This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  Was Lily different from most of her neighbours? That incident stays with me as evidence that she was. A kind woman, with instinctive Christian ethics, she was constantly exhorting Linda and me to see the good in everybody and did her best to instil compassion and tolerance in her children. I’d like to think that when the tensions exploded into the Notting Hill riots of August 1958, our three rooms in 149 Southam Street were a bastion of liberal values. And I believe that was in all probability the case, though I have no concrete evidence for it. I was too young then to grasp the complexities of the crisis; to absorb much more than the sense of fear and threat on the streets – and we already lived with that every day, to some degree.

  I haven’t the first idea what Steve’s views were, either on politics in general or immigration in particular. I can’t say I remember ever hearing him using what we would now call racist language, but by this time I barely saw him and wasn’t privy to his conversations. Back then the complaint that immigrants were ‘coming over here and taking our jobs’ was practically a mantra – a soundtrack to our lives as familiar as moaning about the weather, or the filthy state of the streets or the absence of police on the beat (a common grievance in 1950s Notting Hill) – and given the prevailing atmosphere it would be remarkable if Steve was a non-conformist. There certainly wouldn’t have been any black faces in the pubs where he played the piano, all of which had a saloon bar, a public bar and a colour bar.

  The additional accusation that ‘they’ were taking over houses meant for us could have had a particular potency for Lily and Steve. But as well as being compassionate Lily was an intelligent woman, and would surely have been clear-sighted enough to observe that, far from ‘jumping the queue’ for one of the council houses for which she had been patiently waiting for ten years by then, black immigrants were being squeezed into the same sordid, decrepit buildings that we were occupying.

  The August riots of 1958, so far as I know, didn’t spread to Southam Street. Linda told me that there’d been fights in Bramley Road, where one of her friends lived, and the siege of Blenheim Crescent, during which white youths tried to burn down a house full of black immigrants, took place half a mile away on the other side of Ladbroke Grove. So even at eight years of age I knew that our little world was being discussed in every newspaper – variously described as Notting Hill, Notting Dale, Kensal New Town or North Kensington – and suddenly the focus of national interest.

  I have no doubt that Lily would have stood up for the small, beleaguered black community who had come to live among us. I like to think that if we’d had any black neighbours, she would have been one of those Notting Hill women who did their shopping for them – black women didn’t dare go outside during the riots. That she would have agreed with Justice Salmon’s famous pronouncements when sentencing four white youths to four years’ imprisonment for the part they played in the mayhem: ‘Everyone, irrespective of the colour of their skin, is entitled to walk through our streets in peace, with their heads erect and free from fear. As far as the law is concerned, you are entitled to think what you like, however foul your thoughts; to feel what you like, however brutal and debased your emotions; to say what you like, providing you do not infringe the rights of others, or imperil the Queen’s peace, but once you translate your dark thoughts and brutal feelings into savage acts such as these the law will be swift to punish you, the guilty, and to protect your victims.’

  There were 108 arrests for offences ranging from insulting behaviour to grievous bodily harm. Mercifully, nobody was killed during the six days of rioting. But it would be only eight months before somebody was.

  During 1958, the tensions on the streets were mirrored by increasingly strained relations at 149 Southam Street. Making ends meet was growing even more difficult. Steve had been out of work for months but continued to play the pubs and clubs, returning in the early hours, when he returned at all, and sleeping in until midday. His violence towards Lily was, for the time, at the mild end of the domestic abuse spectrum – many women put up with worse – but it’s hard to express just how terrifying it was for a child to lie there at night listening to all the shouting and screaming, fearing for his mother; hard to convey the deep unhappiness it caused. Steve was a dark shadow in our life, and Linda in particular was becoming more and more contemptuous of him.

  The pools win was a distant memory. The Rowe Housing Trust had decided to remove all ‘pay-as-you-go’ electricity meters from their Southam Street properties because they were being robbed so frequently, mostly by residents desperate for cash. That meant one more bill for Lily to struggle with.

