by Alan Johnson
Lily’s family had taken us back to Liverpool with them for a week following the funeral. Our holiday had its sobering moments, notably our visit to the house in Warham Road in which Lily had grown up, where we experienced for ourselves the icy disregard of her irascible father. But these were easily outweighed by the warmth shown to us by the rest of the Gibson clan, including many cousins we were meeting for the first time. My favourite uncle was Auntie Rita’s husband Harry, a diehard Evertonian marooned in Anfield.
Harry had himself been a promising footballer in his youth and had been signed by Blackpool before the war intervened. He took me along to Goodison Park to see Everton play Nottingham Forest. The home side had won the League championship the previous season with Albert Dunlop, Brian Labone, Jimmy Gabriel, Roy Vernon and, at centre forward, the player known as the Golden Vision, Alex Young.
On the terraces, Harry asked me if I smoked. As I’d been puffing away for years and was eager to demonstrate my masculinity, I eagerly accepted the offered cigarette. However, I didn’t smoke more than about fifteen a week and Harry was a chain-smoker. Matching him fag for fag, I’d had my weekly quota by half-time. Moreover, Harry smoked Woodbine untipped – small, dark cigarettes made with black tobacco that probably belonged in a pipe, or fuelling an industrial boiler. It was like inhaling burning compost.
As half-time approached, Harry, engrossed in Alex Young’s humiliation of the hapless Forest centre half, rather absent-mindedly handed me another stick of black poison. When nobody took it he looked round to find me collapsed on the terraces – completely Woodbined.
The St John’s Ambulance first-aiders brought me round. Since neither Harry nor I was keen to leave, they insisted that I sat rather than stood through the second half and shepherded us to a couple of seats in the stand, close to the directors’ box. It was the first time Harry had watched his beloved Everton in such comfort. As he puffed his way happily through their 6–1 victory, he told me he’d have to bring me to every game now. To get an upgrade like this for ten Woodies was a bargain, although he’d be grateful if I could faint a little earlier in the game in future.
Back in London, we mechanically picked up the threads of our daily routine. But our plan to carry on regardless was swiftly scuppered. A letter arrived, addressed to Mrs L.M. Johnson, from London County Council. It informed us that the Walmer Road building was no longer fit for habitation and had been earmarked for demolition. As she was a medical priority, Lily’s would be the first family to be rehoused. She was offered a new three-bedroomed house in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire – the house she’d always dreamed of, with her own front door – two weeks after her funeral.
Linda was particularly distraught. The prospect of a house away from the slums, a fresh start in a new place, might have helped to pull Lily through if the offer had been made a year or so earlier. It might have made a world of difference to her condition. I diplomatically kept quiet about our declared aversion to moving out of London. To be fair, I think once Lily’s health had taken its dramatic turn for the worse we’d have done anything to please our mother.
Linda went to the Rowe Housing Trust who, since we hadn’t notified them, were unaware that Lily had died, as, evidently, was the LCC. She was asked to wait and eventually to step into the office of the man in charge. He wore a three-piece suit with a watch chain dangling from his waistcoat pocket. As Linda gave a full account of the circumstances of Lily’s death, he made notes on a large ruled notepad that rested on the desk in front of him. Linda finished by passing him a copy of the letter offering Lily a council house.
He read it carefully. ‘How old are you and your brother?’
‘I’m sixteen and he’s thirteen’, she replied.
‘I’m afraid that by law you have to be aged twenty-one or over to hold a rent book with us or with the council. I’m afraid you won’t be able to take up this offer.’
‘But my mum was on the waiting list for seventeen years,’ Linda pleaded.
‘Your mother may well have been on the council waiting list for seventeen years but your mother is dead. You can’t simply inherit her place on the list. In any case, you’re too young to have a council property in any circumstances.’
