This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  The object was clear. We must like Liverpool and Liverpool must like us. The ‘Provy’ was milked for a loan to pay for new clothes for Linda and me: matching red blazers with shiny metal buttons, new shoes of black leather, neat little shorts for me and a flowery dress for Linda. These Provident loans worked like a credit card: you had to repay the money you had borrowed, plus interest, in weekly instalments. Lily grappled with debts like this throughout her adult life.

  The coach station was bustling. Then, as now, coach journeys were much cheaper than taking the train, and with far fewer families possessing cars than is the case today it was a popular mode of long-distance travel. Linda and I were hugely excited to be going on this big adventure with Lily and Steve. We had to share a seat and for a while we were mesmerized by the landscape that unfolded through the large window beside us. As I was too young when we travelled to Coventry and Hull to recollect how we got there, this is my first memory of venturing beyond London’s borders. In those pre-motorway days, in a non-air-conditioned coach without a toilet, the journey was long – eleven hours – hot and punctuated by frequent lavatory stops.

  Aunties Rita and Peggy met us at the coach station in Liverpool and took us on the bus to Anfield and the estate where Lily had grown up. Lily gave us a little walking tour, excitedly pointing out the schools she’d attended and the streets she’d played in. It was incredible to us to be staying in the room that had been Lily’s when she’d lived at Warham Road. I remember opening one of the drawers and finding a hairbrush that, she told me, she’d used as a little girl. Our grandfather must have been there, but I don’t recall meeting him at that stage. It’s possible that Lily deliberately kept us out of his way.

  The people to whom she really wanted to show us off, apart from our aunts and uncles, were the couple she considered her surrogate parents, Mr and Mrs Ireland. We spent a lot of time at their house where there was a pedal car that had belonged to their now grown-up son. I was thrilled to be allowed to play with it. It was a toy I craved throughout my childhood, but one to which I only had access that once at the Irelands’. I made the most of it, pedalling around happily for hours. The real highlight of our week, though, was our first trip to the seaside – we took the ferry, another treat in itself, across the Mersey estuary to New Brighton on the Wirral peninsular, where we paddled and ate ice-cream and built sandcastles.

  There are photographs of our holiday in Liverpool. Me in the pedal car at Mr and Mrs Ireland’s, Linda and me finding shells on the beach, stripped to our baggy underwear, and posing in our brand-new blazers. Steve doesn’t appear in any of them and I’m quite sure he wasn’t the photographer. In fact, I can’t remember him being there at all – which, in the circumstances, is perhaps not surprising.

  If Lily thought this holiday might be a long-deferred honeymoon for her and Steve she had deluded herself. He didn’t come anywhere with us, spending his time exploring the local boozers, having disgraced himself in the first few days by being over-familiar with his sisters-in-law. To Steve this would have seemed like mild flirtation, the kind of behaviour that made ‘Ginger’ Johnson, pianist par excellence, such a favourite with the ladies of Notting Hill. But this wasn’t Notting Hill, and being suggestive to our aunties caused them great discomfort and gave grave offence to our uncles.

  Lily’s youngest sisters, Rita and Peggy, were and remained vivacious women with a great sense of humour; full of fun despite having to look after their miserable father. Like Jean and Dolly, they had good, dependable husbands in Harry Green and Bob Durham. In other circumstances, Rita and Peggy would probably have taken Steve’s flirting in their stride. However, I think the family were all aware that Steve had temporarily left Lily for another woman (although I doubt if they knew about the child he fathered) and would therefore have considered his jack-the-lad behaviour to be in very poor taste. All I know for certain is that words were said, voices were raised and Steve kept out of their way for the remainder of our week in Liverpool.

  Back in London, Steve soon returned to the lifestyle he enjoyed, doing the odd bit of painting and decorating and a good deal more piano-playing. He was out every night and would disappear at weekends to Brighton or Southend. Every year he would spend weeks as the resident pianist for the hop-pickers down in Kent. A lot of men from Southam Street took their families ‘hopping’ in the summer, but Steve always went alone. The coach would pick up the party from outside the Earl of Warwick and as it pulled away the men, in holiday spirits and fresh from a pre-journey session in the pub, would throw pennies out of the windows to the local kids. Hordes of children would scramble for the coins in the filthy gutter. I was too little (and timid) to compete seriously, but Linda was always in the thick of things.

