Please, Mister Postman

by Alan Johnson

  It’s a strange experience, adopting your own child. I had never thought of Natalie as anything but my eldest daughter and she’d never known any other father.

  We didn’t need Beppe’s permission. His failure to take any responsibility for his daughter – not that we’d wanted that – was classified as abandonment. The process was rigorous all the same. After the paperwork was completed, social workers interviewed Judy and me together, then separately. Natalie was interviewed with her mother and then on her own. The school had to be involved and finally we were informed that our neighbours would be interrogated. The truth behind our ambiguous back story, in which Natalie was presented as the fruit of my sixteen-year-old loins, was to be revealed. In the event it didn’t matter: none of our neighbours even mentioned it and I very much doubt that by then it would have been the subject of surreptitious gossip.

  Once I became Natalie’s father in the eyes of the law she acquired a new birth certificate and the chance to rectify something that had always rankled with her: she was the only one of our three children bereft of a middle name. Now, unlike Emma and Jamie or any other child at their school, Natalie would have the opportunity to choose her own. She picked Anne, Linda’s middle name, but Natalie was insistent that unlike Linda Ann, her name would be spelled with an ‘e’. Her wish was our command, and the Lynch Hill school register was amended to include Natalie Anne Johnson.

  At Stopsley, surrounded by our ten children, I reminded Linda of the two Christmases we’d spent alone in our own childhood, especially the one when, as a ten-year-old – the same age as Natalie was now – she’d cooked my dinner, a chicken from a Christmas club hamper, with the plastic wrapping still on it. We rarely spoke of those days, mainly because Linda knew that I was bewildered by her decision to re-establish contact with our father. He’d beaten our mother, refused to contribute to our welfare and, when I was eight and Linda almost eleven, run off for good to start a new life with the barmaid from the Lads of the Village pub. It was one of the happiest days of our young lives.

  Linda realized that there was no question of me following her example and having any kind of contact with Steve, our father. I hadn’t laid eyes on him since he had turned up uninvited at the cemetery after our mother’s funeral and I had no desire to do so now. It took me a while to understand that Linda’s magnanimity was far nobler and more humane than my sulky rebelliousness. Her motivation wasn’t fondness for the father who’d treated her far worse than he’d treated me. It was that streak of protectiveness. Steve and his second wife, Vera, had a daughter together. Sandra was ten years younger than me, an only child desperate to establish a relationship with her half-siblings. Sandra was the reason Linda stayed in touch and she couldn’t see Sandra without seeing Steve. It was hardly a rapprochement. Linda and Mike would visit Steve, Vera and Sandra at their home in Dulwich once or twice a year. Sandra was in contact with Linda more regularly, becoming another beneficiary of Linda’s endless quest to spread serenity by putting a sheltering arm around those she loved.

  We had a wonderful Christmas, although Mike was quiet and withdrawn for much of the time. He was keen to get to his newly adopted pub in Stopsley during its very limited festive opening hours, yet once there he was unusually gloomy, even morose. He believed the economy was in a mess, he told me. Facing rising inflation and rising unemployment, Jim Callaghan’s minority Labour government was trying to deal with the crisis by cutting public expenditure and bringing in deflationary economic policies. Mike wasn’t impressed by the government throwing itself on the mercy of the International Monetary Fund. However, he was more worried about his own future. He was afraid that Henry’s Radios, where he’d spent his entire working life, would go bust or be sold to new owners. Mike had a close association with the family who owned the business. They had taken him on as a Saturday boy at the age of thirteen and treated him like a son. He was concerned that, away from their benevolent regime, he would find life difficult because he had learned on the job and the skills he’d acquired over the years were unaccompanied by any certificates recording his qualifications.

  As we drank our pints and smoked his Senior Service cigarettes, Mike cheered up a little when he talked about what a great thing the fostering had turned out to be. But he was so fond of the two latest additions, Ricky and Murray, that he was dreading the end of their short-term stay.

