This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  There were, of course, no men in our home now and goodness knows what Lily told them, but she certainly didn’t mention Barry Dempsey and I doubt if she told them about the fracas she had witnessed. Who can blame her? She would have been as appalled by the murder of Kelso Cochrane as anybody in Notting Hill, but this was where she and her children had to live. She had enough troubles without having to contend with the very real possibility of retribution by people who had killed at least once already. And with murder still punishable by the death penalty, the stakes were high.

  The most reliable authority on Lily’s frame of mind that weekend is Linda. It wasn’t until some years later that Lily related the events of the early hours of 17 May 1959 to my sister. She told her how afraid she was that Barry Dempsey had recognized her and that the three of us might be in danger. When Linda asked why she hadn’t told the police, she said it would have put us at even greater risk. So she said nothing.

  Within five years Lily would be in Kensal Green cemetery along with Kelso Cochrane. Had she lived, I’m sure that one day she would have told the police what she saw that night. Many years later, I informed them of it myself. At the time Lily was convinced that they would find the murderers without her assistance. She was wrong. Fifty-three years later those killers have still to be brought to justice.

  In the months after the murder, the febrile atmosphere in the area was palpable, even to us children. Bevington Primary, under the firm command of the strong and charismatic headmaster, Mr Gemmill, evidently did its level best to ensure that the school – around 250 yards from the murder scene and in the road where the victim had lived – was a haven from the tension on the streets. Dereck Tapper must have felt particularly vulnerable. Few of those in the habit of using openly racist language had any qualms about doing so in front of their children, and it was quick to filter through to the very youngest members of the community. I’m sure Dereck must have been subjected to the commonplace taunts and harassment. He was a bright and popular kid who could look after himself, but in the wake of Kelso Cochrane’s murder he would have had far more to contend with than before: the issue of race was being deliberately ramped up on the street corners of our community.

  This climate of antagonism was linked to one man, one word, one name: Mosley. Such was my youthful familiarity with talk of Oswald Mosley that I imagined him to be a Notting Hill local, known only in our part of London. To me he was indistinguishable from the other notorious villains or bullies in our area whose names were frequently heard on the streets. I had no idea, at the age of nine, that Mosley was infamous throughout the country and around the world as the founder of the British Union of Fascists, the politician who had campaigned to bring Hitler’s policies to Britain before the war.

  There are only four things I know about Lily’s political opinions. She revered Emmeline Pankhurst, drumming it into Linda that she must always vote because Mrs Pankhurst had fought for her right to do so. She disliked Winston Churchill for reasons I’m not clear about. She loved Jo Grimond and voted Liberal because of her trust in him. And she detested Oswald Mosley.

  Having been interned during the war along with most active fascists, Mosley had left Britain in 1951 to live in France. His attempt to re-invent a British form of fascism known as the Union Movement had failed dismally. He returned to Britain in 1959 for one reason alone: to exploit the racial tension in Notting Hill by standing as a Union Movement candidate for North Kensington in that year’s General Election.

  I heard Lily rail against this terrible man Mosley and picked up the name as it crackled on the Notting Hill grapevine that connected our phone-free homes. Leaflets announcing Mosley’s candidature had been distributed before Kelso Cochrane’s murder. Their content fully exploited the absence of any laws against inciting racial hatred and he was therefore accused by many of being complicit in the crime.

  The police laughably insisted that the motive for Kelso’s murder was robbery rather than race, while Mosley defended himself by pointing out that his leaflets called for the race issue in Notting Hill to be settled by ‘votes not violence’. This stance was totally undermined by the fact that he held a series of public meetings, both before and after the General Election, practically on the very spot where Kelso had been killed.

  Lily laid down the law to Linda and me: she might well be out working when these gatherings took place but on no account were we to go anywhere near Mosley’s meetings. He was a fiend who supported Hitler. His followers were bad people. We were made to promise we’d keep away. I think I kept my promise to Lily – I usually did. And yet I have this memory of Mosley, in a double-breasted suit, standing above a crowd of several hundred people on a grey, early evening outside the Warwick. He spoke in a rich baritone, his arms in constant motion, his face flushed, his large body turning this way and that to project himself to every part of his audience. Whether on that occasion I disobeyed Lily and actually did see Mosley in the flesh, or whether my memory has conflated my genuine recollections of his Notting Hill meetings with images I happened to see around that time or not long afterwards, I cannot say.

