grandmother Flo is buried, and cross the metal footbridge that crosses the A10, watching trucks and cars thunder to and from London.

Being political animals, my granddad ran the tenant’s association, Nan the Labour women’s section. One day in the Fifties she invited an earnest young prospective candidate (who had no chance; despite estates like Bury Green, Cheshunt was Tory) to speak to the Labour ladies about his policies. Nan was mortified by the way the other women sat, listened and carried on knitting, needles flashing and clicking like praying mantes. The pleasant young man was Dennis Potter: years later, Nan would watch his TV play Vote, vote, vote for Nigel Barton and shudder with recognition.

My grandfather Leslie Piggott and his mum Flo in 1915

As you walk east on College Road a huge tree – possibly a cedar of Lebanon – that has barely changed since I was a kid marks the start of Blindman’s Lane. Here, at 55, my paternal grandfather Leslie Piggott grew up in a bungalow without hot water, one of five siblings to Florence and Edwin Piggott, who were doubly blessed. First, because Ed was stone deaf, thus escaping the trenches; second, because he was a nursery foreman which meant there was always food on the table – unlike many homes in what in the Twenties was one of the poorest rural districts in England. (Their luck would change: their only daughter died of cancer and their son Vincent was killed in action in the Second World War).

Even when I was a kid – spending many of my school holidays in Cheshunt – the town had become a distant suburb of London, joined by the threads of rail, river and road, but back in the Seventies the town was overwhelmingly white; Tesco ran the town like the Cosa Nostra. Today’s inhabitants are more diverse and Turkish grocers surround the Old Pond; in my granddad’s youth, the only Turk most Cheshunt people would have met would have been at Gallipoli.

Les and Eileen Piggott at St George’s Church in 1940

The grammar school my father attended has gone now, as has the former Tesco HQ where Nan worked as PA to Jack Cohen. Nan liked Jack, which is perhaps why she began insisting our relatives were Jewish, of Russian ancestry – I later discovered, to my great disappointment, this was untrue. In fact, both nan and granddad’s ancestors were Londoners; Nan’s from Bermondsey, Granddad’s Homerton. There had long been a family rumour that Granddad’s own granddad was arrested on suspicion of being Jack the Ripper; I didn’t believe it until I turned up this item, from the East London Observer, 15 September 1888: “…A man named Piggott [was arrested], at Gravesend, by Sergeant Berry. Piggott, whose clothes were blood-stained. He confessed to having been in Brick-lane on Saturday morning, but it being proved that he was insane, he was sent to the Whitechapel Infirmary.”

At Old Pond roundabout – where Vincent Piggott’s name is inscribed on the war memorial – I turn right down Turners Hill, past the library where my grandfather worked as a teen before discovering the money in the factory was better, past the site of long-demolished Merston House where he was born in 1915. Turners Hill merges into Crossbrook Street, which runs down to Waltham Cross (still as ugly as the day I was born) and has another family connection. In 1944, when my father Michael was just two weeks old, my grandfather wrote him a letter from his RAF base:

“On a certain April evening in 1939, my pal ‘Ginger’ Liddard and I were off for a stroll and a drink along Crossbrook Street to Waltham Cross. In those days, I’m afraid, I was rather a heavy drinker, but anyhow I’ll leave the explanation of my sins until later, so back to my story. We had just passed Cheshunt Building Society when all of a sudden we heard a ‘Hullo’ from the opposite side of the road, and when ‘Ging’ and I looked over we saw, what appeared to us in the dim light, a pair of very young girls. We stuck our noses in the air, said ‘schoolgirls trying to be funny!’ and passed on our way to the nearest pub. On our way back to Cheshunt we ran into the two ‘schoolgirls’ again, this time on our side of the road, and lo! And behold! They were not schoolgirls but very pleasurable young ladies of some 17 years of age…”

Places change: so, too our perceptions. I used to associate Archway with pubs, kebabs and scary underpasses now sealed over; but that was in another life

One of the girls was one Eileen Ball from Enfield. The pair began courting; Nan was much impressed by Granddad’s good manners, smart appearance and relative affluence; as a skilled toolmaker he earned double most of his contemporaries. In 1940, Granddad was given leave from the RAF where he now worked as a Spitfire mechanic beneath Guy Gibson to marry Nan at St George’s Church, Hertford Road. The photographs of their wedding day will be instantly familiar to anyone with English ancestry: grandfather in uniform, grandmother in white. Go into any English home and you’ll find variations on the theme: an ancestor in uniform, smiling uncertainly into the lens (not wanting to be at the centre of this or indeed of anything), a determined, set look; keep calm, and if you come home carry on propagating the genes.

