by Alan Johnson
The house Mike had bought in Watford was only a few doors away from his parents’ home but if Linda had harboured any hopes that her sense of loss might be eased by forging a bond with her mother-in-law she was to be sadly disappointed. She found no echo of Lily’s maternal love in Irene Whitaker. Far from viewing Linda as a surrogate daughter, Irene had always seemed resentful of the intrusion into the close relationship she had with her son and matters did not improve after their marriage.
There was no trace of Mike’s placid temperament in Irene. She was already estranged from her own daughter, after cutting her off because she didn’t like her lifestyle. Linda was thrilled to find out she was pregnant three months after her wedding. She was married, the pregnancy was planned and, expecting her delight to be shared by the grandmother-to-be, she went to tell her the news.
‘You stupid cow,’ spluttered Irene. ‘How could you get pregnant so soon? Haven’t you heard of birth control? You should have waited at least three years before even thinking of having children.’
Thus this joyful event – one that had actually involved the willing participation of her son – was condemned by Irene as some kind of terrible error of judgement on Linda’s part. The relationship never recovered.
Irene’s nature had without doubt been shaped by the terrible trauma she had suffered as a small child. Her mother had committed suicide after discovering that Irene’s father was having an affair. She had been found with her throat and both wrists slit and four-year-old Irene sitting quietly beside her.
With Mike’s parents living so close my sister had little escape from the hostile atmosphere created by Irene and not much fraternal support from me, the brother who continually defied her wishes.
Linda was well aware of what Lily had wanted for me – that I should qualify as a draughtsman and lead a happy life free of squalor and debt – and she saw it as her job to support me towards that goal. To date I hadn’t exactly been co-operative. I’d left school at fifteen when Linda urged me to stay on. I’d refused to move to Watford with her and Mike. Now I was adding to her sense of having failed Lily, and of having failed me, by announcing that, at the tender age of eighteen, I would be marrying a woman with a child and moving back to the mean streets where we’d grown up, with no prospects of becoming a draughtsman or indeed of entering any other qualified profession.
But there was nothing she could do to overcome my resolve. Perhaps she tried to get Mike to speak to me ‘man to man’, I don’t know. If she did, the mission would have foundered on his natural geniality and reluctance to engage in any kind of confrontation.
My mind was made up. I would be married in the summer of 1968.
Chapter 2
AS JUDY AND I planned our future, my musical career suffered a crushing blow. On the verge of what the In-Betweens were confident would be our breakthrough, all of our musical equipment (including my precious Höfner Verithin guitar) was stolen from the room above the Pied Bull pub in Islington where we stored it between gigs.
I couldn’t afford to buy a new guitar. I’d only just finished paying off the thirty-month hire-purchase instalments on an amplifier that had been stolen (uninsured, needless to say) when my first band, the Area, had been the victims of another robbery. It was clear that domestic bliss would be unsustainable on my wages at Anthony Jackson’s with or without the money the band had shared from gigs we performed. I was going to have to get a better-paid and more secure job.
It was Sham, the bass guitarist in the In-Betweens, who pointed me in the direction of the Post Office. He was a postman higher grade, or PHG (a rank identified by the gold crowns fixed to the lapels of the uniform jacket), at the Northern District Office, the main sorting office for north London. PHGs were the ones who stayed indoors to sort letters and carry out minor clerical duties. The pay wasn’t great, he told me, but as a result the Post Office found it hard to attract staff, which meant there were always loads of vacancies and plenty of opportunities for overtime.
Actually there was another reason why I felt it might be time to leave Anthony Jackson’s. The chain was being subsumed into Tesco, the company I had quit on a point of principle just over a year earlier. (I accept there was some ambiguity over the exact terms of my departure, with me claiming I’d resigned and Tesco claiming I’d been sacked.) Johnny Farugia was keen for me to stay. He even got the district manager to talk to me about promotion opportunities. But the more I thought about becoming a postman, the keener I was to don that smart navy blue serge uniform.
