Please, Mister Postman

by Alan Johnson

  Along with another postman I was withdrawn from normal duties, exactly as I had been in Barnes, to spend a week being taught to drive. Our tutor was Mr Clarence, a civil servant overseeing a civil-service course that would lead to a civil-service test. (The Post Office might have left the civil service but it took a long time for the civil service to leave the Post Office.) Tall and very bald, Mr Clarence spoke so softly that it was difficult to hear him, particularly above the loud rattling of our Morris Minor van.

  I loved those old Morris vans, though it must be said that they had their eccentricities. For example, the driver’s door locked automatically when it slammed shut. The locks were manual and were operated by the ignition key. So whenever the driver left the van, he was supposed to turn off the engine and take the key with him. For postmen and women on rural deliveries this was completely impractical. In most instances they would be out of the van for only a few seconds to deliver a letter. As a result, being locked out with the key still in the ignition and the engine running could become a regular occurrence. The solution was to leave the fly window open so that you could reach in from outside to release the door handle.

  Our training model was the same as the one in which I’d had my lessons in Barnes, with dual controls and a little bench seat in the body of the van where the other learner could sit and observe while Mr Clarence instructed the postman whose turn it was to drive.

  Double declutch was no longer required but I couldn’t lose the habit and our instructor encouraged it, purring quietly about how useful it would be on the bigger vans where synchromesh gears were still rare. His quiet, steady, civil-service approach inspired confidence, like a GP’s bedside manner, but there was a major problem with Mr Clarence: he was a sadist.

  The slightest deviation from his orders earned a punch to the left leg just above the knee which varied in force but always hurt. This man knew how to administer a dead leg and he did it as if it were a perfectly natural part of the process of teaching somebody to drive. There was no alteration in the serene expression on his big, round face; no change to the tempo of his conversation.

  ‘Let’s turn right at the next junction. Remember: mirror, signal, manoeuvre.’ Thump. ‘Always best to switch the indicator off once you’ve turned.’ The excruciating pain was at its worst if the driver’s foot happened to be hovering anywhere near the clutch pedal when it didn’t need to be.

  ‘It’s such a lovely day.’ Thump! Muffled cry from driver pretending not to be in agony. ‘Isn’t it? Do try not to ride the clutch, Alan, there’s a good lad.’

  After a full week of being punched by Mr Clarence I was considered ready for the driving test although, I was told, it might be months before one could be arranged. In the meantime, any driver under tuition was allowed to affix his L-plates to a Post Office vehicle of his choice and press-gang its poor driver into becoming an unwilling driving instructor on his town collection or rural delivery. The fact that this could be claimed by the learner as paid overtime made it even more attractive to the novice. Grown men were known to sob quietly as they saw a learner walking purposefully towards them, L-plates in hand, across the sorting-office yard.

  Actually this consensual tuition was quite a good system: it gave the learner a valuable opportunity to practise his driving skills while his workmate acquired an assistant to help with loading and unloading, opening the pillarboxes or delivering mail. I found it infinitely preferable to Mr Clarence’s instruction and would invariably secure prior agreement to accompany a driver on specified afternoons or evenings.

  Eventually the day of the test arrived. It was to be conducted by our civil-service examiner, Mr Brewster. There were four or five of us trainee drivers awaiting a test and we’d all heard tales of how difficult it was to pass with Mr Brewster. A small man with a stooping gait and a sunken face upon which a smile was rarely seen, he could never have been accused of carrying his authority lightly. He had two other notable characteristics: he smoked Craven ‘A’ cork-tipped cigarettes and he swore like a trooper.

  Being tested by this man was a daunting experience. Being passed by him was a slightly less common occurrence than a full eclipse of the sun. One of my fellow learners came up with the idea of having T-shirts produced with the slogan ‘I passed with Brewster’ on the front. The guy who suggested this had just passed at his third attempt. It took me five.

  The ignominy was even greater because by the time I took my first driving test I’d already failed my moped test twice as well – all with Mr Brewster. He was inescapable. If there was a test with an engine involved, he would be the one carrying it out. Thankfully, I was eventually able to remove the L-plates from my Raleigh Runabout RM6, but the vital licence to drive a car continued to elude me.

