by Alan Johnson
One thing that always puzzled me about Arthur was how his wallet came to be constantly full of notes even though he never worked a minute’s overtime. We all took turns to pay for a round of the disgusting liquid masquerading as tea that was dispensed every morning from a wheeled urn by one of the night staff, who must have left it brewing for most of his shift. Arthur sat next to me and when it was his turn to pay he always asked me to go and fetch the required nine cups of char. Out would come the wallet and, with a flourish, he’d flick through a wad of notes, searching among the tens and twenties for a pound for our tea.
Of course he may have had a second job, as many postmen did, but if so I saw no evidence of it. He lived on the Britwell and every day from noon onwards his distinctive yellow car would be parked outside the Ex-Servicemen’s Club in Wentworth Avenue. He certainly didn’t work there: colleagues who used the club occasionally, such as Nobby Deadman, confirmed that Arthur was in residence every afternoon, propping up the bar until closing time. He did collect a fair number of stray golf balls on his delivery (his route circumnavigated the golf club) but I very much doubt that trading in those could have filled that substantial wallet.
Ernie Norrell, born and bred in Burnham, must have been pushing seventy. He was certainly well past the normal pension age of sixty. A jovial man with a rich country accent, he’d bought two cottages on The Gore for a few hundred pounds just after the war, which provided him with financial security. Some of our colleagues resented the fact that he was still working when he didn’t need the money, taking a job that could have gone to a younger man, although that argument was somewhat illogical at the Post Office, given the number of vacancies permanently on offer. Besides, although postal workers retained the civil-service retirement age, hardly anyone actually ever left at sixty. In view of the acute shortage of staff the Post Office was reluctant to compel anyone to retire and, with no state pension payable to men until they were sixty-five, very few could afford to leave earlier.
The rest of us were new to Burnham. Ted Pedell, a rugby player a year or two older than me, was built like the proverbial outside toilet made of brick. He was another Britwellian and we played football together for Slough Postal. He convinced me to train with his rugby club, the Old Pennanians, where I was in every sense a lightweight. Week in, week out for about six months I’d go through the torture of a training regime possibly formulated by Hannibal when he was preparing to cross the Alps. To bodybuilding enthusiast Ted it was a little workout; to me it was more of a near-death experience.
Prev Patel was an Asian guy who’d come to the UK from Uganda just before the dictator Idi Amin seized power in 1971. It was a sensible decision: it wouldn’t be long before 80,000 of his compatriots were expelled from the country by the murderous president. In his late twenties, tall and handsome, Prev modelled his hairstyle on that of his hero, Elvis Presley. I never knew if Prev was a nickname, an abbreviation or actually his full name. Whatever the case, it was his salutation of choice. Prev was what we used to refer to as ‘flash’, a characteristic that didn’t always endear him to his workmates, particularly Asian guys of other religions or customs whose standards of propriety Prev failed to meet. He chain-smoked Peter Stuyvesants, which he held elegantly in his long, slim fingers. He never smoked more than half a cigarette. I think they were more of a prop than a pleasure. Like Arthur, Prev scorned his allocated moped in favour of delivering the mail from his big old gas-guzzling Peugeot. He did a lot of his overtime at Oxford Avenue and we enjoyed working together. Prev left the Post Office after a couple of years, intent on going to America to earn his fortune. I have no doubt that he succeeded.
Micky English, possibly the most decent man I’ve ever known, was, in spite of his surname, an Irishman with a disposition so bright it was like working alongside a sun lamp. The rest of us all had our different moods (Arthur Spearing in particular), but Micky only ever had one: happy. When he finished his delivery he’d ride around Burnham looking for any colleague who needed a hand. He’d have got the teas in every morning if we’d let him and his Embassy cigarettes would have been passed around the whole office if there’d been time.
As the two most avid consumers of overtime we’d often work together to cover Burnham deliveries whose postmen hadn’t turned up that day. I have to admit that I was a provider of such work as well as a taker of it.