And so, in June 1968, I became a postman in Barnes, London SW13.
The music was going to have to take a back seat for a time. Sham, a tall, genial black guy, wanted me to form another band with him. For him, music was a creative outlet and a form of relaxation he could dovetail successfully with his steady job and stable family life. For me at that point, juggling a new musical venture with a new job and the need to work all the overtime I could get, while establishing a family life with Judy, just didn’t seem feasible. I would, I decided, continue to write songs and return to performing at an as yet unspecified time in the future.
Barnes was the stately home of Royal Mail delivery offices. A large brick palace on Barnes Green with a picturesque duck pond on its threshold, it was big enough to accommodate three times the number of staff that actually worked there. Despite its grandeur, it was one of the smaller postmen’s delivery offices (PDOs) in London. There were just thirty of us rattling round its elegant interior.
I’d already received my training on outward sorting (letters collected for delivery to other areas) during my two weeks at the London Postal Training School near King’s Cross station. Now I was to have three days’ training in the office on inward sorting (letters coming into Barnes to be sorted to one of the twenty-four delivery rounds, or ‘walks’).
The entire mail system for what was then still the General Post Office was operated by hand. The only machine was a stamp-canceller, which postmarked all the outward letters. The part of it that recorded the date was subject to tight security. All kinds of scams could be facilitated through unauthorized access to a GPO date stamp, such as counterfeit proof of postage for pools claims and so on.
Two postmen worked permanent nights, starting at our ‘parent’ office at Wandsworth, SW18, where, along with night workers from other offices, they’d sort the incoming mail for PDOs across south-west London. At around 3am, once a sufficient load had accumulated for Barnes, they’d be driven there in a mail van and begin to inward sort the Barnes mail on site.
There were two starting times for the delivery staff, 5.30am and 6am. On arrival they would finish off the inward sorting before collecting the mail for their own walk, taking it to the delivery bench for ‘prepping’ (arranging it in order) and then tying it into hand-sized bundles numbered in the sequence in which they were to be delivered.
Deliveries were timed to finish at 9.30am – a strict service standard. So important was it that the majority of customers received their first post before leaving the house for work that the inward sorting would, if necessary, be cut off before it had all been processed to ensure that postmen could complete their walks by 9.30. What remained would be taken on the less important and much lighter second delivery later in the morning.
The men – and in Barnes, it was all men – were due back at the sorting office by about 9.45. There they would do their redirections (a free service at that time for customers who’d moved house) and deal with any ‘dead’ letters (mail returned marked ‘unknown at this address’, for example) before heading upstairs to the canteen for breakfast.
One postman, Reg, was in charge of running the canteen. He was approaching retirement and had a lung disease which meant he wasn’t fit enough to do deliveries. He’d make tea for the men early in the morning while deliveries were being prepped and then cook eggs, sausage, bacon and beans for them when they got back. Breakfast cost a shilling, and an extra penny for each slice of toast.
At 10.30
am we’d be back down from breakfast to dispatch the outward letters, posted in Barnes and collected from every pillarbox by our two postmen/drivers. The letters would be tipped on to the ‘facing table’ where they all had to be turned the same way up, with ‘shorts’ separated from ‘longs’, ready for the stamp-cancelling machine. Packets would be passed to a man with a hand stamp and cancelled individually.
We’d do a cursory breakdown of this outward mail, but most of it went to Wandsworth to be sorted more precisely. Next we’d prepare the second delivery, which consisted mainly of circulars and pools coupons.
Such were the mechanics of the job; the familiar rhythm of a great public institution serving the needs of the 10,000 or so residents of the charming riverside district of London SW13. It was a process that would have barely changed in the hundred-odd years since Rowland Hill’s reforms and the Penny Black had made postal services available to the masses. We postmen were uniformed civil servants proud to be performing a public service essential to the country’s social fabric.