  One terrible day is etched on my memory: the day everything came to a head over a pet dog we had acquired after Linda passed her Eleven-Plus. Once my sister had persuaded Lily to let us have a dog as a reward, Linda and I had gone to Battersea Dogs’ Home and fallen in love with a hairy, black mongrel with a sweet nature and bags of energy. We named her Cheeky and brought her back home with us. Our love for that dog was as fierce as Steve’s hatred of her. He seemed offended by our devotion to Cheeky, and shouted at Lily for letting us have her in the first place. Lily shouted back and refused to upset us by obeying Steve’s decree to return our pet to the dogs’ home.

  A compromise was reached. Cheeky was to be placed in the yard on a chain whenever Steve was at home. Given how rare this was, that didn’t seem too unreasonable. In any case, Cheeky was terrified of Steve and would much rather not have been around when he was.

  On that awful day, Steve came home early and drunk. It was around 6pm and he must have been drinking since lunchtime. Lily was cooking dinner on the gas stove on the landing. The stove, like the sink, was stand-alone, and when the oven was on the entire cooker was too hot to touch. Cheeky was in the kitchen. It was a bitterly cold day and when Steve insisted that she be taken down to the yard, Lily and Linda pleaded for her to be allowed to stay indoors.

  Voices were raised and Steve moved menacingly towards the dog, which ran to the only shelter available and sat, petrified, in the space beneath the oven. There she remained, even though her back was touching the underside of the oven and being burned by the hot metal. While we cried, the dog howled and Steve yelled, Lily was on her hands and knees, trying to coax poor Cheeky to leave her refuge. When the dog was finally extracted, shaking with fear, there was a large bald patch where the heat from the oven had singed off her fur.

  This was a watershed for Linda: the point at which her dislike and disapproval of Steve crystallized into hatred. From that day onwards, I watched my sister become a much more formidable opponent for Steve.

  Linda had matured very early, both physically and emotionally. At eleven she was already bigger than Lily. The tone she used when speaking to Steve, even before the incident with the dog, was increasingly scornful. Steve was spending more nights away but when he did stumble in, drunk and abusive, he often found his daughter waiting to defend Lily and to remonstrate with him for his fecklessness.

  On one occasion I saw Linda attempting to kick and punch Steve while Lily tried to restrain her. Linda marched down to our room and returned a few minutes later with her Girl Guide’s penknife open in her hand. With a look of utter determination on her face, she launched an attack on her father. The knife would probably have struggled to cut butter but Steve’s face was grey as he fended off and finally disarmed his daughter. Linda ran off with Cheeky. After several hours Lily found her sitting on a park bench in Wormwood Scrubs and persuaded her to come home.

  One winter’s day the year before, when Lily, Linda and I had been queuing to pay the rent at the cashier’s grille in the Rowe Housing Trust offices, we had noticed a poster inviting applications to emigrate to Australia. A picture of an ocean liner sailing into a sunlit port, surrounded by images of kangaroos and koalas, promised ‘a better life’ for just £10 per person. Lily looked at it for a long time before saying, almost to herself, ‘Shall we leave your father and go to Australia?’

  She would have been almost thirty
-six then, still a young woman but worn down with the pain and drudgery of her life. She carried her burdens cheerfully for her children, but she was desperate to improve our standard of living. Could we have joined the ranks of the emigrants known as the Ten Pound Poms? The Australian government, in a bid to expand the population and attract workers for their developing industries, offered assisted passage to adults, and children, in fact, travelled free. But however keen they were to have us, would we have been allowed to go without Steve? I don’t know. All I can see, looking back, is a woman dreaming of ‘a better life’ feeling sorely tempted to climb into that poster and away from the slums of Southam Street. The response from Linda and me was firm and implacable. We didn’t care about leaving Steve, but we were not prepared to leave London. ‘No,’ we said. ‘We are not going to Australia.’

