Please, Mister Postman

by Alan Johnson

  He told me how keen he was to end the internal divisions over IWM. The key was to ensure that our branch officials understood it properly, engaged with it proactively and implemented it to the advantage of our members. ‘They say that in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king,’ he said ruefully, his glass eye seeming to twinkle as much as the real one, ‘but this needs a man with two eyes, and that man is you.’

  He confided that he had planned to talk to me straight after the EC meeting but, since serendipity had intervened, as he put it, and we found ourselves alone, he explained now that he wanted me to write a handbook and to conduct seminars around the country explaining IWM to those branches that expressed an interest in joining the scheme. He warned me that there’d be resentment among some of my more senior colleagues on the EC, but promised that he’d use his authority to ensure that I could undertake this task properly. I might still have been a rebel but I couldn’t complain any longer about not having a cause.

  After the excitement of that conference, back at our house on the Britwell estate, Judy and I sat down to try to gauge the effect that my elevation would have on our lives. After the upcoming bank holiday weekend I would be working from UCW House in Clapham in south London, heading to the office in a suit rather than a Post Office uniform. It was clear from what Tom had said that my job was going to involve a lot of travelling and I knew that my only reliable source of income would be a flat postman’s wage. There would be none of the overtime pay that had helped us to bring up three children, now fourteen, twelve and ten. There would, though, be subsistence payments from the union for travel and time spent away from my normal place of work.

  There would be no more 5am starts, which delighted me, but on the other hand there would be no more afternoons sitting in the rustic calm of Dorneywood Road reading a book while waiting to begin the evening collection.

  Judy was thrilled for me, but it was hard for us both to get our heads round what all this would mean in practical terms. She suggested that we load the kids into the car and drive up to UCW House on bank holiday Monday so that I’d know the way when I started there the following day. It was a good idea: I’d never set foot in the place before.

  So it was that we found ourselves in Crescent Lane, Clapham, London SW4 after an hour’s drive in our Hillman Avenger, admiring the magnificent 1930s architecture of my new workplace. Judy, Natalie, Emma and Jamie and me, gazing at the bricks and mortar that represented a new phase in our lives.

  Chapter 19

  LINDA HAD MARRIED Charles Edwards – or Chas, as he was known – in May 1979. The wedding had clashed with the union’s annual conference and I’d been unable to attend. I’m sure Linda was upset about my absence. I’m sure, too, that Judy saw it as an ominous indication of the priority the union was taking in my life.

  Chas was a stocky, round-faced man with an infectious laugh and a waspish sense of humour. A grammar-school boy, like me, he’d worked in his youth at Elstree film studios. One of his claims to fame was that he’d once met Walt Disney when asked by the studios to deliver a package to the great man at a London hotel. He earned a substantial tip from Disney and an experience on which he could dine out for years. Chas went on to run his own removals business, specializing in packing and shipping the belongings of families emigrating to Canada, South Africa and Australia. By the time Linda met him the business had fallen victim to the superior financial muscle of monoliths such as Pickfords and Chas had become a jewellery salesman. He was also a singer and compère at a club in Loughton, Essex, and his other claim to fame was that he had once sung at the famous 2i’s coffee bar in Soho, where British institutions such as Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard had started out.

  Chas was eight years older than Linda and had three children from his first marriage. His wife of sixteen years had run off to Devon with a man she’d met at work and Chas had custody of Cindy, Ricky and Eddie, who were in their early teens when he and Linda got together.

  It was these children who first endeared me to Chas. I was very protective of my sister and wary of this new man in her life. I doubted that he could provide the stability she needed after the dreadful trauma she’d been through. But those three kids were so polite, so funny and so engaging, and had such a great relationship with him, that I was won over. If he could bring up three children single-handedly to become such well-adjusted teenagers, I reasoned, he must possess the qualities necessary to take on Renay, Tara, Dean and Nicky, too (Linda’s younger foster son, Eugene, had gone back to live with his mother but Nicky had remained with Linda).

