by Alan Johnson
My mother had spent her entire adult life on the council waiting list, bringing up her children in barely habitable, multi-occupied slums. Her dream had been to have her own front door to a house like this. She had died, aged forty-two, still waiting. The offer of a council house came two weeks after her funeral. Now here we were, Judy and me, at the beginning of our married lives, with the chance to move straight into this solid, modern, well-appointed house. It was a chance we grasped with delight. We had no hesitation in accepting the one lifeline we had been given by the council. We would make the Britwell estate our home.
My plan was to try to transfer with the Post Office. When I rang Slough sorting office to inquire about vacancies, the guy I spoke to almost burst out laughing. They had more vacancies, apparently, than almost any other office in London and the south-east. When would I care to start?
Jobs were plentiful in Slough owing to the town’s thriving economy, which dated back to the 1920s, when the enormous trading estate was built on the site of a First World War vehicle depot. It was not only the first business park in Europe but, at almost 500 acres, remains the biggest to this day.
It was the impact on the town of this inter-war munitions dump that prompted John Betjeman’s infamous 1937 poem:
Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow,
Swarm over, Death!
Although Betjeman’s intention was to lament industrialization and the blighting of England’s landscape in general, rather than Slough in particular, the mud has stuck, much to the continuing disgust of the townspeople. If Judy or I had read this before accepting the house on the Britwell, we might have thought twice about it. By the time we did read the poem I was able to appreciate it while disagreeing strongly with its specific reference to the town we were happy to call home. Having been born into a street that literally wasn’t ‘fit for humans’, I knew the difference between a place that was and one that wasn’t.
It may have been the staff shortage at the Post Office that led to my successful ‘establishment’ at the end of my twelve-month probationary period at Barnes, in spite of my less than unblemished lateness record and before the medical was arranged. If so it was lucky for me, as a postman had to be ‘established’ to apply for a transfer. Billy Fairs sorted everything out for me. He told me I would retain my London weighting on a mark-time basis – in other words, until the provincial pay caught up with my wages.
It was with sadness that I left that beautifully appointed sorting office for the last time, cycling off past the pond on Barnes Green and down Church Street towards Castlenau. This prosperous peninsula on the curve of the Thames had been a wonderful place to learn to be a postman. I had said my farewells to Billy and Frank Dainton, Freddie Binks, Les Griffiths, Peter Simonelli, Brian Green and all the other postmen at Barnes. Apart from Andrew, I never saw any of them again.
On 5 July 1969, the Rolling Stones gave a free concert in Hyde Park and I left Notting Hill for the last time. We’d probably have gone to the concert ourselves if we hadn’t had something more important to do. While the flower children were listening to Mick Jagger’s recitation of Shelley in homage to Brian Jones, who’d died a couple of days earlier, we were loading our possessions into a small removals van to be driven thirty miles west to Slough. Judy had saved up some money with which we had bought a second-hand sofa, a blue Formica-topped kitchen table and some chairs. We took with us the big old iron bed that had belonged to Judy’s grandparents and the cots and cradles of our two little girls.
On a gloriously hot summer’s day, the four of us squeezed on to the bench seat next to the removal man, winding down the windows to breathe in the warm air. The van drove along the Great West Road, past the art-deco glory of the Hoover Building, out beyond what we still called London airport and towards the rolling Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire. The A4 cut straight through Slough High Street, lorries and vans dispersing shoppers who hurried across the main road, seeking sanctuary on the pavement as the traffic roared past.
When we arrived at our new home the van bumped up over the kerb of Long Furlong Drive on to the little green around which ten houses nestled. The neighbours who had cars used the green as a convenient parking place so our removal man did the same, churning up the brown dust that was all that was left of the grass.
The council had assured us that the house would be ready but we found it still boarded up, with huge sheets of plywood bolted into the brick on either side of the windows to discourage vandals. It was already midday. One of our new neighbours told us that the council offices in Wentworth Avenue, five minutes’ walk away, would be open for another hour.