St George’s has hardly changed, to my unpractised eye: red brick, imposing, small memorial garden out front where a mourning woman lays flowers. A couple of streets further down I pass Unity Road, where my father was born in 1944. Bombing raids were a part of life: years later my nan, an air raid warden in the factory where she worked, recalled:

“When Michael was about six weeks old, early one evening, I was breastfeeding him when we heard the sound of what we thought was a hit plane coming down. I shot under the table in my mum’s dining room crouching over Michael, who, luckily, was blissfully unaware of the danger and went on suckling!”

Unity Road today, where my father was born in 1944

Unity Road is suburban, low-rise, and seems more affluent than the surrounding blocks. I have a photograph from May 1945 of a Unity Estate VE tea party, Nan holding my father in her arms (unmissable, due to her habit of tippexing outlines round family members in any group photos). Now, on the corner, perhaps on the very site of that street party, stands a vast Lidl.

From Unity Road it’s a slog through scrofulous suburbs and a characterless stretch of the A10 (the factories in which Granddad worked – Murex, Thorns, Manifold – are now retail parks) to Bertram Road, Bush Hill Park. My nan was born at 104, and grew up at 122, poor, half her father’s weekly wage of £2 from Ediswans lightbulb factory going on the rent.

Nan’s dad, Arthur Ball – a name I imagine caused some merriment in the factory – also worked in the factories up the A10. Enfield was heavily industrialised and would be a prime target during the war. One of Arthur’s workmates was Jimmy Dimmock: he worked in the factory all week, then turned out for Spurs of a Saturday. When unemployed, which was often, Arthur – teetotal, musician, talented painter – set up a group for dole-drawers in a hut. He sat Eileen on his knee when she was five and explained how everyone had a right to clean linen; nan took it to heart. She left school at fourteen to help out and got a job at the same factory as her dad, where she was known like all the typists as an “office tart”, and at dinner time Arthur would come through the rubber doors that separated classes (factory and office pool) with his trolley and give her jam sandwiches; a taste of an older England long since gone to Pot Noodle.

Despite her poverty, Nan’s memories of childhood are generous and rich, recalling games in the street, kids in and out of one another’s houses, evenings round the piano, doting grandparents nine doors down.

The current occupier of Nan’s childhood home, Peter, generously lets me come in and see the place Nan was raised. Peter, a rough, friendly decorator of 53, and his wife have lived here for years but are shortly moving to Winchmore Hill.

I’m surprised at the size of the house, with its big back garden and kitchen extension, and have to remind myself that when Nan lived here the extension wouldn’t have existed, and lacked even electricity, let alone flatscreen TV.

From Bertram Road it’s a drab, dreary walk to Arnos Grove, passing through the middle-class ghetto of Winchmore Hill (where my mother grew up in the station house), the site of Minchenden Grammar (which Mum attended with Lynne Franks and Martin Rushent), Mum’s first place of work – the Metal Box Company on the North Circular – to the former council flat where her father, my maternal granddad, resides. All these suburban streets look the same, and I keep getting lost: at one low point I have to double back and walk a mile out of my way uphill. I’m less than halfway through my odd odyssey and exhausted, and for the first time begin to worry I won’t make it, chide myself for failing to do any preparation whatsoever – unless you count walking to the offie.

My mum and dad’s wedding in Arnos Grove, 1966

Despite Granddad’s claims, the Piggotts weren’t drinkers and the Balls of Methodist stock so when it comes to alcohol, I must take after my mum’s parents. My mum’s mum, Kit Walsh, had to leave Ireland when she got pregnant; there are rumours Mum has an older sibling somewhere who was given away. When I was born my nan was still only 36; she’d give me whiskey to help me sleep. Nan was what you might call a character, and great fun. On one occasion when I stayed as a kid, she came in saying she’d just met Jesus on the tube. We thought she’d finally lost it; then it transpired she’d met Robert Powell and given him whiskey from the bottle she kept in her fake fur coat and taught him to sing The Men Behind The Wire.

