This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  A myth seems to have taken root in our retrospective view of the 1950s that women didn’t work outside the home and that the husband was always the breadwinner. That may have been the convention in middle-class households, but it certainly wasn’t the case in the working-class families in our street. As for us, if we’d depended on Steve to win the bread, we’d have starved. Even if he backed the winner in the 3.30 at Kempton Park, it didn’t translate into bread for us. Yet if any woman shouldn’t have been working in 1950s London it was Lily, given her heart condition which, like her relationship with Steve, was becoming progressively worse.

  There is no doubt Steve could be a charmer. Those who heard him play at the Earl of Warwick, the Mitre or the Lads of the Village must have thought we were lucky to have ‘Ginger’ Johnson as a father. And we were proud to see how respected he was when, as tots, we were taken to wedding receptions to sit on top of the piano, taking care not to knock over the line of pints of mild and bitter that grew longer as the evening wore on.

  We were also proud of him at the Cobden Club children’s Christmas party, which for some reason was always held in January, where he was the master of ceremonies. The Cobden Club, on Westbourne Grove, later became a trendy private club and music venue: my son Jamie played there with his band a few years ago. In the 1950s, however, it was a working men’s club, and Steve, as its regular pianist, hosted its annual children’s treat.

  He was rather less charming when he lay in bed all morning after a night of entertaining, surfacing only when it was time to put his bet on. Every morning we would have to take him up a cup of tea, only to find the previous one untouched, cold and congealing by his bedside, next to his dentures, which smiled up at us from the glass of water they were kept in overnight. The bold and brave Linda took to putting salt in the tea as an expression of her increasing bitterness. It was a futile gesture since he never drank it anyway.

  We hated having to go into that dark, dank room, heavy with the stench of alcohol, but it contained the only mirror we owned, on the inside of one of the wardrobe doors. Though Lily, to guard against any tendency to vanity, warned us that if we stared into a mirror for too long we’d see the devil, we did occasionally have to go in to check that we were suitably presentable while Steve lay comatose in the bed.

  The rudest thing I’d ever seen was in that wardrobe. It was a hardback book, the size of a comic annual, which belonged to Steve. Every page contained a series of photographs of a naked woman. I doubt if it qualified as pornography, even in the more innocent 1950s. The women had waxed pudenda and posed artistically like blonde statuettes. I don’t know where the book came from or whose work it contained, but I dare say that in the big houses at the Holland Park end of Portobello Road it would have been considered art and probably displayed on a coffee table. To us, though, it was truly shocking.

  It was Linda, as usual, who initially made this discovery and urged me on to self-corruption. When Steve and Lily were out, I’d sneak in, open the wardrobe, with its rows of Steve’s ties hanging on a wire across the inside of the other door, the one without the mirror, stand on the little wooden chair that served as a bedside table and stretch into the dark recess at the top. I would then ogle the pictures for as long as I dared.

  Impressed as we were by Steve’s talent for music, he made no effort to share it with us. There was always a battered old piano taking up precious space in our rooms – hardly any furniture, but always a piano – and yet not only did he never try to teach us how to play, he made sure we couldn’t teach ourselves, either. He kept the keyboard locked and possessed the only key.

  He did come home once with a cardboard box full of old 78rpm records that he’d bought in Portobello market. These huge, pre-vinyl discs, made of shellac, were extremely brittle. For a long while we had nothing to play them on. All we could do was treasure them and read the labels: ‘In a Shady Nook by a Babbling Brook’ by Donald Peers, on Columbia; ‘With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm’, ‘Tap Your Feet and Sing Bop Dee Bop Dee Doo’ by a forgotten orchestra, and a spoken-word recording of ‘The Giant’s Beanstalk’.

