This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  He never actually took me to a match, but to be fair, I’m not sure that he ever went himself. We never talked about football, not even about that glorious pinnacle of success (QPR were back in the Third Division by 1952), but no matter. This precious record had been passed from father to son and I treasured it. I read and re-read everything that had been written about the manager, Dave Mangnall; about the only QPR player ever to have won an international cap, that season’s skipper Ivor Powell, who played for Wales; and about our magnificent goalkeeper, Reg Allen, who had moved to Manchester United in 1950 for £11,000 – a record transfer fee for a goalkeeper.

  I pestered Lily constantly to let me go to see Rangers play at Loftus Road, which was not far from Hammersmith Hospital in Du Cane Road, where she was spending an increasing amount of time. In the end she gave me the few shillings I needed for admission and a programme. I would be going with Tony Cox and Lily was content that his dad, the ever-reliable Albert, would be there to keep an eye on us.

  It was the 1959–60 season and we were playing Bournemouth and Boscombe Athletic. Like a camera, I stored away my first images of a real football ground, its open green space marooned in a sea of concrete like a small coral island. I soaked up the atmosphere of excitement and expectation, the smell of hot dogs, Bovril and tobacco smoke. Bournemouth were led on to the pitch by their mascot, a man dressed entirely in red and white and known as the Candyman. But he couldn’t hope to compete with the blue and white hooped shirts of the Rangers’ players.

  Lily needn’t have worried about any crowd trouble. There was hardly a crowd worth speaking of. Albert Cox stood sentry at the spot he occupied for every home game: leaning on a crush barrier at the Loftus Road end, about thirty steps up the terrace from the pitch. Pat had provided him with a flask of tea and a couple of rounds of sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper.

  Tony and I were free to go anywhere we liked. We settled for standing at the front, behind the wall that separated the terraces from the pitch, and running up the steps every so often to take a swig of tea from Albert’s flask. Watching the QPR heroes and especially their new signing, the prolific goalscorer Brian Bedford – I tumbled immediately into the grip of an allegiance from which I will never escape. It must have helped that Rangers won 3–0.

  From then on I went to Loftus Road as often as I could to marvel at the exploits of Bedford, Tony Ingham, Jim Towers and the rest. Steve’s gift of that tatty handbook is where that allegiance began.

  As for books, Steve’s influence is, admittedly, more tenuous. It was Lily, so cruelly deprived of the scholarship she coveted, who had read widely as a young girl; Lily who had signed us up at the library in Ladbroke Grove before we could even read ourselves. But I struggle now to remember the books I borrowed, or to recall Lily ever having the leisure to sit down and read as an adult. The truth is that Lily, Linda and I became less assiduous about making the trek to the library as time went on and the routine of borrowing, reading, returning and collecting the next book lapsed into long periods when our library tickets lay dormant.

  To actually possess your own books was different. Being able to pick them up and dip into them or re-read them whenever you liked lifted the pleasure of reading on to another plane. No wonder I was so in awe of the treasures in Mr Cox’s glass-fronted bookcase. And it was through Steve that we began to acquire our own books. Those Cobden Club gifts – Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer, Little Women and my Boy’s Own annual – formed a tiny library which would never have existed if he hadn’t taken us to those Christmas parties.

  It was expanded by two books that followed them into the house, again as presents, I think. One was an Enid Blyton ‘Famous Five’ story. I can’t recall which; what I do remember is the wonderful escapism of immersing myself in the adventures of those children: the delicious-sounding things they ate and how happy their lives were. When the good times gave way to the dark days of the 1960s, I would lie on my bed covered in coats, cold and hungry, drooling over the sausages, pies and cakes and lemonade scoffed by the children of Blyton-land. Their school summer holidays seemed endless, and each day as warm and cloudless as the one before. Well-fed contentment oozed off the page and provided me with genuine comfort for an hour or two every evening.

  But it was the other book that, more than any other, instilled my love of reading: Shane by Jack Schaefer, a slim Western that I first read when I was nine and to which I returned at least twice a year until I was able to add further to my library.