Every postal worker was allowed ten days’ absence without a medical certificate in any twelve-month period. We called these days ‘Whitleys’, after the distinguished speaker of the House of Commons from 1921 to 1928, J. H. Whitley. During the First World War, as MP for Halifax, Whitley had been asked to chair an inquiry into British industrial relations. The report he produced in 1920 recommended an elaborate system of consultation between unions and management. It was intended for implementation in the coalfields but owing to a mining dispute, the Whitley Councils, as they are known to this day, came instead to the civil service. They were another legacy of the world of the GPO that no longer existed. I suspect that Speaker Whitley would have preferred to have been remembered for his contribution to reducing industrial conflict. However, at some stage the agreement to allow ten non-certified days off must have emerged from the Whitley Councils, since it still bore his name.
Our annual leave entitlement was three weeks a year and most of us supplemented it by ‘taking Whitleys’. A supervisor would tour the office, clipboard in hand, solemnly advising certain miscreants of the number they’d taken that year. I was usually on the list. The supervisor would caution me that I was up to five Whitleys already. In response I’d thank him for reminding me that I had another five to take. I suppose this is one of many aspects of my time as a postman that I should feel bad about. But retrospective regret seems pretty pointless and I felt absolutely no shame at the time. Neither did my workmates, whose absence sent Micky English and me out together with sometimes three or even four deliveries to complete, breaking for lunch in the Crispin or the Garibaldi, where this most cheerful of men would confide in me about his flirtatious wife and the hard upbringing he’d had in rural Ireland. The pints having been sunk and our sandwiches consumed, Micky’s smile would be reapplied as we returned to our labours.
The two other Burnham deliveries were driving ‘duties’ performed on rotation (along with a late turn) by Bill Higginbottom, Reg Woolley and Derek Quincy, a trio of Britwellians who all had a cross to bear. Bill was hard of hearing, Reg was afflicted with an enormous nose, politely described as Roman, and Derek suffered from a wracking cough that frequently led to him losing his voice. Arthur Spearing dubbed them Ear, Nose and Throat.
One of the driving duties was the bulk mail delivery to the shops and businesses of Burnham High Street. The other was the only proper rural round in the office, Littleworth Common. Many deliveries were designated as rural in Slough sorting office – Datchet, Colnbrook, Hedgerley, Farnham Royal and Farnham Common, for example – but any authentic rural postman in Cornwall or Northumberland, or outside the cities of Scotland, would have laughed at the description. Littleworth Common was the only Slough delivery that would have earned their respect.
I had assisted Bill (Ear) with the Littleworth Common delivery on the late turn one afternoon while I was still on driving tuition before passing my test, his being the Morris Minor van to which I had elected to fasten my L-plates. There were only around 140 addresses on Littleworth Common compared to over 600 on my own Burnham round. Most of the time allowed for the delivery was taken up by the driving: juddering up dirt tracks, crossing farmland and cruising along sparsely populated country lanes.
One of Ear’s delivery points particularly intrigued me: Dorneywood, a stately home separated from the main road by a long driveway. Halfway along the drive was a small hut which just about accommodated the substantial policeman stationed inside. ‘Ah,’ said Bill knowingly. ‘When there’s a copper on duty it means the man himself is here.’ My inquiry elicited the information that the ‘man himself’ was the home secretary
and Dorneywood his official residence.
I really want to do that job, I thought to myself later. I wasn’t thinking of the role of home secretary but of the job of postman to the good folk of Littleworth Common. But Ear, Nose and Throat were well entrenched and the prospects of me achieving my objective were remote.
Chapter 11
FOUR YEARS AFTER moving to the Britwell I managed to acquire a new guitar. Henry’s Radios, where Mike worked, had branched out into selling musical instruments and he assured me he could arrange a discount on any guitar I wanted. So one Saturday I took six-year-old Natalie with me on the train to Paddington.