  In the meantime our only source of entertainment was the wireless, rented by Lily from Radio Rentals, which was cabled into a brown Bakelite switch fixed to a window frame. It had three BBC settings – the Home Service, Light Programme and Third Programme. I grew up listening to The Archers, Mrs Dale’s Diary, Letter from America, Down Your Way and Have A Go, with Wilfred Pickles (‘Put your feet on the mantel shelf, tune in your wireless and help yourself’). Over the years Lily must have paid out enough rental fees to buy a hundred radios, but renting was her only option.

  We wanted to listen to our ancient records, too, but no money meant no gramophone.

  Then Lily won the pools.

  Chapter 3

  LIKE A HUGE percentage of the population, Steve and Lily did the football pools every week (Steve with Vernons, Lily with Littlewoods). It’s difficult to grasp now how important the pools were to families, regardless of wealth and background. When, many years later, I became a postman in leafy, prosperous Barnes, we had to do special deliveries to clear the mountain of stubby, thick brown envelopes sent from the big Merseyside duo of Vernons and Littlewoods, along with Zetters and Cope.

  When the football results were broadcast on the wireless on Sports Report at 5pm on a Saturday afternoon, they were listened to with hushed reverence across the nation, and nowhere more so than in Southam Street. Those who criticize the poor for spending some of the little money they have on the pools, or nowadays more often on the National Lottery, can never have experienced the profound motivational force of the prospect of a win.

  Lily relied on the ‘tick’ for groceries, the ‘never-never’ – or hire purchase, as it used to be called – for anything more substantial and the tallyman for loans she had no hope of fully repaying. The designation ‘tallyman’ covered anyone who offered credit and then came to collect the repayments. As well as the Provident, which had funded our holiday in Liverpool, Lily borrowed from the Prudential and it was their tallyman, the most persistent, with whom we were most familiar. When we heard four knocks on the front door, we knew the caller was for us (the custom was one knock for the ground floor, two for the first and so on – and the third floor was us). Invariably it would be a tallyman of one stripe or another.

  We were well practised in ducking down away from the windows and remaining silent as soon as we heard four knocks, and lying low until the tallyman gave up. We also knew we had to walk straight past the house if we saw one of them on the doorstep. They were easy to spot with their uniform belted raincoats and the thick, black ledgers they all carried.

  The Man from the Pru, however, wouldn’t be content to knock four times. When that elicited no response he would persevere by knocking once, twice or three times to get someone else to open the door, then stride up to our floor and rap on the two doors leading off the landing, where the stove was. If we were very quiet he’d go away, and to his credit, he never opened the doors to look inside. But he caught Lily often, particularly if she happened to be using the stove.

  Small wonder Lily did the pools every week, and dreamed of the better life that over twenty-two points on the coupon could provide. The first thing she’d buy if she ever won, she used to say, was a house. She always longed to have her own front door. We once had an offer of a council house that would have taken us out of the slums and through a front door that was exclusively ours. The trouble was that the front door in question was in Crawley, in Sussex. The offer was probably made during a push to populate the new towns being built to ease the housing shortages after the war. Steve was adamant: he had no intention of moving out of Notting Hill, let alone going anywhere near a new town.

  Since Lily had no roots in West London, and given her desperation to improve our circumstances, I’m pretty sure we’d have decamped to Crawley if it had been up to her. She consoled herself with the thought that at least our landlords were the respectable Rowe H
ousing Trust and not the notorious Peter Rachman, who was by then busy enriching himself by driving out sitting tenants in Notting Hill, who had statutory protection against high rents, in order to exploit the growing demand among new immigrants from the Caribbean for cheap housing. At that time new tenants did not have the same protection as sitting tenants, and people arriving from the West Indies after the war in response to the call for workers in Britain found it almost impossible to find a place to live. They had no alternative but to accept poor conditions and extortionate rents, and Rachman packed as many of them as he could into shared accommodation by subdividing houses into multiple small rooms.

  Rachman’s domain never extended to Southam Street, or at any rate, not to our end of it, largely because our houses were already so overcrowded and mainly under the control of housing trusts. His principal area of operation was the streets south of Westbourne Grove, including Powis Square, Colville Terrace and Talbot Grove.

