This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  And as for the teeth, we’d had no idea that Lily wore dentures. We subsequently discovered that she’d had all her natural teeth removed when the National Health Service was created. Like many people then, she’d chosen that drastic course of action rather than endure a life of painful dental surgery on teeth already damaged by a poor diet and malnutrition. In the early days of the NHS dentistry was entirely free, so having every tooth taken out was an option that seemed sensible to many working-class people, including Lily and Steve. Lily must have gone to extraordinary lengths to hide the fact she wore dentures. We’d known about Steve’s – they’d grinned at us from his bedside every morning – but Lily, with her lovely smile, her pearl-white teeth? False? Surely not. Yet here they were in a brown paper bag. Another vestige of her dignity stripped away at the end.

  Next on Linda’s to-do list was informing Steve – or at least, getting a message to him. On our way back from the hospital we went to the flat in Peabody Buildings where Steve had taken us as small children to see his mother. She was dead by this time and the flat had been passed on to Steve’s youngest sibling, our Uncle Jim, a good fifteen years his brother’s junior, who now lived there with his own family and an impressive collection of Frank Sinatra albums. Although Jim didn’t have Steve’s musical talent he was passionate about Sinatra. Jim was the only relative of Steve’s we had any time for – or who had any time for us. He was now married to a lovely woman, our Auntie Betty, with one small daughter and another baby on the way. They alone had stayed in touch with Lily and she had always appreciated their empathy.

  Uncle Jim and Auntie Betty were shocked and concerned for us, but Linda politely declined their offers of help. We had learned to be self-sufficient and we hadn’t come looking for anything from them. All Linda asked was that they tell Steve. She promised to pass on details of the funeral when it had been arranged.

  The next day the sun came out and the snow began to melt. Linda searched through the drawers, the wardrobe, the shoe boxes and the various Christmas hamper receptacles. Although she did discover an insurance policy, which she was able to cash in to pay for the funeral, she couldn’t find Lily’s birth certificate anywhere. That meant an expedition to Somerset House when it reopened after the weekend.

  In the meantime Linda went to a funeral parlour she had noticed in the Portobello Road. A frail old man who looked more like an imminent customer than the proprietor emerged from the back of the shop. He made the usual inquiry about the absence of an accompanying adult. Linda explained the situation and told him that we would be hearing from our aunties and uncles in Liverpool soon. However, the hospital had emphasized the need for Lily’s body to be collected from the mortuary quickly. She handed him Lily’s dentures in their brown paper bag and asked for them to be fitted before the funeral.

  The old man asked if we wanted a burial or a cremation. Linda had no idea what Lily would have wanted. It was not a question she had ever expected to be asked. Linda had only one other experience of a death in the family. Remembering that Nanny Johnson had been cremated, she chose the same for Lily. The undertaker said she should come back on Monday with Lily’s birth and death certificates, along with details of how the funeral would be paid for.

  One of Lily’s little homilies was that you could never be lost while you had a tongue in your head. On the Monday morning Linda duly found her way to Somerset House, rising majestically between the Thames and the Strand. She was directed to Birth Registrations, an enormous room as big as an entire school, full of banks of drawers set out in endless rows. A middle-aged woman in twin-set and pearls, a pleated skirt and sensible shoes asked why she didn’t have an adult with her.

  There followed an interrogation as Twin-Set and Pearls completed the required form in triplicate. Lily’s full name, date of birth, place of birth, parents’ names and so on. When enough information had been entered, a search was made and the certificate found amid a towering mass of paper overseen by the lady in sensible shoes who handed Linda a copy of the certificate and asked for a payment of 2s 6d. Linda had just about enough money for the certificate and her fare back to Notting Hill, where she immediately took the proof of Lily’s birth and death to the funeral director in Portobello Road.