  The moment passed, Lily paid the rent and we went home.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t us who left Steve but Steve who left us. I knew immediately that he had gone when I noticed that his shaving equipment – the open razor, the stubby brush, the shaving soap, the jar of Brylcreem – had vanished from the shelf above the stand-alone ceramic butler sink in the kitchen. Lily was ahead of me. She was already rushing straight for the bedroom, emerging to tell us that all his clothes had disappeared, along with the battered suitcase that had accompanied us on our holiday to Liverpool. The first thing I checked for was the book of nudes at the top of the wardrobe. It had gone.

  Steve left on a Saturday morning in the autumn of 1958, sneaking off while we were out. Lily, Linda and I had gone ‘down the Lane’, partly so that we wouldn’t have to creep around to avoid disturbing him, but mostly to see if there was anything useful we could scavenge from the stallholders. We’d returned home expecting a normal Saturday afternoon. Steve would rise at noon and sit around in his string vest and trousers, studying that day’s runners and riders in the Daily Sketch. Linda would go out with her friend Marilyn Hughes. I would play in our room and Lily would iron and clean and rustle up what she could to supplement our staple diet of bread and dripping.

  But this was no normal Saturday. For me, it was a red-letter day; a Saturday I would always remember for the happiness I felt when I was sure Steve had really gone. The sense of exhilaration floods back every time my mind returns to that morning. It wasn’t until I was much older that I understood why, while Linda and I were euphoric, Lily’s reaction was to sit down at the kitchen table and cry. Life is very black and white to an eight-year-old and I was perplexed. Surely she should be as delighted as we were? The period before Steve’s departure had been worse than anything we’d ever experienced. His idleness and our poverty had grown more acute, our lives more miserable.

  Yet Lily sat at the table and sobbed. She wept for the wasted years, for the love that died, for the hardship that lay ahead. I’d never seen her cry before, but tears would come to her more easily from then on. She had always felt that Steve might change. Though she had shouldered the burden of supporting the family, while he was there, some small financial contribution was at least possible and she could nurture the faint hope that he might some day make more of an effort. Now even that was gone. She would also have been acutely aware of the stigma that attached to women abandoned by their husbands, irrespective of the circumstances.

  I understood none of this on that Saturday in 1958. All I felt was joy and relief. My dread was not that Steve would be lost to me for ever but that he might come back. Linda, though even more ecstatic, was able to empathize with Lily. In my bewilderment and immaturity, I reacted only with impatience. Our response quite possibly made her feel even more wretched: the idea that her children could be so overjoyed at being abandoned by their father can only have added to the miasma of regret and failure swirling around in her head.

  That evening Lily and Linda addressed the practicalities and resolved to try to track Steve down. There was probably little legal redress available to Lily and even if there were, we knew no lawyers and certainly couldn’t afford to hire one. But they reasoned that if Lily at least knew where Steve was she could pursue him for financial help to raise their children.

  Since the next day was a Sunday, Steve would surely be playing piano at the Lads of the Village at lunchtime. Lily decided to go there, taking Linda for moral support, but there was no sign of Steve. The landlord was brusque. No, he didn’t know where Steve was. In any case, it was Lily’s fault that he’d run off – ‘You should have gone out with him more and not been so unsociable.’ Their next port of call was the home of Steve’s eldest brother, Wally. They got no further than the doorstep. After Lily had explained her predicament, he reacted angrily. ‘We’ve all got our problems,’ he retorted, closing the door in their faces.

  Lily eventually pieced together what Steve had been up to (though not where he’d actually gone) from various conversations with local gossips eager to share salacious details. I knew little of what she learned. Linda often told me that the most-used phrase in Lily’s vocabulary was ‘Don’t tell Alan.’ But in the fullness of time I got to hear about Steve’s affair with Vera, a barmaid at the Lads of the Village. How he’d spent Christmas with her when we were left alone in Southam Street; the hop-picking holidays in Kent with Vera and her son from a previous liaison; the child Vera had conceived with Steve, but miscarried. Now they were living together, but Lily didn’t know where.