Now 95, Jack Brown has lived in a smart three-bed flat in one of the four-storey blocks for 50 years, raising with Kit six children. Many of my holidays as a child were divided between here and Cheshunt, between my two sets of grandparents. Today all the blocks are covered in scaffolding, making them seem grimmer than ever: there’s no entry phone and when I bang on Granddad’s door he shouts fearfully from within: “Who’s that?”

“Me, Granddad. Mark.” (Adding, as always: “Sandy’s son.”)

Granddad opens the door, looking every day of 95: he is short, as are all my forebears, five two, stocky, face still fierce, still with a purple boozer’s nose though he can no longer drink anything but J2O. He shuffles back to the lounge on his walking stick and we sit at his desk. Kit died at Chase Farm in 2008; a few years later my mum’s youngest brother, my uncle, five years younger than me, assaulted his dad and went to prison. An exclusion order remains in place, and now Granddad’s only visitors are a daughter and her partner. I ask Granddad how he is.

My Irish nan Kit Brown in the 1940s

“Not so good,” he growls, still with a faint Ipswich burr in his accent after all the decades. “I got robbed.” A week earlier, two young men posing as workmen on the renovation used fake ID cards to gain access; one distracted my grandfather while the other took £400 he’d been saving to buy his communist chums a pint for his birthday. A few days later, just down the road, a 98-year-old was beaten almost to death for his TV.

Granddad looks shaken, vulnerable: this family is no stranger to bleak times (Nan mugged on her way home from Bingo, Uncle Liam, stabbed, Uncle Liam, brain-damaged, Uncle Liam, diagnosed with MS, Uncle Liam – who gave me my middle name – who died this year), but I sense this might be the last straw. What a sad end for a man who stood as a Communist Party MP, who dived into burning seas to save Navy comrades after his ship was torpedoed, who worked for 40 years for British Rail, where he showed John Betjeman how to change signals and who once travelled to Moscow with Kit by train. Nan Brown often told me how they were invited to a grand ball in Moscow and as they ascended the sweeping staircase she hissed at my grandfather: “Jack! Your flies are undone!” “That’s nothing,” said Granddad. “You’ve got your dress tucked in your knickers.”

Leaving Granddad, I walk downhill towards Wood Green, reflecting yet again on the astonishing durability of my family genes: at 20 I had four great-grandparents, at 40 all four grandparents still breathed, and even now two grandparents remain, my father’s mother and my mother’s father. Now I recall Nan Piggott telling me of the reception at my mum and dad’s wedding, where my Irish nan’s contribution to the buffet was a string of uncooked sausages and where during a slow dance Jack slid his hand down over Eileen’s bottom as his wife suggested wife-swapping to shocked Granddad Piggott: two very different families, brought together only briefly in a ceremony at Haringey Civic Centre, my mum’s black dress bulging visibly, guests including Fairport Convention.

Neither my mum or dad recalls the date they married (the marriage itself only lasted two years), but both recall where I was conceived: at a Socialist Labour League conference in Morecambe, shortly after friend-of-the-Redgraves Gerry Healy told Mum: “I will sleep with you on the eve of the revolution.”

For a time, Mum and Dad lived in Rosebery Road, Muswell Hill, in a house with a shared bathroom; Mum recalls bopping around the living room to Dizzy Gillespie as her belly expanded. Dad was quite the lad about town in the mid-Sixties: hanging out in jazz clubs and shebeens, a groovy dude in velvet pantaloons. Once, he tells me, Rod Stewart nicked his dope; another time he was on the door of a party in Chelsea when four scruffy looking louts tried to enter. Dad barred their way, to be informed he’d bounced the Rolling Stones. Dad got into an unspecified spot of bother and the young couple went north to Manchester, where I was born: a northerner in spirit but not a drop of northern blood.

