by Alan Johnson
Peggy tells an incredible story which illustrates his vicious character. After their mother’s death, Lily’s two youngest sisters, Rita and Peggy, went to live with relatives, Auntie Nin and Uncle Tom, in Bootle. When the Blitz began they returned to Warham Road. It was just as well they did: if they’d stayed in Bootle they would have been killed when Nin and Tom’s house took a direct hit in May 1941. Their aunt and uncle died, along with their maternal grandfather, who had been staying with them at the time. All three were buried in a communal grave.
Nin and Tom had no children and no family apart from the Gibsons. They had managed to save a bit of money but had not left a will. So many people who perished in the Blitz were in this position that a national newspaper used to publish lists so that relatives could claim their inheritance. It was Lily, by then living in London, who spotted their names on one such list and she and the second eldest daughter, Jean, who did all the work necessary to secure the money for their two young sisters, Rita and Peggy. They each received £100 to be held in trust. It should, as Lily and Jean had intended, have given them a start in life; a nest-egg any loving parent would have cherished and protected.
Not John Gibson. He refused point-blank to provide anything for his two little girls on the grounds that they now had money of their own. Clothes, shoes, school uniforms, bus fares, school equipment – everything had to be paid for from the legacy. By the time they left school it was all gone. In spite of the lack of care he had shown them it was, needless to say, Rita and Peggy who looked after their father as age and infirmity made him increasingly dependent on others. No wonder Lily had wanted to escape this tyranny as soon as she could.
After leaving school, she had moved first to the Norris Green district of Liverpool, where she lived with friends and got a job at the Co-op. Then she had put Liverpool behind her altogether and headed for the NAAFI in London, a bright, pretty girl embarking on a journey she hoped would lead to a future significantly better than the life she had endured so far.
Like Lily’s mother, Steve’s father had died long before Linda and I were born. I knew about the tragically short life of Maria Gibson in Liverpool but nothing of my paternal grandfather – not even his name. Neither can I recall Nanny Johnson’s Christian name. She died when I was four or five, but the regular visits we made with Steve (Lily never came) to see her every Sunday morning are among my earliest memories.
Steve held my hand on these journeys. That sticks in my mind because it is the only time I can remember any physical contact with him. I was tiny, just old enough to walk independently with proficiency, and he’d hold my hand all the way to Nanny Johnson’s; me on the left, Linda on the right, until she cartwheeled away. We liked these visits because we considered Nanny Johnson’s flat, at Peabody Buildings, Delgano Gardens, to be the height of luxury. It was always warm in winter and cool in summer. It had an indoor toilet and a bath (in the kitchen, where the wooden boards placed across it when it was not in use provided a handy extra work surface). There was carpet in something called a living room and a comfortable settee. There were no flies or bugs and it didn’t smell of decay and dirt and damp.
Like all working men in those days, Steve wore his suit on a Sunday. He liked to look smart. Part of the morning ritual was watching him getting ready. Polishing his shoes, ironing his shirt, choosing his tie. It was probably the army that made him so meticulous. He always ironed his own shirt and put a crease into his trousers by placing a sheet of brown paper between the material and the flat iron, heated on the stove in the fireplace. The little Formica table served as an ironing board. After he applied the Brylcreem that ensured not a single ginger hair would be out of place, the final flourish of his toilette was the fixing in place of the elasticated silver armbands that held his shirt cuffs just so on his wrists. This was when we admired Steve the most. Linda would bring her little pair of red shoes to be polished as part of the routine, as I looked on in awe at the transformation.
Off we would go on our Sunday pilgrimage, Steve and Linda and I, turning left out of 107 Southam Street, past the crumbling façades of houses that had lost their grandeur some time in the nineteenth century. There was a lot of rubble on the road, as well as litter and dog mess. In the days before the Clean Air Act of 1956, London’s ‘pea-soupers’, thick, noxious miasmas of fog, soot and smoke from coal fires mixed with industrial pollution, would blacken buildings and corrode lungs. None of this discouraged Lily and the other women in the street from keeping up their own standards: they would spend hours every week scrubbing and whitening their front steps.