  He confirmed that he’d collected Lily’s body from Hammersmith Hospital. It was in a back room, still lying in a temporary coffin. The dentures had been re-affixed but he advised Linda against seeing the body because it was ‘in a bit of a state’. Linda took his advice but asked if she could go into the room to spend a few minutes in private with Lily. For the best part of five years, she and Lily had shared confidences every night in the big bed vacated by Steve. Now she was talking to her alone in the back room of a funeral parlour in the Portobello Road. Linda told Lily how much she loved her and vowed to look after me and keep me safe.

  Verifying that it was actually Lily’s body in there was the one grim task that was beyond my sister. I’m not certain if anyone had formally identified the body but Linda couldn’t. She wanted to remember Lily as she was, the pretty face, the ‘titty nose’, the lovely smile. However, she had no grounds to suspect the coffin did not contain that tiny frame. She just had to trust that the undertaker had made sure Lily would go to her funeral with her teeth in.

  When she got home Linda found a letter from Auntie Jean on the doormat. She and Uncle George would be driving down to London the following weekend with Auntie Peggy. Lily’s favourite brother, John, and his wife would follow. Auntie Rita, though desperate to come, was due to give birth any day and it had been decided that travelling down to London would not be sensible for her. After the funeral, Jean wrote, she and George would take Linda and me back to Liverpool with them.

  The idea of a holiday in Liverpool lifted our spirits. However, the implication in Auntie Jean’s letter was that she intended us to stay there permanently. On that we were clear. It was kind of Lily’s family to offer us a home but we would not leave the city where we’d spent our entire lives. We couldn’t be certain what would happen to us in London but Linda was determined to keep us there, and, most importantly, together and well away from any kind of institution.

  Chapter 16

  I WAS BEWILDERED. My inability to cry nagged at me. The full force of Lily’s death probably hadn’t hit me yet but it felt to me as if I were letting her down.

  With our Liverpudlian relatives arriving at Walmer Road, it was decided that I should stay on with the Coxes until after the funeral and a mattress was found for the living-room floor. Every night leading up to Lily’s cremation, I lay there thinking of her and trying to summon the tears I felt obliged to shed. I was at a loss to understand why I was unable to grieve properly.

  In my defence, tears simply weren’t part of my repertoire of emotional responses. Crying wasn’t something that came easily to us North Kensington boys; indeed, we were positively discouraged from showing such weakness. Steve’s efforts to toughen me up in our little boxing tournaments were designed as much to familiarize me with pain as to teach me how to defend myself. The unwritten rule that boys weren’t supposed to cry was just as deeply ingrained in the working-class culture of West London as it was in the rarefied, stiff-upper-lip milieu of the boarding schools I read about in Frank Richards’ Billy Bunter stories.

  Those around me, with the exception of Linda, also seemed to be deliberately taking care not to display their emotions. The women conveyed a kind of mute pity that among the Liverpool contingent expressed itself in tactile gestures. They’d rub my arm and smile or ruffle my hair, telling me how brave I was. Theirs was a generation familiar with death. They’d come through the war, lost brothers and sisters to disease and seen their mother and grandmother die young.

  Losing Lily had come as a profound shock because they had known nothing of her worsening condition or the heart surgery. They had been shocked, too, by the conditions they found at Walmer Road. None of them lived in luxury but they were mortified to see what their sister had been reduced to. But the fact
that they were undemonstrative in their grief helped me to cope.

  As for the men, they treated me as though nothing whatsoever had happened. But, aside from my uncles, the three I knew the best made extraordinary gestures of kindness. On the Saturday before Lily’s funeral, when we’d finished the milk round, Johnny Carter took me to his house, saying he wanted to show me something. Tough Teddy Boy Johnny hadn’t uttered a word about Lily as we worked together that day. He was well aware of our sudden bereavement because Linda had dropped a note through his father’s door to make sure that the family, and Jimmy in particular, knew of Lily’s death. Jimmy had always got on well with Lily when he and Linda were courting and both Johnny and their father had met her on the odd occasion, too.

  When we reached Johnny’s house he took me straight down to the basement. There I entered an Aladdin’s cave of brand-new musical instruments. Stacked against every wall were dozens of trumpets, violins, drums and electric guitars.