On my way to notify the council of our arrival I remembered the reaction of those two policemen who’d directed us here on our first visit to Slough. Walking the unfamiliar streets of Britwell, I tried to assess the level of danger; to sense, as I had as a kid in North Kensington, the trouble spots, the streets it was wiser to avoid. Nothing registered on my Richter scale. It felt like a peaceful village on a summer’s afternoon. Children played in the pleasant streets, men washed cars, women tended their front gardens or walked back from the Wentworth Avenue shops struggling with bags of groceries. The Britwell seemed to me to be more Arcadian than anarchic.
The council workmen came at about four o’clock to let in the light. The dismantling of the boards felt like a fitting relaunch of our lives; the sun flooding in a grand opening for our little house. As the long summer’s day began to fade, with Natalie and Emma asleep in their own room for the first time, Judy and I stood at the back door surveying the first garden either of us had ever had. We both felt disorientated but elated, too. Perhaps the policemen who’d warned us off the Britwell had been locals dismayed by the influx of London council tenants on to their patch. Whatever their reasons, they had been wrong. This was a Saturday night and yet there was silence except for the sound of television programmes filtering through the open windows of the houses that backed on to ours. We listened, like two anthropologists, to the comforting sounds of domesticity.
Slough might have been only thirty miles from London but to me it was another world. And the post office there was so different from what I was used to that it was like having a new job altogether. The small delivery office at Barnes bore no resemblance whatsoever to Slough. Even the bigger site at Wandsworth, with its dark mahogany fixtures and fittings, seemed like a Victorian preservation project compared with Slough’s modern, cream-painted metal and occasional bursts of plastic. Slough was an all-singing, all-dancing Post Office hub. It had a telephone exchange, attached to the sorting office in Wellington Street, and a separate parcels office on the trading estate.
There were around 200 delivery frames at the ‘inward’ end of the vast sorting-office floor. The ‘outward’ section at the other end was dominated by what looked like an oversized concrete mixer, or a prop from Dr Who. It was called a Seg Alf – segregator and letter-facer, to give it its full title. The mail collected from Slough’s pillarboxes and businesses would be tipped in at one end and churned in a giant drum, which separated the packets from the letters that emerged in their thousands, as if by magic, through slats in the side.
At Wandsworth the men would work together on every aspect of the dispatch, like a swarm of bees moving from task to task. The only automation was the moving chain that brought the mail sacks up from the vans unloading below.
In the Slough office staff worked separately. Some fed the Seg Alf monster, others sorted or tied bags. Bundles were secured with red rubber bands. In London, in a revolutionary attempt at modernization, the supervisors had encouraged us to use these elastic bands rather than the big rolls of waxed string impaled on metal spikes beneath each sorting frame.
The men were having none of this. Nobody – but nobody – used those rubber bands during my days in London, even though it would have made the job quicker and easier. We struck our small
blow against de-skilling by tying every bundle with the slip knot we’d been taught to use during our two weeks at the London Postal Training School.
Infuriatingly, whereas in London I’d been taught to sort letters ‘stamp first’, with the top right-hand corner of the letter going to the back of the frame, in Slough the stamp had to face outwards. Only London did ‘stamp first’ sorting, I was told. The rest of the country – and for all I knew, the entire world – sorted ‘stamp last’. Even the terminology was different. In London the first delivery was known as the GP or general post; the second delivery was ‘the tens’ or ‘the Irish’ (it went out at 10am, once the post from Ireland had arrived). Slough used the more prosaic and straightforward ‘night mail’ and ‘day mail’. The malpractice of ‘shabbing’ in London became ‘baking’ in Slough.
