This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  Mr Pallai had left his native Hungary during the 1956 uprising. He moonlighted with the BBC World Service, broadcasting back to Hungary, while spending his days teaching us history and a new subject on the curriculum, economics. Peter Pallai was built like a rugby player – broad shoulders, slim physique – and wore his thinning hair close-cropped.

  Half the teachers at Sloane seemed to me to be deeply uninterested in both their subjects and their pupils. ‘Dolly’ Harris, who taught us French, was so soporific that boys had been known to sleep peacefully through entire lessons. Mr Woosnam, our geography teacher, at least made an attempt to engage us in his classes. ‘What would you like to do in geography?’ he asked keenly. ‘Play football,’ came the depressing reply.

  My favourite teacher was Peter Carlen, who had taken over from Mr Smith as our English teacher part way through my third year. By the time I entered my fourth and what turned out to be final year, he’d become the second most important adult in my life (Mr Pepper just clinched the top spot). In class Mr Carlen led us, line by line, through Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, exploring the context and the background and pointing out the power of alliteration (‘the rifles’ rapid rattle’); he analysed Animal Farm, explaining the subtext and how Orwell used his characters to satirize the descent of the Russian Revolution into totalitarianism. He took us to the theatre to see Spike Milligan in Oblomov and musicals such as Oliver! and Half a Sixpence.

  Outside his lessons, he maintained his interest in our welfare. He once saw me reading the copy of David Copperfield I’d borrowed from Mr Cox and asked me what else I read. I told him about the paperback crime thrillers I’d begun to pick up for a few pence at the Quality Book Shop in Shepherd’s Bush Road. By then I’d swapped a whole stack of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly magazines for a shelf full of crime mysteries by Agatha Christie, Leslie Charteris, John Dickson Carr and Edgar Wallace. He suggested that I write a review of every book I read at the back of my English exercise book and guided my reading, giving me a list of books he thought I ought to read and would enjoy. On his recommendation I was introduced to Geoffrey Household, Ian Fleming, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and C.S. Forester.

  Mr Carlen was in his early thirties and wore his already greying hair fashionably long, which must have frustrated Doc Henry, who was for ever sending me home to have mine cut. The timbre of his voice commanded attention. I never heard him raise it. There was no need: nobody misbehaved in Mr Carlen’s lessons.

  By this time I’d decided I wanted to be a writer as well as a rock star. I told Mr Carlen of my ambition and he encouraged me to develop characters, pre-plan plots and submit my stories as school projects. I created Mr Midnight, a black-clad superhero with a mission to avenge the wrongs done to innocent citizens, and a detective, Inspector Andrews – basically a synthesis of all the detectives created by the authors whose books I devoured. Having noticed in the novels I’d read that so many important conversations took place in restaurants, I made Inspector Andrews a regular at The Golden Egg, one of a chain of garishly decorated budget eateries. Apart from Renee’s Pie and Mash Shop on the Golborne Road, it was the only restaurant I was aware of.

  I was so convinced my future career as a writer was assured that I used the lessons that bored me (basically all of them except English, history and economics) to try to teach myself to write left-handed, on the basis that if I was going to make a living out of writing I would need to be ambidextrous in case I broke my right arm. I suspect the fact that my hero Paul McCartney was left-handed also had something to do with it.

  After Mr Carlen told me about the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, which offered advice to budding writers and a useful directory of newspapers and publishers of books and magazines, I began to send off my pathetic stories and poems to various magazines and built up an impressive collection of rejection slips. I comforted myself with the knowledge that all writers had to face the disappointment of having their work declined on their way to becoming famous.

  One day Mr Carlen handed me the money to purchase four copies of a book for the school library from a bookshop on the King’s Road. ‘Which book?’ I asked.

  ‘Whichever one you think boys like you would like to read.’

