This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (32 page)

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.

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.

My mother in the back yard of 107 Southam Street in the early fifties.