by Alan Johnson
In order to ensure that deliveries were being carried out in their proper sequence and to spot the early finishers there was a patrol officer. Mr Turner was a supervisor whose only task was to drive round the streets every morning in a Royal Mail Morris Minor van checking up on the delivery men. He covered Mortlake, the separate office delivering to London SW14, as well as Barnes, but that didn’t make his work exactly onerous or worthy of his much higher salary. When I delivered at the eastern end of Castlenau I’d join the regular postmen in crossing the Thames to a Hammersmith café for a cup of tea and a read of the papers. London W6 was beyond the bounds of Mr Turner’s empire and provided sanctuary from his officious gaze.
Most of the men at Barnes had fought in the war and had experiences they rarely mentioned, but which gave them a quiet wisdom. The steady routine of our office may have bordered on the mundane, but there was nothing mundane about the men I worked beside.
Frank Dainton had served as a Guardsman. Tall and straight-backed, he always wore the uniform waistcoat (rarely adopted by other postmen), no matter how hot the weather. He’d previously worked as one of the Queen’s postmen when in SW1, the office that handled all the mail for Buckingham Palace. One of Frank’s duties had been to attend Parliament at the end of each daily session to collect a scroll upon which a House of Commons clerk had recorded, in copperplate handwriting on thick parchment (perhaps with a quill pen), the highlights of that day’s sitting. Frank would wait outside the small post office in Central Lobby, often until the small hours or even, when there was an all-night sitting, the following morning. Once proceedings had concluded and the clerk had completed his task, Frank would be summoned from the green leather seats where he’d been dozing to collect the scroll, which had to be taken immediately to the palace to be handed to one of Her Majesty’s equerries.
This presentation of the day’s events by a loyal subject was the traditional way for the monarch to be kept informed of parliamentary activities. And there was no more loyal subject in the land than Frank Dainton, a fierce defender of the royal family in the surprisingly frequent discussions about their relevance in a fast-changing world.
‘Nobby’ Clark had spent several years as a Japanese Prisoner of War. As was the case with all the ex-servicemen at Barnes, this information had to be prised out of him. None of them boasted about their experiences.
For some reason lost in the mists of time, it was an unwritten rule that all men named Clark were known as Nobby, so I never knew his real Christian name. His great hero was the singer Al Bowlly, who had been killed in the London blitz but not before providing Nobby with a repertoire of songs with which he’d serenade us each day, somehow managing to sing lustily while gripping a lit pipe between his teeth.
Another pipe-smoker was Ted Philpott, a studious character with longish, swept-back hair and a curved-stem pipe, the type that Sherlock Holmes smoked. He looked like a university don but his degree subject was snooker. Every breakfast break would find him at the half-size snooker table, jacket off, thick blue braces on display, ready to take on all-comers. The custom was that the winner remained at the table until he was beaten. I can’t remember which regiment Ted had served in but they must have played a hell of a lot of snooker – he rarely left the table. One quiet morning Ted taught me the basics of the game and its less popular cousin, billiards. Occasionally thereafter I’d be given the chance to join the rest of the office in being beaten by him.
Les Griffiths had served in the Fleet Air Arm. Permanently suntanned in the days before sun lamps, he loved being a postman and was as happy in his work as anyone I’ve ever known.
The lives of Nobby, Frank, Ted, Les and all the other postmen of a certain age, and the lives of their parents, had been defined by war in Europe. It was unremarkable in their generation to have been exposed to its horrors and so their experiences went unremarked, except sometimes among themselves – among fellow soldiers. Even those too young to have fought in the war had completed national service, sometimes having seen action abroad in Korea or Aden. I listened intently, fascinated by their stories, hoping that the chain of events that had led to a world war every twenty years or so had now been broken.
Snooker was part of a daily routine that rarely altered. As we mucked in with the inward sorting first thing in the morning, there would be a mild altercation about something whereupon Peter Simonelli, who saw himself as the sardonic observer of sorting-office life, would mutter to those around him: ‘And another happy day begins at Barnes PDO.’
