This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  We ‘one-ers’ would be placed in the gallery, looking down at the imposing figure of our headmaster, holding centre stage, leaning on his walking stick and regaling us with his reflections on over thirty years at the school. The only plus point was that assembly would overrun and eat into the timetable of, typically, double maths, French and Latin.

  Guy Boas was succeeded by Dr Henry, a small, thin man with sharp, pointed features and wire-framed glasses which encouraged our depiction of him as the Camp Commandant. Our form master was a young Welsh geography teacher, Mr Woosnam, who collected the dinner money every Monday morning by calling each boy’s name and waiting for them to approach his desk with the required cash. Every week he’d call ‘Johnson’ and I’d be forced to respond by shouting, ‘Free, sir.’ It was an embarrassment akin to asking Mr Berriman to put Lily’s groceries ‘on tick’ in front of a shop full of customers.

  Unlike me, Dereck was a PE star. Also in our class was the nascent footballer Malcolm Macdonald, who went on to play for Fulham, Newcastle United, Arsenal and England, and the two of them developed a fierce rivalry in our well-equipped gym (we had wall bars, a trampoline and ropes which we were required to climb at the end of every PE lesson). Malcolm lived in Fulham, between Bishop’s Park and Craven Cottage. It goes without saying that he was an exceptional footballer but he also excelled at cricket and athletics, and carried off the prize in every event he entered at our annual sports day at Hurlingham Stadium. But Dereck matched him as a gymnast – if such a term can be applied to the practitioners of the PE we were forced to endure every week.

  At breaks I would avoid the playground, preferring to go to the geography classroom where Mr Woosnam or one of his colleagues would show reel-to-reel film documentaries about Africa or India, or the Monte Carlo Rally. Or I’d go to the excellent library where, on my first visit, I had picked up a paperback and borrowed it on the strength of the cover. Damsel in Distress by P.G. Wodehouse launched a lifelong love affair with the work of the great man.

  There were other cultural pursuits. The music teacher recruited me to the school choir, in which I sang Verdi and Bizet’s Carmen for a school production. There was also a film club that showed proper movies one evening each month. I had no interest in this until I noticed that the film to be shown in November was Shane, starring Alan Ladd (yes, him again). I was thrilled by the prospect of seeing the book I knew practically by heart brought to the big screen (or to be accurate, the flimsy, portable screen, stretched to its full height of about ten feet in the school hall). I decided to pay my tuppence and go.

  I know this may sound like hyperbole, but that evening was one of the biggest disappointments of my life. Shane’s appearance in the first pages of the book is a moment of dark foreboding. He wears dark clothes, a black silk handkerchief knotted loosely around his throat and a plain black hat with ‘a wide curling brim swept down in front to shield the face’. As Bob, the young boy watching his approach, records: ‘The eyes were endlessly searching from side to side and forward, checking off every item in view, missing nothing. As I noticed this, a sudden chill… struck through me there in the warm and open sun.’

  As I took a seat in the front row of the school hall, I was anticipating this dramatic opening and all that would follow as if I were Bob Starrett sitting on the upper rail of his father’s corral in Wyoming. The film kept to the sequence of the book, beginning with Bob watching Shane’s approach – but the man who came into view wasn’t dressed in dark clothes with a black hat, riding a black horse. He was a diminutive, blond man with a white hat on a grey horse. He was dressed in bright colours and seemed to have a cheery disposition. Paramount Pictures had turned my Shane into Roy Rogers.

  While Lily had pulled herself out of the depths of despair, she remained in the shallows: sad, regretful and, above all, lonely. As she cooked dinner on Sundays the Bakelite switch on the radio would be set to number 1, the Light Programme, for Two-Way Family Favourites – as much a part of Sunday dinner in my memory as the smell of roast lamb. The successor to the wartime Forces Favourites, the programme played records requested by soldiers stationed overseas for their loved ones at home, and vice versa. When that week’s ‘bumper bundle’ (the most-requested record) was one of her own favourites – ‘True Love’ by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, for instance – she would leave the vegetables boiling to a mush and sit down in the little kitchen armchair, dabbing her eyes with a tea towel. Lily liked Bing and adored Grace Kelly. She’d light one of her razor-cut cigarettes and gaze up to the ceiling singing softly, ‘For you and I have a guardian angel/On high, with nothing to do/But to give to you and to give to me/Love for ever true.’

