This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  It was 9.30 by the time we got back to our cold, damp house, feeling distinctly unChristmassy. Sheila Thompson must have been listening out for us. She invited us up for something to eat. It was in the Thompsons’ tidy kitchen-cum-living room on the top landing of 6 Walmer Road, in front of a roaring fire, that we tasted turkey for the first time in our lives. For as long as I live I will remember those sandwiches: thickly sliced bread, real butter (rather than the margarine we were used to) and deliciously moist cold turkey. There were mince pies to follow, and the feast was accompanied by Shirley Bassey on the Thompsons’ record-player. We wouldn’t have to walk downstairs to our grim rooms for ages yet. This was how Christmas should be. Linda and me in the best place for us and Lily in the best place for her.

  Lily’s incarceration in Hammersmith Hospital didn’t make a great deal of difference to our lives. She’d been in hospital so many times that we’d grown used to fending for ourselves. I was a pretty low-maintenance kid, requiring little attention and minimal supervision. Linda would make sure I was up and off to school each morning. She didn’t need to be much of a sergeant-major to get me out of bed as I knew dawdling would spell trouble. A sixth-form prefect would be stationed every day at each of the entrances to Sloane school, and any boy arriving late would be reported to Doc Henry, who had already caned me once for persistent late attendance. Nobody at school knew my circumstances. Why should they have known? It was none of their business. Schools then seemed to have little interest in life outside their gates, and by the same token any parental curiosity about what went on within them was firmly discouraged.

  Linda would toast some bread under the grill of the gas stove and put a box of cornflakes and a bottle of milk on the table for me. She had a more regimented approach to household cleanliness than Lily and was very strict about making me empty my urine bucket in the outside toilet each morning. As I took it back upstairs to my room, she’d squirt some disinfectant in it.

  It didn’t take me long to get ready. It wasn’t as if we had a shower (nobody did then) and the bath in the basement was for special occasions. The trick in winter was to get yourself from under the coat stack to setting off on the brisk walk to Latimer Road Underground station in as short a time as possible. I had it down to a fine art. A cursory wipe of my face with the flannel and the occasional dab at my teeth with an elderly toothbrush was the extent of my toilette.

  That winter of 1964 my bids to beat my record speed were hampered by the time I had to spend combing my hair. I badly wanted to look like Paul McCartney but my hair became wavier the longer it grew and it took me ages to slap it down and straighten it with cold water from our one tap over the butler sink in the kitchen. These were the days before hairstylists for the male population, when men and boys had no choice but to go to a traditional barber whose approach to styling hair was similar to an army chef’s approach to cooking: basic. And it was my way or the highway. Barbers would actually tell off their younger customers for coming in with long hair. ‘Don’t let it grow so much next time, son,’ they’d say sternly, having turned the Paul McCartney you asked for into the George Formby they preferred.

  At school, I flitted between two groups of friends: the Fulham set of Colin James and the Vampires and the Shepherd’s Bush set consisting of Andrew Wiltshire and John Williams (who lived on the Wormholt estate in Acton and could do a perfect imitation of Bluebottle, the Peter Sellers character from The Goon Show).

  Unlike Colin, Andrew lived within walking distance of Walmer Road. Straight down Latimer Road, left into North Pole Road, left again at the Pavilion pub and into a small estate of attractive houses with long front gardens and gabled doorways. Andrew’s parents rented 2 Nascot Street. His father Wally worked at Ravenscroft Park Hospital, where he was in charge of ordering and distributing the supplies. He was a very funny man and Andrew and his brother John shared his dark looks and sharp sense of humour.

  Kath, Andrew’s mother, was Wally’s opposite. Well-spoken and rather prim and proper, she’d smile benignly at her husband’s banter. At least once a day, on the pretext of some manufactured complaint against his wife, Wally would say to his sons, and anyone else who happened to be in the house: ‘If I had the choice of spending half an hour with Marilyn Monroe or the rest of my life with your mother, who do you think I’d choose?’