  Mosley evidently had his supporters. In a community living in such overcrowded squalor, it would have been surprising if he didn’t. Indeed, I suspect he had his supporters in the big houses at the other end of the Portobello Road as well. He had come to Notting Hill because he thought that our constituency of North Kensington offered him his best chance of being re-elected to Parliament. To do that he had to win over working people like Lily. He failed utterly. When the election was held on 8 October 1959, he came last, with under 3,000 votes. For the first time in his forty-one years of contesting parliamentary elections, he lost his deposit.

  Claiming that the ballot had been rigged, he launched an appeal, but the result was upheld. After North Kensington sent him packing he would go on to stand in the 1966 election in Shoreditch and Finsbury, where he did even worse, putting an end to his political career.

  Not long after Kelso Cochrane’s murder we were moved to another Victorian slum at 6 Walmer Road, just off Latimer Road, which snaked its way from Wormwood Scrubs down to Shepherd’s Bush. We were rehoused because Southam Street was being cleared for demolition and in acknowledgement of the fact that it was far from ideal for a girl and boy to be sharing a room at twelve and nine years old respectively. We were pleased when the Rowe Housing Trust found us four rooms – a kitchen plus a bedroom each for Lily, Linda and me. I’m sure Lily must also have been relieved at the opportunity to put some distance between us and Barry Dempsey.

  The house was one of a small terrace linked by a frontage of dirty, dark green flaking paint, interspersed with doorways where a flight of steps led up to the front entrances. We had the ground and the first floor of number 6, beneath a young couple, the Thompsons, with a small baby and a collection of Shirley Bassey records. The basement, though only partially below ground level, was uninhabitable, but Lily persuaded the trust to install a bath and copper boiler in one corner of it. With the addition of some plain brown Formica boards, we created a bathroom: a source of tremendous excitement since we’d never had one before. It did not, alas, do a great deal to improve my low level of hygiene. We had to heat the water using the gas ring under the copper urn and a shilling in the meter produced only enough for one bath. As a result my baths were infrequent and to ensure we got our full shilling’s worth, I would invariably have to use Linda’s dirty water.

  The rooms at Walmer Road were as damp and dreary as Southam Street and our toilet, shared with the Thompsons, was still in a crumbling shack outside. To reach the back door leading out to the small, concrete back yard you had to go through the basement, which had no lights. And Lily still hadn’t attained her heart’s desire: her own front door. But Linda and I were happy to have our own rooms, although for Linda this proved to be a temporary arrangement. Her room was immediately below Lily’s, on the ground floor next to the kitchen on the landing, mine was next to Lily’s. We could both hear her sobbing
in the night. She tried to suppress the sound, taking huge gulps of air and holding her breath, but eventually, when she could contain herself no longer, the waves of her grief would break on the silence. It was almost worse than listening to the vicious arguments with Steve on his return from a night on the tiles.

  After a few weeks spent witnessing this despair Linda had a brainwave. If she slept in the double bed with Lily, not only could she comfort her during the night, but it would leave us with a spare room we could turn into a living room.

  Linda was now a pupil at Fulham County Grammar School for Girls and if she wanted to bring her friends round they would have to sit in the kitchen, with its four battered chairs round a Formica table (we were big on Formica), one old armchair and the washing line slung across the room under the flyblown lampshade. Lily agreed and gave Linda’s bed to the Salvation Army who, in return, found us a second-hand three-piece suite covered with brown plastic.

  Steve had been gone a year by this time, and Lily had taken on yet more jobs. In spite of her illness, she never gave up cleaning. Her only concession to her GP’s insistence that she must not work herself so hard was to try to find additional employment that was less physically demanding than yet more cleaning positions. Her CV soon incorporated the tobacco kiosk in Ladbroke Grove, a newsagent’s in North Pole Road and Harry’s Café on Wormwood Scrubs.