  It was noon on a summer’s day and I was delighted to be released from school to browse in a bookshop entrusted with the assignment of spending the school’s funds, which after some consideration I allocated to George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I felt very adult and, like Mr Carlen, a little bohemian. I remember lighting a cigarette as I strolled down the King’s Road in the sunshine. I’d left my school blazer and tie in the cloakroom so that, for this expedition at least, I could imagine I was a struggling writer seeking inspiration rather than a schoolboy on an errand.

  Mr Carlen knew I intended to leave school at the end of that academic year and wanted me to sit my mock O-Level in English a year early, perhaps reasoning that if I passed I’d be motivated to stay on and take the real thing. As I remember, the mock exams were used to test whether a child was good enough to take the prestigious O-Level or should instead be entered for the inferior CSE. I was keen on the idea but it needed the headmaster’s approval. Doc Henry refused to allow it unless I made a commitment to stay on. I had made up my mind, however, and being deprived of sitting an exam was hardly going to change it.

  Despite our precarious financial situation, Linda never pressurized me to leave school. Quite the opposite. She was scrupulous about going to see my teachers on parents’ evenings. They must have been uncomfortable talking to a ‘parent’ who could have been in the sixth form of the girls’ school next door. Linda always gave me the same advice following these consultations, which was basically work harder, stay on, fulfil your potential. She’d tell me how much Lily would have wanted me to take O-Levels and how I’d be throwing away the advantages of my grammar-school education if I left prematurely. When I pointed out that she herself had left school at fifteen, she made the reasonable point that she’d continued her education at college and, in any case, she had known what she wanted to do, whereas I didn’t.

  Oh, but I did. I would be a songwriter and pop star. The rejection slips had convinced me that I needed to concentrate on music first and take up writing later, perhaps after the fourth bestselling album.

  By now I was playing in a duo with Andrew Wiltshire – me on guitar and vocals, Andrew on his gradually expanding drum kit – but only in the bedroom Andrew shared with his brother, John. Our market research was conducted at the Marquee in Soho, where we saw a Mod band called the Action and, later, a great ‘blue-eyed’ soul singer called Rod Stewart. After paying the entrance fee, we usually didn’t have enough money left for the bus fare home and would walk from the West End to Pitt House, often stopping to sit on steps leading down to the Thames by Putney Bridge to contemplate our futures in the hush of the small hours.

  We’d both decided to leave school and were determined to forge a career in music but we didn’t know how. As the end of the school year approached, I was sent to a careers advice office on the Fulham Road and, at Mr Carlen’s suggestion, asked about a job that involved writing. The very helpful man asked if I’d be interested in producing the blurbs for books and LP records, encapsulating the plot or describing the tracks. This sounded very exciting but nothing ever came of it. Andrew and I told everyone at Sloane that we were going to play in a group that would be touring the country. To us it was more of a prediction than a fib.

  In July 1965, two months after my fifteenth birthday, I duly left Sloane, with no regrets. I’m sure that as far as the headmaster was concerned, the feeling was mutual.

  Dereck Tapper, whose path through the education system had mirrored mine since we were five years old, had blazed a trail at Sloane as he had at Bevington – my Sloane school photograph from 1964 shows only three black pupils apart from him. He stayed on and continued to do well after we parted company.

  Five years after leaving school, I opened a nat
ional newspaper to see a photograph of Dereck playing Romeo in an Exeter University production of Romeo and Juliet, deemed newsworthy because the girl taking the role of Juliet was white and mixed-race casting was considered to be a startling innovation at the time. The characteristic I most associate with Dereck is courage. He knew how to stand up for himself, although when our paths diverged I still had little real comprehension of exactly what it was he’d had to stand up to.

  Despite the unhappiness of most of my time at Sloane, Mr Smith, Mr Pallai and in particular Mr Carlen had begun to prise open a window on the world for me. The school had also happened to place me at the centre of an area that was coming to epitomize ‘Swinging London’ for trend-setters and teenagers across the country and beyond.