  On the drive back to Slough, Judy remarked that she, too, had noticed how distracted and disengaged Mike had seemed. She put it down to overwork.

  We never saw Mike again.

  It’s difficult to write this. Even now, so many years after the event, it is a struggle to form the words on the page. The tears I found it so hard to shed when my mother died have poured down my face a hundred times since for Mike and for the awful, tragic end to his short life.

  It is difficult even to know where to begin, for it had all been building up over a long period but only came to a head in the space of a few short months in 1977. Perhaps the first trigger was the departure of Ricky and Murray.

  They had been with Linda and Mike for a year when my sister was informed that social services had found a couple who wanted to adopt the two boys. Six-year-old Ricky pleaded with Linda to be allowed to stay. She tried to reassure them that they’d be happy in their new home and she and Mike took the boys to visit their new parents. On the day they were due to leave for good Linda gave Ricky a book she’d compiled for him. It was the story of his life so far. She had included the handful of memories he had of his birth mother in the days before he’d been abandoned, of which he had been encouraged to speak. There were lots of photographs of his time at Stopsley and contributions from the other children. Linda felt it would provide Ricky with a sense of his own identity and value.

  Linda and Mike promised to stay in touch with the two boys but it soon became clear that was going to be too difficult for Ricky, in particular, to handle. While his adoptive parents were chatting with his foster parents, he hid in the back of Mike’s van and wasn’t discovered until Mike and Linda were on their way home to Stopsley. Ricky had to be taken back to his new family kicking and screaming.

  Mike was even more affected by this heartbreaking parting than Linda was. When his boss asked him what was wrong Mike told him he’d just lost two of his sons. When he learned that Mike was referring to his foster children he berated Mike for being too community-minded.

  It was not long after this that the full extent of Mike’s condition was revealed. Linda caught him unawares swigging from a bottle he’d taken out of his briefcase when he thought he was alone. It was as simple as that. She walked in to her living room and found him drinking furtively. Not thinking much of it, and assuming that what was in the bottle was wine, she suggested fetching a couple of glasses so they could sit down and have a drink together. But it wasn’t wine. It was vodka.

  Within minutes Mike was in tears, admitting that he’d been drinking the stuff surreptitiously for years, since before they’d met over a decade earlier. Throughout the whole of their life together – courtship, wedding, parenthood – Mike had been addicted to alcohol. He’d chosen vodka way back, in the days when he was still living at home with his parents, because it was odourless and wouldn’t give rise to awkward questions. Demonstrating all the guile and cunning of the practised alcoholic, he also sucked menthol and eucalyptus sweets. Bottles of vodka were secreted all over the house in the places he was most often to be found – in his work shed, the greenhouse, the potting shed, the garage.

  He had been what would today be known as a functioning alcoholic. Only now he wasn’t functioning so well. As the uncertainties about his future increased his drinking had intensified. It had long ceased to offer any pleasure or even temporary relief. He drank now simply in order to feel normal.

  Linda held Mike in her arms as he sobbed out his confession. She swore she’d get him through this no matter how hard it might be. Coincidentally, she’d recently read a magazine article about alcoholism that she fe
tched when Mike was calmer. It had one of those questionnaires alongside it – ‘Ten ways to tell if you’re an alcoholic’. If the answer to two or three of the questions was yes, the respondent potentially had a drink problem and was advised to seek help. Mike answered yes to eight of them. There was a contact number at the end of the article to call to find your nearest branch of Alcoholics Anonymous. Linda said she would ring the next day.

  She spent the rest of the day trying to track down every bottle of vodka in the house and tipping its noxious contents down the kitchen sink.

  It was decided that Mike would take the rest of the week off and then, once he was back at work, attend his first AA meeting at a London branch, close to Henry’s Radios and well away from where they lived.

  In the meantime he would confine himself to the house and stay off the booze. They told the children Dad was sick – and he was. Very sick indeed.