  She understood that every penny counted. Lily struggled to put food on the table and, in a good week, to stretch to a Saturday sixpence for Linda and me. Most of our clothes came second hand from Portobello market. Most of Lily’s were given to her by the people she cleaned for. From the time we started school we qualified for free school meals and were under instructions from Lily to eat as much as we could in case there wasn’t anything for us when we got home.

  I was enrolled at Wornington Road Infants’ School at the age of five and, after the initial shock of being separated from Lily, settled well into my place on the wooden bench seats in Miss Ockingbole’s class. Thanks to Lily, who had registered Linda and me at the library in Ladbroke Grove almost as soon as we could walk, I could already read reasonably well by the time I began school.

  In 1956 we moved a few doors down from 107 to 149 Southam Street. The house itself was no more fit for habitation than the one we’d left, but the move brought us a badly needed extra room and, for the first time, electricity – supplied, like the gas, via a coin-operated meter. Linda and I shared a bedroom on a landing, with another family occupying the second room that led off it. Upstairs was our kitchen and a separate room for Lily and Steve.

  The stove on the landing also provided an additional source of warmth in cold weather, at least when the oven was lit. At number 107, our one fireplace had served as both hob and oven. Since we had to boil the kettle, cook and heat the flat iron all year round, the fire had to be kept burning and the temperature in there could be unbearable in the summer months.

  In the winter we’d all sit round this iron stove to keep warm. At Christmas Lily used to invite ‘Pop’ Walker, who lived on the top floor of number 107, to share our festive fare, eaten by the dull, yellow glow of the gas mantle: chicken, followed by tinned fruit from a Christmas club hamper to which she’d been contributing a few pennies each week. Pop was thought to be in his nineties; he was certainly too old to have been conscripted for either of the world wars that had killed so many over the previous forty years. He spent his last days smoking his pipe and listening to old records on a wind-up ‘His Master’s Voice’ gramophone. One Christmas, I remember, Pop fell asleep smoking a cigar in front of the stove. Suddenly flames were leaping from Pop’s armchair and Lily had to run for a saucepan of water to rescue us all.

  With air-conditioning a rare feature of British homes, today’s city-dwellers will be familiar with the discomfort of scorching urban summers, even if, mercifully, they no longer have to put up with a roaring fire as well. But it’s hard to convey just how cold it could be during the freezing winters of the past in the days before central heating.

  At 149 Southam Street warmth was limited to a radius of about three feet around the coal fire and the vicinity of the stove. The bedrooms were ice-boxes and we dreaded the moment when we had to get dressed or undressed. Lily would tell us to imagine we were entering a warm, cosy cave as we got into bed. She had an old earthenware hot water bottle which she filled from the kettle and transferred from bed to bed. I doubt if I’ve ever been motivated to move as quickly as I was by the prospect of my bare feet coming into contact with the icy linoleum in the sub-zero bedrooms of my childhood. We had no carpet, save for a tatty scrap that served as a mat in fron
t of the coal fire. Everywhere else the floorboards were covered with ‘lino’, cold and cracked, cheap and nasty. Getting up to pee in the bucket in the middle of a frosty night was no fun, but it was infinitely preferable to having to go out into the back yard to use the toilet, which often seized up when the water in the cistern froze. Bowel movements were conditioned by the weather and the availability of newspapers to be cut into squares and used as toilet paper.

  In the early 1950s, before the arrival of the plethora of labour-saving devices most of us take for granted nowadays, every housewife’s life was dominated by drudgery to a certain extent. For Lily, hankering after a car, a phone or a television would have been to dream of unattainable luxuries. It was basic household equipment she really needed. Not having a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner made housework (more or less universally regarded as the exclusive responsibility of women) a perpetual battle. The slums of Southam Street gave it an added dimension. The houses were literally crumbling. Damp seeped through walls and ceilings, there were holes in the skirting boards and doors and windows were sagging and misaligned.

