This Other London

by John Rogers

  I take heart from the hawthorn flowers and look at my map. The lido is over one hundred years old so is marked on my out-of-date atlas. It takes about twenty minutes to reach the Lido on the far side of the common. The gates are unsurprising padlocked shut at 6 p.m. in cold late March. Through the railings I can see plastic chairs laid out around the gushing fountain. The buildings are all painted an enticing baby blue with the exception of the brightly coloured changing-room doors. There’s a real air of art deco glamour hidden amongst the trees. It’s so inviting that I’d happily take a dip, even in this weather.

  That’s exactly what members of the South London Swimming Club do every day, all year round, and have been doing since the Lido opened in 1906. When the water is frozen over the lifeguards break it up and float the ice down to the deep end to thaw. The Sunday-morning races attract up to fifty hardy souls despite the water temperature hovering just above freezing. The Club’s Mandy Worsley told me it was an exhilarating experience, the pool full of smiling faces doing laps and widths in the icy blue water.

  It was worth walking through the blizzard from Vauxhall to find this vision of summer. Lido is the Italian word for ‘shoreline’ or ‘beach’. Just the sight of Tooting Bec Lido stimulates a mental leap forward into a glorious summer of sunburn, BBQs, cold beer, insect bites and moaning about the heat. The Nine Elms development was a psychological Siberian gulag – Tooting Bec Lido is a sun-drenched Venice without the over-priced gondolas.

  The snow has finally stopped, and in the bare treetops the birds are optimistically singing in the spring as I make my way back up Bedford Hill.

  It was in the Heathcote Arms after the Orient match that I finally got the boys to agree to come on a walk with me. Ollie’s standard response whenever I asked them to join me was, ‘You must be joking.’ This time Joe gave it some careful thought as he tucked into his BBQ chicken baguette and sipped his lemonade through a straw. ‘I’ll come on a walk with you … to South Park. Take me on a walk to South Park and I’ll come with you.’ He was well aware that the South Park of the animated TV show is in Colorado and that Colorado is in the United States of America, and that the USA is a flight away from Leytonstone.

  ‘OK, deal,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you for a walk to South Park.’

  ‘Shake on it,’ he said, wiping the BBQ sauce off his hands onto his hoodie.

  ‘I’m in,’ said Ollie.

  ‘That’s South Park in Ilford,’ I said, as we made the deal across the table.

  They flung their heads back half in laughter, half in outrage, spitting chewed-up chips across the table as they did so.

  ‘Ilford’s not in Colorado!’ Joe exclaimed.

  ‘No, but it does have a South Park, and that’s the nearest you’re going to get to Colorado for a while.’

  I now had another reason to justify letting my seven- and nine-year-old sons watch what the unenlightened consider one of the most distasteful and controversial shows on TV. Ollie’s initial well-made argument was that a nine-year-old boy should be allowed to watch a cartoon about a group of eight-year-olds. It had clearly taught them a healthy sense of humour, and that the idiocy of adults occasionally needs to be indulged for the greater good, not to mention informing them that the cure for AIDS is an injection of shredded cash, that hybrid cars produce dangerous smug clouds, that Barbra Streisand exists and that World of Warcraft has an addictive side. We could now add that it had inspired them to embark on a six-mile pilgrimage to a park to the south of Ilford town centre on the spurious basis that it shares the same name.

  The usual preparations and research were mostly put to one side – the main task would be getting the two boys to the other end. Would the conceit wear off by the time we reached the other side of Wanstead Flats where the No. 145 bus passed through to Ilford? It was important for me to co-opt them into my quest. They’ve been watching me depart on adventures alone, sidling into my box room as I pore over old books and maps, making gentle enquiries about why this study of London fascinated me so much, before leaning over to my laptop and bringing up a funny cat video on YouTube. This was a chance to blood them into the practice of urban rambling.

