Please, Mister Postman

by Alan Johnson

  And so we chatted on, a box of a hundred Senior Service untipped lying open on the bar in front of him, on offer to me and anyone else in the pub. (One – or maybe more than one – of the many grateful private customers for whom Mike fixed electrical appliances kept him constantly supplied.) I told him about the strike and he said that unions had grown too powerful and needed to have their wings clipped. If Wilson couldn’t do it, Heath would.

  I disagreed. Mike might not need the protection of a union, I argued as I reached for yet another of his fags, but millions of workers had no skills with which to bargain. For us, collective action was the only way to fight exploitation. Mike smiled, his blue eyes twinkling. ‘Hark at you,’ he said. ‘Well on the way to becoming a bolshie shop steward.’

  The strike duly took place on 30 January 1969. As far as I’m aware, there was no picket line outside Barnes PDO. If there was, I wasn’t on it. For me the strike meant a welcome five-day week instead of the six days I was used to working.

  Losing a day’s pay was a blow to the family finances, of course, but I used this unexpected day at leisure to good effect by preparing one of my poems for publication. I still had the copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook that my English teacher, Mr Carlen, had encouraged me to buy during my final year at school. It was four years out of date by now, but I thought most of the publishers’ addresses listed there were unlikely to have changed. I’d sent detective stories I had written, together with the occasional poem, to various obscure magazines and was rather proud of the rejection slips that came back. It seemed to me that every author I’d read about had been through the pain of rejection before achieving literary acclaim, so I saw it as a rung on the ladder to success.

  I hadn’t had a great deal of time to write very much more since leaving school, apart from the songs I always felt would offer a faster route to fame and fortune. Then my eye had been caught by an advertisement inviting submissions for a volume of poetry, Spring Poets ’69, to be published in May. It was a vanity publication: writers would have to pay for the privilege of seeing their work in print rather than being paid for it. Still, the vision of my elegantly formulated and deeply significant lines appearing in full in a proper, professionally produced hardback volume, with my name alongside them, was too exciting an opportunity to miss.

  I think the cost was around £5 per poem – more than half a week’s wages for me. I had saved enough to submit a single offering, a poem entitled ‘Youth’, and spent the day of the strike tapping away at an old typewriter Judy had acquired in her teens as a Christmas present. The next day, when postal services resumed, I sent it off, along with my postal order for £5, to the Regency Press in New Oxford Street. I’d just made the deadline for submissions.

  We returned after the strike to a backlog of mail strewn across the sorting-office floor in sacks that had remained unopened for a couple of days. Mr Barnes strolled around with his hands behind his back, looking officious. An agreement had been reached with Billy Fairs as to how we would deal with the arrears. There would be one delivery in the morning followed by a second, with a similar volume of mail, in the afternoon, to be completed by about 5pm. This suited us fine. The overtime would compensate for the day’s pay we had lost.

  The same day, the postmaster general, John Stonehouse, announced that he was prepared to negotiate. Billy called us together on 1 February to tell us that, following six hours of discussion with the UPW, the Post Office had agreed to award the 5 per cent increase our OTO colleagues had demanded, unencumbered by productivity ‘strings’ and backdated to the previous August. A further increase of 2 per cent, dependent on improved productivity, would be awarded from 1 April. That day’s Times described this as a ‘complete capitulation’ by the government.

  Our noble sacrifice in support of a minority grade had led to a satisfactory settlement but Billy Fairs was not one for flowery rhetoric. His victory speech consisted merely of a muted ‘well done, lads’ before we resumed delivery of the Queen’s mail and picked up the threads of the familiar routine of Barnes PDO. Everything was back to normal – except in one small but significant respect. Nobody would speak to Ted Philpott. Ted Philpott had come into work on 30 January. Ted Philpott had broken the strike.

  I don’t know how this fact became known. Billy hadn’t announced it in his little speech. Nobody mentioned Ted’s name; the information seemed somehow to be conveyed on the ether. Suddenly, nobody was saying ‘good morning’ to Ted and the usual pleasantries went unexchanged. In the parlance of the age, he had been sent to Coventry. Nobody was aggressive towards him or argued with him about the strike. It was worse, much worse than that. Ted Philpott was simply ignored.

  In the canteen he would rise from the breakfast table hopefully, snooker cue in hand, but nobody would play against him. After a while he’d retreat behind his Daily Telegraph, puffing his pipe, alone in a roomful of men.

  I was at Barnes for only five more months, and in all that time nobody spoke to Ted Philpott. For all I know his isolation lasted until his retirement. I was as guilty as my workmates of inflicting this terrible punishment. I colluded in trying to break a man’s spirit and it’s something I’ve been ashamed of ever since.

  On a Saturday lunchtime in May, I was sitting in The Sun opposite Barnes Green. I’d finished my delivery and was enjoying a pint before cycling home. I was keeping an ear out in case the pay phone fixed to the wall of the pub should ring. Judy had the number and I’d asked her to call me if the parcel she’d gone to collect from our local sorting office (she’d been out when our postman had attempted to deliver it) proved to be the one I’d been waiting for.