  Not having a fridge didn’t matter in the winter, when the whole house was like a giant deep-freeze anyway. In the summer it was a different story, though nobody was in the habit of storing perishable foods whatever the weather. Lily, like most women, habitually trudged to the shops every day to fetch the eggs, bread and butter that formed our staple diet. The food rationing imposed during the war continued for some years into peacetime – it was 1954 before it ended completely – and the concept of stocking up or buying more than what was required to meet immediate needs would have been considered outlandish. In our case, it was just as well, because living hand-to-mouth was the only system our budget would withstand.

  Our milk was delivered fresh every morning, and on hot days it would be kept in a bowl of cold water. Butter was placed in the coolest corner of the pantry – a small cupboard with an outside wall and at least one air-brick.

  If Lily could have been granted a wish for just one appliance, my guess is that she’d have chosen a washing machine. The effort involved in washing by hand, wringing to get as much water out as possible, then putting the clothes through the ancient mangle in the yard, drying them and ironing them with the stove-heated flat iron, was hugely debilitating. Lily did acquire an electric iron when we moved and, when she could afford it, she’d send the washing to the ‘bagwash’, the predecessor of the launderette. Ours was on the corner of the eastern end of Southam Street, at the junction with Golborne Road, opposite the blue police box, from which local policemen could telephone the station in an emergency. Washing was stuffed into a sack, secured with a drawstring, handed over the counter and returned ready for ironing in the same bag a few days later in exchange for a shilling.

  In that pre-supermarket era, high streets in London and towns all over Britain were teeming with small, family-run shops selling anything and everything and our area was no exception: indeed, we were better served than most given that the Portobello Road – ‘the Lane’ – was also nearby. In Golborne Road there was Humphreys’ the butcher’s, next to the Bridge Fish Shop, just over the railway bridge walking towards Ladbroke Grove; then Burgess’s, the greengrocer’s; and, on the corner of Wornington Road, a shop selling nothing but faggots, pease pudding and saveloys. Faggots, for the uninitiated, were rolls of chopped liver, baked or fried; pease pudding was made of split peas, boiled with carrots and onion and mashed to a pulp. Saveloys were pork sausages that had been seasoned, dried and smoked. Even though I spent my childhood in an almost permanent state of hunger, the smell of this shop, which I passed every day on my way to school, put me right off this nutritious 1950s ‘fast food’.

  For me, ambrosia was available a little further down Golborne Road at Renee’s Pie and Mash Shop, where you could get a nourishing meal for sixpence. With its tiled walls and heavy marble tables, there was a solidity to Renee’s that was as comforting as the food. To me, no Michelin-starred restaurant could have matched it. Linda and I went there so often during the first nine, ten years of my life that we deserved shares in the business. Of course, we ate pie and mash (and in Linda’s case, eels – she ate everything, whereas I added eels to my fussy blacklist along with faggots, saveloys and shellfish). The prosaic description ‘pie and mash’ really doesn’t do justice to a meat pie that had a crust unlike (and in my view vastly superior to) any other kind of pie. It was made, we were told, to a secret recipe jealously guarded by the many pie and mash shops across London. What transformed the dollop of mash and enhanced the pie was the ‘liquor’: a thickish, clear sauce freckled with parsley. Renee’s was the place to which children gravitated at lunchtime during the school holidays, or on a Saturday. I don’t remember ever going there with Lily, let alone Steve.

  Our second favourite shop was Holmes’s, the German baker’s. Just inhaling the scent of bread and fresh doughnuts as we walked past on our way to or home from school was enough to fortify us. But the vendors who saw most of our custom were the proprietors of the two rival sweetshops that faced one another across Wornington Road. They were both small but the competition between them was every bit as intense as today’s battles between Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Their weapon of choice was fizzy pop.

