No longer there...
I took an early Eurostar to London. My aunt, the sole surviving member of my mother’s family, was waiting for me at St Pancras. We took a bus to Islington and then she showed me around the area where my late mother and her family grew up. The house, in Duncan Street, has long since gone but many of my mother’s haunts – the church, the ice-cream parlour, the cinema, the music hall – are still there. I never did this tour with my mother. I didn’t think to do it. And now it’s too late. But my aunt has her own rich memories and so we strolled down and around this particular stretch of Memory Lane. Their lives were modest but the area has been well and truly gentrified now (the music hall is a Waterstone’s), and Vatican II did for the church interior my mother would have known. It was a somehow strange but deeply touching experience.
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