  Not so much a lone parent as a lonely one; still young, still pretty, still hoping that someone other than Bing and Grace would bring true love into her life.

  The mother–daughter relationship between Lily and Linda was by this time beginning to reverse: Lily was becoming dependent on Linda rather than the other way round. At night, I’d hear them talking in the bedroom next to mine. Linda’s sacrifice of her own room had had the desired effect and there were now more conversations than tears emanating from the big double bed. They talked of the past, of Lily’s childhood, of her hopes and dreams, of her illness, and of how she might meet a man who would care for her.

  Lily’s ‘three young professionals’ had suggested that she look through the ads in the lonely hearts section of the local paper. Linda sanctioned this idea and eventually I was told that a man called Henry would be visiting us one weekday evening. A plan of action was devised. He was to be shepherded straight into the front room, with its small television set, the Dansette, Steve’s honky-tonk piano and the Salvation Army three-piece suite. On no account was he to see the less salubrious kitchen-cum-dining room-cum-study at the back. I was to be home from school, reasonably clean and presentable, to meet Lily’s ‘friend’.

  Unbeknown to me, she’d answered an advertisement from Henry and met him one evening the previous week in a pub. The first date had gone well. Lily liked him but it was essential to her that we did, too. I made it obvious that I was unhappy about this disruption. Leaving aside my acute shyness, the thought of having to try to impress a strange man who may one day take Steve’s former role in our lives filled me with dread.

  Linda, who’d been in on this from the start, chivvied and nagged me. This was Lily’s chance of happiness after the dreadful time we’d all had with Steve. She knew that my disapproval would be fatal for Henry’s prospects. But she was the extrovert, mature way beyond her years and in absolute empathy with her mother. It was easier for her, I thought in my childish, resentful way. I liked things the way they were and couldn’t understand why Lily didn’t feel the same. But I subdued my protests and followed Linda’s strict instructions to be on my best behaviour.

  So there we were, on parade, clean and smiley, like two children from the Von Trapp family in The Sound of Music, when Henry knocked on the door. Lily behaved like a nervous schoolgirl. She spoke in the pseudo-posh accent she reserved for special occasions, fussing and clucking round the small, balding, rotund, middle-aged man who stood in our hallway clutching a bunch of daffodils. His thinning hair had been arranged carefully to cover his bald patch. When he spoke it was in an accent that belonged in South rather than North Kensington. This was proper posh – as refined and crystal-clear as Guy Boas’s tones at Sloane school assembly every morning.

  Henry was ushered into the front room, where the sight of the piano sent him into spasms of joy. Since Linda’s intervention with the screwdriver, it had been accessible to all and Henry asked for a chair to be brought in so that he could ‘tickle the ivories’.

  And he could play. Not the stuff that Steve played to order, such as ‘Heart of My Hearts’, ‘On Moonlight Bay’, and ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’. Henry played hymns and sang in an uninhibited, impeccably phrased tenor voice. He asked if Linda and I could sing and insisted that we perform, red-faced with embarrassment, in fr
ont of him. I was red-faced, at any rate – Linda didn’t do blushing.

  We fetched a copy of the Record Song Book, which published pop lyrics on cheap paper every month for 3d, and sang ‘Take Good Care of My Baby’ a cappella (Henry obviously hadn’t heard of Goffin and King and didn’t have Steve’s ability to play by ear). There followed Henry’s stirring rendition of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, which we joined in while Lily fluttered between the front room and the kitchen with tea and biscuits. Henry told us he was a music teacher and asked me to sing to his accompaniment. He said I had a lovely voice and was obviously very musical. He would recommend me to the choir at Westminster Cathedral, where he worshipped.

  I did have rather a sweet voice (before it broke) but I wasn’t a Catholic. At that age I didn’t have the first idea that Westminster Cathedral was the country’s leading Catholic church or that it mattered, but Lily, of course, was well aware of the implications. Although she was pleased by Henry’s appreciation of her children, it may well have been her very polarized view of religion, stemming from her Liverpudlian upbringing, that did for poor Henry.

