This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  Seeing Colin put his arm around Yvonne, I put mine around Pauline, tentatively, taking care not to pause or alter the tempo or subject of our inane conversation; trying to make it seem as if it were a natural reflex, like scratching an itch or blowing your nose. Inside, however, my stomach fluttered and my heart pounded. We didn’t kiss or cuddle or go any further than that simple caress. Two boys’ arms around two sets of girls’ shoulders.

  We never were anything but friends with Pauline and Yvonne. Pauline had a boyfriend Colin didn’t like and so wasn’t in our company often. Yvonne became a close friend of mine but our relationship was entirely platonic. That’s not to say she was not attractive. She was a lovely girl: slim and pretty with long, fair hair and an effervescent personality.

  When Colin, Jimmy Robb and I got down to what was laughingly known as ‘band practice’, we were inspired by the marvellous musicians we saw playing live. Colin and I were frequent visitors to Soho, to the Marquee Club in Wardour Street and the 100 Club in Oxford Street. There must have been age requirement for admittance but we were never refused entry. Such regulations were far less rigorously observed in those days. We saw the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things and Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. We went to the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond – where the Rolling Stones had played twice a week until they became too big for little local clubs – to catch Gary Farr and the T-Bones. We saw the Stones, believe it or not, at the Wimbledon Palais (twice). The raw excitement was exhilarating and although I was a confirmed Beatles fan, I had to confess that the Stones were more attractive in terms of their anti-establishment rakishness.

  We’d heard a rumour that the band drank every lunchtime at the World’s End pub just down the King’s Road from our school and took to hanging around outside in our customized uniforms – by now we had cut six-inch vents into our black school blazers. Such modifications attracted the unwanted attention of ‘Doc’ Henry, our headmaster, who was for ever sending Colin and me home to get our hair cut or to change various bits of our attire. When he tired of sending us home he began caning us for these misdemeanours.

  At Sloane, I had found the methods of Bevington Primary’s resident sadist, Mr Hayes, replaced by a much more sophisticated brutality. There only the headmaster and his deputy were authorized to use the cane and instead of being beaten in front of their classmates, as had been the case at Bevington, boys would be caned across the backside in the privacy of the headmaster’s office.

  To Colin, getting the cane meant so much – he’d achieved respectability as a rebel at long last. Even Terry Lawrence began to acknowledge him and agreed to join us once or twice as we posed outside the World’s End every lunchtime for months on end, never catching so much as a glimpse of the Stones.

  As for Colin’s plan to hitchhike round the south coast, his parents eventually persuaded him to join them and his four siblings for a holiday in Burgess Hill, where they had arranged a house swap with friends. Colin’s mum invited me to go with them. We had a marvellous sun-kissed week and I remember spending one idyllic day sitting in the beautiful garden of this huge house reading the James Bond novel Goldfinger from cover to cover while Colin and his family went out for the day. For me it was a great holiday but Sussex didn’t quite provide the rock ’n’ roll adventure Colin had envisaged.

  Earlier in that summer of 1963, before the school holidays, Lily had received a letter from her heart specialist at Hammersmith Hospital asking to see her to discuss a possible cure for the disease that had blighted her life. Ever since mitral stenosis had been diagnosed, she’d spent half her time in hospital having fluid removed from her lung tissue to make it easier for her to breathe and the other half being a guinea pig for the heart specialist, who was seeking a cure. From the moment this letter arrived she began to fret. What kind of remedy would this be? What would it entail? What were the risks?

  In my memory this worrying period for Lily is intertwined with the fall-out from the Profumo scandal that was dominating the news. It had emerged that the secretary of state for war, John Profumo, had conducted a brief relationship with a call girl, Christine Keeler, at the same time as she was involved with a senior naval attaché from the Soviet Embassy. Having initially assured the House of Commons, under parliamentary privilege, that there was ‘no impropriety whatsoever’ in his relationship with Keeler, in early June Profumo was forced to admit that he had lied and to resign from the Cabinet and the Privy Council.

