This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  Steve tried to teach me how to box. These little tournaments scared me and upset Lily, but he insisted they were necessary to toughen me up. He would be stripped to his string vest and trousers and we’d dance around aiming punches at the body, never the head. I was a very skinny southpaw and could duck and weave quite skilfully, but when Steve did land a blow, usually to my arms as I defended my body, it would be extremely painful and leave big bruises. Yet I had to carry on or risk humiliation.

  Lily, who was used to taking his punches herself, was always hovering on the periphery like a demented referee trying to end the bout. If she thought I’d been hurt too much she’d push herself between us. I was too little and scrawny ever to hurt Steve but I punched with a venom that intensified over time, suppressing an urge to cry when his fists got through my defences and connected with my solar plexus, sucking the air out of me. I suppose it was as a result of those bouts that I began to see Steve as foe rather than friend. Someone who, to use a boxing analogy, wasn’t in my corner.

  Like Lily, many women were unconvinced of the virtues of teaching boys to fight, but this had more to do with their aspirations for their sons than any objections to them being ‘toughened up’. To fight on the streets or in the playground was ‘common’. Not fighting was a sign of gentility, of prosperity, of the different, more refined life they wanted for their boys. It’s true that physical altercations in those days tended to involve fists rather than weapons and that they were required to be seen as ‘fair’. There were quaint rules of engagement: you never hit a boy with glasses; you didn’t kick; you never hit a man when he was down. But the Marquis of Queensbury was never around when you needed him, and it was rare, in my experience, that any adult sought to stop a fight, irrespective of how much kicking was going on, if it was between two boys of roughly equal size and age. It was thought to be healthy and natural to let them get on with it.

  So there were playground fights, classroom fights and neighbourhood fights. Aggression wasn’t confined to men and boys, either. Women fought in the street – hair down, sleeves rolled up, punching, biting, scratching, hurling themselves at one another, while spectators gathered round and shouted encouragement. Many men thought it quite acceptable to hit their wives. Mothers and fathers would beat their children in the firm belief that it was essential to good parenting. I can remember Lily giving me the occasional clump but Steve never beat me, apart from during the boxing matches. I don’t think he was interested enough in me to care about ‘disciplining’ me, and Lily was the one who bore the brunt of his temper when he lashed out. But I had a friend further down Southam Street who was always being knocked around and our cousins, Pamela and Norman, were terrified of incurring the wrath of Uncle George. At Bevington school, every male teacher was licensed to assault us. The most sadistic was Mr Hayes who, instead of bringing down the cane across the palm or upturned fingers of the hand, would strike us hard on the inside of our wrists. Cruel and unusual punishment indeed.

  In the 1950s we were, of course, spared the influence of the unfettered violence depicted in films, computer games and other images that is so ubiquitous today. However, in a strange way, the fact that ours was a lesser, ostensibly more ‘honourable’ type of violence somehow made it more widely acceptable. The fights we saw on film were the showdowns between gunslingers and the saloon-bar brawls compulsory to every Western. It is perhaps significant that in those movies, the most contemptible anti-hero wasn’t the ‘baddie’ but the man who refused to fight: the coward. We may not have had anywhere near as much violence served up to us as entertainment on screen, but because it was so accepted – indeed, institutionalized – it was an unremarked element of our day-to-day lives.

  It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that I was largely compliant with Lily’s mission to keep me off the streets. But of course I didn’t always obey. I still blush at the memory of the day she caught me on a box-cart with my cousin Tony Barker, Tottsy’s son, and a gang of his friends from Southern Row. With bikes an unaffordable luxury where we lived, we would build our own transport, invariably involving a wooden plank lashed across two sets of wheels scavenged from an abandoned pram and steered using a rope or string. This particular Formula One model, featuring a little boxed-in seating area for the driver, had left its showrooms in Southern Row to be paraded in Southam Street and I had somehow been persuaded to steer it while the other boys pushed me along.