From Wood Green it’s another slog, through Hornsey and Crouch End and up the hill to Hornsey Rise, then right along Hornsey Lane, thoroughly exhausted now, wolfing eclairs and Coke, the unseasonal November sun blinding. Just before Suicide Bridge – immortalised, if that’s the word, in my first novel Fire Horses – a passing white van smashes the wing mirror of a parked van and the debris of glass and torn metal hits me: the van doesn’t stop. Nor do I. Standing on the bridge I look down over the bowl of my city, London proper.

Empty houses are depressing, and this house has lain empty for more than a year; it smells dank, there are cobwebs, and half the family photographs have been removed from the wall leaving a patchwork of anachronistic memories

Archway Tower – where I used to sign on – has been transformed into an apartment block, reflecting the transformation of an area which in the 1980s – when I lived in a condemned row for three mostly unhappy years – was dubbed “where angels fear to tread”. We stuck the article on the wall, a badge of pride. Much of those years are now just a blur: dropping acid during the Great Hurricane, drinking with Pete Postlethwaite; a blazing row with Kathy Acker.

In my first published story, “Hatful of Holloway”, I imagined a terror attack in which Archway Tower is blown up and falls onto what used to be the Archway Tavern, a rough Irish pub where they cashed your giros at a counter and men waited each morning at six for the van to the site. The same year that story was published, I was at Archway Station with my wife and baby daughter when we heard about the 7/7 terror attacks: I remember looking down Junction Road, trying to work out the safest way home with our precious pram cargo, and suddenly it looked like a corridor of glass.

Places change: so, too our perceptions. I used to associate Archway with pubs, kebabs and scary underpasses now sealed over; but that was in another life. Crossing Highgate Hill, where Dick Whittington turned again, I walk down Dartmouth Park Hill, past the Whittington Hospital where two years apart our two children were born in the same delivery room, a continuation of a process of self-gentrification that mirrors the new N19, where plastered Irish builders have become Damian Lewis and Benedict Cumberbatch. My Irish nan drank in the Boston in the 1950s, telling me how anyone who refused to put money in the IRA collection plate was thrown out the window; the Boston remains satisfyingly down-market, with racing on the TV and smokers congregating at the door even as goths queue for the Dome next door.

Limping past Cathcart Hill, where I lived from 1999 to 2013 with my wife and then our two children; after nine brief months in the country we were pulled back, to Finsbury Park (where, in 1987, I presented Network Seven and hung out with junkies on Six Acre and Andover) and then back to the manor, to Warrender Road, where we live today.

Utterly exhausted I enter the house: my wife makes me tea and sandwiches, Daughter, 14, teases me about my bedraggled appearance; Son, 12 shows me the game he’s been creating on his laptop. It would be so easy to sit here and sleep: but I have made a promise, to myself at least, so after dumping my bag I say goodbye and walk, past Mercers Road, the first house in London I lived in aged 18, where a regular visitor – much to my excitement – was Roland “Fine Young Cannibals” Gift, then at the peak of his fame. In the distance I see London Met on Holloway Road, where I took a degree 10 years later, and where, 10 years after that, my first novel was launched (and sank without trace).

Past Lloyds Bank at Highbury Corner, part of which used to be a curry house above which I shared a room with my oldest friend which had no windows, and maggots on the carpet, and where we had to place a disconnected door in the door-shaped hole to allow the other to defecate in peace. Where, the day in 1991 I received the letter confirming I’d been allocated my own little flat, I picked up a bottle of cider from the floor, took a swig in celebration, then realised it contained urine.

Highbury Corner, where the Islington Twins used to hang out, and those older, odder twins used to walk up and down in matching checked suits, and where I once slept in bushes at the centre of the roundabout, and The Cock, where Arthur Mullard made me get off his stool. Down Upper Street, past 127, the site of Brown and Blair’s infamous Granita Pact, which I mentioned in a novel; past the red-brick Municipal Office where I both worked and signed on; past the town hall where in 2003 my wife and I were the first to be married in the chambers: we appear on council literature. My mum and dad met just around the corner, at an SLL meeting: they saw eye to eye, not only politically, but physically, dad being 5ft 2in, mum 4ft 11in.

Between them they were over 10ft tall.