As we prepped our second delivery mid-morning, whenever the loud ring of the office phone started up – all phones rang loudly then – Freddie Binks, a rakish thirty-something, would shout, ‘If it’s for me, don’t answer it.’ Every bloody time. The same joke, repeated day after day. Then Nobby Clark would burst into a chorus of ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ as Les Griffiths pleaded with him in mock disgust to spare us from the torture.
Freddie Binks was the office Lothario, always claiming to have been seduced by housewives on his walk. Balding with a stooped physique, he was no Cary Grant and his boasts didn’t seem feasible to me, particularly as I remained unseduced during my year at Barnes (and indeed throughout my entire thirteen years delivering the Queen’s mail).
There was one address in Glebe Road where, Andy Trevelyan, the regular postman, told us, the lady of the house would stand at the window and bare her substantial chest every morning for his personal entertainment.
We London postmen carried the mail for our delivery in a sack slung across our backs and tied at the chest. This delivery sack was an important part of our equipment (I was advised by Frank Dainton to look out for a sack with ‘Republic of Ireland’ printed across the top because these were made of softer material. Once taken home and boiled a few times, they would become even softer and would be bleached pure white).
Out on the walk the postman would have one bundle of letters in his hand and, at predetermined points, he would untie the sack, perhaps resting it on a wall of convenient height, to take out the next bundle.
On this particular delivery, Andy would arrive at the wall opposite the house of erotica at 7.55 precisely each morning, just as Mrs Breast-Barer was on the doorstep in her housecoat seeing her husband off to work. While Andy was performing the ritual of extracting the next bundle of mail, taking longer than necessary, Mrs B-B would go upstairs and, at eight o’clock exactly, would appear at the upstairs window, brushing her long hair, impressive breasts on full display. She never looked at Andy, instead gazing dreamily into the distance as if he wasn’t there. The show lasted for a minute or two before concluding with the drawing of the curtains.
Having heard this story I couldn’t wait to get the opportunity to do Andy’s walk, willing him to take some of his leave or perhaps break a limb when I was available to cover. Eventually, one wet morning, my chance came. Andy had a day off and I was given the walk. I set off on my circuit of the quiet streets at the back of Barnes Green, carefully timing my approach to the only address I was interested in. I stopped at the wall opposite the house at 7.55, hands shaking with nervous excitement. Sure enough, the husband emerged from the front door, unfurling an umbrella. Mrs B-B gave him an affectionate peck on the cheek as they stood on the doorstep together.
My head disappeared into the top of my Irish sack as I tried to make myself invisible. The front door closed and a heart-thumping few minutes later there she was, at the window, displaying her breasts in exactly the way Andy had described. She was old enough to be my mother but beautiful in her maturity as she gazed into the distance, brushing her thick, auburn hair without giving the slightest indication that she knew I was there staring up at her.
After a minute or two she put down the hairbrush and pulled the curtains. The show was over. There was something in those sad eyes that made me reluctant ever to see it again.
Two other characters at Barnes were, I suppose, the most important people in the office. Our supervisor (whose rank was assistant inspect
or) was coincidentally named Mr Barnes. The men disliked him intensely. Humourless and officious, he was seen as being entirely surplus to requirements in an office that virtually ran itself. Worst of all, on the rare occasion when there was a problem to be resolved on the sorting-office floor, just the situation in which a supervisor was needed, Mr Barnes would shut himself in his office hoping it would go away. If an early connection failed, leading to a significant quantity of mail for delivery arriving just before we were due to go out, or if there was a problem with an influx of pools coupons (which were voluminous and bulky), Mr Barnes simply vanished. In a small office of thirty men where everyone pulled together, this dereliction of duty was met with scorn and derision, particularly by the ex-servicemen.
The man we relied upon to sort things out was the other important person I must mention: our local representative of the Union of Post Office Workers (UPW), Billy Fairs.
