by Alan Johnson
There was another pub, the Feathers, frequented mainly by tourists, on the boundary of my delivery, facing the imposing gates of Cliveden, the Italianate mansion that had once been the estate of the Astor family. This glorious piece of architecture was in Taplow, so its mail came from Maidenhead rather than Slough. The Feathers was as close as I got to the house that had had a starring role thirteen years before in the notorious Profumo affair, which I remembered my mother reading about in her Daily Sketch in the precious fifteen minutes she had in the mornings to put her feet up with a cup of tea and a cigarette.
By way of contrast with the echoes of the sexual shenanigans of Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies, aristocrats, politicians and spies, I also delivered to a convent and a monastery. The monastery was Nashdom Abbey, run by Anglo-Catholic Benedictine monks in a glorious Edwardian stately home built by Sir Edwin Lutyens for a Russian aristocrat. It became a monastery after the First World War. I would pull up each morning outside its magnificent porticoed entrance in my little red Austin van.
Practically every day there would be a registered letter for the monastery, which meant I had to obtain a signature. This allowed me to wander into the kitchens where the monks, in their sandals and rough, brown habits tied at the waist with a piece of rope, were busy preparing breakfast. An expensive-looking fountain pen would materialize from somewhere and the item would be signed for. There, in that sparsely equipped kitchen, ancient Benedictine order met Britwell estate. I don’t remember there being much conversation between us, although this was not a silent order, unlike the community of nuns known as the Congregation of the Servants of Christ which occupied the House of Prayer in Green Lane. They, too, regularly received mail that had to be signed for, which was a complicated and sometimes disconcerting process seeing as the sisters weren’t allowed any contact with the outside world.
All their post had to be taken down a stone staircase into a gloomy basement room, impervious to sunlight even on a summer’s day. At the end of the room was a wooden turntable. I would place the mail on this contraption and rotate it by means of a pulley, whereupon the letters would slowly disappear to the other side (or perhaps the Other Side).
When there was something to be signed for I had to ring a little hand bell before operating the turntable and wait in silence, listening to my hair grow, until it creaked back into action and the registered letter slip or recorded delivery book slowly re-emerged bearing a signature, as if authorized by a divine hand. Funnily enough, I never felt the urge to hang around to absorb the tranquil atmosphere there.
There was another convent on the delivery. I forget its name now, but evidently it was more connected to the outside world than the House of Prayer as I had to deliver the Daily Telegraph to the abbess every morning, posting it, along with the mail, through a huge brass letterbox that could easily accommodate a set of telephone directories.
I have a confession to make concerning that convent which requires me to go into more detail than I want to. But I need to get this off my chest. It may sound like a tall tale but it’s absolutely true. The abbess wasn’t the only customer to whom I brought the Daily Telegraph from the newsagent in Burnham High Street. The next customer on the round was also a Telegraph reader. But as well as taking the newspaper he subscribed to various periodicals, among them Playboy, Penthouse and assorted other top-shelf magazines. The newsagent would tuck them inside the Daily Telegraph, which is how we delivered them, using the newspaper as a kind of Trojan horse. That man must have had one hell of a paper bill.
The abbess cancelled her Telegraph one week because she was going on holiday. I was normally pretty good at remembering which newspapers had been temporarily cancelled but if it slipped my mind it wasn’t the end of the world as the pile was always in delivery order. So when I reached the address and found no paper for it on the top as usual I’d recall why (it was all about sequencing, you see). But of course, in the case of the abbess and Mr Playboy, I would normally have two consecutive Daily Telegraphs. On the first morning of the abbess’s holiday, finding a Telegraph on the top of the pile, I dutifully pushed it through the big brass letterbox at the convent.
When I got to Mr Playboy’s house half a mile up the road there was no Daily Telegraph. I knew he wasn’t on holiday. And not only had his paper not been cancelled, he would have been looking forward to receiving a couple of particularly raunchy mags that I distinctly remembered the newsagent telling me were included with his paper that day.