While Linda had found out she was expecting her first child three months after her wedding, I learned I was to be a father three months before mine. I was still only seventeen.
Judy and I absorbed the news with mixed emotions. While we were both delighted that, with our wedding date fixed and my application for a ‘steady job’ with the Post Office submitted, the framework for our family was in place, there were anxieties, too.
I had looked upon Natalie as my own daughter from the outset and was determined that she should see me as her dad. She had never met her biological father and there had been no communication whatsoever from Italy and thus no indication of whether he had any intention of ever fulfilling any of his paternal responsibilities. Now she would very quickly acquire a sibling and, while I was thrilled at the prospect of fathering a child, I acknowledged that parenthood wasn’t likely to come naturally to me. But I’d persevere and I had the example of my own father to guide me in what not to do – a kind of reverse role model.
For Judy, there were other considerations. She had already endured the stigma of being an unmarried mother, attitudes having changed little in working-class communities through the so-called ‘swinging sixties’, and was concerned about suffering further damage to her reputation. She didn’t want our marriage to be labelled a shotgun wedding. So we agreed to keep the pregnancy a secret for as long as we could in the hope that we could get past the wedding before it became apparent. Only Linda and Judy’s nan were to be told. When they were, the news added to Linda’s disappointment and increased the hostility Nan was already displaying towards me.
Nan’s name was Mary Syer, but she was never called anything other than Nan by us. In the dark clothes she had worn ever since the death of her husband in the mid-1950s, and with her grey hair pulled tight into a bun like an over-sized Brillo pad, she cut a forbidding figure. I can’t say, looking back, that I blame her for disapproving of me.
Judy’s mother had died in childbirth, along with the baby, when Judy was barely a year old. Her father had promptly run off with a woman with whom he was having an affair. When her maternal grandparents discovered what had happened, they took Judy in and brought her up as their own. Her brothers spent their entire childhoods in Dr Barnardo’s.
Nan understandably took pride in the way her granddaughter had flourished in her care. Having passed her Eleven-Plus, Judy had gone on to one of the most prestigious schools in west London, Burlington Grammar School for Girls, leaving with six O-Levels. She then attended a teaching college before switching to train as a nursery nurse.
Nan had already had to cope with the granddaughter of whom she was so proud becoming an unmarried mother. Imagine how she must have felt when Judy dropped the bombshell that she was to be married to a seventeen-year-old shelf-stacker with no money and zero prospects. In the circumstances Nan displayed huge generosity in allowing me to move into her home after the wedding.
Our little soap opera was being played out against the backdrop of social and political revolution. That spring, students were rioting in the USA and across Europe. In London 10,000 people, mostly students, demonstrated in Trafalgar Square against US involvement in the Vietnam War. Trouble flared after protesters who had marched from Trafalgar Square to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square clashed with police. There were many injuries to demonstrators and police, and 200 were arrested. In France a couple of months later, student protests rapidly escalated into widespread strikes and protests that paralysed the country for a fortnight. The French government’s heavy-handed response and use of the notorious CRS riot police only inflamed the situation. At one point tanks were deployed on the streets of Paris.
At home, the activist Tariq Ali was leading a student movement to abolish money and abandon capitalism. Everywhere, it seemed, students were threatening to overthrow the established order – tuning in, turning on and dropping out.
For Judy and me and millions like us, these events might just as well have been taking place in a parallel universe for all the difference they made to us. Had we been university students, I’d have been about to begin a degree course while Judy would have just completed hers. Perhaps we’d have been more caught up in the groundswell of support for political and social change. As it was we were preoccupied with narrower concerns more directly and immediately relevant to our everyday lives. I was interested in what was happening in the world, and I read The Times, my newspaper of choice, assiduously most days – but none of it felt as if it had anything much to do with us.