  Of course, they had been on minor excursions with me before. In summer we often walk along the old, narrow Forest Road that runs behind the houses from Leyton up to the Hollow Ponds on the edge of Epping Forest. Or we explore the nearest sections of Wanstead Flats till Joe runs himself puce and collapses on the ground. They’ve walked the Limehouse Cut to Docklands with Joe reciting his times tables the entire way. They’ve even ventured through the rump of the forest from Loughton to High Beach in our first autumn out east as a family. But this would be the inaugural walk in which there was real intent to reach an objective no matter how much the legs ached or how sore the feet became.

  Our initial attempt to make the journey had failed. Looking from BBC weather reports to the sagging sacks of charcoal clouds in the sky I’d wondered aloud to Heidi whether heading out in such weather with the kids was wise.

  ‘When have we ever done what’s wise?’ she astutely observed.

  Most people would have said the wise thing to do would have been to stay holed up in the spacious Bondi flat I’d moved into with Heidi three weeks after our first date. But then, they probably would also have said it wasn’t wise to have moved in together three weeks after our first date. That was 18 years ago. Nor was it particularly advisable to head off to teach English in Italy when turning 30 with hardly any money and nowhere to live. We ended up renting the middle floor of a small palazzo for the price of a bedsit. You could say it wasn’t overly sensible to start a family when living in a short-term rented basement flat on Liverpool Road, Islington, when neither of us had any savings or a full-time job. She was right. The clouds would clear, the sun would burst through and we’d reach South Park under a glorious sunset.

  It started raining before we’d even passed the corner shop. We attempted to take shelter under a bare tree on Wanstead Flats but eventually had to turn back with the rain running out of our pockets. But like Stan and Kenny in the South Park episode in which they make the thousand-mile journey to Malibu to get a refund from Mel Gibson because they didn’t like his Passion of the Christ, we were not to be deterred from our quest.

  There was a synchronicity in our reach out for the Far Side of Ilford the week after Easter – South Park had first entered our family life when Ollie bought toy figures of three of the characters from the show at a church Easter Fayre. The fact that effigies of the characters were deemed appropriate to be sold in a church at Easter was another reason I let them watch South Park. Stan, Kenny and Cartman would be coming on the walk with us.

  A large jay swooped into the back garden and perched in the sumac tree on the morning of the walk. With its brightly coloured black, blue and white wing-tips it appeared like an extravagant, unexpected guest. It was a fortuitous sighting as the RSPB website says that they are ‘shy woodland birds’. This one must have flown over the rooftops from Epping Forest. I took it as a messenger from the forest telling us that the weather would hold out for us this time but didn’t share this with the boys as they’d already denounced me as a ‘hippy wizard’. They’ve had a downer on hippies ever since watching the episode of South Park in which the school counsellor becomes a homeless, drug-addicted hippy. Protestations that I’m not actually a hippy would not be helped by claims that birds have been sent by the woodland spirits or even Pan himself. I’m waiting to get them into The Young Ones to illustrate that I’m far more like the loser student radical Rick than the lentil-munching hippy Neil.

  The hoped-for burst of spring didn’t arrive but at least the temperature deigned to raise itself tantalizingly close to double figures for the first time in months. I’d bought us all South Park T-shirts for the occasion, on sale in the HMV on Piccadilly Circus. They only had medium and small sizes, meaning that while Heidi and Ollie had T-shirts that fitted, Joe’s came down to his knees and mine looked like it had been sprayed on. T
he merchandise was one part of a range of tactics to get the boys to complete the walk. Another was straightforward bribery with the offer of chocolate and fizzy drinks at various stages. Distraction would also play an important role. As we set off Joe was sharing his latest thoughts with Ollie on the best way to kill zombies – this got us past the Heathcote and the corner shop, and over the dreaded link road to Leytonstone Overground Station.

  The railway arches have been grandiosely called the ‘Hitchcock Business Centre’. Leytonstone clearly doesn’t know how to celebrate the link to its famous son. The town of Predappio in Italy has turned its status as the birthplace of Benito Mussolini into a minor industry, even though it’s been run by communists since the war. If Hitchcock had been born in small-town America there’d be a two hundred-foot-tall fibreglass statue of the great director straddling the High Road, spooky music would be piped through speakers in the pavement, and there’d be a hotel in which shower curtains would be an optional extra.