But on Sunday mornings all was quiet as we walked towards the top of the street, past St Andrew’s Catholic Primary School, whose pupils all appeared to have freckles and red hair to match their scarlet uniforms. None of them seemed to live near the school.
On the corner was ‘the Debry’. The Luftwaffe could have made a contribution to urban planning by enacting the already overdue demolition order for Southam Street, but in fact they had managed to provide us with only one reasonably sized play area, known as the Debry. It was many years before I encountered the word ‘debris’, made the connection and realized that it wasn’t just the name of one bomb site in Southam Street. The Debry was cleared for the local Coronation celebration in 1953, when Lily covered Linda in Cherry Blossom shoe polish (at Linda’s request) to enter her in the fancy dress parade as a piccaninny. With her milk-bottle-top earrings and her mother’s scarf wrapped around her head, she should have won something. But the Queen Doll prize went elsewhere and Linda was forced to spend hours standing in a basin while Lily tried to scrub the polish off. Had there been a prize for the most politically incorrect costume, she would certainly have walked away with it.
Along Southam Street, I’d look into the areas, or ‘airies’, as we called the sunken enclosures in front of the basement dwellings. These were dangerous places. Many of the metal railings had been removed for scrap and replaced by corrugated iron. The stairs down to the basements were steep and the poor souls who lived in them were continually bombarded with rubbish, footballs, and the occasional falling child. From Southam Street we’d walk into Southern Row, then up the Ha’penny Steps on to the top end of Ladbroke Grove and across into Barlby Road, where two huge gas towers loomed like sinister spaceships.
I can’t remember anything about Nanny Johnson except that she was a formidable woman dressed in black – like the character in the old Giles cartoons. I don’t know exactly how many children she had. The youngest, Uncle Jim, was a teenager still living with her at Peabody Buildings. Steve had at least two other brothers and a sister – Auntie Annie, who had married ‘Tottsy’ Barker. Judging by his nickname, Tottsy had presumably once been a rag-and-bone man, or ‘totter’, as they were called. Within a few years, these equestrian entrepreneurs would be popularized on television in the hit BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son, set just up the road in Shepherd’s Bush. They were a common feature of my childhood. Their trusty horses pulled rickety old carts laden with all manner of unwanted tat and junk collected from local households while the totter usually stood to drive in order to get a better purchase on the reins.
At some point Tottsy must have given up totting for a more respectable occupation as by then he was the only man I knew who worked in an office and dressed in a suit on a weekday. He left for Paddington Station every morning wearing his horn-rimmed spectacles and carrying a briefcase. Lily encouraged Linda and me to look out of the back window at around 8.30 to wave to Uncle Tottsy as he went by on the train. We often saw a man with horn-rimmed glasses in one of the packed carriages. It may or may not have been our respectable relative: nobody ever waved back.
Nanny Johnson’s flat was provided by the Peabody Trust, established in 1862 by a London-based American banker, George Peabody. When he set up his donation fund, he wrote a letter to The Times stating that his aim was to ‘relieve the poor and needy of this great metropolis and to promote their comfort and happiness’. And Nanny Johnson certainly seemed comfortable and
happy as we took our leave.
Although visiting Nanny Johnson was the purpose of the outing, we never stayed very long. Afterwards we usually called at an adjoining block of flats called Sutton Dwellings, where Steve’s friends Ted and Elsie lived. They had children of a similar age to Linda and me and we were allowed to go and play with them in the safe communal yard behind the flats.
After depositing us back at Southam Street Steve, like most of the men in Notting Hill, would go to the pub before his Sunday dinner (lunch was something you only heard about on The Archers and Mrs Dale’s Diary, just like that other mysterious meal, supper – in the evenings, we had tea). Unlike most of them, he had a professional reason to be there: entertaining the customers as the resident pianist. When the pubs closed the men would return home noisily for their dinner, after which the afternoon would be passed in a listless stupor, with parents dozing off and children bored rigid. England was not yet godless enough to allow shops to open or entertainment to take place on a Sunday. Even card games were forbidden in working-class households, including ours.