  When Lily turned into our street and saw me she yelled at me to stop. The emergence of a broad Scouse accent was a sure sign that I was in trouble. My ‘car’ underwent an enforced pit stop and the driver was removed to 149 Southam Street and subjected to some stern words along the lines of ‘I never want to see youse tearing round the streets with a gang like that again.’ And she didn’t, because I wasn’t. At least, not until I became friends with Tony Cox. If my adventures with him gave Lily greater cause for worry, on the plus side they were also responsible for introducing her to Tony’s mum, who was to become her closest friend.

  I don’t know how it happened, but one minute I was alone and palely loitering, reading a book in the big, damp bedroom I shared with Linda, the next I was careering around on the saddle of Tony’s blue bike, while he pedalled furiously, poised above the crossbar. It was a lovely bike: streamlined, modern, with a sparkle in its metallic blue paint.

  One evening, Tony showed me a second bike he’d acquired from somewhere and challenged me to a race. The start was to be outside his home in Lancaster Road, following a circuit left into Brandon Road, left by Latimer Road Underground station and into Bramley Road, and then first left back into Lancaster Road, where Tony’s neighbour, short, tubby Walter Curtis, would be waiting to declare the winner. What Tony’s spare bike lacked in sophistication it made up for in size and I was not a proficient cyclist. He offered to give me an advantage by lending me his and taking the other one himself.

  With the help of the state-of-the-art blue bike, glittering faintly in the early-autumn dusk, I kept pace with Tony as we came to the final bend. But then disaster struck. I was going so fast that it was impossible to keep on track round the sharp corner of Bramley Road and Lancaster Road. I veered straight across the road and collided with a young woman who was just coming out of the little grocery store almost opposite the Coxes’ house, carrying a pint of milk. Her leg was wounded, my front tooth was broken and the milk bottle was smashed to smithereens.

  Such was the furore that Tony was dispatched to my house, ten minutes away, to fetch Lily, who arrived on the scene as I was being nursed by Tony’s mother. I don’t think the young woman I’d hit was too badly injured, though I can still remember her tender words of comfort: ‘You fucking little idiot, why don’t you learn to ride that fucking bike?’ Strong words but well deserved. That ‘fucking bike’ needed a bit of attention after I’d finished with it. I was still in shock when Lily arrived – lapsing into Scouse as she scolded me only marginally less aggressively than my young victim. While Lily’s tirade featured no swear words (we never heard Lily swear), it was equally bruising in its condemnation.

  It was this incident that brought Pat Cox and Lily together. They discovered they had a lot in common. Two tiny, cheerful, funny women – Pat with her delicate, birdlike features and gold-rimmed glasses; Lily still petite and pretty before her heart medication made her put on weight – they had similar backgrounds, both worked every hour God sent and both cared deeply about their children’s future. Like Lily, Pat was not a Londoner. She had come from her home in Nottingham during the war to work for the NAAFI, like Lily. She was even tinier than Lily but possessed the strength and energy of a person three times her size. The cups of tea they shared that afternoon became the first of many over the years, always in Pat’s home because Lily was so ashamed of the conditions we lived in.

  While they were alike in so many ways, they differed, of course, in one important facet of their lives: their marriages. At the end of every day – every single day – Albert and Pat Cox would sit toget
her on their big, comfy settee. Albert would put his feet up on the small table in front of the paraffin heater; Pat would tuck her legs beneath her and lay her head on his chest, and he’d put his arm around her. In front of them would be two glasses of whisky. They separated only for Albert to roll an Old Holborn and Pat to light one of her small filter tips, or to take a sip of Bell’s. Then they’d snuggle up together again. It mattered not who was in the room with them, they would sit like a courting couple, listening to the radio or, in later years, watching TV, uninhibited in their devotion to one another. Despite my tender age, the significance of this stark contrast between Pat and Albert and Lily and Steve was obvious to me.