Natalie had no memory of London and was so captivated by the Underground that, instead of travelling one stop from Paddington to Edgware Road, we went right round the Circle Line in the other direction before getting off to see her Uncle Mike in Praed Street. Henry’s was packed with customers but Mike found time to show us round, whispering to me that he could knock 50 per cent off the listed price.
After much deliberation, I plumped for an Eko twelve-string acoustic model. I can’t remember now how much it cost: whatever the price, it would have been unaffordable without the promised discount but must have been manageable with it. Mike invited me to join him for a lunchtime drink at his London local to celebrate my purchase but in those days, before the arrival of child-friendly gardens and family rooms, taking a child to a pub was completely impractical, not to mention frowned upon in many quarters. So Natalie and I left with the sleek, rosewood Italian guitar safely encased for the journey home. In hindsight, deciding against an electric guitar may have pointed to an acceptance that any revival in my nascent music career was now unlikely.
I was happy at the Post Office but beginning to think about some of the other opportunities it offered. I could easily have plodded round my Burnham delivery for forty years before retiring with a long-service award and the fond farewells of my customers. They were good to me, particularly at Christmas, when they were careful to give their tips to me personally rather than leaving an envelope pinned to the front door which would quite probably have landed in the hands of one of the student casuals who delivered the mail over the course of the two heavy weeks preceding Christmas Day while I stayed in the office sorting it.
There is a tale, probably apocryphal, of a less-than-diligent postman finding a note on the door of one of the houses on his walk that read: ‘Postman – please call for your tip.’ He knocked expectantly, to be confronted by the master of the house, who offered no money but told him forcefully: ‘Here’s a tip: shut the fucking gate behind you.’
I had two or three casuals who laboured for ages over their third of my walk. The exception was a bright bluestocking who one year amazed me by returning within an hour of me sending her out laden down with mail.
All the bundles were numbered in sequence and each casual would have around fifteen bundles for the third of the round for which he or she was responsible. How on earth had my helper managed to get through them so soon?
It turned out that this phenomenally clever undergraduate had simply looked at the address on the front of each bundle and then shoved the whole stack of mail through the letterbox of that house. So all the post for Dawes East Road, for example, went through the door of number one. She had then tripped merrily along to the address on the front of her next bundle, apparently without wondering why the occasional house was receiving hundreds of cards and letters while there was nothing whatsoever for all the addresses in between. Fifteen bundles, and fifteen drops, later, she was back in the office asking what she should do next.
That student must now be approaching retirement age, having perhaps pursued a life of intellectual rigour in academia or as a senior civil servant. Or possibly a brain surgeon.
My customers had no cause for complaint when I was on the job. I was meticulous about shutting gates, never walked across lawns and pocketed those wretched red elastic bands rather than discarding them on the pavement.
I had only one significant bad experience, but it was one that left me with a deep feeling of resentment which may have contributed to a general restlessness and slight dissatisfaction that began to trouble me by the mid-1970s. It happened in upmarket Linkswood Road, my favourite part of the walk – a wide avenue of beautiful houses, at the end of which was a five-bar gate. Beyond that there was nothing except rolling countryside. I would deliver up one side of the road, pause at the gate for a quiet moment of spiritual nourishment (what is life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare, and all that) and come down the other side. Up on the evens, down on the odds, as we said in the trade.
I had just completed my final drop in Linkswood Road one day when a car turned the corner and screeched to a halt beside me. A man jumped out and confronted me. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘The game’s up. Where’s the money?’
I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘What money?’ I asked calmly and politely.
‘The money you stole from the milk bottle outside my house.’
Twenty minutes earlier I had noticed, outside the porch of one of the houses, a milk bottle with the milkman’s money pushed into the neck for him to collect with the empties. I had opened the porch door as usual, left the mail inside and carried on with my round.