  The phone rang and I leaped up to answer it. Sure enough, it was Judy, calling from the phone box on the corner of St Marks Road. In her hand was a parcel from the Regency Press. She wouldn’t open it, she promised, until I arrived home.

  The only person I’d told about the publication of my poem was Andrew, who sat nursing a pint next to me. I poured the beer I had left into his glass and rushed away in a state of excited anticipation.

  Back at Camelford Road, there it was unwrapped, in my hands. Spring Poets ’69, subtitled ‘An anthology of contemporary verse’. The hardback book carried a sale price of 45s (50s by post). According to the back cover, it was available in the USA and Canada for $8. I wasn’t naïve enough to imagine that this book would be bought anywhere but I turned it reverently in my hands, admiring its neat design and skilful binding.

  It contained 504 poems. At £5 a shot, the publishers had collected a whopping £2,520 from us vain and gullible poets. This sum would easily have covered the printing costs and provided the publishers with a handsome profit. There was no need for them to bother attempting actually to sell it to anyone. They couldn’t lose: no wonder the cover advertised a further collection, Twentieth Century Poets, that would be available later in the year.

  The poems featured in Spring Poets ’69 were awful, mine included. Most of the contributors had paid for several pieces of work to be published. Indeed, a certain Isabella Oswald Finlayson had fourteen poems in the book – £60 worth.

  On page 205 I found my solitary contribution:

  Youth

  In frantic years we grow

  To be people of the world

  In frantic years that are supposed to teach us.

  And we never really know

  Why we’re supposed to know

  As a thousand clammy hands stretch out to reach us

  And as we sail the balmy years

  On our cushioned little cloud

  We have no mind or thought of what’s ahead

  Each pimply worry dies in the freedom of our cries

  And crumples on the shelter of our bed

  It takes a lot to learn

  An awful lot to learn

  That all the time you ran your future followed

  The beard is on your face

  You’ve slammed the book and lost your place

  And the bitter pill of
life is slowly swallowed.

  I concede that it’s not exactly T.S. Eliot. However, in my defence, I reckon it’s positively Shakespearean compared with some of the other poems contained in this (to quote the blurb on the cover) ‘fine anthology’.

  Take, for instance, ‘Kippers’ by Sheila Smurthwaite. Here’s an extract.

  Everything’s a pity. Everything’s sad.

  Like a wet kipper slapped against a wall that’s sad.

  I am a kipper. I feel the same as the kipper must’ve felt.

  Hooked, caught,

  pulled in, smoked, cured, dried, packed, opened, cooked.

  Then thrown against a wall.

  A waste. A pity. Sad.

  But gone now.

  Funny smell!

  Funny smell or not, nothing could dampen the thrill of possessing a proper hardback book with my own poem in it. I already had the disc recorded by my first band, The Area (‘A Hard Life’, with one of my compositions, ‘I Have Seen’, on the ‘B’ side). By the age of eighteen, I was both a recording artist and a published poet. The small detail that it was a demo disc and a vanity publication was, to me, immaterial. I was convinced that these achievements were just the foundations of an artistic career to which I would return when circumstances allowed.

  My immediate ambitions were rather less lofty. I’d applied to be a Post Office driver. Andrew had already passed his driving test, thanks to lessons his parents had bought him for his eighteenth birthday. At Barnes he had soon progressed from delivering letters to driving vans. I found out that the Post Office had its own driving instructors and that they would actually pay me to learn to drive, putting me through a special civil-service driving test at the end of the course. It was too good an opportunity to miss. My application was successful and one day in the spring of 1969 Mr Barnes informed me that I was to report to Croydon sorting office, from which the driving school operated, the following Monday.

  Along with another postman, from Raynes Park, I was taken out in an adapted Morris 1000 van. It had dual controls and a rear seat in the body of the van where the non-driving pupil could sit between spells behind the wheel.

  Our tutor was a man of military bearing. He wore a suit (we were in uniform) and said little that wasn’t strictly related to his task of teaching us to drive during two intensive weeks of training. One of the first things he told us was that all Post Office vans had unsynchronized manual transmission gears. This meant nothing to me as I had absolutely no driving experience whatsoever, but I nodded my head as if it did. I soon discovered what it signified. We had to learn to ‘double declutch’ – to put the gearstick into neutral and then pump the clutch again to change up. To change down you had to return the transmission to neutral before performing a delicate little manoeuvre, giving the accelerator a spurt at the same time as slipping into the lower gear.

  My colleague from Raynes Park was older than me and had unsuccessfully completed several driving school courses using saloon cars with synchronized gears, in which this technique wasn’t needed. My lack of experience worked to my advantage when it came to double declutching and I found it easier than he did. By the end of the first week’s training I was happily motoring round the country lanes of Surrey like Mr Toad, double declutching my way to a driving licence – until fate intervened.

