This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood

by Alan Johnson

  And so I joined the In-Betweens as the white guy on rhythm guitar and backing vocals. We played soul – Stax, Tamla, Atlantic – but with a fair smattering of pop, songs like ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’, the Bee Gees’ ‘To Love Somebody’ and our classic rendition of the Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’. I took lead vocals on this while Carmen danced seductively around me, draping herself across my shoulders in a way I wouldn’t have appreciated Danny Curtis doing.

  Our base was a pub called the Pied Horse at the Angel, Islington, opposite the Post Office’s Northern District headquarters, where bass guitarist Sham worked as a postman. North London was a foreign land to me and getting there involved a circuitous tube journey at least once a week for our regular Friday-night gig at the pub and on the odd Saturday when we weren’t booked elsewhere.

  Afterwards I’d make my way back to my solitary billet in Hamlet Gardens.

  Andrew and Ann urged me to find myself a girlfriend so that we could go out in the evenings as a foursome. I had been nursing a serious crush on Carmen, our exotic vocalist, but, much to my amazement, she preferred Mike, the drummer. So when Linda invited me to a party, I was unattached.

  It was a New Year’s Eve party at Mike and Linda’s house in Watford. Or, to be more accurate, a New Year’s Eve Eve party. There was no Bank Holiday on New Year’s Day back then, and with 31 December 1967 falling on a Sunday and everyone due to greet 1968 at work, the event was held on the Saturday night to ensure that the occasion could be properly celebrated.

  Somehow I managed to perform with the In-Betweens and get to Watford for the party, arriving on the last train well after midnight. Everyone was bopping away in Linda’s house when I arrived. Among her friends and neighbours was an attractive black-haired girl with a lovely smile who had come alone. I asked Linda who she was, sotto voce, as she fussed around getting me a drink in the crowded kitchen. The only part of the reply I caught was the girl’s name, Judy Cox, and Linda’s insistence that I’d met her before. Given her surname, I assumed this would have been at Lancaster Road and that she must be a relative of Pat and Albert’s.

  In fact, as I discovered, Judy was nothing to do with the Lancaster Road Coxes. She’d trained as a nursery nurse with Linda, they had become close and I’d met her one afternoon when Linda had brought three of her friends to Pitt House. I remembered, then, trying to impress them in my pretentious way by offering them a cigarette from my flat box of Du Maurier’s, which I considered the height of sophistication. I recalled thinking how pretty she was as she took one.

  Judy was a few months older than my sister. She had been engaged to an Italian who had been in England training to be a teacher. They had been together for three years when Judy fell pregnant and her fiancé fled back to Italy, breaking off all communication. Her daughter Natalie was now fifteen months old and sleeping upstairs with Mike and Linda’s baby daughter Renay while the celebrations proceeded noisily below. When the party was over, the other revellers had all gone home and our hosts had retired to bed, Judy and I were not ready for the night to end. We stayed up into the small hours, talking and getting to know one another, with the radio playing softly in the background – hearing ‘Nights in White Satin’ always reminds me of that New Year’s Eve. As the old year ebbed away, my increasing loneliness went with it.

  Judy’s upbringing hadn’t been conventional. She had been just sixteen months old when her mother died of peritonitis in pregnancy at the age of twenty-four. The baby had been stillborn. Her father was a drunken bully who had immediately married the woman with whom he was already having an affair. They put Judy’s two brothers in a children’s home and sent her to live with one of his relatives. Her maternal grandparents tracked her down and took her back to live with them at Camelford Road, a turning between Ladbroke Grove and St Marks Road in Notting Hill. It was a leased war-damaged house that Judy’s grandparents were eventually forced to sell to a slum landlord because they didn’t have the money to repair it.

  Judy’s father cut off all contact and it was some time before her grandparents were able to trace her brothers, who were living in separate Barnardo’s homes. There they remained until they were sixteen. All this time Judy’s dad was still living in Notting Hill. It took her some while to realize that the man who crossed the street to avoid her whenever he saw her approaching with her grandparents was her father.

  Now Judy was an unmarried mother, which still carried a stigma in the late 1960s, albeit not to the extent it had ten years previously. The ‘sexual revolution’ was by no means as sweeping as is sometimes supposed: the concept might have been de rigueur among pop stars and metropolitan radicals but it certainly didn’t filter through to ordinary families, where having babies outside marriage was still frowned upon. Judy and Natalie – the loveliest child I’d ever encountered, with huge, melting brown eyes and a mass of curly hair – still lived with her grandmother, her grandfather having died when Judy was six.

  We went out on our first date on Judy’s twenty-first birthday a couple of weeks after Linda’s party. I bought her a box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray, which was all I could afford and which must have signalled to Judy that there would be nothing extravagant about our courtship.

  For a while in 1968, the In-Betweens were doing so well that the prospect of music as a sustainable career didn’t seem entirely fanciful. The band was in demand and we had at least two bookings every week. We were becoming more daring in our repertoire, adding our take on Vanilla Fudge’s hard-rock version of ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’, which became a bit of a showstopper with its power chords and piercing crescendo. There was interest from a well-known A & R man at the time, Ian Samwell, and Pat Meehan from EMI sent a talent-spotter to one of our gigs in South London.

