by Alan Johnson
We were of course also acquainted with the people living in the other five houses round the green but these were the neighbours we befriended; the ones with whom we shared our revised chronology. This kind of married couples’ social circle was new to Judy and me. My sister, who had always been far more outgoing than I was, had more experience of the pitfalls as well as the pleasures of such relationships. I remember Linda and Mike coming over to see us not long after we’d moved in to Long Furlong Drive. They found the Saunders in our kitchen when they arrived and we wandered in and out of their house next door as the day progressed.
I’d told Linda about our little deceit, of which she fully approved. When we found ourselves alone in the kitchen she warned me not to be tempted by friendship into revealing the truth. She knew how important it was to me that Natalie was seen as belonging to us both. I fully intended to adopt her once she was old enough to have Judy’s relationship with her biological father explained to her. Natalie could then make the decision as to whether or not she wanted me to assume legal paternity.
Linda issued a word of warning. ‘People become friends and just as easily cease to be friends and turn into enemies,’ she said. Judy, she pointed out, was the one who would be vulnerable to nasty comments if we ever fell out with our neighbours. She urged me never to let my guard slip.
It was good advice. Married father of two I may have been, but my sister was still looking after my interests.
Chapter 6
AS MY OLD bandmate Sham had cautioned when encouraging me to become a postman, the only way to earn a decent wage was either to get a second job (half the taxi drivers in London had apparently done ‘the Knowledge’ while working for the Post Office) or to take advantage of the abundance of overtime generated by the perennial shortage of staff.
So I worked the ‘docket’, so-called because of the piece of paper we carried with the overtime for each day itemized and authorized by the initials of a supervisor. I spent as much time as possible on the ‘Davy Crockett’. That fountain of extra earnings nourished my children, but it also deprived me of seeing as much of their childhood as I wanted to. They were still sound asleep when I left for work before 5am and back in bed by the time I returned at 7.30 in the evening. I remember once asking a postman who was leaving how long he’d worked at Slough sorting office. His answer was five years, nine if you counted the overtime. It was an accurate reflection of the double shifts we were working. Every morning, Monday to Saturday, I toiled on that bloody red bike. On weekday afternoons I did overtime at the parcels depot in Oxford Avenue on the trading estate.
We were also contracted to work one Sunday in six. Often I volunteered to take somebody else’s shift: all Sunday overtime was paid at double time and was pensionable (not that I was even mildly interested in pensionability at that stage of my life). During the week the first six hours of overtime were paid at time and a quarter, the next six at time and a half. From the thirteenth hour double time kicked in – a curious built-in incentive to work long hours.
I envied the men who didn’t do overtime and were able to head home at lunchtime every day. Most of us had no choice but to work on. I certainly hadn’t, with a wife and two children to support and a basic wage that, even with my preserved London weighting, was below the maximum for the job and well below the national average. There was even the odd occasion when I’d work a ‘ghoster’ (filling in for a night worker on a Friday, when there was a tendency for the night men to ‘blow out’). This involved working as normal until lunchtime on Friday, then taking a few hours off to rest before going back in at about 8pm to work right through to the completion of my delivery on Saturday. I swear that I once delivered all the mail in Pipers Close in Burnham while sleepwalking.
It was Burnham, though, that offered escape from the exhausting regime of cycling back and forth as part of my fifteen-hour working day. A couple of months after my transfer, a poster appeared on the sorting-office noticeboard calling for applications for a new national experiment: delivery by moped.
The tiny, ramshackle sorting office in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, a village that was expanding into a town just along the Lower Britwell Road from where we lived, was being repatriated to Slough, its parent office. Volunteers were invited to sign up for one of its eight deliveries. The duty would be fixed and therefore outside the normal rotations (usually two earlies and one late turn). The successful candidates would do the same Burnham delivery week in, week out.
