This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  Although she liked Jimmy, she never saw him as being remotely suitable for her daughter. In the end neither did Linda, but his big smile and tall, gangling frame were part of our lives for over a year before they split up. It was an eventful year for us and Jimmy Carter, who became a regular breezy presence in the house, played a part in it.

  Jimmy would give me the odd cigarette on the understanding that I wouldn’t tell Lily. But when she eventually went back to work later that year at the kiosk next to Ladbroke Grove station, she was allowed free cigarettes to supplement her wages and used to bring home a packet of ten Rothmans King Size for me every week.

  The health implications of smoking had yet to be widely understood. Back then everyone smoked, and everyone smoked everywhere. On the Metropolitan line tube I took to school, there was just one carriage on each train for non-smokers, and that was usually empty. I don’t think Lily’s many hospital clinicians, or Dr Tanner, ever advised her to give it up. As for me taking it up, Lily saw that as a rite of passage.

  I certainly considered it to be a badge of manhood. As Lily and I passed each other cigarettes or (once he knew it was OK with Lily) I accepted one of Jimmy’s Player’s tipped, I felt I was forming an adult bond with them. The ever-sensible Linda, on the other hand, became devoutly anti-smoking – thanks to an early advisory lesson at Fulham County, which included the scrutiny of the blackened lungs of a dead smoker, preserved in a glass container. ‘I want to keep my lungs pink,’ she’d say.

  Lily was surprisingly relaxed, too, about all the lessons I was missing. It must have been a strain on her finances, since she had to provide a meal for me that I would have got free at school. Having pushed me so hard at Bevington, she didn’t seem concerned about my absence from Sloane. It was as if the fact that I was a grammar-school boy was enough in itself to secure my future.

  She certainly believed my eye problem to be worse than it was. She had absolute trust in Dr Tanner but being well aware that I was miserable at Sloane it seems unlikely that she wouldn’t have suspected some degree of exaggeration, if not downright malingering. Maybe she had bigger worries on her mind; perhaps – just perhaps – she liked having me with her while she prepared to go back into hospital for more tests. This time she was not going in for diagnosis of the complaint but to work out what to do about it.

  If that was the case, I must have provided scant comfort or companionship since I spent almost all my time alone in my room, following the pop charts, playing my guitar and reading (and re-reading) my books. By now my interest in football had become an obsession and I invented my own league, featuring teams like London Rovers and Haden Park and over-populated with players going by the names Alan or Johnson. Lily paid for my Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly, ordered from Maynard’s, the newsagents, and preserved in good condition, apart from the double-page centre-spread team line-ups that I pinned on my damp bedroom walls. I produced my own magazine every month, too, called Soccer News, full of team news and ‘photographs’ (my shaky attempts at drawing and colouring in). Lily indulged me by reading it and taking out a monthly subscription. A Soccer News Annual was also produced in a hardback ruled notebook Steve had left behind.

  I was constantly hungry. I’ve never forgotten that emptiness and craving for food. As always, Lily did her best with what we had, but she was feeling very low and on drugs that made her listless. Her stale bread floating in Oxo speciality appeared regularly on the menu.

  Once Lily had gone into hospital, Linda made a momentous decision for a fourteen-year-old. One evening, as she, Jimmy and I sat in our little back room, cold and hungry, Jimmy and I flicking fag ash into the fireplace as we huddled round its fading glow, she made up her mind that she needed to confront Steve herself, face to face.

  Using an A to Z and the London Transport maps in her school library, Linda devised a route by tube and bus to the address we had for Steve in Dulwich. If there had been no alternative, I’m quite sure she would have gone there on her own. As it was, Jimmy volunteered to accompany her. There was no question of me going, and I wasn’t asked. While I admired my sister’s bravery, I couldn’t match it. She didn’t want to see Steve again any more than I did, but she felt she had to force him to face up to responsibilities he was obviously keen to forget. Lily was not to be informed until after the event. For once the ‘Don’t tell Alan’ policy had been overruled. This time it was ‘Don’t tell Lily.’

