This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  Invariably she would spot a trace of dirt somewhere on my face (never on Linda’s) and a huge handkerchief would be produced, spat on and rubbed vigorously at the offending stain, which no doubt added more bacteria than it removed.

  We would carry sandwiches in the waxed paper wrapping from a Sunblest loaf and a few coppers for sweets. We had to report back to Mrs McLean’s at 2.30pm, just before Lily finished at 3pm. We spent so much time in Kensington Gardens that we felt almost proprietorial. There was an invisible border with Hyde Park which we rarely crossed, although the two parks merged seamlessly. The little slope near the Church Street entrance seemed very steep to me at that age and our first ritual of the day was to announce our arrival by rolling down it. We loved the bandstand, from which we’d survey our territory, the statue of Peter Pan, the Round Pond, the Orangery and the museum in Kensington Palace that contained a model of London at the time of the Great Fire. You could flick a switch and the scene would light up to replicate the spread of the fire from its source in Pudding Lane across the city. This effect was achieved by the simple use of tiny light bulbs, but it was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen – and I insisted on seeing it on every single visit.

  Unlike the parks in Notting Hill – the Little Rec, the Big Rec and St Marks, where there were fights and thefts and tension – this was safe territory, and the many summer hours we spent in Kensington Gardens and Exhibition Road, away from the crumbling squalor of Southam Street, were a highlight of our childhood.

  Linda, ever the mini-mum, always knew where the action was. There were regular Punch and Judy shows and, on occasion, films would be projected from a huge lorry with a screen at the back. This truck sometimes visited our area on a tour of ‘play streets’. We’d watch the film sitting cross-legged on the dirty road. Here there would be much pushing and shoving in the battle for the prime spots at the front. The audience in Kensington Gardens was much gentler.

  Whether it was raining or not, we would head off past the Albert Memorial to the museums in Exhibition Road. We went so often that we could have been employed as tour guides at the Science Museum, the Geological Museum and the V&A. But our favourite was the Natural History Museum, and the best exhibit of all was the blue whale that dominated the huge hall in which it was suspended. We adored that whale. Even at that age we worried about it being dead and on display rather than alive and swimming around in the sea. Lily told us we were all put on this Earth for a purpose and that the blue whale’s was obviously to educate and inspire.

  The whale would have admired Lily. Like the captain of a ship, ever alert to the dangers that surrounded us, she steered us through perilous seas. We might have been left alone but we were never neglected. She laid down few rules but we knew what was expected of us: to be polite and courteous and to help those less fortunate than ourselves. Lily swelled with pride when shopkeepers remarked on how well-mannered we were, and how we always remembered to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.

  In Southam Street, we were encouraged to run errands for elderly neighbours who lived alone, like Mrs Sudbury. Linda would do her shopping, while I carried her milk up from the doorstep. We were under strict instructions to accept nothing in return. When Linda once admitted that she’d been given a few pennies for helping with some task or other, she was marched off by Lily to take the money back.

  In effect, Lily was a single parent. She compensated for Steve’s lack of interest in us in the same way that she worked to make up the money that went to the bookies. Her belief in God, while absolute, was informal and unevangelical. She told us that He was everywhere but seemed to have greater faith in astrology and spiritualism than in the established Church. Every year she’d buy Old Moore’s Almanack – a stubby little tome published on cheap paper – for a few pence. When she could afford it, a monthly magazine called Prediction would appear which she would pore over for hours, convinced of its integrity. Every morning, in the precious interval between getting us off to school and going out to work, she’d open her Daily Sketch at the horoscope page and sit with her varicosed legs stretched out in front of her, resting on a kitchen chair. While enjoying a cup of strong tea, a slice of toast and her first cigarette of the day, she would study the forecasts made for the entire family’s star signs with the same intensity that Steve applied to picking winners (or more often losers) from the racing pages when he rose from his slumber later.