  In Leytonstone there’s a sequence of mosaics in the tube station underpass representing scenes from Hitchcock’s most famous films in small, ceramic, square tiles and a row of railway arches where you can buy a second-hand fridge. There’s a pub with rooms above that’s taken his name, but last time I checked it was a South African-themed barbecue restaurant. You can walk the length and breadth of Leytonstone and see not so much as a tea towel on sale bearing Hitch’s great jowly face, or even an ironic stuffed bird. A sign with raised silver lettering announcing that you are entering the ‘Business Improvement District’ has far more Hollywood glamour than the plaque on the forecourt of the petrol station marking the site of Hitchcock’s childhood home. It’s almost as if Leytonstone doesn’t give a shit that one of the world’s most famous film directors was born and raised above a grocer’s shop on the High Road. He even used to catch the train to work at Gainsborough Studios from this very station.

  It’s no surprise then that there’s nothing left of the Royal Lodge near the station. There’s a legend that Charles II used an underground tunnel linking it to Nell Gwynn’s country retreat in Ferndale Road. The boys are unimpressed by this trivia, and that Jonathan Ross lived in Ferndale Road as a kid. They’re more intent on moving the conversation from zombies to Minecraft. I attempt to enlist them in a game of trying to crack the code of the house names carved above the front doors of some of the houses in Ferndale Road. Oak Villa is fairly obvious, as the forest starts at the end of the street. Carlton, Clyde, Percy and Stanley would appear to be references to prominent Victorians. Ollie has already lost interest and has returned to the subject of zombies. It’s partly my fault because I’d been telling them about the shop from Shaun of the Dead in Hornsey. Ollie is now insisting that I list the weapons I’d use in a zombie-survival scenario and not bother writing down any more house names. I relent – I go for a shotgun, with the classic Shaun cricket bat as my secondary weapon.

  Joe is asking why I wouldn’t opt for a chainsaw when I point out the long, straight avenue of trees leading diagonally across the corner of Wanstead Flats. These were planted in the mid-1700s as part of the three hundred-yard-long entrance to Wanstead House – once regarded as one of the great palaces of Europe, superior even to Blenheim. We are usually powerless to resist being sucked along the path formed by the trees that now merge into Bush Wood. I ask the boys which route they want to take – across the Flats in a straight line for Ilford or up the avenue towards the grounds of the old house. They opt for the wide open spaces across the football pitches, which today are vacant with litter buffeted around from goalmouth to goalmouth. Wanstead Flats forms the southern edge of Epping Forest and was long regarded as a boggy ‘waste’ to be used for grazing cattle. Its value has increased as suburban housing has grown up around it on all sides. Regular attempts to build on the Flats have been thwarted. Prefabs encroached after the Second World War but were thankfully only a temporary measure.

  Ollie scans the horizon with a pair of binoculars and pans up to the sky. The army placed missiles on the roofs of the tower blocks backing on to the Flats during the Olympics. The residents of Fred Wigg Tower challenged the re-zoning of their home as a military installation in the High Court and predictably lost. That summer there was something more ominous on the skyline aside from birds and recklessly piloted model aircraft.

  Fred Wigg and John Walsh towers, Leytonstone

  Joe runs up to Ollie. ‘Remember that day we came picking blackberries and made blackberry cake? It was just so delicious.’ You can see that he’s mentally eating the cake again.

  The summer before last we each filled an ice-cream tub with sweet, ripe blackberries that flourished beneath the oak trees at the end of the avenue and on the far side of the football pitches. On the way home Joe concocted a recipe for chocolate blackberry cake, ‘and it had Smarties on,’ he reminds us. After such a bitter, long winter we deserve another good crop of blackberries this summer, and another of Joe’s cakes.

  We brought my mum and dad over here on a walk last summer, the old fella as sprightly in his late seventies as when he carried me home on his shoulders through Cut Throat Wood in Buckinghamshire when I was a kid. There he was pointing out plants to my sons as he had done to me. Broom in bright-yellow flower that I’d mistaken for gorse, before Dad pointed out broom isn’t prickly and has pea pods with black seeds. He shows us vetch, Canterbury Bells ‘or campanula’, not normally a wild flower but here growing in bunches near the road, their large, violet blooms rocking in the wind. Also purple loosestrife with its long spikes of cerise petals and the mauve flowers of mallow, which he says grows on marshland, as the Flats become with the slightest rainfall.

