by Alan Johnson
‘Not really,’ I said nonchalantly, lying through my teeth.
‘Well, you should get the branch to nominate you next year. You won’t get on straight away but you’ll get your name in the frame, and in three or four years you’ll be on. There are a number of retirements coming up and you need to get yourself positioned to replace them.’
I muttered my appreciation of this counsel, still overawed to be in such close proximity to the man who’d led the union since I became a postman and who’d led us through the seven-week strike; a man who was a national figure, better known to the public, thanks to his handlebar moustache and natural eloquence, than most Cabinet ministers. I noticed that above the foliage on his upper lip was a pair of twinkling eyes, looking kindly upon me. Whatever it was, Tom had seen something in me of which I wasn’t particularly aware myself. He told me years later that he’d always tried to encourage young talent and that I’d caught his eye in the incremental scales debate the previous year. The injustice of those scales was what had brought him into the union as a youngster and he was struck by the fact that I was following a similar path.
There was great excitement in the Slough delegation when we broke for lunch. Joe told me that he’d already thought about nominating me for the EC. Whether or not that was true, Tom’s suggestion quickly became Joe’s and it was agreed that I would be a candidate at the 1979 conference (the elections were held at annual conference). I was to succeed at my third attempt, exactly as Tom had predicted.
Chapter 17
THROUGHOUT THE LATE 1970s I looked forward to the new life that awaited me when (not if, when) I was elected to the union’s national executive council.
I followed Tom Jackson’s sage advice and made some half-decent speeches at conference to lift my profile, although not as many as he wanted me to make. As I stood on the rostrum ready to begin one peroration on something or other I heard Tom’s voice from the platform behind me saying, ‘Ah, Alan – at last a speech. I thought you were dead.’
I had an aversion to making speeches for the sake of it. There were plenty of ‘rostrum runners’, besotted by the smell of greasepaint and the roar of the crowd, who enjoyed the thrill of addressing conference so much that they were up at the microphone every five minutes. I liked that buzz as well, I must admit. In truth I was a bit of a show-off and this was as close as I could get to recreating my rock-and-roll years. But I was sensible (and cunning) enough to realize that the audience in front of me was assessing my suitability to be a national representative of their union. There were many more candidates than there were positions to be filled. And whereas aspiring delegates from big branches such as Glasgow or Birmingham could broker deals with each other about how to allocate their block vote, I was from a small branch with only a handful of votes. I had to rely solely on my eloquence and at the same time not appear too big for my boots. I was determined never to go begging for votes in the conference bars and meeting places as I was sometimes urged to do.
I must confess that one of the attractions of election to the executive was an escape from the early-morning starts that I’d never learned to love. I was forever hearing workmates claiming they’d become so attuned to the hours that they woke up automatically at 4am or some other ungodly hour, even when they were on holiday. That never happened to me. Left to my own devices I’d happily have slept until noon.
So concerned was I about losing my job as a result of excessive late attendances that I constructed a Heath Robinson-style system to get me into work on time. One alarm clock was positioned on a chest of drawers near the bedroom door so that I had to get out of bed and cross the room to turn it off. That one was set for 4am. I’d don my uniform and stagger downstairs, where another alarm placed next to the sofa had been set for 4.35. I’d sleep there under my greatcoat to grab that all-important extra half-hour before brushing my teeth, combing my hair and dashing out to the car for the fifteen-minute drive to work. Breakfast would have to wait until I reached Hicknaham Farm.
What those years did embed in me was the ability to catnap. I usually still managed to get home for short breaks during the day, but if I couldn’t lie on my sofa for a fifteen-minute refresher I’d sit in my car in the office car park and sleep sweetly during my lunch break. Even today I can fall asleep anywhere and in any position virtually to order.