  Linda and Jimmy set off one Sunday afternoon when they reckoned Steve was most likely to be at home. He and Vera were living in a street of tall, highly desirable Victorian houses off Lordship Lane. It was a world away from the slums of Southam Street. Linda and Jimmy found the right house, where Steve and Vera evidently occupied the two upper floors. At the top of the flight of steep steps climbed by our intrepid reporter when he first discovered Steve’s whereabouts there was now a bell marked ‘Johnson’ which Linda pressed. They waited.

  It was Vera who answered the door. Small and round with swollen legs – very different from the woman we had imagined – she spoke precisely, in a Home Counties accent. Linda told her the purpose of the visit and Vera invited them in, calling up the stairs to Steve that his daughter was here with her boyfriend. Steve may already have seen Linda from the upstairs window, but she felt that Vera’s advance warning suggested he hadn’t, and therefore needed to be prepared for the shock.

  As Jimmy stood uncomfortably by the door to the flat, Linda marched in and went straight on to the attack. She had no intention of engaging in polite conversation or of staying for a minute longer than she had to. The room, she told me later, was neat and clean, carpeted and warm. In the corner sat a boy of around Linda’s age: Vera’s son, Michael, who gazed quizzically at the visitors trying to work out why they’d come. He lived with Steve and his mother and apparently had no contact with his biological father.

  Steve had been sitting in his armchair by the gas fire. His ginger hair was, as always, combed and Brylcreemed straight back from his freckled forehead. He looked shaken and pale.

  ‘You haven’t sent us any money for weeks,’ Linda announced. ‘Mum’s in hospital and can’t work and we’ve got nothing.’

  Steve tried to make excuses. ‘Things haven’t been easy …’ he began.

  ‘They’ve not been easy for us either and we need money badly,’ Linda cut in defiantly.

  She stood her ground and in the uncomfortable silence that followed Steve crossed the floor and disappeared into the bedroom, returning a couple of minutes later with two £10 notes. Three weeks’ money, much less than he owed but more than Linda expected. She relaxed a little.

  Vera brewed some tea. Jimmy offered round his cigarettes and they sat talking awkwardly for half an hour. From what Linda gleaned, Steve was a changed man. There was a piano in the corner but he no longer played the pubs and clubs. Painting and decorating now took precedence.

  He invited Linda and Jimmy to visit again and to bring me with them. Linda rose to leave, thanking Vera for the tea. As she and Jimmy headed to the door Steve said: ‘By the way, Vera is having a baby. You’re going to have a new brother or sister.’

  Only once the mission had been accomplished was Lily informed. As soon as she was out of hospital and got me on my own she laid into me about going to see Steve. In what must have been an extraordinarily difficult commitment for her to make, she promised she’d come with me if only I’d agree to visit him.

  I was adamant. I refused to see Steve in any circumstances, whether it was with Linda or with Lily. Linda was more accommodating. She told me that although she had felt like a traitor sitting there drinking tea with Steve and Vera, she would go back when the baby was born to see our half-sibling. She and Lily both possessed an exceptional courage that I lacked. As far as I can recall, my obduracy wasn’t rooted in any heroic principle of loyalty to Lily. It was about me, and it was simple. Steve was a stranger to me. It would be embarrassing to have to meet him again and I was afraid that if I wasn’t careful, I might end up
having to live once more with this man I neither knew nor liked. My greatest fear was not losing a father; it was having one.

  Lily didn’t let up. Steve was my dad, she reminded me; a boy needed his father; I’d grow up regretting this missed opportunity. With hindsight, I can see that she was worried about what would happen to me if the heart condition killed her. Steve would need to take responsibility for me, and for that to work I had to be reconciled with him. After the misery he’d inflicted upon Lily and Linda, who’d sought to protect her, they would have been far more entitled than I was to vehemently oppose the re-establishment of contact. Their magnanimity was remarkable, but it was lost on me.

  Linda did go back to East Dulwich a few times, primarily to extract further funds from Steve – despite her appeal, the postal orders were few and far between. I never went with her, much to Lily’s chagrin. Our half-sister, Sandra, was born later in the year. Steve was, by all accounts, a model father this time around. As I say, credit where credit’s due.

