This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  Ron’s daughter, Sheila, may have been the same age as Linda but she lacked her maturity. That was hardly surprising, considering how fast Linda had had to grow up. In fairness, Sheila was a normal fifteen-year-old whereas Linda was already more of a woman than a girl. Blonde and annoyingly coquettish, Sheila seemed to me to consider herself the bee’s knees. I caught her eye as she glanced meaningfully at me on several occasions that evening, whereupon I blushed and she smiled.

  Jimmy and I got up the next morning to a fried breakfast prepared by Lily and Linda. Ron was very satisfied. He rather tactlessly told us what a great cook his wife had been and how important good food was to a man’s happiness. He’d already presented Lily with a challenge. When we arrived the previous day, he had shown her the Christmas fare he’d provided. For Christmas dinner there was a goose, complete with head and feathers and so fresh it might have flown into the kitchen that afternoon.

  Lily and Linda had been conferring in their room during the night. Linda was having cookery lessons at school but she knew nothing about how to cook a goose. Lily had never seen a goose before, let alone cooked one, but she could handle a chicken and reasoned that it couldn’t be all that different. The main problem was the preparation – how to chop the head off, pluck the bird and remove the innards. When this was mentioned in the general chit-chat over breakfast, Ron grew imperious.

  He couldn’t understand how anyone could live as long as Lily without tasting goose. His family always had goose at Christmas and this was the most expensive one he’d ever purchased. It was clear that, to match up to the departed Mrs Ron, not only must Lily cook this bird, she must cook it to perfection.

  Ron was going to the pub to have a few pints with his friends and would return shortly after 2pm when dinner needed to be on the table so that it could be finished as the Queen’s Speech came on the telly. Despite being under-age, Jimmy was invited to go to the pub with him. I was left trying to read in the lounge while Sheila flitted around. Every time I looked up from my book she’d be staring at me disconcertingly, quickly looking away as our eyes met.

  The tension on the other side of the glass partition was palpable. Linda had scoured her cookbook but while it had much to commend it and offered a wealth of advice on baking a cake, it had nothing on gutting a goose. Ron had chopped the head off before going out, but defeathering it took the two women ages. Poor Lily wasn’t to know that geese are notoriously difficult and time-consuming to pluck. This was a job that should have been done in advance – and preferably outside. Evidently Ron didn’t know this, either, never having been obliged to participate in the cooking of his Christmas dinners in the past.

  As so often, I made a bad situation worse by announcing pompously that I couldn’t possibly be expected to eat the poor bird and that although I’d never tasted goose, I just knew I wouldn’t like it. I could hear Lily speaking more loudly and sounding more Liverpudlian as the clock ticked away.

  By the time Ron and Jimmy returned, Linda had laid the table and the dinner appeared to be cooking nicely. Lily confirmed that it would be on the table at 2.15pm. Ron had sunk a few pints which made him a little over-jolly. He lit the open log fire and went to sit at the head of the table, ready to carve. Suddenly, thick smoke began billowing out of the oven. The copious goose fat had caught fire. The oven door was pulled open and the goose rescued from the flames. Ron called Lily a stupid woman, which was a big mistake. Lily might have been small, she might have had a weak heart, but she could stand up for herself. ‘Who are you calling stupid?’ she demanded.

  I buried my head in my book as the recriminations flew. As always, Linda rushed to defend her mother while Jimmy went outside for a fag. Eventually Ron calmed down, Lily rescued what she could of the goose and we sat down to dinner. As always, Lily’s vegetables were overcooked but her roast potatoes were perfect. The goose tasted like lumps of congealed, burned fat and when we got round to the Christmas pudding, as Ron was heard to mutter, the custard was lumpy.

  If we’d had any means of getting home we’d have left immediately. Lily was in high dudgeon, sitting all afternoon with her arm around me. She never normally did that. It must have been a defence mechanism, designed consciously or subconsciously to show Ron that to her, he was not the most important male in that house. I was at an age when such displays of motherly affection could be acutely embarrassing and Lily had never had to cuddle me to let me know she loved me. But unusual though it was, it was somehow appropriate to the circumstances on that tense Christmas afternoon in Harold Hill. Ron dozed off, as did Jimmy. Linda and Sheila cleared up. We were trapped overnight until Boxing Day, when Ron drove us to the station. We never saw him again.