  The EMI scouting mission resulted in an audition at a recording studio in Shepherd’s Bush, which in turn led to the prospect of a recording contract and a short film centred on the racial diversity of the band. Johnny Farugia gave permission for me to be filmed at work in the store in East Sheen. However, before shooting could begin it was all brought to a shuddering halt by what was by now becoming a familiar disaster: the room above the bar at the Pied Horse was broken into and all our equipment was stolen – this time including my precious Höfner Verythin. Perhaps the Victims would have been the most appropriate name for any band I played in.

  After the theft Sham, my closest friend in the In-Betweens, asked me to form another band with him but I knew the time had come for me to take a sabbatical from my life as a musician to concentrate on domesticity with Judy and Natalie and, most pressingly, to find an occupation that would bring us some financial stability.

  Judy and I had decided to get married that July, two months after my eighteenth birthday. With a wife and daughter to support (I later adopted Natalie to make my paternity official), I needed to forget my pipedreams of making a career out of music or becoming a writer and knuckle down to a steady job.

  Sham suggested that I should apply to work alongside him at the Post Office. There were hundreds of vacancies for postmen because the basic wage was so poor, but the low staffing levels meant the opportunities for overtime were virtually limitless. I liked the idea of being a postman, but not in North London.

  The bus I took to East Sheen from Hammersmith every morning passed through leafy, well-heeled Barnes. On summer days, I’d watch a postman on his round along the main drag, bleached white sack tied across his back, crisp brown summer jacket with the sleeves rolled up, dark blue serge trousers with a neat red stripe down each leg. It seemed to me to be an idyllic job, being out delivering mail in those pleasant streets close to the Thames.

  It was that rather romantic image that led me to the GPO recruitment office in Lavender Hill, Battersea, shortly after my eighteenth birthday. I completed what I was satisfied was a successful interview, in which I correctly placed Southend in the county of Essex and Brighton in Sussex, and spotted in the initiative test that, on a picture of a bicycle, the chain was wrongly attached to
the front instead of the back wheel.

  The very nice manager explained to me that, as civil servants, postmen effectively worked for themselves. The General Post Office was still a government department (the following year, under the Post Office Act 1969, it would become a statutory corporation known simply as the Post Office), headed by the postmaster general. This was a Cabinet position and therefore occupied by an elected politician answerable to the government and ultimately to the public. As members of the public, the manager argued, this meant we were his boss. It never seemed plausible to me.

  As it happened the postmaster general at the time, and indeed the last incumbent of that office, was John Stonehouse who, six years later, famously faked his own death, leaving a pile of his clothes on a Miami beach and decamping in secret to Australia in a bid to set up a new life with his mistress. He was found after only a month, and later deported back to Britain to face an array of charges including fraud, theft, forgery and wasting police time.

  It’s a wonder I got the job at all. I was obliged to supply my full name on my application form, which meant I couldn’t leave out my hated middle name, Arthur. In a small act of protest, I tried to distance myself from it by spelling it differently.

  ‘Is this how you spell “Arther”?’ asked the friendly post office manager. ‘With an “e”?’

  I thought I handled this skilfully by taking him through a peculiar family history, invented on the spot, in which ‘Arther’ had been handed down through generations of my branch of the Johnson clan. Unfortunately, his own name was Arthur, which made him a bit of an expert on the subject. My application was successful, but ‘Alan Arthur Johnson’ was what appeared stubbornly on my job offer, Arthur at the Post Office clearly having been unimpressed by my tortuous explanation.

  So I signed the Official Secrets Act, as we civil servants were required to do, and spent two weeks at the London training school in King’s Cross, where I learned to tie a slip-knot, memorized the London postal districts and mastered the technique of hand-sorting letters into a forty-eight-box fitting with reasonable accuracy.

  At eighteen years of age I was about to move house for the seventh time. I’d left school, had four jobs, been in two bands and fallen for the woman I was about to marry, in the process becoming a father as well as a husband.

  My male friends in particular had been envious of my independence, but for Judy and me, the imperative was different. Domesticity appealed to us. We wanted to be a part of family life, not to get away from it. We were bound not only by our desire to be together but, I suppose, by a shared aspiration to create the kind of loving, two-parent family neither of us had known as children.

  For me, family life was to be found with Judy, her grandmother and Natalie at the house in Notting Hill where Judy had been raised. Judy’s grandmother was very disapproving of the shelf-stacker-turned-postman who was to marry her precious charge. She hardly spoke to me at first although she mellowed over time. The four of us were to occupy the two top floors of 2 Camelford Road and I would cycle to Barnes every morning to pursue the occupation that I fully expected to take me into retirement.

  My destiny was not, after all, to become a professional musician. Nor was it to be a writer. Ultimately the Area and the In-Betweens had failed, but we had our moments, and we had so much fun failing that it didn’t matter. The joy of making music with like-minded friends at the Fourth Feathers or the Pied Horse, rather than alone in my bedroom, and the thrill of being able to play in front of an audience, never left me, even if the ambition to succeed in that world finally had.