In my natty light brown cotton summer uniform jacket with its half-belt, double vents and red piping around the collar and sleeves, I cut a lonely figure. In Slough the summer jacket was a dull grey affair with no adornments. After a few weeks of parading my London fashion statement, I was driven by the urge to conform to the uniform stores to kit myself out in shapeless grey. It is the purpose of a uniform, I suppose, to stifle individuality.
The most serious difference between London and ‘the provinces’ was in the way mail was delivered. On my first proper day after a short period being shown the ropes, I was allocated a delivery on the Britwell estate, not far from our new home.
I’d cycled into work on Judy’s Moulton, covering the three miles in about twenty minutes. It was another sunny July morning and I’d tied my velvet-soft Irish sack across my chest as I’d always done when cycling to Barnes. I already knew that the Slough delivery postmen carried their mail in a brown pouch with a broad shoulder strap, but I was still at my nonconformist stage.
A postman was to train me for a week. His name was Mr Khan (which was how he introduced himself to me) and he represented something else that was different about Slough: its diversity. Migrants had long been drawn to the town by the promise of jobs. In the 1930s the Welsh travelled down the Great West Road to find work there; when growth resumed after the Second World War they were joined by hundreds of Poles who had served in the British armed forces. Londoners migrated up the Great West Road to be rehoused in the new council homes, along with new arrivals from the Commonwealth – from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean – encouraged to come to the mother country by a British government facing a severe shortage of labour.
By 1968, there were 13,000 Asian people living in Slough, of whom Mr Khan was one. He was from what was then called East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). He’d been a teacher there and was determined to return to his profession once he’d retrained in England. He told me how he’d come to work as a postman temporarily to earn some money before taking up his studies. It was a tale I was to hear often at the Post Office: teachers, lawyers, university lecturers, even doctors and dentists, biding their time, trying to save up enough money to fund the courses they needed to obtain UK qualifications. It was a struggle, especially for those with relatives in their home countries who were relying on their financial support.
Some did complete the laborious process of requalifying, but the majority shelved their ambitions, stayed in the Post Office and eventually, through length of service, climbed from the lower ranks to become PHGs, then assistant inspectors, inspectors, assistant head postmasters and head postmasters – all grades that have gone now, as has the whole principle of promotion through seniority, which at least ensured some arbitrary advancement for long-term employees.
Today Mr Khan’s job was to accompany me, as I mounted my red Post Office bike with its front pannier for the delivery pouch, and set off to ride the three miles back to the Britwell, where I’d just come from.
The delivery was easy enough with two of us to share the burden and not much harder the following week when I did it alone – up and down Long Readings Lane, in and out of Monksfield Way, with a few more streets spurring off the main route – all of it easily completed within the two and a half hours allotted. However, I hated having to push the bike around everywhere with me. Mr Khan had warned me not to risk leaving it anywhere and walking round. Apparently, a number of bicycles had been stolen on the Britwell.
Walking with a bike or riding it, I never seemed to be without one. I’d loved being a walking postman in Barnes. I detested being a bicycling postman in Slough. I cycled into town first thing in the morning, cycled back with the delivery, cycled round, cycled back. Cycled out with the second delivery, cycled round, cycled back. Cycled home on the Moulton. I was all cycled out.
I was never more exhausted than when I stumbled round those Britwell streets on 21 July 1969, just two weeks after we’d arrived in Slough and the day of my inaugural solo delivery. On this occasion the tiredness was self-inflicted. The USA had inconsiderately chosen the early hours of that morning to put the first man on the moon.
The previous day we had been to Tring for the christening of Linda and Mike’s second daughter, Tara, travelling there and back on a green country bus (Mike had offered us a lift but we didn’t want to drag him away from the celebrations). After we’d returned home and put the children to bed we took the TV up to bed with us, something we’d never done before, so as not to miss the moment when a human being first set foot on another planet. Along with 500 million others worldwide, we stayed awake long enough to see the flickering black-and-white images of Neil Armstrong’s ‘giant leap for mankind’ just before 3am.