  I didn’t ask where he’d got them. Let’s give Johnny Carter the benefit of the doubt: perhaps he had a sideline as a legitimate distributor of musical equipment, an essential part of the supply chain. There again, perhaps he didn’t. He stood in the middle of the room, rolling a fag, his pencil behind his right ear, his hair combed into its customary elaborate sculpture. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he asked. ‘Choose which guitar you want.’ Swallowing my astonishment, I selected a solid Vox electric, mahogany with two pick-ups, a tremolo and a gingham case, which would soon bear the legend ‘The Vampires’, written in Linda’s lipstick.

  I shook Johnny’s hand, thanked him and left his house with my first electric guitar. He took a long drag on his cigarette, saying only that he’d pick me up as usual the next day for our Sunday round. When Mike saw my acquisition his act of kindness was to promise to make me an amplifier for my fourteenth birthday.

  The steadfast Albert Cox had said nothing at all as the drama had unfolded in his house: Linda leaving me there to go to the hospital; me sleeping on his floor; Linda arriving in the middle of the night with the dreadful news. He just pottered on, cooking breakfast for everyone, going to work, tending his allotment, watching QPR.

  One day, in the period of limbo between Lily’s death and her funeral, he called me into his living room. Solemnly unlocking his precious bookcase, he invited me to take any book I wanted to read. I knew exactly which one to choose. I’d studied those books, incarcerated behind the clear glass doors, often enough. I asked for David Copperfield from his beautifully bound set of Dickens novels.

  Thus Ham, Peggotty, Uriah Heep, Mr Micawber and Steerforth became my friends, enrapturing and distracting me with their adventures and bringing me a great deal of pleasure and comfort in the difficult months to come. I couldn’t wait to look at the book. I immediately sat down in the armchair and opened it. ‘Don’t forget to bring it back when you’ve finished reading it,’ said Mr Cox over his shoulder as he locked the bookcase up again. Not a gift, then, but a loan. It was a very generous one, too. And that’s how David Copperfield became the first, and perhaps the last, book to escape from that sturdy bookcase.

  While I was exiled at the Coxes’, our house began to fill up with Scousers. Andrew dubbed it Little Liverpool. Not all of Lily’s family could make the journey to London. Our rooms were full anyway. Auntie Jean and Uncle George were sleeping in the big double bed Lily and Linda had shared. Auntie Peggy, the baby of the family, had my room and Linda slept on the settee in the front room. Lily’s eldest brother, Sonny, came down from Coventry and her two other brothers, John and Norman, from Liverpool on the day of the funeral.

  For Linda and me, it was a strange and novel experience. We had never in our lives had so many adults concerned for our welfare. They bickered in whispered conversations about how we could have been allowed to get into this state and what they could have done to prevent it. There was also much consternation at the absence of the chance to view their sister’s body. These particular conversations were suppressed in front of me but I loved listening to the stories about growing up in Liverpool, how smart Lily had been at school, the memories of the war, the ridiculous and reprehensible behaviour of our grandfather. Although he had refused to come to his daughter’s funeral, pleading infirmity, he had not wasted the opportunity to suggest that Lily was to blame for her own death. She should never have gone to London, he’d said, and he’d counselled her against marrying a ‘cockney’. By ignoring his advice she’d brought all this on herself.

  Lily’s brothers and sisters brought to that shabby house the warmth and humour of a family Lily had missed so much and seen so rarely. She was the first of the eight siblings who had survived childhood to die – the second eldest, but still only forty-two. Peggy, the youngest, was not yet out of her twenties.

  On the morning of the funeral I had to find a non-school tie to wear. I searched through the collection Steve had left behind, which Lily had kept in the gloomy old wardrobe even after the move to Walmer Road, still hanging over the piece of wire stretched across the inside door, where they’d always been. I chose a black knitted tie that was perfect for the occasion, teaming it with grey school trousers and a black jacket with six-inch vents I’d acquired second-hand from the Lane.