  Along with his impressive sporting skills, Tony Cox had the fastest fists in West London. When it came to fighting, where other boys relied on their weight or their wrestling ability (or, like me, merely on their capacity to deter potential aggressors by trying to look hard), Tony was a whirling dervish, pummelling his opponents into submission: left, right, left, right. His height was an advantage. He might take the odd punch if his challenger managed to get through his flailing fists, but he’d dish out about six whacks for every one he received. Yet I don’t remember Tony ever starting a fight. He only got involved when he was forced to react, which was frequently, probably because his Scandinavian looks made him stand out from the crowd and perhaps because his reputation encouraged other boys to have a go.

  There were times when the dangers we faced were unpredictable, and when even Tony’s exceptional talent was no protection. Walking home from school one day with Tony and our friend Dereck Tapper, I noticed, crossing into Chesterton Road, a man in his early twenties acting oddly. He was standing against a wall with a sheet of corrugated iron propped up in front of him. His weird behaviour grew weirder as we passed him. Lifting the metal sheet above his head, he suddenly bent his knees, bringing the edge of it down on our skulls. Clearly this was a man with serious mental health problems and we should have run away as fast as we could but, thinking the best course of action was simply to ignore him, we carried on walking along the street. We soon realized our mistake when he threw his corrugated iron away and swiftly grabbed me round the neck, announcing with a malicious smile that I was his prisoner.

  Tony and Dereck could easily have escaped, but they stayed with me for the bizarre hour or so in which this man held me captive. As this strange quartet roamed the streets, a man with a boy in a stranglehold and two more in tow, my assailant plausibly and loudly proclaimed to passersby that he was a relative playing a game with me. Otherwise I can’t remember what was said, either by him or by any of us in our attempts to persuade him to let me go. He kept Tony and Dereck at bay by threatening to cut my face open with a piece of broken glass, picked out of the gutter outside the notorious KPH pub, which he held against my cheek, just underneath my eye.

  The grandly named Kensington Palace Hotel, on the corner of Ladbroke Grove and Lancaster Road, was where Irishmen drank (hence its other name: Keep Paddy Happy) and it was notorious for fights, both indoors and outside. They would usually begin in the pub and spill on to the streets. To be fair to the KPH, broken glass was a feature of North Kensington streets in general. It seemed to grow in the gutters like grass in a hedgerow.

  The KPH was one of three places in my ‘manor’ that I took pains to avoid if I could possibly help it. The others were Isaac Newton Secondary Modern School (the blackboard jungle where I knew I would be sent if I failed my Eleven-Plus) and the Electric Cinema further up the Portobello Road, known locally as the Fleapit or the Bughole because of its derelict state. It never showed anything we would want to see and its clientele, we heard, consisted of nutcases who would carry us off to be mutilated and murdered.

  The memory of being held against my will, with a jagged piece of glass hovering near my eyes, while people strolled past on one of the busiest thoroughfares in London W10, will never leave me. Nobody tried to intervene or asked if I was OK. In the end, our psychopath was distracted by something and Tony, Dereck and I seized our chance and fled as fast as our legs would carry us.

  Tony and I belted into Cambridge Gardens, where the houses were big and expensive with ample front gardens, mostly hidden behind substantial hedges. We’d found a way to navigate the entire length of this long road without once appearing on the pavement. We knew all the gaps that allowed us to move from one secluded front garden to the next; indeed we’d created many of them ourselves, to the chagrin of the residents.

  By the time we emerged 400 yards away at the junction with St Marks Road, there was no sign of our tormentor. I never told Lily or anyone else about this encounter. What was the point? It would only have worried her. For all his threats, I had only a scratch on my cheek to show for the ordeal, though for the remaining year or so of my time at Bevington Primary, I was constantly looking out for Mr Psychopath and had my escape routes planned in advance.

  When Tony and I vanished into Cambridge Gardens, Dereck Tapper ran in the opposite direction, across Ladbroke Grove towards the room in Tavistock Crescent where he lived with his mother. Dereck was the only other boy who was with me at all three of the schools I attended. I’d first met him at Wornington Infants and we would go on to attend grammar school together. If my childhood was not exactly a bed of roses, Dereck Tapper had a much harder time of it. Dereck Tapper was black.

