The Way to Hornsey Rise – Jeremy Worman (2023)

With thanks to Holland Park Press for the review edition 

Following a very busy week that turned into a non blogging week, I am finally reviewing a lovely autobiography I had meant to write about at least a week ago. 

The Way to Hornsey Rise is a thoroughly readable, novelised autobiography exploring the formative years of the author Jeremy Worman. The memoir depicts how the author came to reject his private education and comfortable background for the squats of Hornsey Rise in the 1970s. The main focus of the book is Jeremy’s childhood and adolescence, his education, his relationships with his alcoholic, mentally fragile mother and his older, ill father. His parents, especially his mother are key figures and are portrayed faithfully and well, the intensity of his relationship with his mother becomes more and more destructive as Jeremy starts to grow up. 

Born in the 1950s to slightly older parents, Jeremy is an only child in a very comfortable large Surrey home. The memoir opens as Jeremy is leaving his junior school and preparing to start prep school – he starts as a day boy, but starts to board after a year or so. The family live in a very large house, they occupy the upper part of the house, the ground floor has been turned into a flat for ‘Uncle Neville’ a former Indian army officer, who Jeremy adores. Jeremy uses any excuse he can to retreat to the world of Neville, who is always happy to welcome him. Sadly, Neville leaves the house, after which Jeremy loses sight of him, later realising he must have been one of his mother’s lovers. The flat downstairs, though empty, retains something of the spirit of Neville for Jeremy, and over the next several years it will be a place where Jeremy continues to retreat in difficult moments. 

The transition from the familiar world of his junior school to prep school is a difficult one, and at first the young Jeremy is rather unhappy.

“By the time Mummy picked me up. I longed to be back at Virginia Waters Junior School, with all those paintings on the bright classroom walls, and lots of friends. As she drove away up the drive, Mummy said, ‘You’ll never guess who phoned.’

‘Uncle Neville?’

‘No, no Diana Dors. She asked me for lunch next week with Irene Bosanquet, and a few others.’

‘Why did you ever send me to this school? How could you?’

 After a difficult beginning, Jeremy finally settles into school, and when it comes time to become a boarder he finds he enjoys the camaraderie of dormitory life. Early on he rejects the Tory politics of most people around him, standing as the Labour candidate in the mock school election. His socialist views become more entrenched as he gets older. There is another difficult transition on the horizon when it becomes time to leave his prep school for public school. Jeremy doesn’t settle happily at this school, eventually leaving, opting to be privately educated in a small establishment set up by a teacher from his former prep school. It is here that Jeremy first encounters Leila, his first girlfriend, his first heartbreak. 

Throughout these years, Jeremy’s relationship with his mother is difficult and emotional, she drinks heavily, turning into a person he doesn’t like and wants only to escape from. Although this is often only as far as Neville’s empty flat downstairs. His mother’s drunken rages are frightening, sometimes verging on the violent – his father meanwhile, ageing, ill and sadly ineffective, Jeremy has begun to rather despise him. Jeremy needs to get away from home. 

“Although Welby House was an unlikely sanctuary, it became mine. I believed that all kinds of experiments in living could happen here – ecological, philosophical, artistic, sexual – and that people like me could remake our broken lives.”

So, perhaps it’s not that hard to see how the disillusioned Jeremy ends up in his early twenties in a squat in Hornsey Rise. In around 1974 hundreds of squatters moved into three large blocks of empty council flats in Hornsey Rise, North London. For a while Jeremy was one of them. 

A really excellent memoir, from Holland Park Press, I am delighted I got a chance to read it.