  On one side of the road was the Kabin, a smart, modern establishment run by a smart, modern guy named Reg. With his dark, swept-back hair and checked shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, he looked a bit like Roy Rogers, the cowboy star of the Saturday morning pictures at the Royalty Cinema in Lancaster Road. The fizzy drinks Reg served were sophisticated – Tizer, R. White’s lemonade and cream soda – and cost three-pence a glass. Opposite was what had apparently once been a neat little place called the Tuck Shop but which was now known to everybody as Bert’s. While it still sold what would qualify as ‘tuck’, the original sign had faded and old Bert – a ringer for Mr Pastry, the famous children’s entertainer of the time, with his pure white moustache and matching frizz of hair – had become increasingly eccentric. As he lurched around the shop in his long, brown shopkeeper’s coat, or climbed up and down the ladder required to reach the ancient sweet jars on the top shelf, he would emit a constant stream of invective, aimed mainly at Reg across the road.

  Bert undercut Reg’s modern, popular fizzy drinks with unbranded alternatives he concocted himself – a kind of non-alcoholic home brew – and poured from a huge bell jar. He sold these for a penny, and they were absolutely delicious, tasting of a sort of amalgamation of different fruits. Goodness knows what this stuff was made of or what it did to our intestines but there was a high level of customer satisfaction among us Wornington Road pupils.

  Both Reg and Bert would be puffing away on a cigarette as they dispensed our drinks. The vast majority of grown-ups smoked, including Steve and Lily. Given how common the habit was in the 1950s, it would have been unusual if they hadn’t. Lily didn’t smoke heavily – probably around five cigarettes a day. You could buy cigarettes in packs of five back then, and she’d convert hers into packs of ten by cutting the cigarettes in half with an old razor blade to make them go further. She smoked Weights until brands like Kensitas and Guards began to offer coupons, which she collected meticulously. If you got through enough fags to trigger emphysema you could acquire a bedside lamp with the coupons.

  Steve smoked roll-ups. His fingers were permanently stained a brownish yellow, as were his false teeth. He played the piano with a roll-up dangling from the side of his mouth. Lily wouldn’t have dreamed of smoking roll-ups: it would have offended her sense of femininity. An essential element of the image of the film stars she admired, like Bette Davis and Grace Kelly, was the elegant way they held a cigarette, sloping upwards from between the first and second fingers. Lily loved ‘the pictures’. When we were little she went at least once a week – without Steve, needless to say. Her daily working uniform of wraparound floral overall and turban would be discarded, her lovely, chestnut wavy hair brushed and styled with the help of a platoon
of pins, grips and clips. Face powder would be dabbed on, creating little clouds of perfumed dust. Finally she’d apply glamorous bright red lipstick, using a broken hand mirror held at an angle directly under the naked light bulb. The results would be checked in the full-length mirror on the inside of the door of the dark wooden wardrobe.

  I loved seeing Lily fully made up and glowing with anticipation. Those cinema trips were one of the few bits of happiness in her life. When we all slept in the same room at 107 Southam Street, I remember Lily’s scent as she bent over to kiss me goodnight before escaping for the evening to Hollywood or Pinewood. Linda would be left in charge of me, since Steve was always out. Sharing Lily’s excitement, I tried, but usually failed, to stay awake so that when she returned she could tell me all about the films she had seen.

  We were used to being left alone from an early age because poor Lily never stopped working. Cleaning and scrubbing for Mrs McLean and Miss MacDougal, a widow and spinster, who ran an upmarket residential boarding house off Church Lane in South Kensington; up on a chair, dusting lampshades for Mr and Mrs Dehn, of Lansdowne Crescent; polishing the furniture and disinfecting toilets in the spacious flat in Notting Hill Gate where she cleaned for three young brothers, a solicitor, a journalist and a stockbroker, whose mother had hired her to tidy up after them. And in the evenings she would often be pressed into service at those dinners in the big houses between Ladbroke Grove and Kensington Park Road.

  The nightly rows with Steve were invariably about money and his failure to contribute very much, if anything, to the household budget. He had very quickly returned to his old ways and seemed to consider it Lily’s responsibility to put a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs and food in our bellies. He even resented the few pennies she spent on going to the pictures. Her hourly rate for cleaning would have been a pittance and Steve probably gambled in a day as much as she earned in a week.