  Nothing prepared Linda or Mike for the horror of the withdrawal symptoms.

  It was only much later that Linda told me about the terrifying hallucinations Mike endured during this drying-out period. Flesh-eating worms were entering his body, huge black insects dropped from the ceiling on to his face, enormous spiders scuttled backwards and forwards across his chest, his legs, his arms.

  Their nights were sleepless as Linda clung on to her husband, who would be curled into a tight ball, shaking, crying, shivering. The demons were relentless, Mike was frail, Linda exhausted. Slowly, step by step, Mike emerged from his pit of torture and despair. He stayed off work for an extra week and then began to go to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, sharing his experiences with others who had passed through, or were still negotiating, the subterranean world where he’d been trapped.

  Mike began to look for jobs locally, in Luton. He felt that, even if Henry’s Radios survived, the daily commute was an unnecessary pressure he could do without. Somebody from his AA group phoned Linda to offer support. She was grateful for the approach but she was confident that they were coping. She kept the caller’s phone number and promised to get in touch if the situation changed.

  Having said nothing of all this to anyone, they now faced the dilemma of whether to confide in Mike’s parents, who had moved to Hampshire but were due to visit Linda and Mike for the weekend. Mike decided that they ought to be told. When he broke the news to his mother her reaction was one of total disbelief. ‘Of course you’re not an alcoholic,’ she scoffed. ‘Don’t be so silly. I suppose this is her idea.’

  This hostility towards Linda was hurtful but nothing new. It was the least of their worries.

  They told nobody else and the next few weeks went well. It was now March. The dark days of winter were passing and spring was arriving. They celebrated Mother’s Day. The children presented Linda with a set of sherry glasses, to which Mike added a bottle of sherry. Linda treated herself to a glass that evening. The next day she was going to London with a friend to visit the Ideal Home Exhibition. Mike dropped them off at the station after taking the children to school. He was due at a job interview in Luton later. The plan was for him to pick up Linda and her friend from the station at 6pm.

  When they got off their train there was no sign of Mike. Linda eventually made her own way home, where she found the children watching television. ‘Dad’s upstairs asleep,’ Renay told her. She found Mike comatose and she couldn’t wake him. Beside him lay the empty Mother’s Day sherry bottle.

  He hadn’t gone to the job interview. He had started drinking before collecting the children from school half cut. He had finished the bottle when he got back home.

  The next day Mike was full of remorse. It was a lapse, but he’d rally and recover the lost ground. His rail season ticket had run out and now that he had resolved to find work locally he decided not to renew it and instead to hire a car and drive backwards and forwards to London (the big, thirsty van he used for ferrying the children around being deemed unsuitable for commuting). It would remove the temptations of the station bar and provide another incentive to stay off the booze and away from the breathalyser.

  On the first day of this new regime Mike was deputed to pick up Renay and Tara from Girls’ Brigade so that Linda could be at the local slimming club she ran one evening a week. Ann, a young girl who lived next door, would babysit the other three children until Mike got home. Linda – who never drove, even though she had passed her test at eighteen – would get a lift back from one of the people in her class.

  She arrived home at 8.30pm to find Ann still there, ashen-faced. Mike hadn’t picked up Renay and Tara as arranged. When he hadn’t turned up, another Girls’ Brigade mum had taken them home with her own daughter and phoned to let Linda know where they were.

  Shortly after Ann had taken that call Mike had arrived home so drunk he’d had to crawl up the long path to the front door. While Ann kept the children in the front room away from this awful sight, Mike dragged himself up the stairs, where he’d remained ever since.

  Linda called a taxi and went to collect Renay and Tara. When they got home, she thanked Ann, who had stayed on with the boys, they said their farewells and Linda ushered her out of the door. Ann had seen Mike incapable with drink; the women who ran the Girls’ Brigade and the other mothers knew he’d failed to collect his daughters. Mike’s ‘problem’ was beginning to become public knowledge in the small community where they lived.