  So Crawley was rejected and we remained in Southam Street with the Rowe Housing Trust. I used to go with Lily from time to time to their offices in the Portobello Road to pay the rent. There was a funny wooden, concertina-style hinged door that led directly into the offices from the street. We’d push it open and walk up a couple of floors where we queued to talk to a woman behind a steel and glass grille. I can still vividly remember the cream woodwork, brown lino and the smell of disinfectant.

  The pools were Lily’s only flutter, although she did embrace bingo a few years later, once the Betting and Gaming Act of 1960 paved the way for the bingo halls that began to spring up in towns and cities across the country. For Steve, though, the pools were a mere Saturday diversion from the horses. I think he must have placed a bet every day there was a horse to bet on. Had he lived in today’s world of easy access to gambling on anything and everything, he might well have taken it up as a full-time occupation.

  Before the 1960 Act, off-course cash betting on the ‘gee-gees’ was illegal and there was no such thing as a licensed high-street betting shop. Linda and I would be press-ganged into running Steve’s bets. He would collar whichever one of us he found first and send us off with a little parcel of money tightly wrapped in the scrap of paper on which his bet was written. We would be instructed to keep it clutched firmly in the palm of our hand and not to let go of it until we passed it to one of the bookies. These men – invariably, in my memory, fat men with trilby hats on their heads and fags in their mouths, reminiscent of the famous silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock – would lurk in doorways in St Ervans Road or Tavistock Crescent. We never knew their names, and the transaction, which was conducted in complete silence, was over in seconds. You’d hand over the bet and the bookie would give you a piece of paper, which Linda or I had to hand back to Steve to prove the bet had been laid. I do not recall ever collecting any winnings on Steve’s behalf, which means either he wasn’t very good at picking winners or that, on the rare occasions when he did win, the walk to find the bookie suddenly became less onerous for him.

  When Lily won the pools in 1957, it wasn’t enough to start a new life. I think she won about £90, which was a significant amount in the 1950s – the equivalent of two or three months’ wages for a male manual worker. She used it to make down-payments on lots of things: a three-piece suite, a sideboard, a kitchen table, a Spanish guitar for me and a red and grey Dansette record-player for Linda. Inevitably, she couldn’t keep up the HP payments, no matter how hard she worked. One by one, her acquisitions were seized or had to be returned, except for the guitar and the Dansette.

  For Linda and me, that record-player brought a sense of joy that is difficult to articulate. We placed it in the middle of our room and spent ages just looking at it, admiring its sleek lines and absorbing the glorious smell of new plastic and rubber. While we were yet to acquire any up-to-date records, we could at long last listen to the old 78s, although I worried that the huge shellac discs would damage the delicate precision of the turntable. My favourites were the records by Arthur Tracy, ‘The Street Singer’, and his rendition of Frances Langford’s 1937 hit ‘Was it Tears that Fell or was it Rain?’

  Skies were grey that rainy day we parted in the lane,

  Was it tears that fell or was it rain?

  There we stood as lovers would;

  Did parting bring you pain?

  Was it tears that fell or was it rain?

  I couldn’t tell if your eyes were misty,

  Or if you felt regret,

  I noticed when you kissed me, that both your cheeks were wet.

  Till we meet again, my sweet

  The memory shall remain.

  Was it tears that fell or was it rain?

  I’ve never heard that record played on anything other than the Dansette in our damp room in Southam Street well over fifty years ago, yet I remember every melancholy word.

  By the time she was in her early thirties, Lily seemed to be degenerating from a good-looking, petite young woman into a dowdy, prematurely middle-aged charlady. Her fresh, Liverpool-Irish prettiness was fading, the glamorous sheer stockings and bright red lipstick made fewer and fewer appearances and the hand-me-down fashionable clothes she acquired from various employers, or scavenged from the market on the Lane, remained hidden beneath the wraparound floral overall she’d once used only for work but now rarely took off. Her beautiful chestnut hair stayed bunched under her turban. Wounded by neglect and battle-weary, she began to put on weight as a result of the drugs she had to take for her heart condition, her legs became mapped with varicose veins and she developed bunions on her feet.