  Apart from helping Linda to prise some cash out of Steve, Jimmy Carter’s other main contribution to our family fortunes was introducing me to his older brother, Johnny.

  Johnny was the eldest of the seven Carter siblings. He was in his mid-twenties and married with two small children. Tall and handsome – except when he laughed and revealed his bad teeth – he retained the look of the Teddy Boy he’d recently been. Johnny’s hair was a work of art. The style he wore was known as a Tony Curtis with a DA (duck’s arse, for anyone unfamiliar with the term, owing to the tapered shape of the hair at the back). He might once have shared his brother’s breezy good humour, but having become a father himself he took his position as eldest son very seriously. In fact he was a very serious man, quietly spoken and mature beyond his years. He could have been taken for Jimmy’s father rather than his brother.

  Johnny had a reputation as a fighter and a man you’d be foolish to cross, though he was now pursuing a respectable occupation as a milkman in Notting Hill – a milkman in need of an assistant. I was given the job, for which I was to be paid 10 shillings (50p) to work all day Saturday (the busiest day of the week because that was when the money was collected) and until midday on Sunday, when the round was completed more quickly. I’d wait in the pre-dawn gloom for Johnny to fetch me in his Express Dairies milk float, which he’d pick up from the depot in St Charles Square.

  Saturday was a long, arduous slog – delivering the milk, collecting the empties, knocking on people’s doors and waiting for them to answer, telling them how much they owed, running to Johnny for change from the big leather pouch he carried around his waist like a gunslinger’s belt. In some of the more prosperous streets on the round, money would be left wrapped in a note jammed into the neck of an empty bottle. Johnny would stop periodically to light the roll-up that rarely left his lips and open the huge black ledger to record who’d paid, who hadn’t and which orders had changed. When he’d finished, out would come his comb and he’d carefully reconstruct the ‘Tony Curtis’ that never seemed to me to have deconstructed in the first place. Lunch was a Swiss roll from the little produce cupboard on the milk float, torn in half and shared between us, washed down with a pint of silver-top, full-fat milk.

  The worst houses to service were the overcrowded, multi-occupied ones with an open front door and no bells with which to summon the occupants. We’d have to go in together and take a floor each, banging on the two or three (or even four) doors behind which a family or a group of single West Indian men were squeezed in appalling conditions.

  There was one of these places in Ruston Close, a cul-de-sac of twenty houses off St Marks Road. Number 10 was in particularly bad repair and there were two customers on each of the three landings. Johnny always sent me in alone while he lit a fag, removed the pencil he kept lodged behind his right ear and commenced an unusually intense scrutiny of the ledger.

  No matter what the time or season, 10 Ruston Close was always dark. There was no natural light on the landings or bulbs in the light fittings. An awful smell of decay and mould, stale food and detritus seeped from the walls. Each room contained several young West Indian men for whom existing in these conditions was the price they paid for coming to the motherland. It took me ages to collect the money, run to Johnny and return with the change. I could never understand why my streetwise boss, my Shane on a milk float, never came in with me to lend a hand.

  It was some time later that I discovered the truth about Ruston Close. The cul-de-sac had been renamed. It had previously been Rillington Place and number 10 was the house where, over the course of ten years, the infamous serial killer John Christie had murdered at least seven women, including his own wife, and the baby daughter of one of his victims, concealing their bodies in the garden and behind the walls of that gloomy, forbidding house. He had committed his final murder there less than a decade earlier. After a badly mishandled police investigation, Christie had finally been caught, tried and hanged for his crimes in 1953 – but not before innocent fellow resident Timothy Evans, the man whose wife and baby girl Christie had killed, had been wrongly convicted of their murder and sent to the gallows. No wonder even tough Johnny Carter was loath to set foot in the place.

  I actually began working on the milk round before Dr Tanner declared me fit to return to school. The 10 shillings a week brought me some money to spend. Desperate though she was, Lily would never take a penny from me, insisting instead that I began to save in a Bible-shaped piggy bank she gave me for the purpose. Neither did she question why I was able to work but not to study. Dr Tanner had provided the sick certificate and that was good enough for her. Eventually I had to bite the bullet and go back. The anticipation was probably worse than the reality, but I’d still have preferred not to have been there if I could have avoided it.