  Renay had run upstairs to get changed and go to the bathroom. As Linda walked back down the hall she heard her daughter cry out. She rushed upstairs to find Mike lying, fully clothed and fast asleep, in a bathful of water.

  Later, when he learned that Renay had discovered him in that state, Mike burst into tears. He was a hopeless drunk, he wailed. His neighbours knew it and, worst of all, so did his eldest daughter.

  It was a while before Linda suddenly remembered the hire car. Surely Mike hadn’t driven home? He had. But he could remember nothing of the journey and thought he must have abandoned the car in the lane leading up to the house. It certainly wasn’t outside. Linda grabbed a torch and went out to find it, check it wasn’t damaged and make sure it was locked.

  She discovered the car neatly parked at the side of the lane. It seemed unscathed and could be left there safely for the night. As she shone the torch across the car she noticed the number plate. The first three letters were LMJ: the initials of our mother, Lilian May Johnson.

  The day after the bathtub incident Mike went to see his doctor on his way to work. He came home that evening very late and very drunk and went straight to bed. Linda was desperate. Although I wasn’t easy to get hold of, I think she’d taken a conscious decision not to involve me in the crisis. She knew how much I admired Mike and how upset I would have been to see him diminished (as he would have regarded it).

  She had always considered it her responsibility to protect me. She had been our mother’s support and confidante more or less all her life and through all our trials and tribulations, particularly when it came to my father’s womanizing, their motto was ‘Don’t tell Alan.’ In any case, I doubt she thought I could bring any wisdom to bear on the awful problems she and Mike were facing now, or shine any light into the shadows engulfing them.

  Instead she confided in a close friend, who advised her to contact the person who’d rung from Alcoholics Anonymous offering help and to talk to Mike’s parents. She took the plunge and called her in-laws. Ted, Mike’s father, answered and they had a long conversation. Ted was sympathetic and comforting. He said he would get the train up from Fareham first thing in the morning to come and talk to his son, to help relieve the burden Linda was bearing and to ensure Mike knew that his father was not ashamed of him for what was, after all, a terrible illness and a breakdown rather than a vice.

  Linda was elated. She didn’t feel the need to contact AA now that she had family support. Mike and his father would be able to talk man to man and find dimensions that were beyond her understanding. It was a breakthrough.

  An hour later the phone rang. It was I
rene, her mother-in-law. She asked to speak to Mike. When told he was asleep, she rounded on Linda. Ted had told her everything about the conversation he’d had with his daughter-in-law. ‘Ted won’t be coming to Stopsley,’ she spat, ‘and neither will I. Mike’s your husband and you’re the one who turned him into an alcoholic. It’s your problem and you can just get on with it.’ Then she slammed the phone down.

  When Mike woke up later that night, Linda told him that his father had been extremely sympathetic but that his mother wouldn’t allow him to come over. Mike was sad and remorseful. He said that he was no good to her or the kids any more. Linda reassured him that she loved him as much as ever and that they would get through this dreadful time together. She joked that if he was still like this in his forties it might be a different story. But they were young, and they had the best years of their life ahead of them once they’d confronted and overcome this obstacle. Later that year they would be celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary. She was determined to make it a new beginning with the man she loved.

  Mike told her that during his visit to the doctor’s that morning, a Wednesday, it had been arranged for him to be admitted to a psychiatric clinic on the Friday to ‘dry out’. There was only one day to wait. Linda urged him to spend it quietly at home but he insisted on going to work to ‘tie up loose ends’ before going into the clinic. The doctor predicted that he would need to stay there for two or three weeks. It was only one day, he argued. In any case, he was due at an AA meeting in London on the Thursday evening. Tony, an Anglo-Chinese guy he’d befriended at AA, would call for him at Henry’s Radios so that they could go together.