Such were the long hours worked by postmen in Slough that a large room next to the canteen was designated as a sleeping room. It was littered with battered old armchairs and those civil-service chairs made of tubular metal with two bits of canvas stretched across them, which were used as footstools. The blinds were permanently drawn and the stale air would carry the sound of gentle snoring with the occasional deep, animal grunt from the heaviest sleepers. I avoided this grim place, but for the indoor sorters in particular it was the only refuge. I remember one postman who actually lived at work for a couple of months. He’d been evicted from his lodgings and would work as many hours as he could before bedding down in the sleeping room every night.
Linda was coping better and, along with her friends and neighbours, I encouraged her to try to find somebody else to share her life. Outgoing and with so much to give, she wasn’t the kind of person who suited being single. Gradually, she began to absorb the message, at least in terms of broadening her social life, and eventually, in typical Linda style, she took the initiative.
Ann, the daughter of Sally next door, who was single herself and four or five years younger than Linda, came up with the idea of joining a singles club called Nexus which met at a bar in Luton and sent out a weekly newsletter containing members’ profiles and details. Linda and Ann paid their year’s subscription to the club but decided after one short visit that the bar wasn’t for them. It was, according to Linda, ‘full of creepy old men’.
They decided on an alternative strategy. They’d forget about the bar evenings and simply put their photographs and contact details in the newsletter. They could then just get in touch with anyone featured there who caught their eye, or respond to anyone who got in touch with them.
The parallels with my mother’s efforts to find love and security were not lost on either of us. After she’d been deserted by my father at the age of thirty-six, she had been persuaded by Linda to put an ad in the lonely-hearts section of the local paper. It didn’t work out for my mother but the 1970s equivalent was – eventually – successful for my sister.
I’d agreed to spend two weeks of my annual leave helping Linda redecorate. My DIY skills might have been sadly lacking but even I could manage to slap on a bit of paint. She decided to take advantage of my visit to set up a couple of dates. As well as being able to look after the children I would be a useful deterrent should any of these men try to get beyond the doorstep when they brought Linda home. Whatever the hopes of her friends and family, she made it quite clear that she was looking for companionship rather than a relationship. She certainly wasn’t seeking another husband. The profile she had put in the newsletter was straightforward: ‘Woman with five children, two cats, a dog, a rabbit, gerbils, hamsters and birds seeks somebody to meet socially for occasional evenings out.’
It wasn’t likely to attract Robert Redford or the Prince of Wales, who was around her age and free at the time, but it did attract a creep called Dave. When he picked her up at 7pm for their evening out, all five children waved Linda goodbye from an upstairs window.
Dave told Linda that he was a film producer. If there was any truth at all in his claim, it was probably that he manufactured rolls of the stuff at Kodak. After boring his date rigid for a couple of hours in a local pub, he drove her home. When they reached the country lane leading to her house Linda heard Dave say: ‘What a lovely night for a murder.’
She surreptitiously unbuckled her seat belt and grasped the door handle ready to make a run for it as soon as the car stopped. ‘Thanks for a lovely evening,’ she said disingenuously, for want of anything better to say, as they drove further down the lane towards her house.
‘You can thank me properly in a minute,’ Dave replied ominously.
I was listening out for the doorbell but I heard Linda running up the path before she got anywhere near the front door. As I opened it she fell into my arms. Dave’s car had just completed its three-point turn and I could see its tail-lights heading off towards the main road.
While I was making a cup of tea for my distraught sister she announced that she’d had it with Nexus. ‘I’m never going out with anyone again’ was her firm statement of intent or, I suppose, dis-intent.
The next day, as I was preparing to pick up Dean from his infants’ school, the phone rang. Linda answered. It was a man named Carl, another lonely heart who’d joined Nexus.
‘I’m sorry, but I’m not in Nexus any more.’
‘How can that be?’ asked Carl. ‘I only got your details this morning.’
‘Well, I’ve only just decided that it’s not for me,’ replied Linda, beginning to get irritated. She was about to hang up but Carl persisted. He was a travelling salesman currently in the area. Could he at least just come round for a cup of tea? Something about his voice attracted Linda and made her change her mind. She gave him her address and said he could come round, but only for half an hour.
