If he had been homeless and rootless, a street person, it might have been very different, purer in a sense. He could have started walking, continued for as long and as tar as he saw fit and then he could have stopped and spent the night wherever he happened to be, then started again the next morning. That way there’d be no crossing the city to get back to base. Not everywhere would be equally hospitable. Doorways in Hamp-stead or Kensington or Chelsea were not welcoming to the homeless, and on some estates a man sleeping in a doorway might have found himself in all sorts of trouble, but as a methodology this homeless version had a lot going for it. Or perhaps, less dramatically, he could have taken to the streets in a camper van and completed daily circular walks from where it was parked, returned to spend the night, then moved on to a new starting place in the morning, gradually covering the whole city.
But, of course, he wouldn’t be doing it like that. He had a home to go to, a wife, a job of sorts and, as tar as possible, he didn’t want that life interfered with. Each day, using either his car or public transport he would need to travel to a spot from which to begin his walking, and at the end he’d either return home or go to work. He wouldn’t be able to walk at weekends, either. He’d just do it on weekdays as though it were a job. Then there’d be family holidays, Christmas, days when he or Anita might be ill and at home. There might even be days when he was required to do something for The London Walker, though of all possible disruptions this seemed least likely.
He had no intention of telling Anita what he was doing. She would not have disapproved exactly, not even thought he was mad, but she was an all too practical woman and she would simply have pointed out the immense difficulties he was going to face, the sheer size of the enterprise.
He was well aware of the vastness of what he was proposing, but at first it was hard to find the exact parameters of that vastness. He spent a lot of time trying to find out just how many miles of road there were in London, but he failed until he consulted an HMSO document called London Facts and Figures. There it all was in black and white, in both miles and kilometres. It told him there were 8,318 miles of road in London, 37 of them motorway, 1,080 of them trunk and principal roads, and the rest were ‘other’. If he walked ten miles a day, fifty miles per week, 2,500 miles per year, he would have covered London in less than three and a half years. That was a daunting task but certainly not an impossible one.
Then he realized that the 8,318-mile figure assumed he would never have to walk the same street twice and that was clearly not to be. For one thing there were culs-de-sac and dead ends. In order to walk along them at all he’d obviously have to walk along them in both directions. But even without such obvious difficulties the asymmetry of London streets was such that covering an area with a single, continuous walk that never covered the same ground twice was next to impossible. Take the simple case of a set of parallel streets running east to west that connected with streets running north to south at either end, a shape that looked like a ladder. There were such configurations all over London. He looked at his map and immediately found examples in Wimbledon, Battersea and Catford. Say you began walking along the east⁄west streets; there was no way to get around such a pattern without either missing sections of the north⁄south streets, or without repeating certain stretches. Given the nature of his enterprise, only the latter was acceptable, which meant he would cover a lot more than the simple mileage of London streets, and the ladder configuration was one of the simplest. As the pattern of streets got more complex, it became even harder to cover efficiently.
Then, like all cities, London was in flux. Even the most recent maps couldn’t keep up. New building created new roads. By the time he’d completed 8,318 miles of walking there would be a new set of streets that hadn’t been in existence when he’d started. He would have to mop these up at the end.
He bought a map, an A — Z, but he chose the colour version because it was printed on smooth, unabsorbent paper. He wanted no blodges, no seepage. He also bought a black marker pen, for he intended to draw a thick black line along all the streets he had walked so that the whole map would eventually become black and obliterated, no street names visible, London reduced to an abstract linear design. The map would become increasingly less useful and one day it would be completely useless and meaningless. That would be a very special day, the day when it was all over, but he knew it would be a long time coming.
The task loomed bigger and bigger, but in a strange way it didn’t matter how big it was, because whatever its exact dimensions it was certainly finite. The task, like London itself, had limits. It was achievable. It was only a matter of time and persistence. There was a goal, an end in sight. For a long time starting seemed like much more of a problem than finishing.
He knew he had to begin somewhere and he knew that in one sense any place was as good as another, but he scanned the index of his A — Z looking for a street name that sounded appropriate. His eyes fell on a line that read North Pole Road. Next day he went there and started his walk.
♦
He had no idea what to expect in North Pole Road. He knew there would not be frozen wastes, igloos, polar bears, and yet he couldn’t imagine what a street with this name would be like. It was situated in west London, not far from Netting Hill, not far from White City, very close to Wormwood Scrubs.
He looked at his A — Z, and then at a tube map and he decided he would have to drive there. He parked in a leafy street called St Quintin Avenue. On the corner were three young teenage girls and they had a baby with them. He assumed it belonged to one of them but he couldn’t really tell. They held the baby up as though he were an aeroplane and made him fly through the air at head height, then every now and then one of the girls would pretend to headbutt him. It looked like a form of torture but it was obviously done with affection and the baby didn’t object.
Stuart made the short walk to North Pole Road. He was glad he hadn’t hoped for too much. It turned out to be an ordinary local high street, with a railway bridge at one end, and a small public garden at the other that served as a traffic island. The street consisted of two parades of shops facing each other: Roger’s Bakery, Mick’s Fish Bar, Jackie’s Flowers, Marion’s Hairdressing, Varishna’s Newsagent, Charig’s Wine Shop. There was a butcher, a greengrocer, a bookmaker’s, a few takeaway food places, a pub called the New North Pole. Everything felt small-scale and decent and unexceptional. It was representative of a certain sort of London, not rich, not poor, not pretty, not ugly, not hostile, not hospitable. He was pleased to have started with somewhere so mundane yet so typical. But try as he might he couldn’t find much to keep him there, so he walked towards Wormwood Scrubs, a place he had never been to before. It was the name both of the gaol and of an area of open land with playing fields. He walked along Ducane Road, past a school and a hospital until he came to the prison.
In some ways it was much as expected, with forbidding brick walls and towers and barbed wire, but its location was not at all as he’d have pictured it. He somehow felt that prisons would be located in the middle of nowhere, away from people and civilization. Wormwood Scrubs, however, was situated on a main road, on a bus route, near shops and a housing estate and a railway line. The prisoners could probably look out of their cells and see the buses and trains going by. It felt all wrong. The sheer proximity of daily life would be part of the punishment. The high walls meant there was little for him to see, but at one corner of the prison site there was what looked like a house (although surely the gaol didn’t contain workers’ cottages?) and there was a walled garden with a huge rose bush climbing up over the brickwork and escaping.