  I knew I’d failed my first test when the van I was driving (with Mr Brewster in the passenger seat beside me) felt sluggish. Staring straight ahead in his most inscrutable manner he advised me to pull into the kerb. When I went to apply the handbrake I realized it was already on. I’d forgotten to release it when we set off.

  Each test began with Mr Brewster trying to pretend he’d never set eyes on me before in his life while I, consumed by nerves and overdoing the bonhomie, would greet him like a long-lost brother. The only sign of recognition I ever got from him was ‘Fuckin’ Ada, not you again’ at the beginning of my final ordeal. At the end of each test he would take out a Craven ‘A’, tap its cork tip on the box and light it up as a prelude to his interrogation on the Highway Code. As far as I recall, the cork tip on a Craven ‘A’ wasn’t a filter, just a wrap of stronger, brown-coloured paper intended to prevent the cigarette from sticking to the smoker’s top lip. Whatever its purpose, its effect was to impart a brownish hue to Mr Brewster’s mouth.

  By my fifth test (my eighth if you count the three I’d had on the moped) – which I’d begged the Post Office to allow me to take, pointing out that everything they had spent so far on my driving training would be wasted if they stopped short of this final hurdle – my worry wasn’t whether I could drive a car, it was whether I could pass the bloody test.

  Surely Mr Brewster wasn’t the only civil-service examiner in the south-east region? Surely he had occasionally to take a holiday or a day off sick? But the terrible inevitability was confirmed when I saw a familiar stooped figure walking towards the van.

  It was a clear, spring day as we set off from the sorting office in Reading, where the tests were held. I drove superbly, if I say so myself. On Judy’s advice I had taken a herbal potion from the chemist to calm my nerves. It seemed to be working, even if it was just a placebo effect. I took every turning beautifully, reversed round a corner using my wing mirrors in textbook fashion and performed my emergency stop with such abruptness that it almost sent Mr B. through the windscreen (a powerful incentive for a forceful but clean execution of that manoeuvre).

  I pulled up as instructed in a quiet, tree-lined street. Mr Brewster wound down his window, tapped and then lit his Craven ‘A’. ‘Right,’ he said, gazing straight ahead of him. ‘Time for a few questions.’

  The Highway Code was attached to the clipboard on his knee. By now I was an expert on that little booklet. I knew every chapter, every page, every paragraph. I felt confident enough to answer questions on its punctuation or where it had been printed, such was the scrutiny to which I’d exposed it.

  Brewster asked three or four questions which I answered with panache, picturing that full driving licence, printed in black, rather than provisional red, that was on its way to me.

  The examiner sucked hard on his cigarette. ‘What is the most dangerous traffic light to approach?’ he asked.

  My serenity evaporated. ‘That’s not in the Highway Code!’ I protested.

  ‘Who said the questions had to be from the Highway fuckin’ Code?’

  I shuffled in my seat and began to flush. ‘Amber,’ I guessed.

  ‘Nope.’ He took a drag on his fag.

  Beads of sweat were forming on my forehead. A sparrow
landed on a low branch of a poplar tree and stared at me. Time stood still.

  ‘Red,’ I said eventually.

  There was nowhere else to go with this question.

  ‘It’s green,’ said an exasperated Mr Brewster. ‘Green is the most dangerous fuckin’ light to approach. You assume the cars at the fuckin’ junction will stop at red, but some day some bastard won’t.’

  There was silence in the van, mine resentful, his reflective.

  ‘Well, I’m not impressed,’ said Mr B. after a while. ‘But I’m going to give you a pass, against my better judgement, because frankly, I’m sick of the fuckin’ sight of you.’

  The sparrow flew off. The sun came out. At that precise moment I could have kissed Mr Brewster full on his cork-tip-stained lips.

  Chapter 10

  HAVING FINALLY PASSED my driving test I was lucky enough to acquire, for nothing, a 1959 Ford Anglia – the little car with the sweeping nose line and slanted rear windows – thanks to my neighbour Martin Saunders’ links with the motor trade. It was perfectly serviceable and I drove it for six months before Martin offered me another Anglia, dark grey with burgundy seats, for £45.