I broke into a cold sweat as the penny dropped. I had just delivered soft porn to a convent.
I drove back as quickly as I could. All was silent. There again, it usually was. This did not necessarily indicate that nothing was going on within. I prised open the letterbox flap, crouched down and peered inside. I could see the fat wedge of papers, the Daily Telegraph still concealing its titillating cargo. Holding back the stiff, springed flap with my upper arm, I stretched my right hand down into the wire cage on the inside of the door, delving as far as I could. It was while I was in this position, knees bent and arm elbow-deep in the letterbox, that the door opened inwards, bringing me with it.
The woman looking down on me was so sweet. Having heard me scrabbling at the door and noticing that I’d brought the unwanted paper for her absent abbess, she thought I’d refrained from ringing the doorbell for fear of disturbing the nuns. Now I could retrieve the situation by removing the offending bundle from the convent. I carefully lifted the Daily Telegraph out of the wire cage as if it were a precious heirloom and disaster was averted. Nobody would ever be any the wiser.
As will have become apparent, the population of Littleworth Common was diverse. There was an air vice-marshal at Pumpkin Hill Cottage and a community of farm labourers in Chalk Pit Lane. Miss House, the head teacher, lived on the premises at the tiny village school, Dropmore Infants, and received her wages via registered letter every Friday morning, along with a magazine from the National Union of Teachers. And there was the house where a massive Irish wolfhound patrolled the front garden. So far was this beast’s head from the ground that he practically looked me in the eye as I swallowed hard and unlatched the gate. Nose and Throat assured me that this was the gentlest of dogs; that all he wanted to do was escort me from the gate to the front door – a distance of about 20 yards, which can seem like a mile when you’re in a state of barely controlled terror. This wasn’t just an escort, it was an armed escort. The grey-and-white woolly-haired hound would seek out an elbow with its teeth and gently clasp it in its giant jaws. Off we’d go, from gate to door, as if I were an elderly gentleman being guided to my cinema seat by a kindly usherette. Thankfully I was allowed to make the return journey alone. Once back in the van I’d use a mail sack to wipe away the copious quantity of wolfhound spittle that had lodged on the elbow of my jacket.
Well-meaning colleagues would often tell me that dogs sense fear and react aggressively. I never considered that information to be at all helpful. Being scared of a dog is bad enough; thinking that the very fact that you are scared will encourage the dog to rip your throat out does nothing to quell the fear.
If the wolfhound’s house was my least favourite Littleworth Common address, Hicknaham Farm was the one I couldn’t wait to get to – a wonderful oasis in this verdant desert. It may sound as if I’ve synthesized the Archers with the Larkins of The Darling Buds of May, but truly there could have been fewer happier places to be than in the kitchen of Mr and Mrs Rayner, who owned the farm.
Every morning at about 8.10 I’d pootle up the long drive across open farmland, park the van and make my way through the strutting peacocks and somnolent dogs to the kitchen door. Mrs Rayner would be hovering around the Aga as Terry Wogan (now better known than seven years earlier, when Arthur Spearing had mentioned the obscure disc jockey on his round) was ‘fighting the flab’ from a substantial ancient radio perched high on a shelf on the facing wall. It looked as if it had been there long enough to have broadcast Edward VIII’s abdication speech.
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Everything was substantial about that farm kitchen, including the table where a wedge of toast made from a fresh loaf and thickly spread with butter would be placed for me alongside a steaming mug of all-milk coffee, and where one or maybe two of the Rayner sons (depending on which of the three of them wasn’t out working on the farm already) would eventually come down from their bedrooms to eat. They were themselves substantial, come to think of it, big strapping lads who were not at all fazed to find the postman and, once a week, the dustmen in their kitchen as they sat, half-dressed, polishing off a substantial breakfast.