To the Angel and past Nags Head, for so many years our pub of choice: sometimes when I had no money I’d walk up and down Upper Street for hours, watching all the drinkers behind warm glass. Taking a right up White Lion Street I pass a Hilton, bemused: in the 1980s King’s Cross was still rough. Up York Way, we attended “acid rock” warehouse parties in 1986; today I turn south onto Amwell Street, passing the flats where I lived with J and her mum back in 1989-90 before it all fell apart (all me – my bad).

The Nags Head, Angel: our family’s pub of choice

Filthy McNasty’s – where I set a key scene of my first book, and once drank with Shane MacGowan – is now the George and Monkey. One night on mushrooms I had a bad trip there, and Amwell Street extended to eternity. At Roseberry Avenue I pass Finsbury Town Hall, where I was once best man, stinking drunk because I’d just been on the telly.

Exmouth Market had pie’n’mash and jellied eels when I lived in the Peabody Flats (1991-98); I pass the pub where the blind man used to give his guide dog Guinness in an ashtray. Down the steps I staggered down a thousand times: in Australia, 1994, homesick, I was watching A Fish Called Wanda when I saw those same steps, my own flat. I look up at the tiny bedsit where I lived and died a thousand deaths, crushed by loneliness and rage; some rainy winter Sundays I would walk from my flat to the Thames without seeing a soul, go days without uttering a word. I became so introverted, so lacking in confidence and self-esteem that I began to imagine a huge coat which as I walked through the snow would erase all my footsteps, leave no trace. But then Clerkenwell Green around the corner is where I explained to J that one day, I would be quite the catch, and she laughed; and at Clerkenwell Green I learnt my first novel was to be published.

I’d only been living in Farringdon Lane a few months when a new neighbour moved into the flat directly upstairs. By a bizarre coincidence it was J’s best friend D, with whom we’d once trekked across Europe; D now worked as a childminder for Mike Leigh and told him about this strange event. A year or two later, when Naked was released, I was somewhat perturbed by the similarities between the Thewlis character and myself. Pure coincidence, of course; though later, when D told me about Secrets and Lies and I asked if it was about her, D laughed and said – “No, Mark – it’s about you. Again.”

When I first got involved with the magazine, I was also still vaguely involved with Class War, agitating at Wapping, appearing on page 2 of The Sun holding a misspelt banner; when Princess Anne came to tour the youth project I was locked in a room because they were scared that I’d burst out with placards.

It has grown dark, and as I begin the final stretch to Soho in my long back coat, I feel invisible. Am I really here, or just another ghost in a city full of ghosts from Roman armies to Amy Winehouse? My steps and breath shorten; the pain in my thighs, calves, feet, hips intensify: but now I know I will make it.

I pass the Phoenix, site of my second book launch in 2010, when it seemed authordom was mine and easy. Eighteen months later I was back on the dole. As I limp up Shaftesbury Avenue each step is a torment, but now I see my destination just across the road, in Soho proper: The Coach and Horses.

Why end here? Well, I had to end somewhere, so why not a pub – one I frequented when Jeffrey Bernard propped up the bar, and I had to restrain a mate from flattening Norman Balon who’d called him a cunt, and where, years later, for two short hours, I was part of the media aristocracy?

Entering, I order a Guinness. The barmaid smiles and serves. I check my pedometer: 48,664 steps, 20.7 miles. No, there’s another reason I picked this pub.

1999: My lowest ebb. Having graduated from college and secured an agent I borrowed £10,000 from a bank in anticipation of the advance that was surely coming, and never did. With fellow loons I drifted across the capital, drinking and taking whatever else I could find all night and day, sometimes sleeping rough; at one point in Oxford Street I lay on the bonnet of a car and was carried for several hundred yards. Then, later, as police came to arrest me for causing a disturbance in my flats, I smashed my fist through a window and almost severed the hand entirely; I was rushed to hospital but after being bandaged left again, still buzzing. Next morning a doctor removed the temporary bandage and I saw my severed wrist, tendons and veins dangling, like a robot; I was rushed back to hospital for emergency surgery.

A few days later I wandered into the Coach and Horses, Soho, where a pretty trainee nurse from Liverpool smiled and seeing my ragged, loose sling said in a kind voice:

“Are you OK?”