I’d been approached to join the union on my first day in the office by Reg, the office cook, who was also the branch treasurer. As well as explaining the importance of joining, he suggested I take out a policy with the UPW Insurance Society that would mature when I reached the retirement age of sixty and supplement my civil-service pension. Although I found it impossible to focus on retirement while still in my teens, I duly signed up for everything Reg put in front of me, which included something called the Civil Service Sanatorium. While the contributions made a dent in my wages of £10 per week, it seemed a prudent thing to do. Within a week or so I’d received my UPW membership card.
My knowledge of current affairs, if embryonic, was sufficient for me to understand the role of trade unions and my experience at Tesco was enough to convince me of their necessity.
Billy Fairs was the first union representative with whom I’d ever come into contact and he was a fine standard-bearer for trade-unionism: good-natured and unassuming, but with a sharp brain and a strong sense of public duty. He and Les Griffiths were the two staunchest union men in the office, sharing the thankless role of union rep. At the time I joined Billy was taking his turn.
Billy was the other ‘reserve’ at Barnes. Whereas I had my job foisted on me as the rookie, Billy was a reserve because he chose to be. Partly this was to minimize any disruption caused by him having to attend meetings but another reason, he told me, was that it was the best way for him to gain a proper understanding of all the jobs his members had to do.
In one of the rare weeks when Billy and I had no walks to cover we would be detailed to deliver telephone directories. This involved filling an ancient Royal Mail handcart, a crimson-painted, basket-weave contraption on wooden wheels, with these fat, heavy phone books and placing them on the doorsteps of the telephone subscribers of Barnes.
Not every house had a telephone but most did and some were divided into flats requiring a whole library of directories. We worked with a pack of printed cards telling us where each subscriber lived. It was a hard slog and Billy did the lion’s share, insisting on pushing the barrow and checking the cards as well as helping me to carry the directories to the door.
There was no cutting corners with Billy. Every duty he covered was meticulously performed. It was a characteristic of almost every union rep with whom I came into contact. They did the job properly, arguing that those who didn’t were letting down their colleagues as well as the public.
The clearest example of corner-cutting was ‘shabbing’ the second delivery. I know not where the term came from but to ‘shab’ was to hold back items from the second delivery until the first delivery the next day. Shabbing in its mildest form was keeping back a pools coupon that was the only item going to the top floor of a block of flats when the postman was bound to be returning with much more mail the following morning. In the most severe manifestation of the practice, the entire second delivery would be held back to be reintroduced into the system the next day, the motive being to get home earlier.
While supervisors would turn a blind eye to shabbing, Billy was uncompromising in his insistence that our deliveries should be completed literally to the letter.
Although I can’t remember ever considering the matter in these terms, if I had been asked back then to choose between a future in management or with the union – if I had, in effect, been asked to be Mr Barnes or Billy Fairs – the union definitely presented the more inspiring, if less remunerative, career path.
Chapter 3
THERE WAS A further injection of young blood at Barnes when my best friend and best man Andrew Wiltshire joined me there. Andrew was a restless spirit. He’d already had three jobs since leaving school at fifteeen to pursue pop stardom alongside me as the drummer in the Area. The last had been as a butcher, which he had soon come to detest. We had worked together during my ill-fated career with Tesco and now he too fancied trying his hand at being a Barnes postman.
Andrew had been going steady with Ann Cheetham since our days with the Area. I’d been at primary school with Ann before her family moved out to Aylesbury and she was a niece of Mrs Cox’s. They were now engaged and Ann had taken over the tenancy of my room at Mrs Kenny’s in Hamlet Gardens when I’d married.
Andrew cycled to work every day from his parents’ house near White City on an old sit-up-and-beg bike his dad had given him. More often than not, riding Judy’s cutting-edge Moulton, I’d meet him on Hammersmith Bridge in the insulated hush of the early morning. We’d pull our bikes off the road, light a cigarette and lean on the balustrade watching the Thames flow beneath us. It wasn’t exactly Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge, but for us it had its own profundity.