The official said he’d ask somebody from the council to visit us and a couple of days later another man duly turned up on our doorstep. He was waiting there when Linda came home from work. She invited him in, made a pot of tea and there ensued a long conversation. This man wasn’t unsympathetic but he was equally unequivocal: there was no prospect whatsoever of us being rehoused by the council. At sixteen she was a child and we should go to live with relatives. When Linda told him that the only relatives who could or would take us in were in Liverpool, and that she was training to be a nursery nurse in London, he had a brainwave.
‘It’s beyond question,’ he said, ‘that your brother will have to be taken into care. He’s likely to be placed with foster parents. As for you, I’m sure Dr Barnardo’s could facilitate your childcare studies as part of a programme of care at one of their homes.’
This did not go down well with Linda. She went through everything again: the long periods of time we’d spent alone, the bills paid, the debts cleared. At the end of her peroration she announced that if she and I weren’t given a place where we could live together, we’d refuse to leave Walmer Road and they’d have to pull the house down around us.
It was a bravura performance which obviously earned her the respect of the already kindly disposed council official. He left still insisting that allocating us a council house would be impossible but promising to speak to his superiors to see what could be done. A few days later he sent a letter informing us that we’d been assigned a social worker who would be in touch with us shortly.
Needless to say, Linda dealt with all of this on her own, and I’m sure my pessimism wasn’t helpful. When she told me of her plan for the Siege of Walmer Road, I pointed out that we’d be considerably easier to remove than the old piano that still occupied the front room.
I held out very little hope for our prospects of staying together, even less when Linda told me about the appointment of a social worker. He made his first appearance on a rare occasion when we both happened to be at home. His name was Mr Pepper. A tall man in his early thirties, with sandy hair, florid cheeks and a kind face, he always wore a white mac, irrespective of the weather.
Mr Pepper had evidently worked hard to follow up the council official’s ‘brainwave’ because he had a little presentation prepared. He’d found a ‘nice’ foster family who lived close to my school and were prepared to take me in straight away. After Easter, Linda could have a place on an NNEB course at Dr Barnardo’s at Barkingside with accommodation provided.
Coincidentally, we had visited that very institution a few years earlier after a fund-raising effort Linda had made in aid of Dr Barnardo’s. This had consisted of attempting to sell bits of old tat at a penny apiece from a trestle table set up outside 6 Walmer Road. Linda had got the idea of this ‘table sale’ from seeing similar initiatives on the streets of Fulham, where she went to school. She had no doubt chosen Dr Barnardo’s as the beneficiary because of her desire to work with children; perhaps at the time she was thinking she might work for them. Anyway, we raised something like 10 shillings, of which Lily probably contributed a shilling or two, scraped together to buy some of her stuff back.
On receiving Linda’s letter and postal order, Dr Barnardo’s invited her to see their children’s home at Barkingside. The charity’s head office was also there, and I assume it must have been their showcase London residential home. Lily couldn’t go with her so she roped me in. I recall a series of houses set in a square round a kind of village green. Accommodation was allocated according to the children’s ages and each building had a ‘house mother’ or ‘house father’ in charge. It all seemed jolly enough but something about the regimented existence chilled our souls. Our perception was probably unfair and undeserved but we came away feeling gla
d we were visitors rather than inmates.
When Mr Pepper had outlined his solution he sat back on the old brown settee, looking very pleased with himself. Linda exploded. She leaped off her chair, stood in front of him, hands on hips, and gave him both barrels. ‘How dare you! You’ve never even met us, never spoken to me, and yet you’re asking us to do what I’ve already said is unacceptable!’ Mr Pepper looked like a schoolchild being told off by his headmistress. ‘But it’s all been arranged,’ he pleaded.
My guess is that the council official had given a somewhat misleading account of his conversation with Linda to Mr Pepper, who had gone to a lot of time and trouble to secure what he believed we wanted.
‘Well, you can just un-arrange it,’ Linda retorted fiercely, ‘because Alan is not going to live with foster parents and I am not going to Barnardo’s.’