  Linda’s children appeared to have absorbed all the shock and horror of their father’s death without displaying any immediately obvious symptoms of lasting damage. But Linda worried about delayed reactions. So when she and Chas married her first priority was to move the new extended family away from what had become a house of sorrow in Stopsley. Needing somewhere big enough for two adults and seven children, they each sold their respective properties and had a five-bedroomed house built to their specification in Hockley, not far from Chas’s Essex base.

  I don’t think Linda ever really understood what my election to the executive council meant. She’d tell people that I worked for the TUC. She knew I wore a suit to work and travelled a lot and this convinced her that it was some kind of promotion; that I had at last got myself the sort of job that fulfilled our mother’s ambitions for me. Though our mother had been determined I should become a draughtsman, I’m sure the only reason she picked that career was that draughtsmen were professionals and went to work in suits.

  I thought of my mother as, fully suited up, I boarded a plane stationed on the tarmac at Heathrow airport for my first-ever flight. I chose an aisle seat because I felt it would get me through the journey better if I didn’t look out of the window. Around me sat bona fide businessmen and women, flicking through newspapers, oblivious to my nervousness.

  Not only was it the first time I’d ever flown, it was also my first assignment as a member of the executive council of the Union of Communication Workers. And for good measure, it would be my first trip to Scotland.

  Harry Jones, the assistant secretary at UCW House responsible for IWM, had called me into his office to brief me on a dispute in Dundee. An IWM scheme had been introduced, the hours had been cut but the expected bonus had never materialized. The office was out on strike. I was to travel up to Dundee to resolve it. I asked which train I was to catch.

  ‘That would take too long,’ said Harry. ‘We’ve worked out a quicker way. You’re to travel to Manchester on the shuttle from Heathrow and from there get on a smaller plane to Dundee. If you leave now, you’ll be there by tea time. The branch is organizing a meeting this evening for you to address. You’re to get them back to work, hopefully by tomorrow. Good luck.’

  I didn’t like to mention that I’d never flown before. Even in 1981 it seemed strange for a person to have reached his thirties without ever having stepped on a plane. I’d been abroad, but only once – to Denmark with the Children’s Country Holidays Fund charity when I was twelve – and we’d travelled by boat. I didn’t have the kind of fear of flying that prevents some people from even attempting the experience but I can’t deny that I was anxious.

  At that time shuttle flights were just that. There was no pre-booking. You just turned up, piled on, found a seat and took off. It wasn’t even necessary to buy a ticket before boarding. The cabin crew spent the entire journey to Manchester collecting fares, like conductors on a London bus. No tea or coffee was served.

  I kept my attention focused firmly on whatever I could find to read and felt a real sense of achievement when we landed at Manchester. The second flight was on a much smaller plane, a forty-seater, a far more daunting experience for a first-time flyer. Facing the Dundee strikers that evening was a breeze compared to getting there to start with.

  The next day I convinced local management to reclassify a lump of hourage as what the scheme termed ‘authorized variations’, in ot
her words, hours that had arisen for reasons unassociated with fluctuating volumes of mail and unconnected to the staff’s productivity. This reclassification meant that these hours were treated as if they’d never been worked, earning the bonus not just for that week but for the whole month the scheme had been running at that office.

  The men went back to work, normal service was restored to the good folk of Dundee and I left the city with one of its eponymous cakes and a book of (risqué) poetry by Robbie Burns – gifts from a grateful branch. The Post Office was satisfied and Harry Jones told me there were plenty more IWM problems to be resolved, hopefully before they developed into industrial disputes.

  ‘We must take the kettle off the gas ring before it boils over,’ he said when I got back. He was one of the two national officers responsible for postmen and women and PHGs named quaintly by the union the ‘indoor secretary’ (Harry) and the ‘outdoor secretary’ (a wonderful character called Maurice Styles).