  Something else happened that Christmas that I didn’t tell Lily, Linda or Ron about. After Jimmy and I went to bed that night, a note was pushed under the door. It read: ‘Dear Alan, I hope you’ve enjoyed your time with me. I like you very, very much. My room is opposite. I’d love it if you came to see me. Love Sheila xxx.’

  Jimmy read it over my shoulder. He laughed so much I thought he would choke. I just sat there bemused, flattered that Sheila was attracted to me but with no intention whatsoever of crossing the hall to experience whatever delights lay behind that door. I turned out the light and, as Jimmy continued to chuckle away quietly, drifted off to sleep. I woke up in the night. Although it was pitch-black I soon ascertained that Jimmy wasn’t on his side of the double bed we were sharing. Perhaps he’d just gone to the toilet but he didn’t come back in the ten minutes it took me to fall asleep again. I’m not suggesting that he padded over the hall to Sheila’s room, but then again, I can’t be sure that he didn’t.

  Chapter 12

  IT CANNOT HAVE been long after that disastrous Christmas that Linda decided to sit me down and explain the facts of life. I was twelve and Lily was in hospital. Linda and I were alone in the back room of Walmer Road, me in the little armchair, Linda perched on the kitchen chair. ‘Do you know how babies are made?’ she asked. I suspect that Lily had put her up to this. Too embarrassed to tell me herself, she’d subcontracted the task to Linda. Or, knowing my sister, Linda had volunteered.

  I can see with hindsight that Lily was worried about me reaching puberty without knowing the things a father was meant to pass on to his son. I recall how, when I visited her in hospital and sat by her bed with my hands out of sight resting on my knees, she’d say: ‘What are you doing down there?’ As I blushed and remonstrated with her, she’d justify her concern by elaborating, ‘I don’t want you playing with yourself.’ Lily had learned the Ten Commandments off by heart when she was at school and she was fond of quoting all ten to us. ‘Thou shalt not play with thyself’ had lately become the eleventh.

  ‘Do you know how babies are made?’ I was confident I had the answer to Linda’s question. It had all fallen into place a couple of years earlier, when I’d watched the wedding of Princess Margaret to Anthony Armstrong Jones on television. Up until then, I’d never been able to figure out why a woman could not have babies before she was married. During the Royal Wedding service, after the couple were pronounced man and wife, the cameras had focused on the altar while the bride and groom went somewhere with the Archbishop of Canterbury, out of sight of the congregation and the cameras.

  It came to me in a flash that this must be the point at which a bride was injected to enable her to have babies. It all made sense. Princess Margaret had been injected and the following year she’d had a child.

  I relayed this information to Linda with a knowing smile, proud that I’d worked this out all by myself, and sat back awaiting confirmation of my theory. Linda looked carefully at me to see if I was joking. When she realized I was not, she dismissed my theory disparagingly, pointing out that one of our cousins who’d had a baby had not been married. Then she told me exactly how babies were made.

  I listened with mounting horror. How could a man do that to a woman? It was so brutal and indelicate. If the woman I married wanted a baby, I would have to make s
ure the wicked deed was performed swiftly and sensitively, inflicting what I had no doubt would be my unwelcome attentions on her for as short a time as possible – in the dark. A simple injection seemed, to my twelve-year-old self, to be preferable in every respect.

  It was also early in 1963 that Lily saved my life. In my second year at Sloane, I was beginning to hate school less. The indignity of being a ‘one-er’ was over, I was adjusting to the grammar-school environment and had started to enjoy the lessons that interested me and not to bother too much about those that didn’t. I did what little homework we were given on time and received moderately good reports. I’d picked up a knack for making myself anonymous, keeping my head down, staying quiet, avoiding trouble.