  I parked the car proudly outside the house. The Britwell had been built at a time when only a minority of its residents were expected to own cars. While there were little clusters of rented garages, with up-and-over tin doors, dotted around the estate, none of its 3,000 houses had parking spaces or lowered kerbs and most of the roads were too narrow to park on. We families round the green vandalized the environment by bumping up the kerb to park in front of our houses. As a result ‘the green’ would have been more accurately described as ‘the brown’.

  Having a car (and a licence) revolutionized family life. It made it easier for us to visit Judy’s nan, living contentedly in her flat in Hanwell. Once settled there, and as she watched our family grow, her initial iciness soon thawed; in fact I think she even became quite fond of me. We could also now drive to Tring to see not only Linda and Mike but also my best friend Andrew Wiltshire who, by complete coincidence, had moved to the same town with his wife Ann. The route involved traversing Amersham Hill, down on the way there, up on the way back. With five of us in the elderly Anglia, it felt like a mountain slope. I was always so anxious coming home about whether we’d actually make the summit that Judy and I developed a little ritual of lighting cigarettes to celebrate a successful climb.

  By now Linda had a third child, Dean Byron (Byron was a compromise, an alternative more acceptable to Linda than Mike’s preference, Dylan), born a few months after Jamie. So we now had two daughters and a son apiece.

  After hearing Shirley Williams give a speech on housing in Stevenage, my sister had joined the housing charity Shelter, for which she worked hard to raise funds.

  Mike, Andrew and I would often gather in the Anchor in Tring High Street to put the world to rights. My brother-in-law and my closest friend both counselled me against spending the rest of my working life in the Post Office, a prospect that was perfectly acceptable to me. I liked being a postman. Whenever I was asked for my occupation I was proud to make that declaration. It had, I felt, a certain cachet. I liked the job and the camaraderie with my colleagues. Yes, the basic pay was low, but it could be supplemented and I liked the sense of security and of belonging to an historic institution.

  Restless Andrew hadn’t lasted long at Barnes after I’d left for Slough. He and Ann aspired to be house-owners rather than tenants and Post Office wages were hardly conducive to that ambition. They faced a long wait on the council housing list in any case. We’d been awarded our take-it-or-leave-it lifeline because we had the good fortune to be living in a house the council wanted to demolish. The local authority was under no such obligation to Ann and Andrew.

  At first they rented a private flat in Tring. Having already been a butcher and a postman, by the early seventies Andrew was a salesman for McCain’s frozen chips. Before long he’d become the first person I knew to work with computers. Like me he’d left school with no qualifications and longed to return to music. But he’d never replaced the drum kit that had been stolen with my amplifier from the Fourth Feathers Club off the Edgware Road and by now he, too, was immersed in the responsibilities of fatherhood. His son Toby had been born in that fertile year for me and mine of 1971 (four months after Jamie and a month after Dean) and Ann gave birth to twin sons in 1975.

  In between, Andrew and Ann suffered a terrible tragedy: the cot death of their five-month-old daughter Simone, born in 1973. Ann had taken Toby and Simone to Linda’s house for the day. When she left she placed the baby in the pram to sleep on the walk home. They arrived back to find Andrew assembling some flatpack furniture he’d bought. With Simone still soundly asleep in her pram, Ann took the opportunity to give him a hand. When they’d finished they tried to wake the baby for her feed. She was dead.

  I can’t remember now how Linda reached me. Since we had no phone, usually she would ring either the Saunders next door, who did, or the inquiry office at the Post Office, depending on the time of day. As soon as I heard the awful news I drove straight to Tring to be with our friends, who had just been questioned by the police.

  They were staying with my sister. They couldn’t face returning to the flat where their baby daughter had died to look again at the flatpack furniture and relive what they’d had no way of knowing were the last moments of their daughter’s life. Not then and not ever. They moved in with Ann’s mother in Aylesbury until their dream of owning their own house was put on hold by the eventual allocation of a council house.