  Harry had a relaxed disposition but wasn’t thought to be a brilliant negotiator. Like most of the handful of national officers (elected full-time employees of the union) he disapproved of IWM and had been instructed to assume responsibility for it by Tom Jackson. To Harry this was a distraction from his main task, which was dealing with the march of what was then called ‘mechanization’ but would now be known as new technology.

  The primary purpose of postcodes, for example, introduced in the mid-1970s, was to make ‘mechanized’ sorting possible. Instead of hand-sorting the mail the PHGs would sit at coding desks translating postcodes into a series of phosphorous dots that could be read by huge sorting machines and directed to the appropriate dispatch point. The skill of hand-sorting was at the start of a slow decline, although I remember thinking that the new system would never catch on because people wouldn’t remember, let alone use, their postcode. By 1981 I’d already been proved wrong.

  In the same way as I had when I’d first become a postman at Barnes, I closely observed my new workmates at UCW House. Although he looked incongruously Chinese, Harry was actually of Welsh and Italian extraction. While he spoke neither language he demonstrated his devotion to his mother’s country by eating spaghetti with practically everything. At any restaurant, whatever its bill of fare, Harry would ignore the menu and insist on a medium-rare steak with spaghetti piled on top.

  The outdoor secretary, Maurice Styles, was a committed communist and a great friend of Dickie Lawlor, who was now retired. Both men had been expelled from the union at one stage in the early 1960s but had subsequently been rehabilitated to the extent that they’d become part of the leadership they’d spent most of their union careers attacking.

  I loved Maurice. He lived a frugal life, buying all his clothes at jumble sales. As a result they were usually too small, sometimes too large, for his massive frame but he was completely unconcerned about how he looked. He once addressed conference wearing trousers that were so big his belt was somewhere around his armpits. Only we on the platform behind him could see that the seat was split right across his backside.

  Maurice and Jean, his equally committed communist wife, gave away all the money they earned. They lived in Brixton and were involved in dozens of initiatives there to help the poor and repair the racial tensions that erupted into riots the year I was elected to the executive. The joke at union headquarters was that Maurice’s tiny but formidable wife would call him to account every evening, standing him by the fireside as she looked up at him from her armchair and demanded to know what he’d done for ‘the party’ that day. But there was nothing remotely sinister in his politics. Indeed, by then the Communist Party of Great Britain had given up on revolution and was campaigning for a Labour government. Or at least, that was Maurice’s position.

  Fiercely intelligent, Maurice was another autodidact. He had taught himself mainly through reading and as a result he had learned a lot of words he’d never actually heard pronounced. (As an autodidact myself, I just about steered clear of the pitfalls inherent in this form of self-education by virtue of having been such an avid listener to the BBC Home Service when I was growing up.) Maurice was none the less an impressive orator. He once rose to take issue with the perpetrators of a fractious debate criticizing his actions and remarked in his south London accent that ‘all I’ve ’eard in dis debate is clitch after clitch after clitch’.

  Maurice’s was the most important national officer position in the union, representing the men and women who delivered the nation’s mail. He had been a postman himself – indeed, all the assistant secretaries had come from the grades they represented.

  Working for the telephonists was Kim McKinley, a remarkable woman in every respect. Another eccentric dresser, Kim appeared regularly in a black leather pilot’s jacket, complete with white fleece lining, and a pilot’s cap. She also had a penchant for leather trousers and flowing white scarves. All she needed to complete the Biggles impersonation was a pair of flying goggles.

  Many years before, Kim had been the youngest member ever elected to the EC, succeeding in her early twenties and becoming a national officer ten years later. Now she was in her fifties, a chain-smoker with a deep attractive voice who, unlike Maurice, would never have pronounced ‘cliché’ as ‘clitch’. Indeed Kim’s pronunciation was impeccable. She sounded more like a member of the royal family than an ex-telephonist from Brighton.

