Alan Johnson’s first volume of memoirs, This Boy, is still in the bestsellers’ list, but the Stakhanovite postman has made a second delivery, timed impeccably for the party conference season. It charts his escape from the urban jungle of Notting Hill to Britwell council estate in Slough, via a succession of GPO sorting offices and eventually to high office in the Union of Communications Workers.
Like its predecessor, Please, Mister Postman takes its title from a Beatles classic. The boy left in the care of his 16-year-old sister after their mother’s death dreamed of becoming a rock star. He played in a succession of pop groups and even recorded a demo disc, until the theft of the band’s equipment, including his precious Hofner Verithin guitar, from a room above an Islington pub, put paid to his musical career.
His mother had wanted him to become a draughtsman, because they went to work in a suit, but fellow guitarist Sham, ‘a tall, genial black guy’ persuaded Johnson to become a postman. At least the job had a natty uniform. He married sweetheart Judy, who already had a baby daughter, and when the house they shared in west London with her ‘Nan’ was condemned, the young couple were offered a council house in Slough.
It was boarded up, the garden was overgrown and the estate had a bad name with the police, but it had its own front door and a bathroom. Brought up in a slum, the still-teenage paterfamilias grasped at the lifeline, and they lived there for 19 years. As tenants. Johnson refused to take advantage of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ revolution, even when it became Labour Party policy.
‘Life there was good,’ he reflects. Unlike the raucous streets of his childhood, there was no noise on Saturday nights except the sound of television programmes filtering through the open windows of houses about.
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