I flushed with anger now as I told this gentleman that I hadn’t touched his money, managing to do so with more civility than he deserved in the circumstances.
‘Give me the money’ – his words were spoken slowly for emphasis – ‘or I’ll call the police.’
What had happened, it transpired, was that on leaving for work Mr Angry had called out to his wheelchair-bound wife that he’d leave the money for the milkman on his way out. Apparently it was usually left inside the porch but on this occasion for some reason he’d put it outside. Some time later, when his wife heard me arrive with the post, she went to collect it, saw no sign of the money in the porch and phoned her husband at work to tell him I’d pinched it.
He had been on his way home when he’d accosted me. He hadn’t even been back to check before accusing me of theft. Of course, when I stood my ground he returned to his house and found the money outside the porch where it had been all along.
He came to report this curtly in a surly, unapologetic manner that left me feeling even more peeved. He and his wife might well have believed that the Britwell estate was full of thieves and that if I wasn’t guilty as charged on this occasion, I probably had been in the past or would be in the future.
I reported the incident when I returned to the office, hoping that the Post Office might wish to take some action to protect and defend the integrity of their staff. But the supervisor just shrugged his shoulders and said there was nothing he could do about it. He was probably right. What had happened had already been cleared up and therefore the false accusation had gone no further. The Post Office was hardly likely to sue on my behalf for defamation of character.
Still, this encounter left me with a burning sense of injustice which may have been at the root of my sense of having reached a crossroads. After five years on my Dropmore Road walk I decided to apply for promotion. I had no real enthusiasm for acquiring the gold lapel crowns of the postman higher grade but at the same time I was worried that if I didn’t seek such advancement it could become a road not taken, an opportunity missed. The increase in wages would be welcome – my pay would go up by around 15 per cent – but I’d have to work inside all the time, which didn’t appeal to me. While I had no ambition to become a supervisor, I wouldn’t even have the option if I didn’t first of all pass through this ‘higher’ grade.
The process required me to go on an ‘acting list’, which meant I remained a postman but covered PHG vacancies as and when.
In the spring of 1974 I spent two weeks at the PHG training school at Bletchley Park, the wartime headquarters of the top-secret British intelligence operation that cracked the German Enigma cipher in 1941. It was an interesting time to be there. The secrecy imposed on
Bletchley staff had been maintained after the war – indeed, some of them have never discussed their work to this day – and the heroic exploits of the code-breakers were only then beginning to come to light.
The village of Bletchley was about to be engulfed by the new town of Milton Keynes, which was still under construction – a fact borne out by the vista that greeted me as my train pulled into Bletchley station: a vast, ghostly expanse of half-built houses, laid out in perfectly symmetrical grids, stretching as far as the eye could see. One evening we students went for a drink in a local pub in rural Bletchley, where we chatted to villagers who would soon become the city-dwellers of Milton Keynes without moving house.
The course taught us about ‘keys and tabs’, ‘cash on delivery’, registered letters and other services we’d be expected to handle as PHGs, the most intriguing of which was dealing with high-value packets. The HVP system had been introduced in 1930 as a means of enabling banks to transfer banknotes, cheques and other securities safely through the mail – it was HVPs that the perpetrators of the Great Train Robbery had been after when they raided the Glasgow to London mail train in 1963. Instruction on HVPs was given in hushed tones and conditions of secrecy worthy of the mansion and huts elsewhere on the site where the cryptanalysts had performed their vital work thirty years before.
In fact high-value packets were already in terminal decline as banks found more secure ways to move used notes. Having assiduously learned the esoteric procedures for dealing with them, I doubt if any of us ever actually encountered one. I certainly didn’t. They were soon to become extinct as, eventually, would the postman higher grade.
It was one Friday night in 1974 in the Slough Supporters’ Club – a social club opposite the sorting office, overlooking the greyhound track on the corner of Wexham Road and Wellington Street – that Mick Pearson and I decided to join the Labour party.