  It’s a simple story of good and evil, set in nineteenth-century Wyoming and told through a boy of about my age then, Bob Starrett, who lives on his parents’ ranch. Shane is a former gunslinger trying to escape his violent past who is hired as a ranch hand and eventually has to return to his fighting ways in order to protect the Starrett family from the powerful landowner trying to drive them from their homestead.

  The book had a profound effect on me. I wanted to be like Shane, to be admired like Shane, to carry an air of mystery like Shane and to impress gullible kids, as Shane had impressed Bob Starrett (and me). The 1950s was the era of the Western, which dominated both the cinema and imported television drama; a time when Gun Law, Wagon Train and Rawhide created stars like James Arness, Robert Horton and a very young Clint Eastwood; when Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger and the Cisco Kid held us in thrall for half an hour most evenings, once Lily eventually managed to rent a telly as well as a wireless from Radio Rentals. (It was, incidentally, The Lone Ranger, which used the thrilling William Tell overture as its theme tune, that introduced me to classical music.) But Shane, created by Schaefer in 1949, was different from them all. He was darker, more textured; an anti-hero unsuited to the clean-cut innocence of 1950s television.

  Music, books, Queens Park Rangers. We had a telly at last, 45rpm discs for our record-player, an embryonic library and I had a guitar. So Steve had played his part in making my life more fulfilling and was now sending money on a fairly regular basis. Credit where credit’s due.

  My enthusiasm for the Cubs didn’t last and I hung up my woggle well before the age that a Cub was meant to mature into a Scout. I’d learned to light a match (although I persisted in striking it towards me rather than away from me, as Baden-Powell advised), to use a public telephone and to chop wood. I played in goal for the Cubs football team and Lily would come to watch our games at Wormwood Scrubs and Hyde Park. My role model was Ray Drinkwater, the QPR goalkeeper, and I was never happier than when I trooped home covered in mud at the end of a match.

  But I lost interest in the kind of organized fun offered by Akela and her colleagues, preferring the disorganized fun to be had with Tony Cox (for whom the Cubs had never held the slightest allure) and our band of brothers – and one sister, Carol Smith, the archetypal tomboy.

  Because of her friendship with Pat Cox, Lily now had fewer qualms about me going out on to the mean streets of Notting Hill, away from her protective gaze, whenever Tony knocked for me. We would play football, either in St Marks Park, where we set up a five-a-side mini-league, or thundering around a disused car park on Bramley Road, or cricket, usually on the wickets to be found painted on the walls of so many of our streets, bowling from one pavement across the road to the one opposite, where the batsman would stand. Occasionally our game would be rudely interrupted by a passing car or van but not often: there still weren’t many cars around, even as the 1960s approached.

  We knew our own streets in London W10 so well that sometimes we liked to wander further afield to the sunlit uplands of W11, where we knew no one and no one knew us. Holland Park, at the far end of Portobello Road, was unlike anything we had in the Town. It seemed to me more exotic even than Kensington Gardens. For a start, it had peacocks, which strutted around as if they owned the place. It had statues and water features, tennis courts and a Japanese garden. Best of all, it had wild woodland and something called an adventure playground that looked like a film set for a Western: logs positioned deliberately for hiding behind, rickety bridges across a rea
l stream and shrubs and bushes everywhere.

  Strangely, whenever we went there after school, there would be no other children around. We could swing and climb and jump and roll for hours in this outpost of our little empire as if it were our own private fiefdom. Holland Park produced conkers on an industrial scale and Carol Smith, who could beat most boys at most things, was always particularly keen to stock up for the season.

  At the other extreme, geographically, culturally and aesthetically, was Wormwood Scrubs. There were very few trees on the Scrubs and certainly no peacocks. Just flat, barren land used for football pitches at weekends and overshadowed by the dark, hulking mass of Her Majesty’s prison on the far side. This was London W12 at its most desolate, and it stretched for what seemed like miles. When Lily worked on the White City side, at Harry’s Café, cooking eggs and bacon for the truck drivers heading up to the North Circular or down to Shepherd’s Bush, I’d go to meet her there sometimes and wonder what it must be like to be lost on the Scrubs after dark.