  Our instructor informed us that he was taking the following Monday off, which meant we would have to report to our delivery offices that day and resume our driving course on the Tuesday. I chose that Monday morning to oversleep. I was still in my probationary year as a postman and my ability to get to work on time was an essential measure of my suitability for the job. I’d already been late a couple of times. We were allowed five minutes’ grace, but any longer and Mr Barnes would put a red cross next to the name of any offender on the attendance sheet, officially recording him as late. This was a task Mr Barnes performed with enthusiasm. While he’d spend most of the morning bunkered in his office, first thing he would hover over the attendance sheet like an eagle waiting to swoop on its prey.

  My start time at Barnes was 5.30am. Waking with a jolt twenty minutes after the alarm had gone off, I realized to my despair that it was pouring with rain, which meant losing valuable time struggling into my Post Office-issue oilskins. I cycled to work as fast as I could and arrived just as Mr Barnes was uncapping the nib of his big red pen. I was within the final seconds of my five-minute grace period.

  I made my way to the sorting frames and just as Peter Simonelli began to say: ‘And another happy day begins at Barnes PDO,’ I fainted. Clean away. Fell to the floor like a sack of spuds.

  This has happened to me on a couple of other occasions, once before and once since: I have simply overheated and gone spark out.

  When I came round Mr Barnes announced that I’d need to go for a medical and in the meantime I couldn’t continue on the driving course which, in the circumstances, was fair enough, I suppose. The medical was to take place at Armour House in the City of London. But as things turned out I never had it. Before it could be arranged, I was off to pastures new.

  We had received a letter from the council telling us that our house was being compulsorily purchased to be demolished. Camelford Road, like Southam Street, Walmer Road and Lancaster Road before it, would be falling under the wrecking ball. Nan would have a choice of relocations, but as Judy and I had been on the housing list for less than a year we would be given one offer, take it or leave it. If it wasn’t acceptable we’d have to find our own accommodation. The only reason the council had even this tenuous obligation to us was their compulsory purchase of our home.

  Nan quickly settled on a move to sheltered accommodation on the Cuckoo Estate in Hanwell, a cosy flat where pets were allowed and where she would retain her independence at the same time as becoming part of a new community. As for us, there was absolutely no prospect of being able to raise a deposit to buy a house, let alone meet mortgage repayments. We had no choice but to accept whatever we were offered. We just hoped it would prove to be the opportunity we’d been waiting for: a fresh start in a family home of our own.

  Chapter 5

  ‘EXCUSE ME. DO you know how to get to the Britwell estate?’

  It was a sunny June day in 1969 and Judy and I were outside the station in Slough, Buckinghamshire, thirty miles west of London. We had just arrived on the 9.30 train from Paddington. In my hand was a letter from the London County Council offering us a council house in Long Furlong Drive on the Britwell estate, Slough. We’d come to explore this ‘offer’, fervently hoping that the rustic-sounding road would live up to our expectations.

  The two Thames Valley policemen to whom my question was addressed were chatting beside their pale blue Ford Anglia. They looked at each other knowingly.

  ‘Do we know how to get to the Britwell?’ one of them said. ‘We should do, we have to go there often enough.’

  The other one asked Judy why we were going there. Judy told him. ‘Well, I wouldn’t live on the Britwell for all the tea in China,’ was his helpful advice. We caught the bus as directed, travelling in silence, thinking about what the policemen had said. Camelford Road was hardly Sunnybrook Farm. On Saturday nights we could hear the commotion outside the notorious KPH, the Kensington Palace Hotel, just down the road, as chucking-out time unleashed hundreds of inebriated men from the pubs of Notting Hill on to the streets at the same time. Violence was a constant undertone in our part of west London. Surely the Britwell estate couldn’t be worse than where we were living now?

  The bus turned off the Bath Road at the Three Tuns and proceeded so far down Farnham Road that we were almost on the manicured lawns of Farnham Royal before it suddenly veered left. This was the Britwell. Rows of pretty houses panned out behind latched wooden gates and narrow paths. Another turn and we were on Long Furlong Drive, which was indeed very long. I gazed at the bucolic scenery out of the left-hand window. A mound of greenery separated the residential area from the confines of the grim Slough Trading Estate, wher
e the Mars factory, one of the town’s largest employers, scented the air around the Britwell with a perpetual aroma of warm chocolate.

  Judy nudged me to draw my attention to the view from the opposite window: a community centre flanked by football pitches. On a long brick wall at the back was painted, in huge letters, ‘Keep Britwell White’.

  The bus took us on to the council offices in Wentworth Avenue, a turning off Long Furlong Drive remarkable only for featuring the one building on this huge estate, constructed in the previous decade, that could be even loosely described as a tower block. The rest of it consisted of houses and low-rise flats set in acres of open green space with lots of trees – a legacy of the orchard Britwell had once been.

  The letter we had brought from the LCC was addressed to Judy. Householders had to be over twenty-one, the so-called age of majority. I had just turned nineteen. Judy was now twenty-three, so the council house would need to be in her name. We collected the keys from the council offices and walked round to the house we had come to view. It was set back in the corner of two rows of terraced houses grouped around a green – at the end of its row, which made it semi-detached. A two-bedroomed house with gardens front and back. The windows were boarded up to deter vandals and the grass was unkempt and overgrown. Inside there was a long downstairs room running the width of the house, a snug kitchen, two bedrooms and a loft.