A regular walk, no shifts and, best of all, no bike: for me Burnham was a godsend. The deliveries were heavy, but I didn’t care about that. Becoming a Burnham postman in October 1969 restored my pride and satisfaction in my chosen occupation. It was like going back to Barnes. We even had the old-style delivery frame, with a box for each street, rather than the new whizzy Portobello racks that had been introduced in Slough (so called because they’d been trialled in the Portobello district of Edinburgh, not the more familiar Portobello Road of my childhood) and looked more like the 45rpm disc-holders in the record shops.
There was only one problem. In anticipation of having a Post Office moped that I could use, either officially or unofficially, to get to and from work, we had jumped the gun by selling Judy’s Moulton.
I discovered that until the brand-new Raleigh runabout mopeds arrived, Burnham postmen were to be taken in a van from the Slough sorting office to the little telephone exchange at the top of the High Street, where the pushbikes required to carry them onwards to their respective walks would be stored. To my joy, I managed to nab the walk that began and ended at the telephone exchange and therefore didn’t need a bike. But for a while I was still going to need transport between Britwell and Slough.
The cavalry arrived in the shape of another Burnham postman, Tommy Chessman, and his Reliant Regal. Tommy had spent over twenty years as a bandsman – a trumpeter – in the army before taking the well-trodden path from the forces to the Post Office at about the same time as I’d joined in 1968. He was a small, nippy kind of chap; eternally cheerful, with an unwavering generosity of spirit. He and his wife rented a large, ancient cottage in the rural tranquillity of Lower Britwell Road, a ten-minute walk from our house.
Tommy had been based at Burnham but had moved to Slough with the mail. Now that he had to report to work there, Long Furlong Drive was on his way and he offered to pick me up at 5.15 every morning in his three-wheeler. This fibreglass beauty was Tom’s little eccentricity. On those journeys to Slough he would regale me with details of the savings he made on petrol, maintenance and road tax, merely, in essence, by sacrificing a wheel.
Some mornings Tom’s kindness had to be extended to the task of waking me up – a particular problem on Saturdays if I’d been for a few pints the night before with one of my new friends and neighbours around the green. Judy and I slept in the front bedroom and Tom would throw small pebbles at our window to avoid disturbing anyone else’s rest by banging on the door. He was admirably persistent, patiently throwing as many stones as it took. Once I’d signalled that I was awake and getting dressed, he’d wait in the car while I pulled on my uniform and stumbled out into the cold, black pre-dawn.
At long last the mopeds arrived, done out in gleaming red livery with the royal crest on each leg guard. I was furnished with a provisional driving licence in a small burgundy booklet. At a glance it looked exactly the same as a full driving licence. The only difference was that the specifications of the type of vehicle it licensed me to drive were printed inside in red rather than black. As long as I had L-plates fitted front and back and a couple of hours’ instruction, I had the freedom of the highway. The equipment we had was the same as that given to the telegram boys, who rode proper motorbikes to deliver the urgent messages telegraphed from afar. But while they were roaring around on 175cc BSA Bantams, we plodded along on machines only marginally more powerful than a lawnmower.
I’d leave the sorting office with two pouches strapped to the carrier at the back of the moped and one across my c
hest. On would go the white peaked crash helmet, the brown PVC mock-leather jerkin (over my long Post Office double-breasted coat), the enormous fluorescent gauntlets and a small pair of round goggles. In Burnham I parked the moped behind a block of sheltered accommodation at the near end of Dropmore Road, leaving two pouches full of mail on the bike while I delivered the contents of the third on foot, in a circle that brought me back to the bike. Then I’d set off down Dropmore Road with a pouch on each shoulder, finishing my figure-of-eight walk back at the moped. Though it wasn’t secured, the bike was never stolen; neither was any of the mail or my motorcycling gear, which I left on the carrier while I did my two-and-a-half-hour delivery.
The second delivery later in the morning combined most of the earlier walk with Burnham High Street. Because of the volume of mail destined for the High Street, home to businesses such as A.C. Frost, the estate agent, and Buck’s Die Casting at the end of an alleyway off the main road, it received its heavier first post by van.