  His visit had been truly memorable, like someone dropping in from another planet. There was nothing to dislike about him, his jollity and enthusiasm were infectious, the worst I’d had to suffer was a mild dose of embarrassment and I’d been flattered and pleasantly surprised. And yet, as the door closed behind him, Lily had already made her decision. She announced with some solemnity that though he seemed a nice man, they had nothing in common. She had his address and would write him a nice letter thanking him for his kindness but saying she didn’t think they were suited to one another. Nevertheless, she was glad she’d taken her employers’ advice and answered that lonely hearts ad. Next time, she would place her own advertisement and she promised that Linda could help her to sift through the replies and choose another candidate.

  By 1961, Linda herself was ready to become involved in the dating game. She was fourteen, but looked eighteen; more significantly, as a result of the adult responsibilities she had taken on she was mature far beyond her years on every level. Having toiled away at Berriman’s until she had paid off Lily’s slate, she was now working there one evening a week and on a Sunday for wages. She also had a Saturday job at Woolworth’s and a job in a chemist’s two evenings a week after school. During Lily’s frequent stays in hospital, it was Linda who took care of us and dealt with officialdom. Having opened letters from the likes of the Provident, the Prudential and the Electricity Board to discover other debts, she was now working to try to clear those as well.

  Linda had taken to frequenting a youth club in Sutton Dwellings where, years before, she’d discovered Steve and Elsie in flagrante. Lily allowed her one night out a week but she wangled a second by persuading me to join a boxing school there so that she could go again on the pretext of escorting me to and from my boxing sessions.

  The boxing was short-lived but Linda managed to retain her second night out. She would spend ages getting ready, backcombing and lacquering her hair into the required beehive. Her clothes, like mine, had always come ‘off the barrow’, the second-hand stalls in Portobello market, but now she was managing to set aside some of her wages to buy the occasional new item for herself. Her liberty bodice had long been replaced by a bra and life at 6 Walmer Road had become more fraught for me, with two women constantly screaming for me not to come in as I opened the back-room door. One or other of them would invariably be engaged in some feminine ritual such as a strip wash, the purpose of which I failed to appreciate.

  One day, Linda came home from school and announced that she’d been asked out on a date. An Italian man named Antonio had approached her on her tube journey between Hammersmith and Latimer Road, told her how lovely she looked, given her his address and asked if he could take her out. The news exploded in our little back room like a hand grenade. The interrogation swiftly followed. How old was Antonio? He’d told Linda he was twenty-four or twenty-five. Couldn’t he see by her uniform that Linda was a schoolgirl? Lily wanted to know. What kind of depravity motivated a twenty-five-year-old man to chase after schoolgirls? Linda wasn’t old enough yet to go out with any boy, let alone a man of his age. Linda protested that he was a young student living alone in a room at the other end of Walmer Road. He was tall, handsome, courteous and respectful – a real man.

  As she always did when she was angry, Lily lapsed into Scouse. ‘Youse wouldn’t know a man from a shirt button!’ she yelled. Her daughter, by contrast, was controlled and determined. She knew that the extra responsibility she’d shouldered gave her greater licence to stand her ground.

  A compromise was reached. Lily and Linda would visit Antonio’s lodgings so that Lily could meet him and, more importantly, speak to his landlady to get a third-party appraisal of the handsome Italian. It all seemed to go well and Lily reluctantly agreed that Linda and Antonio could step out together, but with strict conditions attached. She must know where they were going (the cinema), what route they’d take there and back (they’d be going on foot to the Royalty in Lancaster Road) and a strict curfew (9pm) was applied. Antonio was to walk Linda straight home and there was to be no kissing. Lily would have chaperoned them if she could. As it was, she paced around all evening, patrolling the front room as 9pm approached, peering out of the window up the road for the first sign of Linda’s return.