‘But you’re too young to live by yourselves,’ Mr Pepper reiterated.
Linda snorted. ‘Too young? It’s a bit late to worry about that now. We’ve been living by ourselves for years.’
Linda could be very eloquent and persuasive and couldn’t have failed to convince Mr Pepper of her capabilities and accomplishments – or of the truth of her succinct concluding argument: if he was concerned about our welfare, he’d keep us together, not force us apart. She was even more confident that she’d be able to pay the rent on any council house we were allocated since receiving a letter from Steve the previous day. He said he’d resume his maintenance payments, if not on the same scale: the £6 10s a week he’d been ordered to pay originally would be reduced to £2 10s because Lily was dead and Linda was earning. Nevertheless, it was something. He told us that we could rely on him, and the postal order would arrive every week. We couldn’t and it didn’t, but at least the thought was there.
Mr Pepper’s conversion from villain to hero couldn’t have been easy for him professionally. On the strength of that one meeting, he must have decided that the risk of letting us stay together was worth taking. Who knows what machinations he had to go through to achieve that for us? We just waited to hear from him, blissfully unaware of whatever battles he was fighting on our behalf.
One day I returned from school to find him on our doorstep, white mac fully buttoned despite the warm weather. I let him in and left him sitting in the front room to wait for Linda. Half an hour later she arrived and asked me, in hushed tones, if Mr Pepper had said anything. He hadn’t – and he looked tense. Linda feared the worst. We went together into the front room to learn our fate.
Mr Pepper began by saying how much better off we would be if we agreed to the arrangement he had already suggested. Had we thought any further about it? Linda said we hadn’t and wouldn’t. He then made a point of asking me if I was of the same view. I announced, somewhat more meekly than Linda, that I was. He told us that he’d argued with the council that we should have the opportunity to remain together and had eventually managed to obtain their reluctant agreement. We could be given a place to live on two conditions. The first was that we had to find an adult householder in London to stand as a guarantor. The second was that we accepted that he would be visiting us on a regular basis as our social worker.
Linda was so overcome she almost cried. She took Mr Pepper’s phone number and said she’d ring him as soon as she’d been round to Peabody Buildings to ask Uncle Jim to stand as guarantor. Mr Pepper was clearly impressed by my sister’s maturity and no doubt felt they were now allies. But if he thought there’d be no further confrontations he was underestimating her.
Once Uncle Jim had agreed and Mr Pepper had been to see him with all the necessary paperwork, the council offered us a flat in Hammersmith. Linda went to take a look at it. The flat was on the top floor of a ten-storey block served by a lift that was covered in graffiti and reeked of urine. The previous tenant, an old lady, hadn’t wanted electricity installed, preferring to retain gas lighting. It was in almost as bad a state as the condemned houses in Walmer Road and Southam Street. The walls were damp and cracked and there was mildew everywhere. Nowadays an enterprising estate agent might try to talk it up by describing it as ‘open-plan’: not a single room had a door – they had apparently all been pulled off and chopped up for firewood. We were used to unpleasant smells but the rank stench emanating from that flat, Linda declared, almost made her vomit. Wisely deciding against investigating the source of the appalling stink, she closed the door, marched to the nearest telephone box and rang Mr Pepper.
‘The flat is disgusting, I’m not accepting it,’ she told our hero.
‘You can’t refuse,’ he said. ‘They won’t make you another offer. You’re in no position to reject it. You have to go where they send you.’
‘Well, we’re not going there. Go and look at it yourself and if you honestly think you could live there, come round and tell me.’
Mr Pepper went to see the flat the following day. It was the last we heard of it and within a week we’d been offered another one.
PART III
AFTER LILY
Chapter 17
THE SOUTH SIDE of the Thames was uncharted territory for Linda and me. But that’s where the council sent us – to Pitt House on the Wilberforce estate in York Road, on the border between Battersea and Wandsworth. Number 11 was on the first floor of a squat four-storey block built in the 1930s.