  Chapter 5

  THE 1951 CENSUS recorded that 12.7 per cent of the population in the area around Southam Street lived at a density of more than two people per room compared to a London average of 2.5 per cent. That figure must have risen as landlords like Peter Rachman exploited those arriving from countries such as Trinidad and Jamaica at the behest of a government keen to fill the many vacancies in public services, notably transport and the NHS. Most came alone, and at first they were mainly men: young men without family commitments or married men keen to establish a home before bringing over their wives and children.

  As a result there can have been few, if any, other black kids at our school when Dereck Tapper began his education, along with me, at Wornington Road Infants. If there were others I don’t remember them, and I can recall only two besides Dereck at Bevington, which we attended from 1957 to 1961. I have no memory, either, of any black people living at our end of Southam Street, although one house at the eastern end, number 27, was home to a large number of West Indian men. With hindsight, it seems quite likely that it was one of the outposts of Rachmanism.

  The West Indians came under an immigration policy that allowed free entry from Commonwealth and colonial nations. They saw Britain as the mother country and they were proud of it and loyal to its institutions. Theirs was a culture of relaxed conviviality, and they must have been expecting at least a welcoming hand. What they found, too often, was a brandished fist.

  Into our decaying streets they came, useful scapegoats for the overcrowding, the appalling conditions, the poverty, the absence of hope and aspiration. One of Roger Mayne’s 1956 photographs brilliantly captures the cultural collision. Four West Indian men are pictured sauntering into Southam Street (perhaps they were heading for number 27), relaxed but wary. One looks at Mayne’s camera with amusement, two are half-smiling. But the man in front is on the look-out for trouble as they head towards a group of young guys gathered round the steps leading up to a front door. Youths with grey, pinched faces who don’t yet seem to have noticed the quartet ambling towards them.

  The black men are dressed in stylish jumpers and jerkins, baggy trousers and wide-brimmed hats, set at just the right angle. Four little white boys stare, glued to the spot as if they were witnessing a Martian invasion. I was six when that photo was taken, living in that exact location at that exact time. I remember very well the cards in newsagents’ windows (we were instructed to check them on our way to school to see if anything interesting and cheap was being offered for sale). Those headed ‘Rooms to let’ were, like most of the rest, handwritten, but the legend ‘No Blacks’ could have been pre-printed, it was on
so many of them. Often it was accompanied by ‘No Irish’ and ‘No dogs’.

  On stifling summer evenings, the little communities that gathered on the steps of the houses in Southam Street, their numbers swelled by the need of most inhabitants to escape the intolerable heat indoors, became a daunting challenge for any passing West Indian. The preferred method of provocation was to flick little missiles, usually rolled-up strips of the silver paper from their cigarette packets, at any black face that came within range. If their victim stopped to remonstrate there’d be a row, and often a full-blown fight. If he chose to ignore them and walk on, he would have to endure the catcalls that followed him down the street.

  These black men were bus conductors, postmen and hospital porters and tended to be older, wiser and more self-controlled than their tormentors – young, thin Teddy Boys, either unemployed or still at school. But there was little doubt that those silver pellets conveyed the hostility of most of the community.

  Maybe a year or so before Mayne encapsulated the simmering tension on our street, a young woman had hammered desperately on the door of 107 Southam Street. I have no idea who she was or why she ran to Lily for help. But I do remember why the Teddy Boys were chasing her. She had committed the ultimate sin in the eyes of her pursuers: she was a white girl who’d gone out with a black man. Lily went to the door and ushered her inside. Four or five Teds began to throw stones and junk from the streets at our window, shouting that the girl was a ‘fucking wog-lover’. We cowered inside, transfixed by terror, until eventually they gave up and went away. This must have been around 1955, during the first stirrings of the rancour that would lead to the Notting Hill race riots three years later.