This Boy, by Alan Johnson- review

This Boy is no ordinary politician’s memoir, still less a politician’s ordinary memoir. It ends where others might begin: when the author is barely 18, newly married and only just starting work as a postman. The trade unionism that he later took up and the career in politics that led to several cabinet posts in two Labour governments are not even hinted at. Yet however thrilling, their story, when it is told, will be dull by comparison with this. Alan Johnson had a childhood quite unlike most politicians’, and he describes it with a simplicity and power that make it easy to see why he came to be the potential Labour leader most feared by many Conservatives.

Johnson was the son of Lily, a small, bright, Liverpudlian mother, plagued by ill health and overwork, and Steve, a musically gifted, drunk and violent father. They lived in North Kensington, a part of London now infested by millionaires, but then — Johnson was born in 1950 — peopled by the poorest of the poor. Many of the houses, including the Johnsons’, had been condemned in the 1930s.

Typically, one or more families would have a floor of a house, cooking on a landing and sharing a single lavatory in the back yard. Heating in the Johnson household came from coal picked up in the streets behind the carts that made deliveries to the big houses in Holland Park. Gas provided the light, if a shilling could be found for the meter; if not, candles were lit. There was no electricity.