  She was told to give up her cleaning jobs and rest. Any exercise or activity that raised the heart rate, such as the nightly battles when Steve finally wandered home, made the symptoms worse. But Lily could not afford to stop working. When her increasingly frequent stays in hospital forced her to do so, we would be plunged deeper into poverty and debt and she had no choice but to work even harder when she came out.

  When I was seven and Linda was ten, Lily was taken into hospital again just before Christmas. As usual, she’d been paying her few shillings into the Christmas club for a hamper, which was stashed in the pantry. She had also already bought and wrapped a Hotspur annual for me and a Bunty annual for Linda, placing them with boxes of sweets in two pillowcases for us to delve into on Christmas morning. I’m sure Linda must have abandoned any belief in Santa Claus by then. If I’d begun to doubt his existence, my suspicions were confirmed that year.

  Steve went off on the afternoon of Christmas Eve and never came home. We were used to fending for ourselves but we’d never been on our own at Christmas before. We found our pillowcases and ate the sweets for breakfast while reading our annuals and waiting for Steve to return and cook our Christmas dinner.

  When he failed to materialize Linda decided to take control. She put the chicken from the hamper in the oven, checking the instructions on the plastic wrapping carefully to make sure she cooked it for the recommended time. Lily had left a pile of shilling pieces to be fed into the meter so that there would be enough gas to cook the dinner. Unfortunately, the instructions said nothing about removing the wrapping, and while Linda prepared the potatoes and cabbage, the acrid smell of burning plastic filled the kitchen and eventually drifted into Southam Street from the sash windows we’d raised to try to clear the air.

  Alerted by the stench, Brenda, the young Irishwoman who lived with her husband and two young children on the next landing, tried to rescue the chicken but was forced to concede defeat. She showed us how the plastic had melted into the flesh of the chicken and explained that we wouldn’t be able to eat it now. She asked where Steve was. Ashamed to admit he had abandoned us, we made an excuse for him and said he’d be back later.

  We ate the vegetables and some more of our Christmas sweets before setting off on the long walk to Paddington General Hospital for visiting time. Steve was waiting for us outside the ward. His breath reeked of beer and cigars as he bent down to speak to us in confidence.
‘Don’t tell Mum that I didn’t come home. Tell her we had a nice dinner together. If you say anything else it will upset her and she’ll have a heart attack and die.’ Hospital visiting times were very restricted then, even on Christmas Day, so we only had to keep up the pretence for half an hour.

  When we left the hospital, Linda and I walked home while Steve headed off in the other direction. He didn’t return that night or on Boxing Day. He must have come back very late on 27 December, while we were asleep, because he was there the next morning. Lily was due to be discharged the following day and he reminded us again of the reason why we must keep our little Christmas secret. I doubt Lily ever knew that we’d spent Christmas alone that year.

  The stay in hospital did nothing to halt her decline. She picked up the cleaning jobs again just a few weeks after leaving hospital, contrary to doctor’s orders. During school holidays she had to take us with her. We were quite happy to explore this alternative universe. Instead of individual gardens, the residents of the grand houses in Lansdowne Crescent, off Ladbroke Grove, where she charred for Mrs Dehn, had exclusive access to a private park at the rear, and we were allowed to play there. But it was Mrs McLean’s, the refined boarding house off Church Street, that provided Lily’s most regular employment. She had started there when Linda was at primary school and I was still at Wornington Road. On Lily’s days at Mrs McLean’s Linda and I would catch the 52 bus with her. We got off just before it turned into Kensington High Street, where she’d give us our instructions before sending us off to play in Kensington Gardens: ‘Do not talk to strangers, stay together and shelter in the museums if it rains.’