This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  To begin with, at least, the postal order would be delivered every Friday through the letterbox of 6 Walmer Road and Lily built a little ritual around its arrival. Friday’s tea would be fish and chips from the shop in Latimer Road and I would be sent to Berriman’s to choose a cake in possession of the money to pay for it. Lily’s slate at the shop was in any case no longer the source of anxiety and embarrassment that it had been, for it was in the process of being wiped clean.

  When Linda had gone to the shop one day to get some sugar ‘on tick’, Mr Berriman had taken her to one side and told her that unfortunately he couldn’t allow any more credit until Lily’s bill was paid. My ever-resourceful and industrious sister asked if she could work off the debt by helping out in the shop. Mr Berriman agreed and thus it was that Linda started her first job aged twelve, working two evenings a week after school and at weekends, stacking shelves, cleaning and occasionally serving customers.

  Lily did her best with whatever food she could afford, but although she had many talents, cooking wasn’t one of them. She didn’t enjoy it, either, and given the inadequate facilities she had, who can blame her? At least the gas stove at Walmer Road was in the kitchen, and not on the landing like the one at Southam Street. The kitchen was also where we ate (our redesigned front room, with its Salvation Army three-piece suite, was reserved for visitors and special occasions, and certainly not to be used for eating), and where Linda and I did our homework, on a ‘desk’ created by placing a piece of hardboard across the armchair. In summer, Lily would have the sash window wide open, which allowed the bluebottles to circulate freely.

  Linda has always claimed to like burned toast. She may well have made a virtue of necessity. Since Lily didn’t so much cook as overcook, we were used to eating burned food and were in no position to be fussy. And for some strange reason she always used batter mix for pastry, so on the rare occasions when she had the time and energy to bake, we would have laid before us a kind of incinerated Yorkshire pudding with meat or apples in it.

  However, she couldn’t be faulted on her two specialities: bread pudding and roast potatoes (or ‘roasties’, as we called them). The bread pudding, made from stale bread donated by the people she cleaned for, might have been a little overdone but it was beautifully moist with a crunchy coating and we’d eat great slabs of it sprinkled with sugar. For the ‘roasties’, she put the potatoes straight into a pan of dripping without parboiling them first. They were nearly always perfect, miraculously escaping the fate of so many other elements of the Sunday roasts Lily tried to produce every week.

  When our finances didn’t stretch to such a feast, we’d have left-over potatoes and greens mashed together as bubble and squeak and cold Yorkshire pudding, smeared with jam, or our staple diet: bread and dripping. Potato fritters would be produced from a more conventional use of batter. We’d drink tea and, during our exotic phase when Steve was ponying up the maintenance payments, Camp coffee – ersatz, treacly black stuff from a bottle with a colourful label. In the bad times we’d be given a bowl of Oxo with bread floating in it, or have cornflakes for tea as well as breakfast.

  The few years from the end of 1959 until the early 1960s were the best of times for us. There was no more shouting, no violence, no arguments and Steve was at long last making a regular contribution to the household income without actually being there. Lily seemed much happier: she’d come to terms with losing Steve, and obtaining the divorce and securing the court order were major achievements. She was now receiving more money from him than she ever had when they were together. Though Steve’s exit had lifted a shadow from my life and Linda’s, Lily’s despair had cast another. Now that she was so much more cheerful the approach of a new decade seemed to herald a better life for all three of us.

  Lily had high hopes of Linda and me. She had been thrilled when Linda was accepted by the Fulham County Grammar School for Girls, even though she had to rely on welfare payments to acquire the school uniform with its neat little velour hat. Linda was focused and always knew where she was going: she had declared her intention to become a children’s nanny from a very early age.

  Lily expected me to follow in my sister’s footsteps by passing my Eleven-Plus. There were no inducements or repressive demands, just an unwavering awareness of her ambitions for me. Lily wanted me to become a draughtsman. She told me it was a skilled profession and, like Uncle Tottsy, I would go to work in a suit. To be a draughtsman I had to go to grammar school, and to get there I had to pass the exam.