I rarely saw Mr Rayner, who had a series of voluntary and public-service roles and was gradually handing over responsibility for the farm to his sons. It was Mrs Rayner who was the absolute monarch in that kitchen; mistress of all she surveyed. She must have been in her early fifties, a handsome woman with greying hair and strong features. An old-school Tory with absolutely no sense of false superiority over the various tradesmen who trooped through her kitchen, she relished being a woman in a man’s world. No workman left that farm without being treated to Mrs Rayner’s hospitality or her well-developed curiosity. She had a genuine interest in people; in their lives, opinions and ambitions.
The conversation crackled and fizzed like the bacon frying on the Aga. Mrs R. soon found out that I was a union official. She was anti-union, anti-Europe and anti-state intervention (a hot topic in an era when the car manufacturer British Leyland was being nationalized). At first I was inhibited in the debates that raged in that kitchen parliament. The importance of good manners had been drilled into Linda and me by our mother, including politeness and respect for our elders. I had no experience of discussing political issues with someone from such a different background and so obviously from a different social class. But it quickly became clear to me that Mrs Rayner could take it as well as dish it out. Bert, the senior binman of the crew of three that joined me in the kitchen every Tuesday morning, shocked me with the vehemence of his albeit good-natured attacks on the farming community.
He was a small, wizened man approaching retirement (although in truth, he looked well over sixty-five). Whereas I always politely remained standing in my usual spot by the door as I consumed my coffee and toast, Bert would plonk himself down at one end of the bench seat round the kitchen table while his colleagues stood behind him.
‘You fucking farmers,’ I remember Bert saying to Mrs Rayner one day as she made him his piece of toast. ‘You stick together like shit to a blanket.’
Mrs Rayner didn’t turn a hair. Handing Bert his toast, she responded nonchalantly, ‘Yes, it’s called solidarity, and you bolshies could learn a lot from us.’
Bert went on to point out that while Mrs R. opposed state intervention she was quite happy for farmers to be the biggest recipients of state largesse. Gradually I plucked up the courage to offer a view, repeating some statistics from an article I’d read in the Sunday papers about the disproportionate amount of European money paid to farmers. She countered with a detailed argument about the cost of farming and the consequences for society of ending subsidies.
Mrs Rayner gave as good as she got, enjoying the argument and never taking offence. She regarded Bert as a proper socialist and probably thought of me as too young to hold a firm opinion on anything, but she treated us all as equals – at least in that big old farm kitchen, where the problems of the universe were tackled every morning with more laughter than venom.
We became good friends, Mrs Rayner and I. When she found out how much I loved reading she lent me Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, which she declared was her favourite book and insisted I read, quoting its famous opening line, ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ (I did read it – finishing the final riveting chapter sitting on a clifftop in Cornwall, where I took the family on holiday that year.) In return I lent Mrs Rayner Cider with Rosie, which she’d never read.
One Christmas she stored the bicycles we’d bought for Natalie and Emma in one of the barns until Christmas Eve. She gave me a plump chicken as part of my Christmas tip. I also delivered boxes of Hicknaham Farm eggs around the common and to a few postmen at Slough who’d heard about this source of fresh farm produce.
I remember walking into the kitchen one afternoon to find Mrs Rayner in her bra and slip washing her hair at the sink. I blushed and apologized but she was completely unabashed. We townies might have been offended by such a breach of social niceties but this countrywoman couldn’t give a damn.
Hicknaham Farm was a warm and welcoming place and I’ve never forgotten what it taught me about arguing strongly but without rancour, just as I’ve never forgotten the friendship of Mrs Rayner.
And of course, the Littleworth Common delivery also took in Dorneywood, the stately home I’d first seen when Bill Higginbottom took me on his round for driving tuition. Dorneywood was built in the eighteenth century. Set in 215 acres of parkland, woodland and farmland, it was donated to the National Trust in 1947 as a country home for a senior member of government. The prime minister decides which Cabinet minister should live there and a few (most recently Alec Douglas-Home) have used it themselves in preference to Chequers, the PM’s official residence on the other side of Buckinghamshire. When I began delivering to Littleworth Common, Dorneywood was the country retreat of the home secretary, Merlyn Rees. I once saw him, surrounded by security guards (this was at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland), drinking with his family outside the Jolly Woodman, but I never saw him at the house itself.