  Lily’s determination to stay with Steve was in part dictated by the times in which she lived. When couples got married they stayed together, come what may. Children born outside wedlock were stigmatized as ‘illegitimate’, single women were referred to as spinsters and a failed marriage was unusual and invariably deemed to be the fault of the wife. Divorce was rare outside the upper classes and ‘living together’ was practically unheard of beyond bohemian circles of artists and poets. Poor Lily: every woman close to her had married well – not in the material sense, but in the sense that their husbands were good men. Her sisters were happily married and so were most of the people we knew locally, which can only have increased Lily’s feelings of isolation and sharpened her suffering.

  Linda and I were certainly aware from an early age that our family was a poor example of what families were supposed to be. The father of Linda’s lifelong friend Marilyn Hughes worshipped his wife in the most flamboyant, demonstrative way and the parents of my school pal Tony Cox were the most perfectly suited couple imaginable.

  I met Tony when I moved up from Wornington Road Infants’ School to Bevington Primary. He was tall and skinny with hair so blond it was almost white. With his blue eyes and fair skin, he looked positively Scandinavian. His sister, Carole, who was in Linda’s year at Bevington, had similar colouring. They took after their mother’s side of the family. Their younger brother, by contrast, had inherited the dark, Mediterranean appearance of their father, Albert.

  There are no surrogate fathers in this story. The lack of any meaningful relationship with Steve did not spur me to seek an alternative father figure. In fact it had the opposite effect: it made me mistrustful of men in general and uncomfortable in their presence. I much preferred being with women. But if I had been inclined to fantasize about the ideal father, as Linda was (she idolized her teacher at Bevington, Mr Freeman, and often voiced her wish that he was our dad), Albert Cox would have been my choice.

  He epitomized the kind of steady, decent, hard-working man who had fought the war in the forties and delivered the peace in the fifties. He wasn’t a striking figure: he was of no more than average height, his hair was thinning and, like many former soldiers, he was never seen out of the house without his army beret. The gabardine mac, buckled at the waist, teamed with the beret identifying the regiment in which the wearer had served during the war is a style we’re probably more likely to associate nowadays with the 1970s sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave Em, whose gormless central character, Frank Spencer, clung on to a sartorial statement that had long since gone out of fashion. But it was a common sight on the streets of Britain twenty years earlier.

  Steve never wore his beret. Having made an appearance at his wedding, it was never seen again. Perhaps his particular regiment didn’t permit any part of the uniform to be retained on discharge; perhaps the beret was only available at a price he couldn’t afford. More likely it was because he loved to show off his Brylcreemed red hair, combed tight to his scalp like finely raked soil.

  Albert Cox, on the other hand, was proud of his beret, which I think bore the insignia of the Royal Engineers. At any rate, that was his trade in Civvy Street: he was an engineer with London Underground. The Coxes lived at 318 Lancaster Road in another house that no longer exists – that one became a victim of the Westway, the elevated section of the A40, which drove a huge concrete path through London W10 in the latter half of the 1960s. The Coxes rented two floors of the four-storey house, just round the corner from Latimer Road tube station. The buildings here were still in good condition and there was no trace of the squalor and de
bris that blighted Southam Street.

  The Coxes’ home was remarkable to me for boasting an entire room that you had neither to sleep in nor eat in. Compared to the numbing, incapacitating chill of our house, their two floors seemed gloriously warm all winter long, thanks to the paraffin heaters that burned on each landing and in the large, light, airy ‘front room’. The Coxes had carpets, too – deep-piled, unfrayed and smelling of clean blankets and carpet shampoo – which added to the atmosphere of comfort and warmth. And in that gracious, cosy front room was another source of wonder: a beautiful glass-fronted bookcase. Inside were two sets of books, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the novels of Charles Dickens, plus an assortment of second-hand hardback classics – Treasure Island, Pride and Prejudice, The Moonstone.