Apart from being impressed, watching the trouble in France on the evening news, by the way French male students dressed, their cashmere jumpers draped carelessly across their shoulders as they manned the barricades, and trying to imitate the look as Judy, Natalie and I promenaded around Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons, I was emotionally uninvolved. We were merely interested spectators of events that were taking place in the name of our generation. I was about to become a married man with two children. I didn’t want to abolish money – I needed to earn the bloody stuff.
Linda came to terms with the fact that I was to be married to her friend and contemporary and was there to support us when we married at Hammersmith register office. In fact it was she who took the photographs. Nan suppressed her disapproval to attend. My closest friend, schoolmate, former bandmate and workmate at Tesco, Andrew Wiltshire, was best man. There was no honeymoon. At the Post Office, annual leave was allocated according to seniority and, as a recent recruit, I was required to take my two weeks’ summer holiday in May. It seemed you had to put in about twenty years’ service to get a break in July. Still, we couldn’t have afforded a honeymoon anyway.
The Syers had rented the top two floors of 2 Camelford Road since just before the war. By the time I moved in the ground floor and basement had been empty for years. Unlike the condemned homes of my childhood in nearby Southam Street and Walmer Road, it wasn’t a slum. It was more like the cosy rooms at Lancaster Road, where I’d lived with the Coxes. There was a small kitchen, two bedrooms and a spacious living room with a sofa and two armchairs, one of which was Nan’s, identified by its antimacassar, worn arms and a little footstool positioned in front of the electric fire.
There was no central heating, of course, but the coldest thing about the house was Nan’s obvious disdain for me. While we rarely spoke, she succeeded in making her hostility clear, leaving the living room when I came in to watch the telly or, on one occasion, turning out the light in the kitchen where I was reading the paper to avoid obliging her to leave the living room. As I sat in the dark, my eyes still trained on the previously visible newspaper, she muttered about the need to save electricity. When she had to speak to me, muttering was her preferred form of communication. But she was fine with Judy and Natalie and I became used to the undeclared cold war between us.
I cycled from Notting Hill to work in Barnes every day on Judy’s trendy small-wheeled Moulton bike. Barnes was, and remains, a highly desirable locatio
n. Hugh Cudlipp, the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers and subsequently of the International Publishing Corporation, had a large, modern house on Church Road. The walks trudged by us postmen every morning were populated by film stars such as Lynn Redgrave and Sylvia Syms, along with actors who were not yet as well known, among them Timothy West and his wife Prunella Scales, and Frank Thornton, still to become known to millions as Captain Peacock in the sitcom Are You Being Served? Luminaries from other spheres of public life, including the former Welsh rugby star and broadcaster Cliff Morgan and assorted government ministers, artists and writers, were also dotted around the patch.
I had a wider knowledge of the area than most of my colleagues. While every Barnes postman had to know which streets were on which delivery to deal with the inward sorting, few had the experience I gained on the ground, because by the time I left Barnes I had done all of the walks. Choice of duties, like choice of annual leave, was assigned on the basis of seniority. (The Post Office was dominated by ex-servicemen and this was reflected in its culture. We didn’t come to work, we came ‘on duty’; we didn’t go on holiday, we went ‘on leave’; and we didn’t sign for jobs but for ‘duties’.) As the junior man I had the ‘duty’ nobody else wanted. I was one of two ‘reserves’ covering the deliveries of men who were sick or on annual leave, which meant I eventually got to do every delivery in the office.
I knew which ones were easy – the walks where I could be back in the office by 9am and spend a leisurely hour and a half having breakfast and playing snooker on the half-size table in the canteen – and the ones that were a struggle to finish on time. I was soon warned off getting back to the office too early by an old hand who pointed out that if I was ever seen to finish a walk unduly quickly, more streets might end up being added to it, to the disadvantage of the regular postman, who was invariably much older than me and not so fast on his feet. It was a fair point. The majority of my colleagues seemed to be at least thirty years older than me.