  Tony Cox persuaded me to find out. He’d heard there was a derelict army camp way over towards the prison and talked us into going to investigate it. A tenuous grasp of history was only to be expected in a bunch of ten-year-olds, but even that doesn’t fully explain why we were convinced that the camp had been run by the Japanese and that they had baked British soldiers in the ovens. But apparently that was the word on the street. This alternative Famous Five – Tony, Dereck Tapper, Walter Curtis, Carol Smith and me – set off in the late afternoon of a winter’s day.

  By the time we reached our destination the prison walls were still visible in the gathering gloom. Tony had brought the front lamp off his bike to use as a torch. The site had indeed been an army camp of some description. There were turrets and concrete bunkers overgrown with grass and weeds. We played a few half-hearted war games, pretending to be soldiers, but as the prison walls faded into the descending darkness, all we really wanted to do was to lay down our arms and head for home. Tony, our leader, was scathing. What was the point of coming all the way out here if we didn’t go down into what looked like a concrete subway and find the ovens in which our brave boys had been incinerated?

  We stood nervously contemplating the slope leading down to what had once been a tunnel but was now open to the sky. It contained a complex array of walls and alleys that looked as if they had been the living quarters. Tony switched on his lamp and pointed the way. The rest of us followed meekly, staying very close together. When we reached the bottom, Tony moved the beam of his bike lamp around to properly illuminate what we’d already discerned by the light of the moon: there was a row of three or four openings that looked very much like ovens.

  I froze but Carol insisted on poking about inside these large metal canisters, searching for bits of charred remains – a bone or a tooth that might have survived the flames. Convinced that we were the first to make this discovery, we vowed to ensure that it remained our secret. This was fine by me, particularly as Lily would have been extremely cross if she’d found out where I’d been. We returned to the ‘death camp’ once or twice more in daylight but it was always deserted and the only people who might have been aware of our investigations were a few dog walkers and any lost souls peering out of the tiny, barred cell windows above the walls of HMP Wormwood Scrubs.

  The camaraderie I shared with Tony and our mates was the nearest I got to Blyton-land during my time at primary school and its days were already numbered. The band of Bevington brothers (and one sister) would be scattered once we followed our own paths through the secondary education system and my close friendship with Tony did not survive puberty.

  I passed my Eleven-Plus. Given how momentous the exam was, I wish I could recall even one of the questions. I do remember the day of the exam itself, with Mr Gemmill in attendance and my final year teacher, Mrs Leadsford, supervising. Tall, slim and very attractive, she’d been an enormous help in those all-important last twelve months. When the results arrived, Lily was ecstatic, although I don’t think she ever really doubted that I’d succeed.

  Dereck Tapper also passed the Eleven-Plus, becoming the first black child at our school to do so. He must also have been one of the first to take it. Given the hardships he must have endured, it was a remarkable achievement.

  Carol Smith failed. Walter Curtis was in the year below us so had a year to wait for his ordeal; he, too, would fail. The big surprise was Tony, my resolutely unstudious friend. I think he would actually have preferred to have gone to Sir Isaac Newton Secondary Modern, along with the majority of the boys in our year at Bevington, but instead he found himself destined for grammar school. A few others also passed, including a boy named Peter Hayward, whose parents declined the opportunity of a grammar-school place because they couldn’t afford the uniform. Peter wore glasses and I remember feeling really sorry for him because I knew he’d be bullied as a ‘four eyes’ at Isaac Newton. Lily couldn’t afford the uniform, either, but she would never have contemplated for a second not sending me to a grammar school.

  On that single day, the day of the exam, Tony Cox did well. Others in my year who were bright enough and worked much harder happened to do badly. Yet our performances on that day alone would largely determine our futures. The arbitrary nature of this test, and the traumatic effect of its importance on the lives of small children, was already the subject of fierce political debate.