  My favourite subject was English, taught at that time by Mr Smith. He must have been in his late twenties but dressed as if he were much older. Unlike the other young teachers – Mr Bollard, for example, who drove a two-seater sports car and wore sunglasses – Mr Smith could have been born in brogues and turn-ups. His face, beneath a fringe of severely cut fair hair, bore a permanent expression of anxiety. Small and shaped like a bowling pin, he walked with tiny steps, as if his shoelaces were tied together. We were constantly expecting him to topple over any minute. A committed Christian, he also taught Religious Education, a role that did not always sit easily with the fierce temper he tried, but often failed, to suppress. He was once seen hitting a boy over the head with a rolled-up newspaper yelling: ‘Christ is love, you little bastard!’

  What I most admired about Mr Smith was that he spent a part of every single RE lesson railing against the evils of apartheid in South Africa, a regime that was far from universally decried in the early 1960s. His moral outrage was infectious and while he never converted me to Christianity, he converted me, and, I suspect, many other boys, to the anti-apartheid cause. My limited – and obviously indirect – experience of what people in West London had to suffer merely because of the colour of their skin was troubling enough. The idea that racism could be enshrined in law was truly shocking.

  Mr Smith had been given permission to put on a school play to be staged on two evenings in January 1963. It was a production of Emil and the Detectives, Erich Kästner’s children’s adventure set in 1920s Berlin. I was cast as one of the gang of detectives and had about four short lines to learn. I had practised them throughout our Christmas sojourn in Romford and felt confident of giving a masterly performance. Lily couldn’t come to the play but Linda dragged Jimmy Carter along on the first night. I travelled home with them afterwards, my coat covering the blue and white matelot shirt I’d worn on stage and my face still smeared with dirt to reflect my character as a street urchin who had been recruited to Emil’s cause.

  The following evening, a Friday, the school hall was packed for our final triumphant performance. As I made my way home alone afterwards, I began to feel unwell. Lily and Linda were already asleep by the time I got in. I collapsed on to my bed and endured a night of delirium. Lily found me sweating and shivering the next morning and transferred me to her big double bed while she pondered what to do.

  Dr Tanner had a Saturday morning surgery and Lily decided that instead of waiting for a home visit that afternoon, I must be taken to see her straight away. Unable to stand unaided, I wanted to stay in bed and refused to budge.

  Lily grew agitated, shouting at me to get up and finally recruiting Linda to help fling the covers back, drag me to my feet and into some clothes and half-carry me out of the house.

  It was about three quarters of a mile from our house to Dr Tanner’s surgery. At twelve, I was already taller than Lily and Linda and they struggled, slinging one of my arms round each of their necks, to take my weight and haul me along the pavement. By the time we arrived I looked so ill that the receptionist ushered me straight in to see Dr Tanner, who immediately called an ambulance to rush me to St Charles’ Hospital.

  It turned out I had acute appendicitis. I went from ambulance to operating theatre in ten minutes to have my appendix removed. I was told later that if there had been any delay it would have burst and I’d have died from peritonitis. It was only thanks to Lily that I didn’t. Had she waited for the doctor to visit I wouldn’t have been here to tell the tale.

  I thoroughly enjoyed my fortnight on the large Nightingale Ward at St Charles’ among men of all ages, including a few who seemed to be more or less permanent residents, though they were far from bedridden. There was a communal room with a TV where we could go whenever we liked during the day and every bed had its own radio set on which I could pick up the three BBC stations I was used to. I was able to read as much as I wanted to and was brought three substantial meals every day. My hospital bed was much more comfortable than my own, with clean bed linen and warm blankets.

  Visiting was tightly restricted to half an hour every weekday evening, an hour on Saturdays and none at all on Sundays. Lily came on all six days she was allowed, occasionally with Linda and Jimmy. We went through the familiar ritual, usually played out around Lily’s hospital bed rather than mine, of trying to find things to say to fill in the time. The long silences were punctuated by Lily barking in a loud voice: ‘What are you doing down there?’ every time one of my hands slipped under the covers.