It must have been against the rules to take my moped home and, guessing what the response was likely to be if I asked, I never sought permission to do so. There again, nobody ever issued any kind of proclamation forbidding it, either. I usually managed to make it back to Long Furlong Drive at lunchtime to watch The Herbs, Trumpton or Mary, Mungo and Midge with Natalie and Emma, who didn’t seem to enjoy it as much as I did (I was particularly fond of the officious Constable Knapweed in The Herbs, who kept law and order and ‘watched to see that all was well along the garden border’).
At 2pm I’d report for overtime at Oxford Avenue, where parcels were sorted and dispatched entirely by hand. The parcels would arrive at one end of the building to be unloaded into wheeled wicker skips and taken on to ‘roads’ to be sorted, emerging at the other end for dispatch. Having been allocated a road, my job was to fetch the skips of parcels and sort them by throwing them into the appropriate sack (accuracy was important, delicacy wasn’t). When a sack was full I’d tie it, attach a label indicating where it was going and secure it with a lead seal by means of an iron sealer, like a massive pair of pliers. It was very satisfying to feel the lead yielding to the crushing grip of the sealer. I kept the seals – and, later, the thin aluminium clips that replaced them – in a bag velcroed round my waist. The secured bag would be hurled into one of the wheeled conveyors at the end of the road, which would be periodically rolled away by the dispatch drivers who loaded the bags on to the 600cf vans that were, at that time, the biggest used, and whisked them away to Slough Station, Reading or the big London parcels offices.
Oxford Avenue was hard, gruelling, dirty work. The dust from the mail sacks permeated everything and made us filthy by the end of the shift. Some of the men wore dustcoats but the emphasis was on speed, which could be hampered by extra layers of clothing. We’d stop for a cup of tea at 3pm and take an hour’s break between 4.30 and 5.30 ahead of the main dispatch, handled on a ‘finish and go’ basis. Usually we’d get away by 7pm, an hour before our shift was due to end. The rest breaks were enlivened by card schools and darts matches. Once I’d overcome my initial shyness I was soon joining in, acquiring my own set of darts and a disturbing taste for poker and three-card brag. Fortunately, we only gambled for shillings and pence.
There were around thirty men in all working the shifts at Oxford Avenue, including the supervisor, a couple of PHGs and Jimmy Hill, whose sole occupation (as Reg’s had been at Barnes) was to run the canteen. A few of them were based there permanently, men who had forsaken the fresh air of early-morning deliveries for the dusty confines of the parcels depot. It wouldn’t have been my choice, but some of them preferred it to the early starts and all the cycling. Among the Oxford Avenue crew was ‘Pat’ Paternoster, the unofficial foreman and one of the hardest workers I’d ever seen. Pat was lean and fit, his checked shirtsleeves always rolled up to the elbow, exposing muscular forearms. Though not an unsociable character, he never joined the card schools or darts teams. He was a man in perpetual motion, gulping down his tea in a couple of minutes and constantly on the lookout for tasks to keep him busy, even if it was just tidying the skips or sweeping the floor (a largely vain pursuit at Oxford Avenue).
Pat wasn’t a conversationalist but over the years I worked with him I discovered his motivation. He was determined that his children would go to university and every spare copper he made was channelled into that ambition. It wasn’t a unique aspiration but it was rare among working-class men born in an era when only a tiny elite, 3 or 4 per cent of the population, went into higher education, and almost all of them were from public schools. It was as if every parcel Pat sorted, every bag he hefted on to the back of a van, every load he dragged across the parcel-office floor would bring him closer to his goal. I’ve never seen a smile as broad as Pat’s when he told me some years later that his eldest daughter had been accepted at Cambridge.