  In the meantime she persuaded me to join the Cubs, where every week we’d chant our mantra – dyb, dyb, dyb, dob, dob dob. Do your best, do your best, do your best. Done our best, done our best, done our best. And I was doing my best, believe me.

  My incentive to pass the Eleven-Plus was twofold: to please Lily and to avoid the dreaded Isaac Newton Secondary Modern. In those days the type of education you received would be decided, and therefore your academic prospects more or less mapped out, at the age of eleven, when all children in their last year of state primary schools were tested and streamed for secondary education. Those who passed the Eleven-Plus – approximately 25 per cent of pupils, though this varied around the country – would be offered grammar school places, a more academic education, O-Levels and A-Levels and a springboard to better opportunities in the job market or for joining the tiny elite that went on to university. All the rest would go to a secondary modern, where the broader curriculum embraced practical skills (woodwork for the boys; cookery for the girls).

  This separation of sheep from goats seems ruthless now (though there are still some politicians who long for its return) but it was in fact introduced as one of a series of progressive educational reforms that emerged from the wartime coalition government. The 1944 Education Act (known as the Butler Act after the Conservative president of the Board of Education, ‘Rab’ Butler) was also responsible for free and universal education, raising the school leaving age from fourteen to fifteen and the provision of free milk for schoolchildren. As part of the new tripartite education system, it enshrined a commitment to establishing technical schools alongside the grammars and secondary moderns. These, however, failed to materialize on the scale envisaged.

  The teachers at Bevington Road Primary School seemed just as aspirational for their charges as Lily was for Linda and me, none more so than the school’s motivated and motivational headmaster, Mr Gemmill. I’m not sure whether Lily and Mr Gemmill ever met. Parental involvement seemed to be minimal then, and I don’t remember there being such things as parents’ evenings where the children’s progress was discussed. We would simply bring home our school reports (or not bring them home, in the case of some of my classmates, who’d boast in the playground about how they’d destroyed them) at the end of each term and that was the extent of the contact. Lily was generally pleased with my reports, which she studied closely before storing them, in date order, in a cardboard suitcase that had once contained a hamper from the Christmas club.

  Mr Gemmill was a hands-on headmaster, interrupting our lessons at random in order to dispense slices of his cracker-barrel philosophy. Thanks to him, I never began a sentence with ‘and’. Nor did I ever put ‘i’ before ‘e’, except after ‘c’. I knew better than to pronounce the letter ‘h’ as ‘haitch’, or to expect thirty-one days in September, April, June or November. At school assemblies, Mr Gemmill would tell us about the discovery of the planet Pluto a few decades before and how, one day, man would colonize the moon. Before school holidays, he’d recommend radio programmes to listen to in order to improve our minds.

  Unfortunately, it was also thanks to Mr Gemmill that I acquired a lifelong fear of water. When I was eight he decided to take all the boys in my year to Lancaster Road swimming baths to teach us to swim. His method was simple. He would stand like Neptune, up to his chest in the water, his arms outstretched, and beseech us to jump in one at a time. He boomed reassuringly that we had nothing to be afraid of because he would catch us. The first barrie
r to learning to swim, he said, was fear of the water, and he was there to help us overcome it.

  Soon it was my turn to throw myself in the general direction of Mr Gemmill’s hairy torso. We failed to connect and my journey to the bottom of the pool is one I still relive every time I get a whiff of chlorine. After what seemed like an eternity, though it must only have been a few seconds, Mr Gemmill’s huge hands located me and I was pulled to the surface to be restored to dry land. There was no sympathy for my near-death experience but I was never taken swimming again, and that suited me fine.

  Swimming apart, at Bevington school I was, if I say so myself, a model pupil, ending up as a prefect and an official dinner monitor. As a prefect I was required to stand on the landings at break time and when the classes finished for the day to prevent fellow pupils from running down the stairs too quickly. At dinner time the dinner monitors would be responsible for clearing up the dirty plates collected by the table monitors.