  I was the only child on the ward and the nurses and my fellow patients made a great fuss of me. One young nurse in particular commanded my devotion. She was French and the loveliest woman I had ever seen. She worked nights and was responsible for bringing my Ovaltine, checking I had removed the earpieces from my radio set and that my pillows were plumped and positioned ready for sleep.

  I’m not sure if the adult patients were given the same treatment. In the more regimented NHS of the time, they might well have been. For me, it was the highlight of the day. The French nurse would chat and smile and cast her tender spell. As she bent over me to straighten the bed covers, I would catch a whiff of her perfume. She made her rounds at about 9pm and one evening she found me listening to a brilliant science-fiction play on the Home Service, which was only halfway through. She agreed that I could continue to listen, provided I kept my earpieces out of sight by putting the sheet over my head. The glorious experience of listening to a radio play in the dark was matched only by the warm sense of complicity with the woman I’d fallen for.

  It was through those little plug-in earpieces on the Nightingale Ward that I first heard ‘Please Please Me’ by the Beatles. The Fab Four themselves weren’t new to me – ‘Love Me Do’, their first single, had been a minor hit the previous year and I’d seen a photograph of them in a music magazine to which Linda subscribed. We liked the fact they came from Lily’s home town and noticed that the drummer had a grey streak in his hair, which seemed to disappear as Ringo’s fame grew.

  Linda never went beyond this early interest but for me hearing ‘Please Please Me’ on that hospital radio began a passion I feel just as strongly fifty years on. It is difficult to describe the impact the Beatles had on me, a young boy approaching puberty who had always been enthralled by pop music. It’s no exaggeration to say that they became one of the most important elements of my life. Their songs came soaring out of the sea of mediocrity and imitation that was British popular music at the time, leaving our other home-grown rock stars, all second-rate replicas of US artists, floundering.

  They would all succumb, one by one, to the Beatles’ influence – Marty Wilde, Adam Faith, Billy Fury and eventually even Cliff. Their Elvis Presley pompadours were de-greased and cut in the new style – the moptop. From slicked-back hair to floppy locks; from a music culture driven by middle-aged men in Tin Pan Alley to something fresh and new introduced by four young Liverpudlians who wrote their own songs. Once, as I sat on a number 11 bus on my way to school, I overheard a conversation between the bus conductor and some adult passengers on the conspiracy theory of the moment: those two kids in the Beatles couldn’t possibly have written those songs. Unable to deny their talent, they doubted its source. John and Paul had to be a front for accomp
lished older musicians and songwriters. I burned with resentment at the outrage of the old misappropriating something that belonged to the young. At least, that was how it looked from my side of the generation gap.

  Happy as I was in my cosy hospital bed that January listening to ‘Please Please Me’, I didn’t realize quite how fortunate I was to be there at that precise moment. The outside world to which I would shortly return was in the grip of the bleakest, coldest winter since the seventeenth century.

  Apart from a brief reappearance at Sloane after Christmas the appendicitis was responsible for me beginning 1963 as I’d begun the previous year – off school. The Big Freeze made the house even colder than usual and I’d stay in bed, dressed in layers of threadbare jumpers and buried under as many old coats as I could muster, until lunchtime, when Lily came home between jobs to see how I was. After two weeks in hospital, I had more or less fully recovered from the operation but I cultivated an air of fragility to draw out my freedom from school for as long as possible.

  My main task during the freeze was to fetch coal in Lily’s old pram. Those in better houses and with greater resources had their coal delivered, often in bulk to last the entire winter. While some coal merchants had acquired trucks by this time, most still used a horse and cart, lifting the sacks on to their backs and tipping them into the coal cellars through a manhole cut into the pavement.

  Their horses vied with those of the totters for space at the water troughs, great stone structures placed on convenient corners by animal welfare charities. Huge, magnificent carthorses were also a regular sight outside the Earl of Warwick and the Latimer Arms, patiently chomping from a nosebag full of hay while their masters sank a couple of pints at lunchtime.