  The carpet and the paraffin heaters, together with the breakfast Mr Cox cooked for everyone every morning – the Coxes believed in a proper big, hot breakfast, not a bowl of cereal or a slice of toast – spoke eloquently to me of working-class prosperity. Mr Cox provided for his family: not only did he dedicate all of his wages (supplemented by the money his wife Pat made working at a fish and chip shop on Shepherd’s Bush Green) to ensuring their wellbeing, he devoted his spare time to the same cause. The tomatoes they ate at breakfast came from the allotment Mr Cox cultivated assiduously, spending every hour he could after his shift at London Underground planting and pruning and digging, tilling the city soil of North Kensington and bringing home boxes of its produce on his old sit-up-and-beg bike, balanced precariously on the front basket. Albert Cox: hunter, gatherer, provider, protector.

  The bookcase, too, was a badge of Albert’s benign paternalism: a signifier of his aspirations for his children’s future – although it must be said the effect was undermined by the fact that, like Steve’s piano, it was kept firmly locked. Unlike me, neither Carole nor Tony showed any interest in reading. Although I had been a regular at the library in Ladbroke Grove since Lily first took Linda and me there when we were toddlers, I possessed only a few books of my own, thanks mainly to the Cobden Club. When Steve hosted their Christmas party, we each received a gift and the gift was always a book. We must have gone to three such parties from 1954 to1957 and I clearly remember the three books I came away with – Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer and a Boy’s Own annual – and one of Linda’s, Little Women. It was those three books that belonged to me, rather than the ones I borrowed, that I read and re-read, treasured and cherished.

  I hinted to Mr Cox how much I’d welcome the opportunity to look at the gems in his bookcase, without success. Perhaps he felt they were too precious to entrust to a small, sticky-fingered boy.

  I’m not sure what it was that cemented my friendship with Tony Cox, or even if that’s how it could be properly described. We were complete opposites. He was a buccaneer, an adventurer straight from the pages of my favourite comic, The Hotspur. The thought of sitting indoors and reading a book was anathema to Tony. Just sitting indoors would be bad enough. This tall young Viking was a very good fast bowler, a half-decent footballer and the champion of our summer sport, known as Flick Cards. Although I was none of these things, we somehow forged a bond.

  Most boys of that era collected the cards that came free with bubble gum and other sweets, as well as cigarettes and (I think) Brooke Bond tea. I was no exception. We were all desperate to acquire full sets, getting our hands on those that eluded us by bartering or swapping spares with our schoolmates. Some of the cards were educational (I still recognize the flag of Honduras from my ‘Flags of the World’ collection); others were military, featuring the uniforms of soldiers through the ages or the weapons they carried.

  Those we liked the best were the strong, thick, laminated cards that bore the photograph of a footballer or cricketer. These were what we used at school to play Flick Cards. The obsession with this game among my primary school contemporaries was feverish, and yet, like so many childhood crazes down the years, it seemed to vanish almost overnight. Flick Cards could be played on your own or as a team sport. A card would be placed on its end against a wall with the players standing a prescribed distance away, usually ten paces, each holding his own stack of cards and taking turns to flick one at the target. The technique was to hold an edge of the card you were flicking between your first and second fingers and then throw out your arm as if you were slapping someone’s face with the back of your hand. The boy who succeeded in dislodging the standing card would win all the others that had been flicked in vain. When there were several competitors, you could play with any number of cards lined up against the wall. The victor would be the boy who dislodged the final one.

  At Bevington Primary our playground games were strictly segregated, as indeed was the playground: a thick painted line separated the girls from the boys. Flick Cards was for the boys. The girls’ sporting seasons consisted of skipping in the winter and in the summer the game of Two Balls, which involved bouncing rubber balls off a wall with a level of skill far greater than was required for anything the boys attempted.

  I kept my battle-scarred cards in an old Black Magic chocolate box, its shiny black quilted lid contrasting sharply with the sorry condition of the treasures it safeguarded. Although I joined in competitive games like Flick Cards in the playground, away from school I rarely ventured out to engage in the rough and tumble of the streets. I was a much more solitary child than my effervescent sister, who was usually to be found outdoors – often upside down, doing handstands against a wall with her dress tucked into her knickers to stop it falling over her face, or skipping with a rope hung ingeniously from the two little metal arms set high up on the lamp posts. I preferred playing indoors in our bedroom, where I created my own imaginary world.