When I remonstrated with her, quoting the pledge she’d made the previous night, she argued that, first of all, she wasn’t going out with him so technically the pledge remained unbroken. Secondly, such was her indifference to this persistent salesman that she wasn’t even going to bother to get changed. Since we had been painting her bedroom and Linda was still dressed accordingly, this declaration was more dramatic than it might otherwise have been.
As I walked down the lane towards Dean’s school, a car stopped. The driver wound down his window and asked me the way to Linda’s house. This was how I met the man who was to become the love of Linda’s life and her second husband; the man who would rescue her from the wretched grief that had consumed her since Mike died. And I met him before she did.
Oh, and his name wasn’t Carl. It was Charles. Linda had misheard. By the time I returned with Dean he was leaping round the front room, startled, after one of Linda’s cats jumped through the open window on to his lap with a live mouse between its teeth. Linda, who’d been making tea in the kitchen, heard him scream and rushed in, her hair scrunched into an untidy bun and, true to her word, still wearing an old smock splattered with paint. It was like a scene from a Brian Rix farce.
This relationship won’t last, I mused to myself. I was wrong. It did, and it does to this day.
As our children moved from primary to secondary education, we became involved in the campaign to save one of the better local schools.
Slough had retained Buckinghamshire’s system of selective education even after being dragged across the county line into Berkshire. The existence of grammar schools meant that in our area the comprehensive schools were comprehensive in name only. The future education of and direction taken by our children and their classmates would hinge on their performance on the day in a test at the age of eleven, just as had happened with Linda, Judy and me and our contemporaries. With the top 20 per cent or so of those pupils considered to be the brightest on the basis of the test being creamed off by the grammars, the comprehensives were, to all intents and purposes, secondary moderns.
I loathed this state of affairs but I could do nothing about it. I couldn’t even convince most of my friends and neighbours of the unfairness, the waste, the cruelty of effectively labelling children successes or failures at the start of their secondary schooling. I was active in the local Labour party by now and knew our MP, Joan Lestor, very well. She told me how much she hated the system but that its popularity with voters meant that any attempt to remove it would cost her the seat. It was as simple as that.
Warrenfield Comprehensive, the secondary school on the Britwell, had a terrible reputation. At that time schools were still closed institutions, as they had been in my schooldays. Parental interest was discouraged, performance standards were opaque and achievements were not measurable by any meaningful comparison. Schools were largely immune from outside scrutiny but by any yardstick it was impossible to classify Warrenfield as anything other than a poor school. In its defence, it suffered from a lack of resources, since the lion’s share followed the kids designated as the brightest to the grammar schools where, by and large, the best teachers wanted to be.
Natalie failed the test, as would Emma; Jamie went on to pass it. Natalie detested the thought of going to Warrenfield almost as much as I’d feared ending up in the North Kensington blackboard jungle known as the Sir Isaac Newton School for Boys when I was her age. So Judy and I fought to send her to Haymill, a school in Burnham Lane that had a better reputation. She gained her place and I became a school governor there. But within a year of Natalie starting at Haymill the school was earmarked for closure.
I joined a feisty bunch of parents and teachers determined to come to its rescue. We set out to convince the council that falling school rolls (the principal reason given for the planned closure) were a temporary blip and that it was too good a school to be sacrificed to an accountancy problem that would be rectified in a few years. We raised money for our campaign by organizing carnivals and cricket matches; we marched through Slough High Street, delved into the archives of the National Federation for Educational Research (conveniently located in Slough); we presented petitions, lobbied councillors, wrote to ministers – all to no avail. Our arguments for choice and diversity in education provision were considered to be heresy by the local education authority.
Haymill closed and Natalie, along with her classmates, was forced to move to the school she dreaded in the worst circumstances, as an older pupil from a merging school. The council used the opportunity to change Warrenfield’s name to Beechwood in an effort to remove the stigma and salvage its reputation. Emma joined Natalie there the following summer. She was a bright girl expected by everybody to pass that damned test but, like so many other children over the years, she flunked it on the day. It left her with a sense of failure she could never quite overcome despite all our efforts to dispel it.