  My general good behaviour and these responsibilities were not enough to spare me from Mr Hayes’ enthusiasm for the cane. I wish I could remember what he caned me for, but I struggle to come up with a single significant transgression. I do recall a minor incident one dinner time, when I was collecting the plates from the table where my first true love, Linda Kirby, was table monitor. I loved Linda so much that I befriended her unctuous brother, Russell, even though he was in the year below me, in an attempt to weave my way into her affections. It failed. Linda Kirby was totally indifferent to my good looks and natural charm. My cause wasn’t helped when on this occasion I took the plates she had piled up and handed to me and, in response to some light-hearted banter, playfully brushed her cheek with my hand. Unfortunately, I hadn’t noticed that on the edge of one of the plates was a mound of mashed potato into which I had inadvertently stuck my thumb. The sight of Linda glaring at me as the whole table laughed at the huge blob of half-eaten mash I’d accidentally transferred to her nose has haunted me ever since.

  Showing off to girls might well have had something to do with me falling victim to the attentions of Mr Hayes. It certainly didn’t take much effort to get yourself caned. Some of my schoolfriends endured it on an almost daily basis. We all feigned nonchalance but in truth it was a petrifying experience.

  ‘Who can tell me which record is at Number One in the Top Twenty?’ Miss Woofendon asked. She was our music teacher but this was the first time she had ever remotely touched on the kind of music I was passionate about. I imagine that if you asked that question of a class of ten-year-olds today, plenty of hands would go up. Even more would have done in the golden years of the 45rpm disc from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s. But this was January 1961, pop music was in its infancy and youth culture had yet to spread to primary-school pupils.

  I was still a painfully shy boy and blushed profusely if ever I found myself the centre of attention. But I knew the answer and nobody else did. My hand went up. ‘“Poetry in Motion” by Johnny Tillotson,’ I announced confidently. If Miss Woofendon had asked for the rest of the Top Twenty, I could have reeled those off for her and I’d have had a fair stab at naming the ‘B’ sides as well.

  By this time, Steve’s regular postal orders had enabled Linda and me to add to the collection of shellac 78rpm relics that he had left behind. I remember the excitement of the Saturday morning trip we made to the Lane to buy our first two records. After much deliberation, we plumped for ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be’ by Max Bygraves and ‘Theme From a Summer Place’ by the Percy Faith Orchestra. Not the most tasteful choices, I concede, but back then people of all ages bought singles and the charts reflected this diversity.

  With our new-found affluence – supplemented by some of the money Linda began to earn from other jobs she took on in addition to the Berriman’s debt repayment plan – we purchased records by Emile Ford and the Checkmates, Jimmy Jones and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. We kept them pristine, each in their paper sleeve, and they would be catalogued before being stored in an old shoe box. When we couldn’t afford the original we’d go to Woolworth’s in the Portobello Road to buy cover versions released on their own Embassy label. A record then cost about 7/6d (37½p) whereas the Embassy cover would only be about five bob (25p).

  Lily indulged our passion for music as far as she could. She entered Linda for a competition which resulted in her winning tickets to see Cliff Richard and the Shadows at the London Palladium in 1958. The same year she took me to the Chiswick Empire, where my hero Lonnie Donegan was appearing in pantomime along with the top-of-the-bill singer Joan Regan. She displayed a patient appreciation of our efforts to replicate The Marcels’ version of ‘Blue Moon’ as we walked back to Walmer Road after picking Linda up from Girl Guides on a Wednesday evening.

  I’d been writing my own songs since I was six or seven. I was too shy to sing them to anyone other than Lily and Linda (I found even that something of a challenge). So they’d be subjected to ‘When the Wagons Keep on Rolling’ or my rock classic ‘Fed Up’ (‘We had a date/You were late/And when I tried to kiss you/Baby you hesitate/Well I’m fed up – ooooh’). As always, Lily would offer encouragement though the closest she got to liking pop music was a penchant for the Bachelors (known then as the Harmonichords – they changed their name in 1962) and Elvis singing ‘Old Shep’.