  At Walmer Road she also took up ‘home work’ – painting and varnishing wooden figures to go on toy roundabouts. The pieces were delivered in large crates, which Linda and I would help to unpack. The extra money enabled Lily to rent a television, which took pride of place in our newly arranged living room alongside the Dansette.

  Walmer Road was about a mile away from Southam Street, on the other side of Ladbroke Grove, and some distance from the shops and stalls of Golborne Road and the Lane. We still, of course, had a pub nearby – more or less everyone in London had a pub nearby then. Ours was the Latimer Arms, which was almost opposite our house on the corner of Latimer Road. A few doors down was an abandoned shop which an ancient woman had somehow commandeered. For a few hours every morning she would sell milk there across a makeshift counter. There were no other groceries available, and indeed no heat or light – just crates of pint bottles of milk.

  Next to that was the newsagent’s, run by Mr and Mrs Maynard and, on the corner of our row of houses, at the junction with Oldham Street, a traditional grocer’s, Berriman’s. Mr Berriman was a kind, cheery middle-aged man, with light brown wavy hair, red cheeks and glasses which he wore in a scholarly way on the end of his nose. He always had an immaculate brown buttoned overall over his collar and tie.

  Berriman’s sold virtually every kind of grocery and household product, which he and his assistants would dispense to customers with a dexterity aimed at preventing queues. But there was always a queue at Berriman’s, particularly when I had to go with a list of things Lily wanted and the instruction to ask, once it was all packed and tallied, ‘Mum says is it OK to put it on her bill?’ I absolutely dreaded these moments. Irrespective of how often I had to do it, I always went red with embarrassment. I knew that Mr Berriman was being asked to provide groceries ‘on tick’ and that he would have to wait a long time before any of it was paid for – if it ever was.

  There must have been other shoppers making similar requests but I never saw them. The people in front of me in the queue always produced crisp one-pound and ten-bob notes, while those behind me, or so it seemed to me, stood watching in judgemental silence as I threw myself on Mr Berriman’s mercy. As far as I can recall, he never refused me.

  Leaving Southam Street as it slid towards extinction, putting behind me the dirty old derelict houses, with their peeling plaster, rotten window frames and cracked panes and the streets that crackled continuously with the undercurrent of danger, seemed like a landmark event even to a nine-year-old. And if conditions at Walmer Road were only marginally better, all things considered, we saw the move as a significant improvement in our circumstances. I had my own room and lived closer to my friend Tony Cox; Linda was nearer to Latimer Road tube station, from where she needed to travel to Hammersmith every day to catch the number 11 bus to Fulham County, and there was a greater sense of community built around Mr Berriman’s shop and the newsagent.

  Lily liked sharing her bed with Linda and they would talk well into the night. It was during these confidential woman-to-woman chats that Linda came to learn more about our family history. Lily’s unhappiness was compounded by her failure to track Steve down. He’d fled all of his old haunts in Notting Hill and we had no idea where his new ones were.

  With no prospect of Steve returning, she had decided she wanted a divorce. As an abandoned wife she was, in effect, neither wife nor single woman, and trapped in a bureaucratic limbo between the two. As a result I doubt she had much access to help through the benefits system. The ‘welfare state’, established after the war to tackle the five ‘giant evils’ – squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease – identified by William Beveridge in his influential report, had brought us the National Health Service, an expansion of National Insurance and the Family Allowance, among other reforms. But in the 1950s any benefit entitlements would have been administered through the head of the family – the husband – and based on his tax allowance and the ‘stamps’ he paid. A divorce would formalize Lily’s situation and lead to a court order for maintenance, but she couldn’t even begin that process without knowing where Steve was.

  Lily’s motives weren’t purely financial. She’d made up her mind that, at thirty-seven years of age, she was still young enough to start afresh with somebody else. Her other reason for finding him was one with which she annoyed me on a regular basis. ‘He’s still your father,’ she would say. ‘Whatever he’s done to me, a boy needs a dad.’ Given that neither Steve nor I had ever had the slightest interest in each other, this message was received with sullen resistance. I was managing perfectly well without a father and felt no ‘need’ for one at all. On the contrary, I’d been happy to see the back of him.