  Kath would smile sweetly. ‘She’d never have you for half a minute, let alone half an hour, you silly old fool.’

  Nothing could disguise their deep affection for one another. The Wiltshires’ was a happy household, and streetwise, funny Andrew (never Andy) was to become my closest, dearest friend. Despite his short stature he also seemed irresistible to women.

  One evening Cheryl Roberts knocked for Linda, who was out somewhere with Mike but due to return soon. I was there with Andrew. We’d been sitting in front of the coal fire, toasting bread on the flames with a toasting fork. Cheryl said she’d wait and so we moved to the front room, where I switched on the electric heater in her honour and we watched TV. At least, I was watching TV. As I was sitting in front of it in the armchair with Andrew and Cheryl on the settee behind me, I assumed they were, too.

  There was the same age difference between Cheryl and Andrew as there was between Linda and me: three years. I was therefore shocked – yes, that’s the word, shocked – when I happened to glance round to make some witticism about the programme we were supposed to be enjoying and caught them snogging. Quickly turning my gaze back to the TV screen, I sat there beetroot red and frozen with embarrassment as the sound of lips being swapped continued to emanate from the sofa. I suppose I have to admit to a tinge of jealousy. I’d been lusting after Cheryl for as long as Linda had known her, but felt she was way out of my league. As indeed she was.

  When Linda didn’t appear Cheryl said she had to go home. Andrew volunteered to walk with her. I can’t explain how I ended up going, too – like a huge great lemon rolling along in front, while Andrew, who was an inch shorter than Cheryl for each of the three years’ difference in their ages – reached up to embrace her at regular intervals.

  There was no repeat of that evening and Cheryl eventually became engaged to Andrew’s brother, John. I’d take you on the route between these two events if I could remember the way. Suffice it to say that if nobody else knew about that evening, Andrew knew that I knew. It gave him a certain edge as we travelled together through our rites of passage.

  The Fulham set and the Shepherd’s Bush set mixed only in the toilet of the Sloane school playground. It was actually more of a pissoir than a toilet. There were no cubicles and it consisted merely of a concrete shed with an entrance at each end and a duct along both main walls in which to urinate. Urination, however, was discouraged as this was the smoking room for third- and fourth-year boys (the fifth and sixth forms had their own facilities elsewhere). There weren’t that many smokers so the place was rarely crowded. Terry Lawrence and Stephen Hackett would be there; Colin, Jimmy Robb, Andrew and John Williams were all regulars and I was a fixture during every morning break with my packet of ten Rothmans (when Lily could supply me with them) or Player’s Weights (when she couldn’t).

  Doc Henry’s office overlooked the toilet and he could be seen at the window looking down malevolently as clouds of smoke drifted through the open portals and doorways of our social club. There was little he could do because of the perfect strategic position of the shed. Since no teacher could reach us without walking across fifty yards of open playground, where he would quickly be spotted by our look-outs, catching us red-handed was impossible. It was a rare victory over our cane-happy headmaster.

  I became a regular visitor to Yvonne Stacey’s big house on Waltham Green. Although her German mother disapproved of Yvonne’s mini-skirts and much else about the emerging 1960s culture, she encouraged her daughter to bring all her friends home. She genuinely liked the company of young people and was interested in their views. A seamstress who had longed to become a doctor, she had been forced to quit medical schoo
l at the outbreak of war.

  She’d met Yvonne’s father, a master baker, when he was a British soldier arriving in Germany fresh from the D-Day landings. That experience and the sights he saw in the concentration camps he’d helped liberate had deeply affected him. He spent most of his time at home sitting in silence, trying to control a temper that had been mild until the after-effects of his wartime traumas kicked in, perennially overshadowed by his German wife’s vivacious personality.

  Yvonne introduced me to her parents as if I was some raving intellectual because my nose was constantly in a book. Yvonne’s mother loved poetry and had read all the classics. She felt I was a young man with whom she could share this passion. On my second or third visit, she gave me a battered paperback copy of Dante’s Inferno, which she insisted I take away with me to read. While I loved reading, fourteenth-century epic poetry was somewhat beyond me; still, I did my best. On each subsequent visit, I was asked to discuss Dante’s opus – its inferences and undercurrents, its use of metaphor. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I found it turgid and unfathomable. It served me right. I had become a victim of my own pretentiousness.