  The sexual liaison at the root of the scandal was something that in those days would probably have been brushed under the carpet had it not been for Profumo’s cardinal sin – lying to the House of Commons – and Keeler’s association with the Soviet attaché, an alleged spy. As it was, at a time when the Cold War was at its peak, the spies Burgess, Maclean and Philby had only recently been outed, the Establishment was being challenged and the media were becoming less inclined to show deference to politicians, the scandal rocked the nation and would lead, by the end of the year, to the toppling of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government. For many it remains a powerful catalyst in the seismic social changes of the 1960s.

  As well as the fall from grace of the Establishment archetype John Profumo, educated at Harrow and Oxford, the story featured minor characters from London’s underbelly, including a society pimp and a Jamaican drug dealer, as well as the good-time girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. Some of its sub-plots unfolded close to Walmer Road in Notting Hill and Marylebone, where both these women had at one stage or another been kept as mistresses by none other than our local slum landlord, Peter Rachman.

  I can picture Lily on the morning of her hospital appointment, sitting down for her treasured fifteen minutes of self-indulgence after getting me off to school. Feet up, a cup of tea and a cigarette in her hand, the Daily Sketch on her lap and Housewives’ Choice playing quietly on the radio. She must have found it hard to concentrate on the latest shocking revelations in her newspaper. She said nothing within my hearing about the scandal itself – it involved too much sex for her to feel comfortable discussing it with me. Profumo’s resignation did, however, give her a chance to reiterate one of her favourite homilies: ‘A liar is as bad as a thief,’ she’d say as Jack de Manio, or one of the other presenters of the Today programme, pontificated on the latest developments as I ate my morning cornflakes (or, if I was lucky, Scott’s Porage Oats). It was all far too complex for me to understand. I was just mesmerized by the beauty of Mandy Rice-Davies.

  Lily’s appointment was at noon, which meant she would have to leave her job at the newsagent’s early to be there on time. Linda had offered to go with her and they’d agreed that she would leave Fulham County at morning break to meet Lily at the hospital. Lily relied so much on Linda, confiding in her, consulting her; she knew she couldn’t face this ordeal without her daughter’s support.

  The previous week, Dr Tanner had written to the council’s Housing Department to say that, given her illness, Lily could not go on living in such terrible conditions. Neither should she be climbing stairs. After seventeen years on the waiting list for a council house, she would, Dr Tanner assured her, be given medical priority. Lily’s dream of opening her own front door into a house that was all hers was at long last tantalizingly close to being realized.

  Linda had decided to leave school that summer and begin training as a nursery nurse. Her weekly pay would be only £5 but that was more than she earned from her various evening and weekend jobs. She had promised Lily £3 a week to help with the housekeeping. Lily should have been feeling happy about all this good news: she was going to be rehoused, receive some regular income and a cure for her weak heart was in prospect. And yet …

  Lily and Linda sat silently side by side as the heart specialist explained what he had in mind. Hammersmith Hospital was pioneering an operation to cure mitral stenosis by inserting a replacement plastic valve. The procedure had only just been developed and Lily would be one of the first patients to benefit from this breakthrough. He warned that w
ithout an operation to replace the mitral valve, she would not live for very much longer.

  As this operation was so cutting-edge there were obviously risks involved but if it was successful it could add ten years to Lily’s life. If she agreed to have the surgery, she’d need to give up work and take things easy. She would have to be as fit as possible before they could operate. She would be in hospital for at least three months, probably six. Lily listened, her eyes focused on the specialist’s desk. An old-fashioned clock on the wall ticked loudly. Beneath the desk, out of sight of the consultant, Lily’s hand reached for Linda’s.

  When the doctor had finished, Lily frowned. She thanked him and said she needed time to think about what he’d said. As they left the hospital, Linda sensed that Lily had already made her decision. She was going to refuse the operation.

  Chapter 14

  LINDA LEFT SCHOOL as planned in July 1963, at fifteen years of age. She studied for two days a week at Brixton College and worked in a nursery at Brook Green in Hammersmith for the other three days in pursuit of her National Nursery Examination Board Certification (NNEBC) to qualify as a nursery nurse.