  At 2pm, the funeral entourage arrived at 6 Walmer Road. A few neighbours had gathered in the street to watch, along with some urchins too young for school.

  Linda and I stepped into our designated vehicle, the one following the hearse containing Lily in her small coffin. I knew I still owed her some tears. Linda wept quietly beside me. As well as grief I felt a sense of foreboding. Deep sorrow for Lily, yes, but also unease about what lay in store for Linda and me when things returned to normal, if they ever did.

  As we crept along Ladbroke Grove, a man stopped at the side of the road and with great solemnity made the sign of the cross. I’d never seen this done before and it comforted me in a way I remember trying to rationalize at the time. This stranger was paying tribute to Lily. I was deeply moved by his gesture and for a good while afterwards, whenever a funeral procession came past me in the street, I would stop and make the sign of the cross in the hope that it would bring similar comfort to someone within the dark interiors of the passing cars.

  Our last journey with Lily, from Walmer Road to Kensal Green cemetery, was short and straightforward. Left on to the Harrow Road at the north end of Ladbroke Grove, and we’d arrived at her final destination. All Souls, Kensal Green, which was inspired by the famous Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, is among the most historic and most beautiful public burial grounds in the country. Given the miseries of Lily’s brief life, it is perhaps ironic that in death she would reside at such a prestigious address, alongside the likes of William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins. Not forgetting, of course, Kelso Cochrane, who had been so brutally murdered on the corner of our street.

  It was the first funeral I had ever attended and I was bemused by its rituals. None of the adults who now surrounded Linda and me, people from the undertakers and the crematorium, had known Lily, been with her through her travails or offered her help when she needed it, yet here they were now, respectful and solicitous, when it was too late.

  It wasn’t a grand affair. Women like Lily are dispatched quietly with little fuss and no obituaries. Her brothers and sisters swelled a thin congregation at the crematorium. Pat and Albert Cox were there, Mike’s parents’ came with him from Watford and Uncle Jim and Auntie Betty appeared, making around fifteen mourners in total.

  I can remember nothing of the service but I do recall, when it was over, going into the grounds of the cemetery to see where Lily’s ashes would be placed. Mike had paid for a rose bush to be planted for her and Linda had arranged for a plaque with Lily’s name and dates to be displayed beside it.

  As we paid our respects at Lily’s resting place, I caught sight of a man standing about fifty yards away, looking over at us. He was beckoning me. It was Steve.

  Linda quickly spotted
him. She grabbed my arm and led me towards him. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said, tears pouring down her cheeks. He mumbled something about not having meant this to happen and asked if he could have a few minutes alone with me.

  To my consternation, Linda left me with him. The politeness that Lily had instilled in me prevented me from being rude or turning my back on him. It’s true that I was scared of him, too, but it was not fear that was crippling me now. Nor was it grief, or resentment, or anger, though I felt a measure of all three. The emotion that overwhelmed me was excruciating embarrassment. I simply didn’t know this man who was talking to me as if I ought to know him. But I knew enough to be painfully aware that he bore much of the responsibility for Lily’s difficult life and early death, and all I wanted was for him to go away.

  The ordeal lasted for no more than a few minutes. He asked me how I was and said he had a gift for me. It was a key ring with a miniature football attached to it. I took it, thanked him and we walked away from each other. For ever.

  Uncle George had paid a penny for a platform ticket at Liverpool Lime Street and now leaned his tall frame through the lowered sash window into our carriage, issuing firm instructions about staying in touch. If we moved we were to remember to take out a Post Office redirection. It cost nothing and would ensure that any mail sent to 6 Walmer Road would be forwarded to us.

  Auntie Jean and Uncle George had made it clear that they wanted to make a home for us in Liverpool. We were adamant that we wanted to stay in London. We saw no reason whatsoever why we shouldn’t just continue our life as before. We had coped on our own through Lily’s countless hospital stays, the last time for over four months, and Linda was used to managing our finances as well as taking responsibility for our welfare. We intended to keep our heads down, say nothing to anybody and simply carry on living at Walmer Road.