John Esposito was another Oxford Avenue regular, a PHG from the Britwell who’d fought at Monte Cassino and was renowned for his ability to get anything anyone wanted discounted and sold from the boot of his car. John never stopped talking in his high-pitched voice, like a garrulous castrato. Before transferring from London he’d been a CCS driver. It was Central Control Services that provided the men who drove the mail across London, between the stations and out to the provinces. Unusually for the way the Post Office operated at that time, these men did nothing but drive. They certainly didn’t demean themselves by helping to unload. They enjoyed some of the best terms and conditions in the organization thanks to the industrial muscle they wielded. If the handful of men at CCS were to walk out the mail network would grind to a halt.
And there was Bill Pickley, who always wore the regulation brown dustcoat over his immaculate clothes. Bill was a short man with a small, beautifully maintained ’tache that looked as if it had been painted under his nose. I was a great admirer of Bill’s style. Every day he’d walk into the gritty environs of Oxford Avenue for all the world as if he were a stockbroker arriving in the City: dazzling white shirt, dark tie and elegant suit, his shoes so highly polished they could have been used to see the cards his opponents were holding during the tea breaks had he chosen to use them for such a purpose.
Every Friday I trudged home from Oxford Avenue with my wages, in cash, contained in a sealed brown envelope with holes in the side that provided a comforting glimpse of the earnings within. With the children in bed and Dad’s Army playing on the black-and-white TV in the corner of our front room, we’d sit down to allocate our resources and I’d tot up the overtime docket to be handed in the next morning for payment the following week.
As the 1960s drew to a close Judy and I were settled in our new surroundings. She had quickly immersed herself in the Britwell community, helping to set up a playgroup for toddlers in Wentworth Avenue. I’d joined Slough library, where I graduated from reading up on modern history to books on political theory, interspersed with the novels I preferred and read for pleasure rather than instruction.
Christmas 1969 was, in effect, our first together as Judy had been in hospital the previous year giving birth to Emma. On Christmas Eve, as she would do every year, she went to the midnight service at St George’s Church, opposite our green on Long Furlong Drive. Recently built, it boasted a metal sculpture of St George slaying the dragon above the entrance. I would never darken its doorstep. Having come to the conclusion early in my teens that I was an atheist, nothing I learned or that happened to me subsequently changed my mind. However, I always admired and respected the community activists who worked with Judy and whose prime motivation was a deep and unwavering faith.
I remained as fresh-faced at nineteen as I’d been at nine, so when Judy bought me my first razor for Christmas (along with a psychedelic folk album by the Incredible String Band, The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion – I confess to a short flirtation with hippydom in those Flower Power days at the tail end of the sixties) there was no real use for it. None the less I rushed into the bathroom to shave with it o
n Christmas morning. When I came downstairs, rubbing my chin in a manly kind of way and professing to having had a ‘great shave’, Judy inquired whether I’d managed to get the blade in all right. I told her there had already been a blade in the razor. She informed me rather tartly that it was a dummy made of cardboard for display purposes only. It had felt fine to me.
And so my teens petered out with that momentous decade, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Even before I turned twenty, I found myself, overnight, officially an adult when the change in the law that lowered the age of majority from twenty-one to eighteen came into force on the first day of the 1970s.
The Labour government that had been in power since 1964 had steered through a good deal of groundbreaking legislation that reflected the dramatic social shifts of the 1960s. Laws had been enacted to protect ethnic minorities from racial discrimination and the kind of abuse encouraged by Oswald Mosley as he stood on a soapbox at the corner of my street in the 1950s; homosexuality had been decriminalized, capital punishment abolished, abortion legalized. Women were beginning to assert their right to equal treatment.
Even the Post Office had been revolutionized. The Post Office Act of 1969 changed it from a government department to a statutory corporation. The powers of the postmaster general were transferred to a new Cabinet position, the minister of posts and telecommunications, and within the corporation the office was replaced by a chairman and chief executive. As part of the transformation telecommunications were split from postal services. It was one of the biggest shakeups of the Post Office since its inception. I remember being very much aware of its historical significance when I returned to the sorting office at the end of my last shift as a civil servant.