  The one big chance I was given to fulfil my ambition to be a rock star was, as it happened, nothing to do with the Area or the In-Betweens.

  Before the demise of the Area, when Andrew and I were answering ads for musicians in the music press, we were both called for auditions. Andrew very nearly became the drummer for the Mindbenders, whose single ‘A Groovy Kind of Love’ reached Number 2 in the charts in the UK and the US in 1966. He narrowly lost out after making the final shortlist.

  If the band for which I auditioned didn’t have the cachet of a Top Ten hit on both sides of the Atlantic, they were just as famous in Britain for covering other artists’ top ten hits and are often described as having been the best warm-up act of the 1960s. This rather backhanded compliment didn’t do them any harm; indeed, they had a reputation for stealing the limelight from some of the bigger bands they supported.

  Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers were ubiquitous on the BBC pop programmes broadcast every weekday lunchtime in the pre-Radio 1 days when restrictions on ‘needle time’ – which had led to the rise of offshore pirate radio stations capable of circumventing them – were in force. These regulations meant that the BBC had to use live bands to cover pop songs and the Jaywalkers were in demand for their ability to provide rather more authentic renderings of hits by beat groups than the old boys in the Joe Loss Orchestra, who were considerably more at home with Glenn Miller than the likes of the Kinks or the Troggs.

  I’d answered an advertisement placed by the band in Melody Maker for a rhythm guitarist/backing vocalist and was invited to audition. I was a few months short of my seventeenth birthday and felt I looked a lot like Peter Frampton, who was just a few weeks older than me and soon to become the boy wonder of the pop world as front man of a band called the Herd. I should say that nobody else thought I remotely resembled Frampton, but I was deemed to have the pretty-boy look fashionable at the time. The audition was in Soho. The summer of love was on the horizon, and even we Mods were putting foulards round our neck, if not flowers in our hair. I went dressed in my favourite outfit, a light, tight-fitting double-breasted cotton jacket, white with a thin black stripe, tight black trousers and Chelsea boots. Not only was I convinced I looked the part, I was certain I was the prodigal talent the world of popular music was waiting for.

  Peter Jay was the band’s drummer but someone else was on drums for the auditions, freeing him up to sit with his management team and closely observe each applicant’s performance. The song I was asked to sing and play with the band was a Beatles number called ‘This Boy’. I knew it well enough but had never played it before. They gave me the sheet music and asked me to take lead vocal in a three-part harmony.

  The key they were using had a tricky D major 7th chord, but I mastered that and we did the whole song straight through twice and the middle eight once more on its own, from which I deduced that I was in serious contention for the job. I’d been word- and note-perfect and Peter Jay chatted to me afterwards, advising me that if I joined the band I’d need to turn professional and sign up with the Musicians’ Union. He said they had a few more applicants to audition and they’d contact me.

  They never did but for a few glorious days I was convinced that ‘This Boy’ had landed me the career I craved.

  I was ecstatic as I left the audition and caught the tube back to Notting Hill. For some reason I’d jumped into one of the few carriages reserved for non-smokers, which were rarely full. This early in the afternoon, the carriage was practically empty. Looking at my reflection in the dark window, something made me think of Lily. Was it the guitar I was carrying in its red case, bought with Lily’s small legacy? More likely it was the ‘No Smoking’ directive displayed across the famous London Underground symbol on the glass. Lily was for ever telling us about an entertainer of the 1930s who had taken his stage name, Nosmo King, from a no-smoking sign. Every time we travelled on the tube together she’d repeat the story, insisting it was true.

  Something strange happened. I saw Lily’s face, heard her voice and, as the train carried me towards what I was convinced would be a brilliant future, hot tears began to flow. I thought of my mother and cried.

  EPILOGUE

  THE SUMMER OF 1968: my wedding day, twenty-three years after Lily’s. We were married at Hammersmith Register Office. Judy travelled there with Natalie and her grandmother on the Metropolitan line from Ladbroke Grove. Andrew was my best man and the Coxes were
in attendance. There had been no official photographer at Lily’s wedding and there wasn’t at mine, either, just some black and white snaps taken on Linda’s camera to mark the event. We’d come through so much in the four years since Lily had died and had managed to evade what my sister always referred to as ‘the authorities’, who we feared would ensnare us. Linda, heavily influenced by Lily’s belief in spiritualism, was convinced that Lily was our spirit guide; that she’d protected us in some mystical way. I was never in any doubt about who’d protected me: it was Linda.

  On Christmas Eve 1968, Judy gave birth to our daughter Emma in St Charles’ Hospital. Linda’s second child, Tara, was born shortly afterwards and by early 1969 we had two daughters apiece: the grandchildren Linda had so badly wanted Lily to live to see.

  Only Linda and I knew the true extent of Lily’s heroic attempts to overcome adversity. Only I could testify to the extraordinary courage and determination of my sister. Lily would always be the light inside us, and our inspiration as we set out on an adult life that was only just beginning; one that would, for both of us, be infinitely better than her own.

  My mother Lily as a teenager, working for the Co-op in Liverpool.