It was, it must be said, only just south of the river – about 500 yards from Wandsworth Bridge. Opposite the estate, on the riverbank, was the huge Booth’s gin distillery, whose aroma covered the entire neighbourhood like a thick, pungent juniper blanket. My memory automatically generates that smell whenever I cross Wandsworth Bridge, even though the distillery gave way years ago to plush riverside apartments.
Our flat was a maisonette. Our own front door opened into a sizeable living room and there was a separate kitchen. Upstairs were two bedrooms, our first indoor toilet and a proper bathroom. To us it was pure luxury.
We left North Kensington on 4 May 1964. It was farewell to Berriman’s, Maynard’s and the little old lady in the ‘milk shop’ opposite us. Farewell to the people who’d managed to establish a community amid the squalor and poverty of Southam Street and Walmer Road. Linda would never return but for me, the umbilical cord had not quite yet been severed.
Too far away now to help Johnny Carter deliver milk or paraffin, I said goodbye to him and thanked him again for my guitar. Mike loaded our few belongings (including the Salvation Army three-piece suite) into a small hired van. We left Steve’s piano behind for the demolition men, part of a Notting Hill that was disappearing for ever.
Linda paid the rent, fed the meters, bought the food, washed and swept, all with minimal help from me. Mr Pepper would call on us once a week in the early evening. On the nights he was due Linda would cook a proper meal to underline the success of our domesticity. She spent the weekends in Watford with Mike and then I would have the flat pretty much to myself.
Linda was as good as her word, never once defaulting on the rent. How she managed is still a mystery to me. Steve’s contribution soon dried up, leaving her to support us on her modest wage with financial help from Mike, when he could afford it. But manage she did, and I suspect she was so obviously in control that Mr Pepper quickly realized neither she nor I required the constant monitoring that had been stipulated. As a result, though he was obliged to continue his weekly visits until Linda’s eighteenth birthday, they gradually became briefer and more perfunctory.
What both Linda and I found most difficult was the antipathy of our neighbours, who seemed to resent seeing two teenagers occupying a council flat when they knew of many families on the waiting list. Given our own bitter experience, to a certain extent we could understand how they felt – Lily had waited in vain for seventeen years for decent accommodation – but their naked hostility was hard to rationalize.
In two and a half years at Pitt House, I can’t remember any of our neighbours ever speaking to us. It didn’t matter much to me but Linda was gregarious and anxious for
us to be accepted. It wasn’t long before the situation worsened. The eldest boy in the flat next door, a lad of about Linda’s age, hung around with a gang. One evening they pulled out the fuse box to our flat, which was easily accessible in the communal area at the end of the landing.
Mike reconnected everything, but it happened again and again – always our fuse box, never any of the others. Linda complained to the caretaker, to no avail. He seemed to bear us even more ill will than the tenants did.
With Linda in Watford most weekends and me out and about, it was probably only a matter of time before someone broke in. The flat would be in darkness and it was obvious nobody was at home. They would come on a Saturday. The first time they took our beloved Dansette. The second time they took my Vox electric guitar (which could have been divine retribution, given how Johnny probably acquired it in the first place). The third time they didn’t take anything because there was nothing left to steal. We had no insurance and we didn’t report the break-ins to the police, or to Mr Pepper. If we’d told Mr Pepper his Plan A could have been resurrected, and if we’d told the police they’d have told Mr Pepper.
Pitt House was a palace compared to where we’d lived before. If the price we had to pay to stay there was a bit of nastiness from the neighbours and the caretaker’s indifference, it was worth it. What mattered most to Linda and me was being together, free from any institutions.
The Wilberforce estate was much closer to my school than Walmer Road. Indeed, I often walked there and back. The sixteen months I remained there after Lily died was the only period of my time at Sloane I enjoyed, thanks to the arrival of two new teachers I liked and who inspired my interest in their subjects.