  The date was set for Lily’s operation: 26 February 1964. I didn’t appreciate at the time how petrified Lily must have been. She was hundreds of miles away from her family in Liverpool, worried sick about us and facing major heart surgery at the very age her mother and grandmother had died. She never discussed her feelings or fears with me. Linda was her confidante. Already carrying a huge weight of responsibility on her young shoulders, she was well aware of Lily’s anguish.

  When Linda, Mike and I trooped into the hospital ward the night before the operation, we found Lily in tears. Mike went for a walk at Linda’s suggestion. I stayed where I was, rooted to the spot by the unprecedented spectacle of Lily crying in public. I had heard her weeping in her room during the night many times, but never like this, and never in front of other people. I was as embarrassed as I was concerned. Lily pulled me to her and hugged me. She never did that, either. She’d always insisted that I kiss her cheek when saying goodnight and she was forever tidying my hair and smoothing my clothes, but that’s as tactile as it got. We never hugged. It just wasn’t our way. The only time I could remember her cuddling me was on that disastrous Christmas afternoon at Ron’s, and on that occasion I’d been well aware that she was making a point.

  ‘I haven’t signed the papers yet,’ she sobbed to Linda. ‘What if I die? What will happen to you?’ Her words cut me like the surgeon’s scalpel. In the space of a few minutes I’d had three new and thoroughly unwelcome experiences. I’d seen Lily cry openly, she’d hugged me for practically the first time and now she was talking about dying. This was getting dark and dangerous.

  Lily still insisted that nobody in Liverpool was to be informed, not that it was possible now to notify any of her relatives in advance, with the operation only hours away, assuming she finally signed the consent form. Linda tried to soothe her by repeating what the consultant had said about the operation adding years to her life. She reminded Lily that she was in the care of some of the finest heart specialists in the world and of what the alternative would be. She pointed out how ill she’d been and would be again. ‘You’re not well and this operation will save your life,’ she summarized succintly.

  Lily seemed to have calmed down by the time we were asked to leave. She hugged me again and gave me a radiant smile as I looked back at her from the door of the hospital ward.

  She must have signed those papers because the operation went ahead as planned the next day. I went to school and Linda went to work as usual. At the hospital in the evening we were told that Lily was in intensive care following the surgery. The nurse asked if there was an adult with us. Linda explained that she was Lily’s next of kin and was eventually allowed to see her. I wasn’t. I whispered to Linda that I thought this was unfair, but she wasn’t about to press my case, fearing that making a fuss would only lead to her being excluded as well.

  A tracheotomy had been performed because Lily was having difficulty breathing and, as she was so poorly, a coma had been induced. Linda was warned about the condition in which she would find her mother. ‘She will know you’re there, so talk to her and tell her that she looks well,’ said the intensive care sister as she shepherded Linda to Lily’s bedside. ‘You have to give her encouragement.’ Linda described the ward to me later. Dimly lit, it was filled with the gentle hum of medical machinery and a strong smell of Jeyes Fluid. Lily lay with her eyes tightly shut, wires and tubes poking out from every part of her tiny frame.

  Linda suppressed her tears and her deep disquiet. She told Lily that the operation had been a success, that she’d soon be home. She waited for a response, scrutinizing Lily’s face intensely in search of the slightest twitch or flicker. There was nothing. No sign that she’d heard. No indication that she knew Linda was there. The sister asked Linda to leave and we caught the bus home.

  Linda went back every day, sometimes with Mike, more often alone. If her sheer willpower could have improved the situation, Lily would have leaped out of bed and turned cartwheels. As it was, her condition deteriorated day by day. A week after the surgery, on Wednesday 4 March, Mike drove Linda to the hospital for her usual early-evening visit. She was told that Lily’s kidneys were failing and that she would need another operation that evening. Linda wasn’t permitted to see her, even to go through her daily routine of chatting away without receiving any response.