  After over a year without a word, or a penny, from Steve, Lily was at her wits’ end. She talked to Linda about borrowing money to pay a detective. Her health was deteriorating and she was due to go back into hospital for another lengthy stay, which meant there would be no money coming in at all.

  It was during this spell in hospital that Lily’s heart condition was at last accurately diagnosed and explained. She was suffering from mitral stenosis, which meant that the mitral valve, which separates the upper and lower chambers on the left side of the heart, wasn’t opening properly and the blood flow was being restricted. This causes the upper heart chamber to swell as the pressure builds up. Blood may flow backwards into the lungs, with fluid collecting in the lung tissue, making it hard to breathe. Lily was told that, in her case, the condition was in all probability a legacy of the rheumatic fever she had suffered as a girl. Though I, of course, knew nothing of this, the doctors must have made it clear to her then that she would not have long to live, particularly if she continued to drive herself so hard.

  At a point where her prospects couldn’t have seemed much bleaker, to Lily’s surprise and delight, she was given some real help from some qualified professionals.

  Chapter 7

  ONE DAY, ALONE in one of the comfortable bedrooms of the flat in Notting Hill where she cleaned for the trio of brothers, Lily was overwhelmed by sorrow and exhaustion. With everyone out and the door shut, she sat down on the edge of the bed and began to sob uncontrollably. Unbeknown to her, one of the three ‘young professionals’ – the journalist – had come home and heard her crying. Having coaxed her into telling him about Steve’s moonlight flit with Vera from the Lads of the Village, he asked Lily to give him the most recent photograph she had of her errant husband. He worked for a local newspaper in Kensington, he told her, and he was sure he would be able to track Steve down. For Lily, just being able to talk to somebody about her plight was a help. She didn’t think a
nything would actually come of this man’s generous offer.

  She was wrong. After various fruitless inquiries around the Town, our determined reporter rang The Lads of the Village and asked to speak to Vera. The landlord said she hadn’t worked there for a while and no, he hadn’t a clue where she’d gone. The journalist, assisted by his modulated, plausibly authoritative tones, commented that this was a shame, because he represented an insurance company and he was trying to find Vera because she had some money coming to her. They had found her workplace but the address they had for her was out of date. The amount was significant and it would be so unfair if they were unable to pay it out.

  The landlord made an excuse about needing to ask his wife and when he returned to the phone, he provided the address of a house in Dulwich. The journalist then went to the trouble of making the trip to south-east London with Steve’s photograph in his pocket and knocked on the door of the Dulwich address. The man who answered was Steve, all right. He gave a false name, but when he was confronted with the photograph and a press card, he was forced to admit that he was Stephen Arthur Johnson: pianist, painter and decorator, philanderer and absent father.

  Lily was overcome with gratitude. The journalist’s efforts had been more than she’d ever hoped for and thanks to him, she now knew where Steve and Vera were living. For Linda and me, Dulwich fell into the same category as Walthamstow: it was some far-off place about which we knew very little. Its only relevance to us was that it meant Steve was living a long way away and we didn’t have to worry any more about bumping into him on the streets of Notting Hill.

  The brothers’ kindness didn’t end there. Journalist brother spoke to solicitor brother and he offered to help Lily, pro bono, to secure a divorce. I’ve never seen the divorce papers (though years later, my Auntie Peggy told me that she had, and had been shocked and enraged by what she’d read) and so I have no idea how long it all took. Given that it was a straightforward case of desertion, I presume the divorce was granted more or less automatically. I have no recollection of Lily going to court: all I remember is that she was very pleased with the outcome. Steve was ordered to send her a postal order every week for £6 10s – £1 10s for her and £2 10s each for me and Linda. There were no custody or access issues: Steve never asked to see his children and his children certainly didn’t ask to see him. Lily had her decree nisi and we had some money from Steve – for a while.