I would moan to Andrew about life in Camelford Road and he’d tell me of his plans to marry Ann, buy a house and settle in a job that paid good money, one where he could wear a suit and drive a company car.
As the birth of our baby approached I worked all the overtime I could, sometimes in Wandsworth, where all the mail from postal districts SW13 to SW20 was processed every evening. Even there the only automation was the moving chain that brought up the mail sacks from the vans unloading below and tipped them on to the facing table, which was large enough to accommodate the forty or so men gathered around it.
Having faced the letters we’d move en masse to the sorting frames for outward primary sorting (it was the postmen higher grade, with their crowned lapels, who did the secondary, more specialized sorting, breaking down, let’s say Scotland, into its various counties and major cities). On the primary sorting we’d incentivize our endeavours and liven up the humdrum work a bit by contributing sixpence (2½p in today’s money) each to a sorting competition. Each group of five would have a kitty of half a crown (12½p) that would go to the first man to get a letter in every one of the forty-eight boxes on the sorting frame.
I suppose it’s inevitable that somebody at some point must have thrown the letters into any old box just to win the prize, but if it happened at all it wouldn’t have been very often. We postmen were extraordinarily conscientious about ensuring that mail went to its proper destination.
In the little time I had back at Camelford Road in the evenings I would often walk Nan’s dog, Suzie, primarily to get out of the house, but also to try to ingratiate myself with the dog’s mistress.
Camelford Road ran from St Marks Road, via Ladbroke Crescent, into Ladbroke Grove, so walking Suzie allowed me to revisit some of my old haunts. Many of them were already gone. Buildings that had been condemned before the war, and subsequently exploited by slum landlords who crammed them full of as many people as possible for extortionate rents, were finally being demolished to make way for the A40 extension.
Ruston Close (formerly Rillington Place), where Johnny Carter, the milkman who gave me my first proper weekend job, used to sit in the milk float and make me collect the money owed by the tenants of the infamous number 10, was still standing, though most of its houses were boarded up by this time. It had been given a stay of execution to allow shooting of the film 10 Rillington Place, starring Richard Attenborough as the serial kille
r John Christie, whose chilling murders there in the 1940s and early 1950s were responsible for the notoriety of the address. As soon as filming was completed, it would be gone, and the locale redeveloped in a way that obscured the very site of one of the most notorious houses in criminal history.
Suzie and I would amble down Cambridge Gardens, up Oxford Gardens and back along St Marks Road, avoiding Ladbroke Grove. The atmosphere on the streets, where an undercurrent of intimidation had always been perceptible to some extent, had become much worse in the four years I’d been away. The population of Notting Hill seemed to be divided between those who welcomed the sight of a police officer and those who feared it. Those in the latter category were predominantly black, particularly teenage boys who were regularly subjected to all kinds of provocation by a police force that reflected the worst prejudices of local people – the kind of prejudices I’d witnessed as a child and which had been cynically harnessed by Oswald Mosley in the 1959 general election campaign.
The streets of Notting Hill had become even more dangerous than I’d remembered them. All of this – Nan’s hostility, the escalating tension in the area, the turmoil caused by the destruction of entire streets to build the new road and flyover – rapidly eroded my lifelong resistance to moving out of London.
As we’d planned, Judy and I had put our names on the waiting list for a council house as soon as we were married. It was a very long list but Camelford Road, too, was due for demolition and we’d been told that this would place an obligation on the council to rehouse us.
I mentioned this to Andrew in our dawn discussions on Hammersmith Bridge. He suggested I should try to secure a place on the idyllic council estate in leafy Barnes: beautiful gabled cottages behind wooden latched gates with tidy front gardens. Given their desirability and the long queue of families who’d applied to live there, we both knew this was a pipe dream. Wherever we were sent, it was highly unlikely to be London SW13.