  She had no one to turn to. Her sister Jean had by this time left Walthamstow to return to Liverpool, Uncle George having transferred there with the Post Office. In any case, Lily would have been reluctant to admit to her abandonment. Her sisters were never told of the problems when Steve was at home, so she was hardly likely to reveal what she regarded as her failure now that he’d gone. For Linda and me, Steve’s departure marked the end of a terrible life and the start of a brighter future. We did not understand, then, why Lily felt that the bad old life was merely entering its next phase.

  PART II

  LILY

  Chapter 6

  IT WAS JUST past midnight on 17 May 1959, my ninth birthday, that Kelso Cochrane, a thirty-two-year-old Antiguan working as a carpenter to try to save enough money to study law, was murdered on the corner of our street.

  The murder remains unsolved but Lily saw the beginning of the altercation that led to Kelso’s death: five or six white men pushing and shoving one black man. As she shouted at them to leave him alone, one of the assailants looked up and their eyes met. She recognized him and she was pretty sure he recognized her, too.

  I know this man’s name, but will give him a pseudonym here. Let’s call him Barry Dempsey. He was typical of the hollow-cheeked Teds who populated Roger Mayne’s photographs. He lived at the other end of Southam Street, but was notorious right across the Town. Most of the young guys round our way swore and scrapped but few had Barry’s reputation for unprovoked violence.

  Poor Kelso Cochrane had the misfortune to encounter Dempsey and his cohorts at midnight on the Saturday of a warm Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend as he was walking back from Paddington General Hospital, where he’d gone to seek treatment for his hand after injuring it at work. Kelso lived in a flat in Bevington Road near my school and had presumably walked down Southam Street from Kensal Rise at the far end.

  At the same time, Lily was walking up Golborne Road on her way home from serving and washing up for Mrs Dehn, who used to host a dinner party every Bank Holiday weekend. When Kelso Cochrane was accosted on the corner of Southam Street and Golborne Road, outside the bagwash, Lily had reached the Earl of Warwick on the opposite corner and was turning left into our end of Southam Street. After Barry Dempsey caught her eye, she took fright and ran home without a backward glance. Sadly, the sight of a gang of white Teddy Boys bullying a solitary black man wasn’t unusual on the streets of Notting Hill. Lily hoped that by shouting at them she would let them know they had been seen and halt the attack. She must have been mortified to find out the following day that Kelso Cochrane had been stabbed once, in the heart, with gr
eat force and had died in St Charles’s Hospital less than an hour later.

  As my ninth birthday dawned on the Sunday of that sultry weekend, Southam Street became the centre of attention for reporters, police officers and politicians. The community was stunned and the atmosphere was heavy with suspicion and fear. A murder then seemed to create more shockwaves than it does today, perhaps because there wasn’t anything like the saturation news coverage we are used to in the twenty-first century. Everyone tuned into the same few limited news bulletins on the wireless or on television, if they had a set. For those who did, having a choice between two channels was still a novelty: ITV had only been in existence for three years. Linda’s friend Marilyn Hughes’ parents were the only people we knew locally with a telly – her father was also the only man we knew who owned a car – and they would occasionally kindly allow both of us to go round to their house in Wornington Road to watch The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.

  That day we didn’t have to possess a TV to know that the camera crews set up outside the Earl of Warwick were broadcasting pictures of the streets where we lived to audiences around the world. Kelso’s murder was the lead story in all the bulletins.

  At lunchtime, the men got suited up as usual to go to the pub as the police began house-to-house inquiries, monitored by the women who habitually spent hours at their open windows on the upper floors of Southam Street, watching everything that went on. They would put pillows or cushions on the crumbling window sills on which to rest their folded arms, the raised sash windows poised above their necks like guillotines. The heavy activity that Sunday brought reinforcements to their ranks. They would all have seen the police come to our door, either that day or the next. The officers were mainly interested in talking to any men in the house to establish their whereabouts on the Saturday night.