  Carnaby Street, a favourite stamping ground for Colin James and me (though I only remember once buying any clothes there) was already at the beating heart of pop culture. Chelsea had for many years been a district towards which artists, musicians and theatrical types had gravitated and its inhabitants tended to be in the vanguard of new fashions and social changes. When I started at Sloane, King’s Road was still a street of butchers and bakers, newsagents and grocers, like any other London high street. As I left school the cutting-edge, psychedelic boutiques for which the road would become renowned were beginning to appear. Yet I don’t remember it occurring to me that I was living my life at the hub of Swinging London. History exists only in retrospect and besides, as someone once said, if you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t there.

  The Establishment was changing, too. In the 1964 general election the country had elected its first Labour government since I was a baby. Under the new prime minister, Harold Wilson – a former grammar-school boy – we would see the introduction of a whole series of social reforms. By the end of the decade, comprehensive education had been expanded nationwide, polytechnics and the Open University had been created, abortion was legal, capital punishment abolished and homosexuality decriminalized.

  While I didn’t listen to the radio as often as I had when we’d had a set wired into that Bakelite switch, I kept abreast of current affairs. When I got my first full-time job I decided to buy The Times to read on my way to work. It seemed an adult thing to do – and I now considered myself an adult.

  I began work the Monday after I left school, as a postal clerk with Remington Electric Razors at their headquarters on Kensington High Street. I was paid £10 every fortnight, from which I gave Linda a few pounds towards the rent, and received five luncheon vouchers a week, worth 3 shillings (15p) each. Losing free school meals at Sloane (where the dinner ladies gave me seconds and sometimes thirds) was a blow, but I found a café that served steak pie, chips and baked beans for exactly 3 shillings and that’s what I ate, every single lunchtime.

  My job was to log in all the shavers being returned for repair by registered post and dispatch them back to their owners once they were mended; to frank letters on the Pitney Bowes machine and to take the mail to the Post Office in Kensington High Street every day at 5pm. It was far from absorbing and left me plenty of time to dream of the future. Those daydreams never featured working for Tesco, yet that’s where I ended up six months after leaving school.

  I got the job through Ronnie Handley, a neighbour of Andrew’s, who lived with his dad a few doors away from the Wiltshires in Nascot Street. We showed Ronnie great respect as he had his own scooter and an M-51 fishtail parka, the pukka parka, so to speak. He was about twenty and worked as a warehouse manager at Tesco in King Street, Hammersmith.

  Supermarkets were just becoming a familiar sight on London’s streets and this was one of the bigger stores in West London. Ronnie told me he needed an assistant. The pay was much better than at Remington’s – £8 a week, plus luncheon vouchers, too – so in January 1966 I moved on to Tesco, where my principal function was to support Ronnie, ordering stock for the warehouse and helping to unload the deliveries. The Tesco managers (including Ronnie) wore tunic-style cream linen jackets. The non-managers (including me) wore awful black nylon overalls that flapped around our knees.

  Andrew was training to be a butcher. He liked the sound of the customer-free environment of the Tesco butchers’ department. It was based at the warehouse, from where cuts of meat were transferred to the shop already shrink-wrapped, which meant Tesco butchers never had to deal with the public. A few months later, he joined me there.

  By day we were unassuming supermarket workers, but every moment of our spare time was devoted to the pursuit of our dream to become pop stars. We longed to form a proper band. Luckily so did Danny Curtis, elder brother of my childhood friend Walter, who was engaged to Tony Cox’s sister, Carole. Danny had a passable voice, bags of energy and few inhibitions. At nineteen years of age, Andrew and I felt he was getting on a bit, but on the other hand that brought certain advantages. He drove a van, he could talk his way in and out of anything and he knew how to mend fuses and cable wire.

  Danny came over to Pitt House to talk me through his ideas. He would be our singer/manager and would make bookings, provide the transport, set up the gear and distribute our earnings. He volunteered to advertise in Melody Maker for two guitarists. We christened the band the Area and painted the name on the side of Danny’s ancient Bedford van. Our base was to be the Fourth Feathers Club in Edgware Road, one of a series of Feathers youth clubs across London.