  The Saturday milk round restricted my chances of getting to Loftus Road to watch Queens Park Rangers, but I attended as many home games as I could manage or afford. When I couldn’t go I had to content myself with my football magazines and books. Lily had trained us to keep our eyes on the pavement and the gutter whenever we passed a pub or one of the newly legalized betting shops, because that’s where men were most careless with their cash and most likely to drop coins from their pockets. One day I struck lucky outside a betting shop on my walk home from Latimer Road station, spotting an array of coins scattered on the ground, which I pounced on and quickly pocketed. When I inspected my haul I found I had about 10 shillings’ worth in all, including three half-crowns. I ran all the way to Shepherd’s Bush market to buy the one thing I desired above all others: The Topical Times Football Annual.

  Although I lived and breathed football for a long while, I wasn’t much good at actually playing it. I made the Danvers House team at Sloane no more than a couple of times, and even then only as goalkeeper. Malcolm Macdonald demonstrated his footballing genius early on for Turner House, scoring five against me in the Danvers goal.

  The Sloane playing fields were a bus ride away in Roehampton, where we had to trek one afternoon a week. I might not have shown much prowess on the park, but I looked forward to those afternoons. They were a break from the schoolwork I hated. And at Roehampton there was fresh air and extensive grounds. Another attraction was the presence of pupils from the Carlyle Grammar School for Girls, situated right next door to Sloane in Hortensia Road, who shared our Roehampton sports ground. The walls of Carlyle Grammar were high and we never mixed with the girls apart from at Roehampton. As we matured, that window of opportunity was welcomed more and more eagerly by the boys from Sloane.

  Chapter 11

  ALTHOUGH 1962 WAS a difficult year, it was not all gloom and doom. That summer I was to be taken away on holiday by the Children’s Country Holidays Fund, a charity that provided seaside or country breaks for inner-city slum children who would otherwise never have the chance of any respite. Originally established in 1884 by the Reverend Samuel Bartlett and his wife as the Children’s Fresh Air Mission, the charity is still going stro
ng today, known in its current incarnation as CCHF All About Kids and focusing on children of primary-school age.

  I don’t know how this opportunity came about: I imagine Lily or Linda must have put my name forward as Linda had been on a CCHF holiday herself, in 1956, when she was nine. I remember waving her off at the coach station with Lily.

  Linda had gone to Guildford, a mere forty miles from Notting Hill, though at the time it seemed to us a long way away. I was going somewhere more exotic than Surrey, to another country: Denmark. It was to be a ten-day adventure at the end of the school summer break. We would be staying at an agricultural college about thirty kilometres from the port of Ejsberg, taking the train from Liverpool Street to Harwich and sailing from there to Denmark. From the day the trip was arranged, I spent hours lying on my bed thinking about the voyage and anticipating the thrill of arriving in a foreign country. I could not begin to imagine what it would be like. With our visits to Coventry, Hull and Liverpool now a distant memory, I could hardly comprehend not being in London, let alone not being in England.

  When the time came, Lily removed my school reports and other papers from the cardboard Christmas hamper case and packed it with everything she thought I would need. Before waving me off on the train at Liverpool Street, she managed, as she invariably did whenever taking her leave of me, to find a mysterious patch of dirt on my face that required the spat-on hankie treatment.

  Our party comprised about seventy of us waifs and strays of secondary-school age, a small officer corps of university students who had volunteered to supervise us and a couple of adults in overall charge. The crossing to Ejsberg was terrible. An almighty storm had the North Sea heaving and rolling like a fairground ride and practically every one of us was seasick. I abandoned my bunk in the humid cabin below deck where I was supposed to be sleeping. In the crew’s quarters nearby, sailors were chatting, eating, drinking and smoking, oblivious of the turbulence. Green with sickness, I eventually found some relief sheltering under blankets on a deckchair in the open air. There I spent the rest of that long night, dozing fitfully.