  There was, in fact, already another alternative: a new type of secondary school had just opened in Holland Park which was neither a grammar nor a secondary modern. Ironically, for some of the well-heeled parents at the other end of the Portobello Road, it would have been de rigueur to send their Eleven-Plus successes to this innovative ‘comprehensive’ school, which was open to all children, whether or not they had passed the exam. But for working-class Lily, there was no point in passing the Eleven-Plus if it didn’t lead to a grammar-school place, which she saw as her children’s escape route from the kind of life to which she’d been condemned. Ironically, Holland Park Comprehensive was to become a hugely successful and fashionable school, and even at that early stage the kids who went there were more likely to be mixing with the offspring of diplomats and politicians than the Bevington Road Primary School diaspora.

  So Lily and I set out to find a grammar school that would take me. The nearest was St Clement Danes in Du Cane Road, but they didn’t even call me in for interview. Our next choice was Sir Walter St John’s in Battersea. They at least granted me an audience, which Lily attended with me. This consisted of the pompous, begowned head teacher putting a coin on one end of a ruler, balancing it across his fingers and asking me a question about the weight needed to counterbalance it, or some such nonsense. I was nervous enough being interviewed; having to subject myself to more tests struck me as perverse. I gave the wrong answer and was rejected. It began to dawn on Lily and me that passing the Eleven-Plus might have been the easy part. These head teachers were sizing me up to see if I was good enough for their schools and I was not, it seemed, coming up to scratch.

  Sloane school was our last roll of the dice. There were no other grammar schools within reasonable travelling distance. As it was, Sloane was a forty-minute tube and bus ride away in Chelsea, well beyond my stamping ground. It had five hundred boys and a famous headmaster, Guy Boas, who’d been in situ for thirty years and was known nationally for his schoolboy Shakespearean productions during the 1950s. When Lily and I arrived there seemed to be hundreds of boys sitting in the school hall, all waiting to be interviewed by two teachers stationed at desks on the stage.

  Guy Boas wasn’t there but his avuncular deputy, Mr Bailey, was and it was he who beckoned me towards him for a five-minute discussion from which Lily was, to her chagrin, excluded. I reassured her that the interview had gone well. At any rate, there had been no silly tests and no trick questions, as far as I could tell. A few days later, I was offered a place, as were Tony Cox and Dereck Tapper.

  As well as free school meals, I qualified for a free
tube and bus pass because I lived more than three miles from the school. Lily was able to purchase a second-hand uniform, which included a belted navy blue mac I never wore and a cap which I’m proud to say never went anywhere near my head. The ‘Social’ provided shoes, but there were still books to buy and ‘amenity fees’ to find, which meant Lily taking on still more cleaning jobs, in spite of the doctors’ warnings.

  Why had Sloane taken me when two other schools hadn’t? Perhaps it was less discerning than the others; maybe there was some kind of ‘baby boomer’ drought in London SW3, or more wealthy families than in other boroughs who eschewed the state system altogether and sent their offspring to public schools.

  Whatever the reason, on 5 September 1961, Tony Cox and Dereck Tapper and I set off, on separate routes from our respective homes, to begin our grammar-school education in the unfamiliar environs of the King’s Road, Chelsea.

  Chapter 9

  I WAS DEEPLY unhappy at Sloane Grammar School. I hated the journey, the teachers, the lessons. I had few friends. Tony Cox was in a different form and in any case I’d grown less fond of wandering the streets with him in the evenings, preferring solitary confinement with my guitar, my burgeoning collection of second-hand Matchbox cars – which could be had for a few pence down the Lane – a book or Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly. Dereck Tapper was in my class but, like me, he seemed to have become more introverted in the scholarly environment of ‘the Sloane’, as it was known. We’d be subjected to dense and wordy lectures every morning at assembly by the gowned and mortar-boarded Guy Boas who, in our first year, was seeing out the final months of his distinguished career.