  It was through Kim that I learned about something called the marriage bar. She was married but had kept it a secret so that her status would not hamper her advance through the union’s ranks. At the time she was elected as the assistant secretary for telephonists married women weren’t allowed by the union to take such a promotion. The marriage bar had been introduced into the civil service in the late nineteenth century to prevent married women taking the better-paid jobs by blocking any promotion beyond a certain grade. The rationale was to give priority in the workplace to women who had no support from a husband. The civil-service trade unions (including ours) applied the same principles to its staff and some kept them even after they’d been scrapped by employers.

  Tom’s deputy, Alan Tuffin, a genial West Ham supporter, was the perfect counterweight to Tom’s showmanship. He had little of Tom’s charisma or fluency and had become deputy general secretary through sheer hard work and application. There wasn’t a devious bone in his body and I rarely heard him say a bad word about anybody, although there were plenty of colleagues who tried his patience. He had succeeded Norman Stagg, the pint-sized battler who’d been an encouraging influence on my development in the union and had retired the previous year. Alan was a meticulous negotiator, the best I’ve ever worked with. Along with Joe Payne at Slough, it was he who taught me the importance of attention to detail.

  With the exception of Tom’s, the senior positions in the union were dominated by cockneys, reflecting the fact that a third of the members, and coincidentally a third of the mail, came from London. Among them was Les Hewitt, a former communist who’d moved steadily to the political right. Olive-skinned and extremely dapper, he was a genuine epicure. He not only had a fondness for fine wines, he knew a lot about them, too. Unlike the poseurs who’d stick their noses into their wine for show after swirling it round the glass a couple of times, without knowing why they were doing it, and then take a gulp, Les could tell with one sniff if it was corked (‘You don’t taste corked wine,’ he instructed me in his gruff, cor-blimey voice, ‘you smell it.’). This nugget was one of several that came my way in his attempts to educate me properly. ‘A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine’ was another, along with ‘water is for shaving with’, his admonishment to any waiter who offered to bring a jug to the table.

  My immersion into this new life with its fresh cast of characters away from the dust of Oxford Avenue and the sweet early-morning air of Littleworth Common came to an abrupt halt when I broke my ankle playing football.

  There are two versions of what happened. The one I prefer is that I was playing the game I’d loved all my
life when my involvement was ended by a harsh tackle that necessitated my retirement from the sport at the tragically early age of thirty-one.

  This is true but doesn’t tell the entire story. I wasn’t actually playing in a match – it was a kickaround at Burnham Beeches. I was indeed tackled brutally and unfairly by Darren Speight. I could stop there with my dignity intact. Choosing to go on involves revealing that Darren Speight was ten years old and Jamie’s schoolfriend at Lynch Hill.

  I had taken the two of them to kick a ball about at the Beeches, a short drive away from the Britwell. After the outrageous foul I knew I had to get to hospital. I tried hard to minimize the pain I was feeling in front of the boys, dismissing the knock as a sprain and smiling manfully in a way I thought would be reassuring to the little bastard who’d inflicted this injury on me.

  I dropped Jamie and Darren at home and drove on to Wexham Park hospital, where my worst fears were confirmed. I’d driven four miles in a car with manual gears, pressing down the clutch pedal with a foot on the end of a broken ankle.

  I was out of circulation for over six weeks. Fortunately, by then we were on the phone. It had become essential once I was fully embroiled in my IWM mission. I wasn’t just helping to resolve disputes but also assisting branches to set up schemes and beginning work on the handbook Tom Jackson had commissioned. It was eventually published as The Step-by-Step Guide to IWM but, like all union handbooks, had no byline on the cover, much to my disappointment.

  The scheme necessitated some complex calculations and had elements like ‘traffic change factors’, which required working hours to be expanded or contracted in proportion to increases or decreases in the volume of mail handled (this was, after all, meant to be a productivity scheme).