  As predicted, Lily refused to countenance the radical heart surgery she had been told would extend her life in spite of Linda’s attempts to persuade her that it was the best option. ‘Don’t you want to see your grandchildren?’ she’d ask, exasperated at Lily’s Taurean stubbornness. But Lily wasn’t being stubborn. She was scared. Scared of the operation, scared of having to stop work when we were poorer than ever and scared that the dreaded age of forty-two had brought with it the spectre of death, as she had feared all her life it would. She was finding it difficult to carry on working, there was no money from Steve any more and no sign of any offers of a council house, despite the medical urgency.

  All of this was discussed by Lily and Linda long into the night, their conversations whispered in case I overheard. I was meant to believe that all was well and Lily was fine, and I played the role expected of me, preferring to hide my deep sense of foreboding than to attempt to break into their secret dialogue and have my fears confirmed.

  When Linda started work she found to her consternation that her travel costs from Notting Hill to Hammersmith and Brixton ate into her modest wage so extensively that she could only manage to contribute £2 to the housekeeping, rather than the £3 she’d planned. Another heavy blow was dealt by the Rowe Housing Trust, which decided to remove all gas and electricity ‘pay as you go’ meters from their Walmer Road properties, too. We knew from having to switch to fuel bills at Southam Street that this would only make life even more difficult. Lily had already begun to fall behind with her debts in the summer and the bills would now be much higher in the winter.

  She spent most evenings alone. There were no trips to the cinema any more. Her only nights out were spent on her own in the new bingo hall, where she hoped to win the jackpot that would transform our lives. There had been no man on the horizon since the debacle with Ron and her children were spending more and more time away from the squalor of Walmer Road.

  I was usually to be found with Colin James or Andrew Wiltshire, another schoolfriend, who lived close to the newly built BBC TV Centre in Wood Lane and was part of a completely different musical scene. Unlike Colin, Andrew was proficient at playing an instrument – the drums – and he was keen that we should play together. So I would be either in Fulham, or Shepherd’s Bush, or going to see bands in Soho and all over south-west London. At weekends I was delivering milk and now, some evenings, paraffin.

  As the summer waned, Johnny Carter had decided to boost his milkman’s income by delivering paraffin oil two nights a week and asked me if I’d help. My wages were 3 shillings a night plus free pie and chips on the way home. I set aside some old clothes for handling this awful stuff. They reeked so much of oil that Lily insisted I store them in our decrepit basement.

  The paraffin round was in Barnes and Mortlake, following the flow of the Thames. We had a van – a kind of souped-up milk float with the same type of door-free cabin at the front to make hopping in and out easier. I would knock on designated doors on cold, dark winter evenings, collect a metal or plastic container, take it to the tank on the back of the van, fill it up, return it to the customer and collect the money. We had a monopoly on pink paraffin – our only rival traded in the blue variety. The livery on our respective vans was coloured accordingly. Don’t ask me what the difference was. All I know is they both smelled the same.

  In the depths of winter it was hard to motivate myself to go out for four hours in the evening. It was only the thought of that hot pie and chips afterwards – purchased from a shop on Hammersmith Broadway and transferred from the newspaper in which it was wrapped to our mouths by paraffin-soaked fingers as we drove back to the depot – that spurred me on. That and the money. Those 3 shillings, plus tips, enabled me to buy more Pye International records, or back copies of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly from a second-hand shop in Hammersmith Road, or some of the detective novels I’d recently begun to read. It also meant that as well as free school meals, I had a hot dinner twice a week. Both Linda and I ate much better than Lily, who hardly touched anything alone in that cold, damp house every night.

  Indeed, Linda now had a new boyfriend who, on their first date, actually took her to a proper restaurant for dinner. She tried to pretend she was used to it although Renee’s Pie and Mash Shop was the closest either of us had ever come to such an experience. Her boyfriend’s name was Mike Whitaker and he was the cousin of her best friend Cheryl. She’d gone with Cheryl to a family wedding and by the end of the evening had been asked out by two different suitors: the drummer from the band and Mike. She did what any girl in her right mind would do and turned down the drummer.