  ‘The only things that grow under oak and beech are holly and perhaps a bit of yew because the drippings when it rains off the beech make the soil sour. Hardly any light gets through the canopy when the oak and beech are in leaf,’ he told the boys as we passed through Bush Wood.

  He found a large field mushroom in the hedgerow near the roadside. ‘Here you are, boy. Nice bit of bacon with that and you’ll be able to walk for miles,’ he says to Ollie. He thinks it’s a bit big and could be ‘what we used to call Hedge Mogs’ or hedge mushrooms, ‘which are a little bit sweeter than ordinary field mushrooms. Cut ’em, don’t just pick ’em, or they won’t come back next year.’ Dad never leaves home without a penknife, which always makes me nervous of the legalities of that in East London. He bends down, cuts the mushroom and holds it up. ‘Look at that. Is that not a perfect mushroom?’ he says, turning it over to reveal the fleshy gills under the cap where the spores lie, running the curved blade of his knife around the gills. ‘You’d have found them on old sheep paths years ago,’ he says.

  Ollie takes a big sniff, ‘Oh, yum. Can we eat it?’

  Dad breaks it in half so we can see the cross-section, admiring the pungent, sweet aroma. At seventy-seven years old he’s as enamoured with the fruits of the fields as he was as a kid wiling away his days wandering the South Chilterns with his ferret.

  ‘We could live on Wanstead Flats. There’s nice shelter and we could live on mushrooms,’ enthuses Ollie.

  When we show Heidi the mushroom she demands that we throw it away, the city girl’s fear of accidentally eating toadstools reinforced by a vivid memory of a short story by Italo Calvino about a group of impoverished Italians in Milan getting poisoned by toadstools they mistook for truffles.

  It was afternoon excursions like this as a child that engrained a love of walking deep into my psyche and my soul. After Sunday roast we would head out with our Jack Russell, across the playing fields behind our council house, past the paper mill, through the long, echoey tunnel that carries the M40 between London and Birmingham, over the A40 and into Cut Throat Wood, where Dick Turpin had a cave, or so they say.

  Dad would cut nut stems from a double hedge to make me bows and arrows, swords and spears. He attempted to teach me the names of trees, plants and birds. Occasionally, he would have a shotgun discreetly hidden inside his
jacket that he’d bag a rabbit or pigeon with. I’d have to run to reach the game before the dog, as you’ve as much chance of getting a dead animal off a Jack Russell as you have of convincing my old man that this was actually poaching. ‘You can’t own the birds in the sky,’ he’d say incredulously. When I rang him after reading Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World to the kids, he went through the list of ways Danny’s dad poached pheasant, critiquing each one.

  Joe darts into a circle of trees in the central section of the Flats where he’d previously found a mysterious rusty-metal box buried in the ground. The top had broken open and grasses were growing through the hole. This area had been used as a prisoner of war camp during the Second World War and we speculated that the box was a remnant from that time. The goalposts erected by Italian POWs remained here until the 1990s. Heidi’s Italian grandfather Valentino had been a British prisoner during the war. He was a man who lived a life as romantic as his name deserved. Was he perhaps held here among these trees on Wanstead Flats? He was an excellent cook and would have made good use of the hedge mogs. Valentino passed away in sunny Sydney at the age of ninety-two, denying us the chance to ask him.

  During the Olympics the same patch of ground housed not prisoners but a temporary police HQ. Ominous official notices appeared on the trees where dog walkers leave polite messages and Christmas cards for each other. The Anti-social Behaviour Act was invoked in order to permit the police to disperse any large crowds in the area. A gathering of dogs having a sniff of each other’s tails could be rounded-up by anti-terrorism officers. Football matches would be suspect as well – who was to say it wasn’t a crafty terrorist plot disguised as a five-a-side?