I always knew, though, when he was in residence, thanks to the presence of that sturdy policeman in the little security hut halfway down the drive leading to the house. He never stopped and searched my Royal Mail van, simply waving me through. The mail might not have been checked going into Dorneywood but I knew that some letters and packets had already been intercepted in the sorting office. I never saw anyone handling them, but if I nipped away from my sorting frame to collect registered letters or fetch a cup of tea, I might come back to find that some of the mail I’d just sorted had disappeared. I assumed somebody from the investigation branch, who blended into the sorting-office background, had taken them to check and that they would be reintroduced into the system later. It did occur to me how easy it would be for a postman to get past the rather rudimentary security that was supposed to protect the home secretary.
I wish I could describe the interior of Dorneywood, its lavish reception rooms and its sweeping staircase, but unfortunately I never set foot inside the main house, not once in my five years on Littleworth Common. I had to take the mail to a door at the back that led to the servants’ quarters. There I’d exchange a cheery word or two with a member of staff, much as I did at Nashdom Abbey, and be in and out virtually within seconds.
For me the main function of Dorneywood and its environs was as a resting place. Once the delivery was finished my next task was to collect mail from the postboxes perched on poles around the countryside and the pillarboxes in Burnham. None of these could be opened before the advertised collection times so if I finished the delivery promptly I’d have to wait somewhere. My chosen spot was the winding lane opposite the entrance to Dorneywood, where there was a handy layby with a lovely view across the fields and peace, perfect peace.
I passed the time there regularly, but when I think back to those days one summer afternoon comes to mind. I remember sitting in the van with both front windows wound down to let the breeze blow through, reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Time seemed to be suspended on the thick, balmy air. I’d just begun to contemplate standing for the executive council of the union and was glimpsing a life beyond the sorting office. But exciting as this potential expansion of my horizons was, the realization that if I took this route I might never again enjoy the serenity of Dorneywood Road on a quiet summer’s afternoon gave me a pang of regret. It was one of those idyllic moments which you feel you are already experiencing as a memory, even as it occurs.
Chapter 16
HAVING T
RIED MY hand at oratory in the Slough sorting-office canteen during the South Africa boycott, albeit to no avail, I was determined to hone my public-speaking skills in front of a wider audience. Apart from appealing to the showman that lurked beneath my shy exterior, it would be essential to fulfilling my emerging ambition to become a lay member of the union’s executive council. It was an ambition that at that point seemed so far beyond my reach that I was keeping it to myself. To achieve it I would need to attract the votes of branches across the country and the only way to bring myself to their attention was by speaking at conference.
Once again it would be an issue on which I had particularly strong feelings that gave me the push I needed. At my second UPW annual conference, in 1977, there was a proposition urging the executive council to seek the abolition of all remaining age-based incremental scales as part of that year’s pay claim. By now I was on maximum pay and well aware that, while those plodding through these awful scales were seized, as I was, with the injustice of it all, there was a general tendency among our members to adopt a more blasé approach when the mountain had been climbed and the pinnacle reached; an attitude of ‘well, we had to go through it, why shouldn’t they?’
No further progress had been made in reducing these scales since the end of the 1971 strike. Now this motion sought to eradicate them completely. It was just the motivation I required, and on the day this proposal was debated I was on my feet, waving my agenda pad in the air to attract the chairman’s attention. I succeeded. He pointed to me. Off I set on the long walk to the rostrum. Once there I looked out on a sea of faces waiting expectantly for my words of wisdom and sagacity.
Speakers had to start by giving their name and branch. That done, those speaking for the first time usually declared the fact, prompting a round of supportive applause. In my arrogance I’d already decided to dispense with such a pathetic effort to attract sympathy. I wanted to give the impression that I’d done this so many times it was actually becoming a bit of a bore; that those present should feel grateful I’d decided to dispense another dose of riveting rhetoric when I obviously had better things I could have been doing with my time.