  Since Lily was either working in the evenings or in hospital, she wasn’t in much of a position to apply her strictures consistently. But she never lost her power over us and the thought of upsetting her was probably as effective in controlling Linda’s hormones as it had been in getting us both through the Eleven-Plus. Antonio wasn’t around for long anyway, though as Linda grew older, inevitably more boyfriends materialized.

  In early December, three months after I’d arrived at Sloane Grammar School, I was granted a temporary escape from it. It was an accident in the gym that brought about my reprieve.

  I had been given the job of putting the ropes away after our PE lesson, which involved sliding them to the side of the hall to be tethered against the wall bars. Each rope was weighed down by a heavy metal ball – one of which was sent swinging around by a boy as I approached, hitting me in the eye.

  Our sports master, Mr Alder, over-dramatized the incident and so I did as well. What was a simple bang in the eye became sight-threatening – there was even talk of calling an ambulance, but it was decided (with my encouragement) that I’d be better seeing my own doctor. So I was sent home to visit the surgery, walking slowly out of the school, holding my head as if in agony.

  By the time I’d arrived at the little tobacco kiosk in Ladbroke Grove where Lily was working that day, I had entered into the spirit of my wounded soldier role and was clutching my bruised eye like King Harold at Hastings after the arrow hit him. Lily took me to see our glamorous American GP, Dr Tanner, whose basement surgery was close to Lancaster Road Baths. More like a movie star than a medic, Dr Tanner had thick, copper-coloured hair and was just about the most exotic person in our bleak West London landscape – not only a foreign doctor but an attractive female foreign doctor at that. She must have chosen to work in our part of Notting Hill out of a sense of public duty.

  Owing to her heart condition, Lily spent a lot of time with Dr Tanner, who took a great interest in our welfare. Having examined my eye, she said I must stay away from school until after the Christmas holidays, when she would reassess the situation. In the end, a combination of what must have been some genuine eye damage, a bout of conjunctivitis and my ability to persuade Lily that the effort of prolonged study would make me feel desperately ill kept me off school until the following April.

  I never recovered academically, and by the time I returned to Sloane, things at home had changed for the worse, too. Steve’s money had begun to arrive more infrequently and then stopped altogether.

  Chapter 10

  THE DAWN OF the new year of 1962 saw me off school, Lily off work and the little income we had to supp
lement Steve’s increasingly rare postal orders being brought in by Linda.

  Lily had been in and out of hospital, either for check-ups or because of illness, throughout the previous year. At least she and the doctors now knew exactly what they were dealing with. But she had another heart complaint in addition to the mitral stenosis: the continuing absence of a man in her life. There were two main topics of conversation in her big double bed every night. Linda would be telling Lily that she had to do something about Steve’s failure to honour his commitment to send us money every week. Lily would be telling Linda how she was planning to put her own advertisement in the lonely hearts column of the local paper.

  The two issues were related. Lily’s planned adventure wasn’t just a quest for companionship. Her only regret about breaking with Henry was that he was obviously reasonably well off and, while she wasn’t a mercenary woman and money wasn’t her prime consideration (we occupied that position), these were days when women were much more heavily dependent on the income of their husbands.

  The ‘three young professionals’ she had cleaned for had moved on by this time and were no longer available for advice and guidance. Linda was. She argued that as we had Steve’s address in East Dulwich, Lily must write explaining how desperate we were. To Lily this seemed like begging, but she swallowed her pride and wrote to Steve. There was no reply. And there were no more postal orders.

  Early that year Linda began to go out with Jimmy Carter, a fifteen-year-old lovable rogue, one of seven children in a family renowned for being ‘hard’. They lived in St Anne’s Road, on the cusp of Notting Hill and Shepherd’s Bush, and the patriarch was a rag-and-bone collector – a totter (Jimmy always swore that Hercules, the horse in the TV series Steptoe and Son, had belonged to his dad). Jimmy had already left school and worked with his father selling on the scrap metal and second-hand tat gathered on the cart. Unfortunately, his dad also dealt in manure, which meant that Jimmy sometimes arrived to take Linda out carrying a certain aroma that was noticeable even in our unsanitary conditions. Lily would heat up the copper in our cobbled-together basement bathroom and insist that he had a bath.