Though nominally Church of England, neither Steve nor Lily ever went to church. While Lily believed fervently in God, she seemed to distrust organized religion, perhaps as a result of the sectarianism of her Liverpool childhood. Linda and I were briefly sent to Sunday School when we were small, probably as much to keep us occupied as anything else, but we hated it, and Lily soon gave in to our objections. The tedium of the long afternoon was relieved only by the arrival of a whelk and winkle man wheeling a hand barrow full of fresh shellfish. These vendors only appeared on Sundays and somehow managed to cover every street. Steve and Linda would scoff brown paper bags filled with shrimps and whelks doused in vinegar and carefully extract winkles from their shiny black shells with pins. Lily and I hated the stuff and would remain aloof during these seafood orgies.
The truth about Steve’s Sunday morning visits to his mother was bound to emerge eventually. It’s a shame that Linda had to be the one to spill the beans.
One summer Sunday, we walked round to see Nanny Johnson as usual and then dropped into Sutton Dwellings. Ted wasn’t at home. He was, I think, a lorry driver and often absent. As we played outside in the sunshine, Linda was her usual boisterous self, hurtling round the play area with a gang of kids in tow. She may have been a restless spirit, but she was always fiercely protective of her little brother and would be keeping a careful eye on me – static as usual, sitting quietly in the shade. The good thing about being static is that it’s usually safe.
Linda, on the other hand, was for ever having accidents. As a baby at 107 Southam Street, she crawled through the window of our room on the ground floor and fell into the ‘airie’, landing on her head. Incredibly, a large bump was the only damage. On another occasion she fell over while fetching a bottle of vinegar from somebody called the Vinegar Man, who toured the streets with a huge barrel on a horse and cart, crying ‘Vinegar!’ at the top of his voice. The bottle broke and she cut her knee on the jagged glass.
On this warm Sunday the inevitable fall had happened on a patch of hard, gravelly shingle. She ran up to Ted and Elsie’s maisonette, suppressing her tears, to show her blood-splattered leg to her father. The front door was open. Finding nobody in the living room, she dragged her bleeding leg upstairs and opened the bedroom door. She must have been very quiet because Elsie and Steve were caught by surprise – in bed together, and if not in flagrante delicto, certainly approaching the delicto stage.
As Linda was only five or six years old there would have been a reasonable expectation that she didn’t understand what she had seen. At any rate, as Steve, Linda – her leg adorned with plasters – and I walked home together nothing was said. But Steve underestimated Linda’s maturity and she was soon treating Lily to an honest appraisal of her discovery. The prospect of enjoying the Sunday dinner we’d been waiting for and a normal, boring Sunday afternoon evaporated when Linda announced to Lily: ‘I saw Daddy kissing and cuddling in bed. He doesn’t love you any more. He loves Auntie Elsie.’
A hush hung over 107 Southam Street. The calm before the storm. But Linda, it seems, though correct in the first part of her analysis, was wrong in the second.
Chapter 2
STEVE LEFT LILY for Elsie when the truth emerged about his Sunday visits. Unfortunately, he came back.
Linda’s revelation had led to the kind of shouting and screaming that were a feature of Steve and Lily’s life together. In those pre-television days (or rather, the days before TVs were affordable for people like us) it must have provided entertainment for the other families sharing our house. For Linda and me, though, these rows were gut-wrenching periods of fear and misery. We would lie in our beds trying to shut out the noise by pulling the covers over our heads.
Around the time Steve went off to live with Elsie, Linda and I both had measles and Lily was unable to go out to work until we’d recovered. Money from Steve was elusive enough when he was at home, and he made no attempt to send any after he’d left. Six months later, Steve returned and Elsie went home to Ted – pregnant with Steve’s child.
I knew nothing of this for years: I didn’t find out that I had a half-brother, David, until I was in my teens. We’ve never met. His existence helped to explain the mystery of the famous ‘punch in the passage’ incident. A man had knocked on our door one Saturday morning and insisted on seeing Steve. There was a commotion and the sound of a body falling to the floor. Apparently, little Linda then ran out into the passage to find Steve flat out with Ted standing over him. ‘Leave my dad alone!’ she yelled, but the damage had been done. Steve had been given a good thumping. I remember his grey face as he staggered back into our room, with Lily strangely unsympathetic to his plight.