  When Linda and Mike returned to Walmer Road, the three of us sat in the back room around the fire, saying very little but thinking a lot. At nine o’clock that night there was a knock on the door. It was the police with a message from Hammersmith Hospital. Linda was to ring them immediately. She decided to head straight to the hospital rather than waste time in the phone box. I’d given up appealing to be allowed to go with them. Linda had enough to cope with already and in truth I was frightened about what I’d have to face if I did go. Instead I was dispatched to stay with the Coxes so that I wouldn’t be alone in the house. Mrs Cox was, as always, accommodating. I could sleep on the floor in her large front room. Space could be found for Linda in a bedroom upstairs. Whatever happened that night, neither of us wanted to return to the cold despair of Walmer Road.

  As I disappeared into the paraffin-scented warmth of 318 Lancaster Road, and Mike’s Ford Zephyr bore Linda to Hammersmith Hospital, the snow began to fall.

  Linda and Mike were left sitting outside the intensive care ward for a long time before a doctor came to speak to them. He was brusque and to the point. During her second operation Lily’s kidneys had failed. There was nothing more that could have been done to save her. She had died in theatre.

  Linda was poleaxed. She had been utterly convinced that Lily would survive; that the surgery would be the turning point for her. That she’d return to a more tranquil life, free of debt, live in a decent house with its own front door, some reward for all those years of toil and squalor. For the operation that was to have transformed Lily’s life instead to end it so prematurely was the final cruelty inflicted on a woman who had borne so much misery so courageously for so long. Linda was in such distress that she didn’t think to ask to see Lily, and nobody invited her to do so.

  At Lancaster Road, under some blankets on the living-room floor, I was wide awake when Linda arrived in the early hours. She took me into the kitchen on my own to break the news to me. I knew I was expected to cry, but somehow I couldn’t, and didn’t. I went back to my blankets, pulled them over me and lay there, trying to comprehend the enormity of what had happened. It was unthinkable that I would never see Lily again. Eventually, I drifted off to sleep. I knew that Lily deserved tears but my eyes remained resolutely dry.

  Somebody had to deal with the aftermath, and inevitably that somebody was Linda. It is scarcely believable that my sister, at just sixteen years old, could have dealt with it all so completely, but she did.

  First thing in the morning she wrote to convey
the sad news to our Auntie Jean in Liverpool, asking if she’d pass it on to Lily’s siblings. Then she went to a phone box and rang the nursery where she worked to ask for time off, and Sloane school to tell them I wouldn’t be attending for a while. Mike had to go to work, so next Linda and I trudged through the snow to Hammersmith Hospital.

  A woman from Administration told us that Lily’s body was in the mortuary. Linda must arrange for it to be collected by an undertaker as soon as possible. The woman echoed a common refrain: ‘Why haven’t you got an adult with you?’ I felt like telling her we were fresh out of them. Linda was handed a death certificate. ‘You’ll need this,’ she was told, ‘and your mother’s birth certificate. She can’t be buried or cremated without both.’

  Linda said she’d search for it at home. If she couldn’t find the original, the administrator advised, she would be able to obtain a copy from Somerset House, where the records of the births, marriages and deaths of every person in the United Kingdom were kept. The administrator gave Linda the address printed on a card, along with a brown paper bag containing Lily’s belongings. ‘We had to cut her wedding ring off her finger before the operation,’ the woman explained. ‘It’s in the bag. Oh, and we took her false teeth out as well – you might want to give them to the undertaker.’ These offhand remarks stunned Linda almost as much as the news of Lily’s death.

  Lily had never removed her wedding ring. Perhaps it was simply because it wouldn’t come off, but I suspect there was more to it; that it was just too big a step for her to take. That ring symbolized a commitment she had never broken, even if Steve had. It gave her dignity and it was a badge of the conformity that was so important to her. For her to lose it at the end, in such a brutal way, was shocking. Even I could sense that.