  Mike would probably have been rather disconcerted if he’d had any idea how much we already knew about him by the time he came to Walmer Road to pick up Linda for that first date. She had given Lily chapter and verse, as she was required to do before going out with any boy. Mike was in his early twenties, with a car and a profession. The car was a sky-blue Ford Zephyr and he worked as an electrical engineer at Henry’s Radios in Praed Street off the Edgware Road.

  He was only about 5ft 8ins tall, but taller than Linda (a prerequisite on which she insisted), blond with dimples in his cheeks when he smiled and pale blue eyes that matched the colour of his car. Lily liked the sound of him. On the night of the date she kept watch from the shared upstairs front bedroom while Linda got ready. When she saw the big blue car driving slowly down the road she rushed downstairs and out into the street, waving her arms and shouting frantically: ‘Are youse luking for Linda?’ in her most excited Scouse. There was to be no prospect of this excellent catch slipping through the net.

  Mike was ushered into the front room to wait. I’d made sure I was already in there. I shared Lily’s curiosity – this was a man of means and he was taking my sister out. Jimmy Carter had been fun but he was too young and too immature to be suitable as a serious contender for Linda’s affections. Mike was an adult with a car and a good job. I needed to do a full appraisal.

  He was dressed smartly in an Italian suit (though the jacket was cut too short for my liking). He wore Chelsea boots with Cuban heels and elasticated sides which made him look taller than he was. Goodness knows what he made of that house (he told Linda much later that he couldn’t believe anyone still lived in such conditions). Mike had been brought up in a neat semi in Watford, which his parents owned. His father was a manager on the railways and his mother was a housewife who idolized her son and had difficulty accepting that he was no longer a child. Although he was in his twenties, she’d take his wage packet each week and hand him back an allowance she determined to be sufficient for his needs.

  If, when Mike walked into our front room and took off his coat, he’d revealed a pair of angel’s wings it would merely have served notice of what he was to become to us. I have never met anybody as kind or gentle or more generous than Mike Whitaker. N
either have I ever met anybody I admired more – not in the same way I had admired the Real Mod, with his double cuffs and streetwise philosophy. Mike wasn’t a Mod. If truth be told he was a bit of a Rocker, but in those days, by the time you were in your early twenties, you were neither. You were an adult, and adults weren’t Mods or Rockers, they were just adults.

  I respected Mike in a much more fundamental way. He engaged me from that first meeting. Softly spoken with impeccable manners, within about ten minutes he’d captivated Lily as well. For me the attraction was simple: he was someone who knew a great deal but carried his wisdom lightly; somebody I could look up to, perhaps even emulate. Mike had left school at fifteen, against his parents’ wishes, to do the only job that interested him: working with valves and circuit boards, repairing radios and TVs, advising and consulting on electrical systems, making amplifiers and loudspeakers. The family that owned Henry’s Radios, which had been established for many years, treated him like a son. He’d gone to work for them as a Saturday boy when he was thirteen and spent a lot of time in there when he should have been at school, too. I don’t think Mike had any formal qualifications. He had learned his trade by working at it and he was now not only the chief electrical engineer at Henry’s but managing the shop as well.

  One of Mike’s eccentricities, as far as I was concerned, was his fondness for folk music. He had every LP ever made by the Kingston Trio, and others by Peter, Paul and Mary and Pete Seeger, but it was an artist with a more contemporary sound that he eulogized the most. He introduced me to the music of a little-known young American folk singer called Bob Dylan and lent me his latest LP, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – the one with the cover showing Dylan, shoulders hunched, walking through the snowy New York streets with Suze Rotolo. It took only one spin of that album and a glance at the cover for me to acquire a new hero, one whose lyrics encouraged me to start reading poetry. There was a time when I could recite every word of songs such as ‘Gates of Eden’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.