  Our advert brought us bass guitarist Ian Clark, a red-haired Scot studying music at university in London, and, on lead guitar, Tony Kearns, who’d left his native Chester to seek fame and fortune in the capital and owned an exotic Futurama instrument.

  When it became obvious that my small amplifier – the one Mike had made for me as promised for my fourteenth birthday – wasn’t powerful enough, Danny blagged me an old Marshall from the Small Faces, who also practised at the Fourth Feathers, as did a band called the Wild Angels. The famous impresario Don Arden, who was managing the Small Faces at the time and whose son Dave played with the Wild Angels, was a frequent visitor.

  It was just as we were putting the group together that my Vox was stolen in one of the Pitt House break-ins. My saviour, to my surprise and gratitude, was Lily. She had left £40 for me – whether in a savings account, or from an insurance policy, I no longer remember – which Linda hadn’t mentioned, having intended to set it aside for me until I was older. When I lost my guitar my sister decided to give me the money. I used it to buy a gorgeous red Höfner Verythin from a shop in Wardour Street for £35.

  Once my guitar had been replaced, we were up and away, playing in pubs and clubs that Andrew and I were too young to drink in. We had a regular spot every Wednesday night at the Pavilion opposite Wormwood Scrubs, a big music venue where we occasionally supported the Symbols – a band that made the lower reaches of the charts with an early cover of the Four Seasons’ ‘Bye Bye Baby’. On one exhilarating evening we played in front of 1,000 people at Aylesbury College – not quite Shea Stadium but a lively enough venue. When the crowd made it clear that they wanted to hear us rather than the headline band, Fifth Dynasty, we really felt we were going places. And we hadn’t the slightest doubt that the principal place we were going was the top of the charts.

  Chapter 18

  AS MY MUSICAL career was launched in 1966 our two-and-a-half-year occupancy of the Pitt House maisonette was drawing to an end. Linda and Mike were going to be married on 24 September and Mike had found a house for them in Watford, close to his parents. Linda had by now qualified as a nursery nurse and would be transferring from Brook Green to a nursery closer to her new home. The house Mike was buying had three bedrooms and they wanted me to move there with them. The idea was the topic of several heated discussions between Linda and me but she knew in her heart that I wouldn’t leave London. I was a Londoner, born and bred, my whole world was in the town and I had no intention of relocating to what I saw as the countryside. The problem was, where would I live once she was married?

  Linda came up with an elaborate plan to enable
me to stay on in the flat after she moved to Watford, which involved Mike’s sister, Barbara, a single mother living in a caravan in Surrey. Linda asked the council if Barbara could move into the flat in her place. The woman from the LCC was in no mood to discuss this option. No, she replied curtly, that would not be possible. When would Linda be returning the keys? At least the threat of foster parents had diminished. Children in care were generally turfed out at the age of sixteen.

  The solution came from 318 Lancaster Road. Linda contacted Mrs Cox, who said I could stay there, sharing a room with my erstwhile best friend, Tony. I would pay a few pounds in rent from my wages as I’d done at Pitt House. After two and a half years away from Notting Hill, I was going back to my manor.

  I had no romantic notions of returning to my roots, nor had I missed Notting Hill. I’d been particularly glad to escape our miserable accommodation. But there were practical reasons why it was good to be back. Living with Mr and Mrs Cox was perfect for me, and for the Area, with Danny living opposite and Andrew within walking distance. Although Tony and I never resumed our close friendship, we always got on fine. While he wasn’t actually a Mod, he had a Lambretta and a parka with ‘The Who’ emblazoned on the back. I’d ride pillion as we buzzed around town with his mates from Kilburn in a scooter cavalcade.

  Picturing the Coxes’ large living room brings so many memories of that time into sharp focus. It was there that one evening, after returning from a gig at the Fourth Feathers, I watched the horror of Aberfan – the collapse of a mountainside colliery waste tip sited above a Welsh village, which engulfed a terrace of homes and a primary school – unfolding on the TV screen. The disaster claimed the lives of 116 children and twenty-eight adults.