I became more conscious of my alcohol intake after what happened to Mike. I didn’t take a vow of abstinence or join a temperance society but I was anxious to understand at what stage ‘enjoying a pint’ became ‘having a drink problem’. I’d wince whenever I heard the term ‘alcoholic’ used in a pejorative or lighthearted way. I now knew what a dreadful illness alcoholism was and I missed Mike and his gentle ways more than I could tell anybody – except Ernie, the great listener.
He and I would have a few pints together every Friday evening at the Crown in Farnham Common, just off the Britwell. I’d also have a drink with my union colleagues Joe Payne and Dave Stock at least one evening a week after work. And the Sunday lunchtime ritual at the British Legion continued. Occasionally husbands and wives would go to the Legion together on a Saturday night. The women drank Bacardi and Coke or gin and orange while we men stuck to our pints of light and bitter or mild, or lager, which had become increasingly popular through the 1970s.
Nobody drank at home in those days, except at Christmas or at parties and on other special occasions. Alcohol was consumed on licensed premises, you had tea or coffee indoors and ne’er the twain shall meet. Wine with meals at home was a rarity. By the late seventies, Judy, who could turn her hand to anything, had begun distilling homemade wine as a hobby. Buckets of dandelion and burdock or turnip wine would gurgle away in plastic buckets in the cupboard under the stairs. We’d crack open a bottle of Black Tower or some other German sugar-water to accompany Christmas dinner. If we ventured out for a meal at a steakhouse or a restaurant in Windsor for a special celebration we’d demonstrate our sophistication by ordering Mateus Rosé and taking the bulbous bottle home to serve as a candle-holder. Half-empty bottles of sherry or advocaat could be found at the back of most working-class sideboards, along with the odd small bottle of Babycham or Cherry B
, waiting, like the Christmas decorations, to make an annual appearance. They were hardly ever touched at other times during the year.
Almost everyone smoked. I always found the generosity of smokers touching. The way that cigarettes were offered round turned them into a small gift, presented in a spirit of friendship. Practically the only adult close to me who didn’t smoke was Linda. When she was in her teens and acted as my guardian at the flat we shared on the Wilberforce Estate in Battersea, she bought twenty menthol cigarettes one Christmas. She smoked one on Christmas Day and stored the other nineteen for future Christmases. I think I might have nicked them. Whatever the case, she never smoked again.
Although I’d been puffing away from the age of twelve I rarely got through more than ten fags a day, lighting my first around lunchtime. I vowed to myself that I’d break the habit by the age of thirty. However, in 1978, two years ahead of my self-imposed deadline, while waiting to pick up Natalie, Emma and Jamie from the Post Office children’s Christmas party, I stubbed out a cigarette and suddenly decided, on the spot, that it would be the last I’d ever smoke.
The money I would save was a powerful incentive. I decided I would bolster my willpower by setting aside what I would have spent on cigarettes and rewarding myself with LPs instead. Within a week or so I was able to buy a special, yellow vinyl version of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. It was followed at regular intervals by albums from Elvis Costello, Supertramp, Billy Joel and Joe Jackson.
Those records are still redolent to me of an era that was fast disappearing. The end of that decade was marked by the general election of May 1979, which brought in a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, the UK’s first (and, to date, only) female prime minister.
Jim Callaghan, leading a Labour government without a majority in the House of Commons, had been forced to make deals with minor parties and to accept referendums on devolution in Scotland and Wales. Yet in spite of these difficulties, and the problems of trying to run the country during a time of high unemployment and rising inflation, as late as the autumn of the previous year Labour had been ahead in the opinion polls. Had Callaghan chosen to call an election then, he might just have won it. As it was, when millions of public-sector workers took strike action that winter, amid continuing pay restraints, photographs in the press of rubbish stacked high in the streets and reports of the dead remaining unburied were credited with diluting Labour’s healthy lead. It was not the Winter of Discontent, though, that finally undid the government. Its demise was brought about by defeat in the House of Commons by a single vote on a motion of no-confidence over devolution, forcing Callaghan to go to the country.