  As well as the boxful of records, someone – probably Steve – had brought home a huge stack of old greetings cards and postcards. You could get all kinds of things for next to nothing down the Portobello Road that might well have fetched some much-needed income if we’d taken them to a collector. I used the greetings cards to build a cardboard city for my toy cowboys and Indians, standing them with their spines in the air and the two sides forming an open tent. My cowboys and Indians weren’t separated into ghettos. The cardboard town centre and suburbs formed a peaceful, harmonious city with a grid system that would have impressed a town planner.

  While Lily was happy to allow Linda to take her skipping rope out into the road, she was determined to make sure that I was not roaming the streets, principally, I think, because of a belief that while girls were safe, boys were likely to ‘get into trouble’ or to be attacked by other boys. In truth, preventing me from straying into dangerous territory didn’t take much effort. Lily may have been over-protective, but her concerns were well founded.

  Chapter 4

  I HAD FIRST become the victim of crime at the age of six. Still young enough to be fascinated by bright colours and shiny objects, I had built up an impressive collection of sweet wrappers and bus tickets. In the days before thin paper rolls were used to print tickets with the turn of a handle on a chunky silver machine, bus conductors carried an oblong board with a row of tickets in various colours which corresponded to journeys of different lengths. They would punch holes in these tickets, using a small contraption they wore slung round their necks, to prevent them from being used again.

  I’d assembled my collection in the summer holidays when Linda and I rode the number 52 bus with Lily on her way to work at Mrs McLean’s in Church Street. The sweet wrappers were purple and shiny and had once enclosed fruit bon-bons. I kept the tickets and wrappers in an old jewellery box Lily had given me, a navy blue tin with a cream interior and little compartments that opened out as the lid was lifted. I was so proud of this prized collection that I decided one day to take it to school and show it to my classmates.

  My infants’ school in Wornington Road wasn’t far from Southam Street and there were no roads to cross or traffic to navigate, which is probably why Lily, who watched over me so intently, allowed me to make the journey
alone. On my way home that day I was accosted outside the ice-cream shop by an older boy called Stephen Kirk. With his badly cut hair, clenched fists and general air of malice, this kid spelled trouble. He didn’t need to issue a formal request: I knew he wanted my navy blue box.

  ‘What yer got in nair den?’

  ‘Nuffink.’

  ‘Less ’ave a look.’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Less ’ave a look or I’ll wallop yer.’

  I had no choice but to open the box and reveal the treasure. The boy snatched the blue box and ran off across the Golborne Road without so much as a backward glance.

  Casting my mind back now, I don’t think I ever felt safe on those streets. For while there was a genuine sense of community in our neighbourhood, the threat of violence that bubbled perpetually beneath the surface was a part of our everyday lives. It erupted frequently. Adult men would fight outside the pubs on a Saturday night and gangs of boys, keen to prove how tough they were, would attack if provoked. And it didn’t take a lot to provoke them. Sometimes it was enough to make the simple mistake of looking at them. Having said that, sometimes not looking at them could be interpreted as weakness and lead to the same outcome.

  When to look, when not to look and indeed how to look was a complex skill, acquired through trial and error. It was important to appear ‘hard’. This could involve chewing gum or spitting indiscriminately and always required narrowing your eyes and adopting a jaunty gait. If you could carry this off in a way that made a potential adversary worry about the likely result of any attack, it was a useful deterrent. If you couldn’t, it was best to keep your eyes averted to avoid the piercingly delivered question: ‘Oi! ’Oo you screwin’?’ (In the slang of that time and place, the verb ‘to screw’ had a less salacious definition than it does today: it merely meant ‘to look’.) Fighting was an essential part of a boy’s life and fathers regarded education in the arts of pugilism to be as important as learning to read (unfortunately, some thought it even more important).