  ‘Why should I let the toad work squat on my life?’ Philip Larkin complained. In the early 1970s I had yet to discover his poetry but the sentiment would have chimed with me.

  At home I still strummed away at the battered old Spanish guitar, its more sophisticated successors – a Vox Electric and my much-mourned Höfner Verithin – having come and gone. I wrote songs that were influenced by the music I listened to in the post-Beatles 1970s: Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Joan Armatrading, Lindisfarne and the band probably more dogged by tragedy than any other in rock-music history – Badfinger. But the closest I got to being back in a band myself was harmonizing Simon and Garfunkel songs with Martin Saunders in his living room. Martin had a clear, almost soprano voice and, like my songwriting, the only accompaniment our duets needed was an acoustic guitar. I also had an old honky-tonk piano that I’d bought for a tenner from a house sale in Colnbrook, ready for the night classes I intended to take to learn to play it.

  It was work, though, that dominated my waking hours. I ‘performed’ (for that is the verb that was used) my regular duty week in, week out, rain or shine: number 229, start time 05.40, finish 13.16, Monday to Friday (10.40 on a Saturday). After nipping home for a quick sandwich it was off to Oxford Avenue for an afternoon of dust, dirt and darts. As time passed, Jamie replaced the girls on the sofa for fifteen minutes of Trumpton or The Herbs (and I was still the one who was most entertained). Before long he, too, was at school all day.

  My Post Office number, 272, remained emblazoned across the black-and-gold enamel badge clipped to the breast of my smart uniform jacket. The number never changed; the uniform did, unfortunately. The navy blue serge with the red stripe down the trouser leg was replaced by a thinner, more insubstantial dark grey worsted suit that maintained the tunic jacket but never looked as smart or felt as fitting for the job. At least it ended the postman’s affliction of ‘blue legs’, which occurred every time the old serge trousers got wet in the rain, transferring the blue dye from uniform to skin.

  In summer, instead of the cotton jacket, we were forced into a light grey version of the winter uniform, in even thinner material, with the most extraordinary black trimming on the collar and cuffs. Judy said it made me look like the lead singer of Showaddywaddy.

  The care I’d always taken with my clothes hadn’t waned and as I spent most of my time in uniform I wanted to wear it an
d accessorize it in the smartest and most stylish way I could. I was among a minority of postmen to adopt the uniform waistcoat, just as old Frank Dainton had at Barnes. For cold weather I wanted a better overcoat than the regular issue and, with the assistance of the supervisor in charge, I searched through the stock in the uniform store until I found what I was looking for: a double-breasted, long, black greatcoat that fitted perfectly over my uniform, the hem reaching down to the bottom of my calves. Circa 1960, it was still in perfect condition and served me through many a winter.

  I’d complain that I had the heaviest delivery in Europe and I was only half-joking. It was certainly the heaviest of any of the nine Burnham walks. I rarely left the office with fewer than three bags of mail. We Burnham men were a race apart from the Slough workforce. They were on rotation whereas we were on fixed duties; they pedalled bikes, we rode mopeds. They sorted on to the inward primary fittings while we collected the mail from the box on the frames marked ‘Burnham’ and did our own breakdown on separate frames in our far-flung corner of the vast sorting office.

  The men I worked with were by and large a homogenous bunch. Tommy Chessman – the man who’d saved me from being sacked in my early days on the Burnham duty with his patient wake-up calls and three-wheeled taxi service – was one of three postmen who’d been centralized at Slough with the mail, leaving behind the dilapidated shed that had been the Burnham delivery office. The other two were Arthur Spearing, a sprightly cockney from Shepherd’s Bush, and Ernie Norrell, one of the few genuine locals I met in my time at Slough.

  Arthur delivered in the semi-rural Green Lane area, where there were long distances between clusters of housing. He soon abandoned the moped, preferring to use his yellow Volkswagen ‘Jeans’ Beetle with its blue denim seats. Already in his late thirties, Arthur was far too old for the car he was driving (youth was a fleeting state in the 1970s). He was forever complaining about the number of packets he had to deliver to a disc jockey nobody had heard of who lived on a road called The Fairway. They were demo discs for a bloke called Terry Wogan.