Ted had agreed to bring David up as his own son, and Steve had agreed to make a financial contribution. When he failed to pay, Ted had come looking for him. The punch probably succeeded only in forcing Steve to prioritize payment to Ted and Elsie over his erratic support for Lily and us. When Linda asked Lily years later why she’d taken Steve back, Lily said that she loved him and, more importantly, that she wanted us to have two parents. Perhaps she also harboured a hope that he’d change his ways.
Early in 1954, after Steve returned from the six months he spent living with Elsie and fathering her child, there was a period of relative calm during which Steve and Lily tried to make a fresh start. It was during this rapprochement that we went on a holiday together to Liverpool. Lily missed her native city terribly. London in general and Notting Hill in particular were not welcoming to ‘outsiders’. She was self-conscious about her Scouse accent and tried hard to lose it – not because she was ashamed of it, but out of a desire to conform. Linda and I never noticed her accent at all, apart from when she said words like ‘look’ and ‘book’ which became ‘luke’ and ‘boowk’, and the occasional ‘Oh aye, yeah’ to indicate consent. Otherwise it emerged only when she was excited or angry.
Lily didn’t miss her domineering father but she pined for the company of her sisters and her favourite brother, John. Three other siblings had left Liverpool during the war. The eldest, Joe (always called Sonny), had joined the RAF and now lived in Coventry, and a younger sister, Dolly, had worked with Lily in the NAAFI. They fell out after Dolly lured one of Lily’s boyfriends away from her – a dark, handsome soldier from Hull called Les Foster. The rift had become entrenched when Dolly and Les had married and moved to Hull, where they eventually raised nine children. It had taken several years for diplomatic relations to be re-established.
Jean had married another Londoner, George Heath, and moved to Walthamstow, where they lived in a semi-detached house owned by George’s family. Auntie Jean was Lily’s Liverpool lifeline in London but, with no phone, they couldn’t talk to each other unless we trekked out to Walthamstow, which was something of an expedition back then. Jean and George never came to visit us: Lily would have been ashamed of the conditions we lived in and Steve generally wanted nothing to do with
Lily’s family, although he enjoyed flirting with her sisters. Lily, Linda and I managed to go and see Jean and George at least once a year, but Lily and Jean were very close and I’m sure it wasn’t as often as Lily would have liked.
Uncle George was a tall man with a shock of black, wiry hair and a low, booming voice. He had a good white-collar job as a Post Office clerk and drove a motorbike with a sidecar, in which he ferried around our cousins, Pamela and Norman, who were roughly the same age as Linda and me. Their house in Walthamstow was immaculate. They were the first people we knew who had had a telly and a fridge. Seeing Auntie Jean’s house with its neat little garden made Linda and me more aware of the kind of home Lily wanted so badly to provide for us.
Lily would have been pleased to see her sister doing so well and to have her at least within more manageable reach than her other brothers and sisters. I do remember making one visit to Coventry and Hull respectively when Linda and I were small. Uncle Joe and his wife, Auntie Peg, were settled in a lovely new council house on the outskirts of Coventry. I can still picture the hills, fields and trees, and recall having egg salad for tea.
Hull, by contrast, seemed to have even more bomb sites than London but Dolly and Les, living in the midst of them, were very happy together. We liked Les a lot. He was sweet-natured with a disarming smile. On one magical evening during our stay there he took us to Spurn Point in a wood-framed Morris Traveller (what Dame Edna Everage once described in a spoof TV travelogue about Shakespeare’s heritage as a ‘half-timbered’ car).
Steve hadn’t accompanied us on these trips but in the period of glasnost post-Elsie, he agreed to come with us to Liverpool. So it was that we lugged our suitcases to the number 52 bus stop, headed for Victoria Coach Station, on a hot Saturday in the summer of 1954. Linda was six and I was four. For Lily, this visit was hugely significant. We were to meet not just her family but Mr and Mrs Ireland, who had taken Lily in when she contracted rheumatic fever in the early 1930s. It was the first time she’d been back to Liverpool since the war and her first opportunity to show off her children.