  Seeing how besotted I was with the Top Twenty, one Christmas she bought me a tiny crystal radio set so that I could listen to music on my own in my room. It had a metal clasp and a string aerial that led me into the Promised Land of Radio Luxembourg, with its three or four hours of pop music every evening, preceded by Horace Batchelor advertising his ‘Infra-Draw’ system for winning the pools and the American evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong, who would preach in a thunderous voice throughout his programme The World Tomorrow. Armstrong’s message, shouted in capital letters, had to be endured in order to get to the music, which thrilled me, despite the snap, crackle and pop of the continuous static.

  Steve’s piano had come with us to Walmer Road and Linda used a screwdriver to break the lock and open it. Either Steve had taken the key with him, or he’d hidden it amazingly well, because we never managed to find it. Although I now had access to the ‘joanna’, the only instrument I wanted to play was the guitar. Happily, the Spanish one Lily had bought me, like the Dansette record-player, had continued to survive the process of down-payment followed by repossession that befell most of the purchases Lily had made with her pools winnings.

  I acquired Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day instruction manual, first published in 1957 and still going strong today, which is renowned for inspiring so many apprentice guitarists in the 1950s and 1960s. I should have lodged a complaint under the Trades Descriptions Act because it was ages before I began to master even the basics. Sitting alone in my room at 6 Walmer Road, with no heat and a bucket of urine in the corner, I tried my best to imagine I was in the Deep South with Lonnie and his Dixie Darling, fighting the Battle of New Orleans.

  But I got there, and by the time I was able to answer Miss Woofendon’s question, I already considered myself to be a singer-songwriter. And I knew in my heart I would never be a draughtsman.

  Chapter 8

  IT WAS BETWEEN the ages of eight and eleven that the three great passions of my life – music, books and football – began to impose their grip on me. Although Steve was no longer around to influence me, I need to acknowledge the important role he played in sowing the seeds of all three of them.

  A little of his musical talent passed through the Johnson genes to Linda and me. Lacking his instinctive genius, I could never play by ear so I needed Mr Weedon’s help. But I would do the kinds of things I can imagine Steve doing had he decided to take up the guitar rather than the piano: retuning the strings so that I could more easily shape major chords, for example. While that instilled habits I’d have to unlearn eventually, my long periods alone with the guitar, finding out for myself the joys of composition and chord progression, might well have echoed Steve’s approach a
t my age as he taught himself to play the piano.

  As for football in general and Queens Park Rangers in particular, Steve was a Rangers fan. That was hardly remarkable because everyone in Notting Hill seemed to be a Rangers fan. With nothing like the huge media coverage of football that exists today, most boys supported their local team. And for us that meant the club right on our doorstep: I knew of no Chelsea, Fulham or Brentford fans on our manor, even though all three clubs were within easy reach.

  As Brentford, like Rangers, were firmly entrenched in the Third Division, they were our main West London rivals. Fulham spent most of the 1950s in Division 2 and Chelsea, a seemingly permanent fixture in the top flight, were literally out of our league. The Rs, though, had tasted success – just the once. In the 1947–48 season QPR had been champions of Division 3 (South) and for the first and, at that point, only time in their existence they had been promoted to the Second Division.

  Every football league team used to produce a handbook at the end of each season recording their results, goalscorers and so on. There were photographs and profiles of the players, lots of information on the reserve and youth teams and a little potted history of the club, updated every year.

  Steve had the QPR handbook for that gilded 1947–48 promotion season. It was small and stubby, with the photographs printed on shiny paper that felt more expensive than it probably was. It had lost its cover and been knocked about a bit by the time he passed it on to me, but passed on to me it was.