As I did my walk a few hours later TVs were still flickering in practically every house. Through the net curtains of Long Readings Lane I saw people gaping at the inconceivable: men cavorting on the surface of the moon. The only distraction was the rattle of their letterboxes as I reminded them about the everyday concerns of life on earth.
The move to Slough was our chance to start a new life – and we took it, like fugitives adopting false identities. Nobody knew us, or had known us, despite the fact that the Britwell was full of west London families, from Ealing and Acton, Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith, North Kensington and Paddington. The majority had come in the 1950s, when the estate had been built as part of the postwar effort to provide sufficient council housing to meet the huge demand. Neither of us had had all that many friends and acquaintances in Notting Hill. And nearly all of those we did have had, like us, been displaced by the remorseless advance of the A40 extension, most moving south-westwards, to a new estate in Roehampton.
Having been given this fresh slate, I didn’t want anyone to know that I wasn’t Natalie’s biological father and Judy didn’t want anyone to know that she had been pregnant when we married. So we moved the date of our marriage back a year and left a certain ambiguity around our association at the time of Natalie’s birth in 1966. Our new back story was that I had fathered Natalie at the age of sixteen and married Judy at seventeen. In the period between these two events we’d lived together. Very cutting-edge 1960s. Not so much far out as a bit out – not so far out that we couldn’t get back again.
In the big old houses and crowded streets of Notting Hill it had been easier to remain anonymous. Here the ten homes around the green were grouped in an L shape with us in the corner. Our neighbours had no alternative but to watch over our comings and goings as we watched over theirs.
Martin and Karen Saunders next door to us had two little girls of similar ages to Natalie and Emma. Our neighbours on the other side, at the end of the second row of houses – separated from us by a walkway to the concrete square of garages, which could be rented by residents for a modest sum – were Brenda and Tony Gabriel, who also had two children. Two doors down from them were Robert and Kathleen Metcalfe, who had a son and daughter, as did Mick and Susan Pearson next door to them. A settlement of nuclear families: Dad, Mum and the requisite number of kids.
Martin Saunders was posh. That is to say he spoke the Queen’s English and wore a suit for work. He was a salesman for a car component
s manufacturer. Karen was from the Mozart estate in Paddington – like Judy, a girl from a poor background who’d done well at school. I think she and Martin had met at university.
Tony, a painter and decorator, had a chunky build that belied his high-pitched voice. He had the street style of a minor gangster. His wife, Brenda, was a stunning beauty who dressed in the glamorous clothes she helped to sell from the ladieswear shop where she worked on the Farnham Road. Tony and Brenda were the Len Fairclough and Elsie Tanner of the green. They called each other ‘babe’ and danced together to the Platters in their front room when the children were in bed. At least, that’s what they did once they were reconciled after one of their many arguments. The pattern of their lives was roughly two months reconciling to every month of arguing.
Robert Metcalfe, a big, genial man with big, dark eyes that lent him a Mediterranean appearance, a broad smile and thinning hair, was a grafter, working mostly as a lorry driver but willing to try his hand at anything that turned a penny. Kathleen, a pretty Irishwoman, had come to England as a youngster.
Slim, attractive redhead Susan Pearson spent her days stitching and sewing at an old Singer machine in a corner of her living room, doing piecework for a variety of employers. While she worked she listened to Radio 4. As a fellow Radio 4 enthusiast, I envied her constant access to its delights: from Today in the morning to the Afternoon Play. The end of the play was her cue to go and pick up her kids from school.
Her husband Mick was what was known then as an ambulanceman. Today he’d be a paramedic. He’d had a troubled childhood: he and his brother had spent most of it in a children’s home, escaping a father who was a violent drunk and a mother who found it difficult to cope. He was highly intelligent and very funny but constantly unfulfilled in his working life. The ambulance job was the one he did for the majority of the ten years in which I knew him well, but he had a whole series of them, including factory worker, labourer and baggage-handler at Heathrow airport.