Alan Johnson (2016) The Long and Winding Road: A Memoir.

I’d like Alan Johnson to be Prime Minster. That seems outlandish as Jeremy Corbyn, but Johnson is not such a Daily- Hate- Mail figure. But he was Home Secretary under the Labour Government 2009-10, a position our current Prime Minster Teresa May held before becoming Tory leader. I guess at the end of polling today she’ll remain Prime Minister. I read an interview with Paul O’Grady on Sunday in which he wished the heads of David Cameron, and his sick sidekick, George Osborne should be placed on display on Tower Bridge. I’m not sure I’d add Teresa May to that list, but I could easily be persuaded. Cameron and Osborne poisoned debate and played to the Tory grandees by using stereotypes of working-class life taken from shows such as Jeremy Kyle to cut the welfare budget and keep cutting it with spurious claims that it was to bring the nation’s deficit down to zero. If black people were portrayed in this way it would be classified as a criminal offence. Inciting racism. The promise to cut the nation’s deficit has been quietly side-lined by May.

The Long and Winding Road at one point tells us how the Conservative Party stage manages its annual get together. That’s when they pick their victims. The usual line-up. Johnson managed to infiltrate the conference. There’s a cartoon Johnson, from The Times, May 1994, portrayed as dog, savaging the President of the Board of Trade, Michael Helseltine who had lined up the Post Office – Telecom, Royal Mail, Parcelforce and Post Office Counters – as the next public service to be privatised. All were in profit, but, of course, it wasn’t about that. It was about ideology. Privatisation is good because it makes rich people richer wasn’t one of their arguments, but you get the general drift. The buzz word is usually efficiency.

That’s two paragraphs and I’ve barely mentioned Johnson’s book. I found it a bit boring and got to page 111 and pulled the bookies slip I was using as a bookmark from the book. The chances of me reading on are slim. It’s Johnson’s third autobiography and there is repetition. He needs to bring those that have not read his first book up to speed. This Boy, which is by far his best, outlines what happens when his feckless father left his sainted mother Lily, and the family was left to fend for themselves in East London slums in the 1950s.  I started with his second book, Please, Mr Postman, and worked my way backwards to This Boy.  Alan Johnson has met his future wife, who works with his sister Linda, but already has a kid, but they settle down in Slough. He starts working for the Post Office, a postman, all childhood dreams of becoming a pop star, put out of his head, with as much overtime as he wanted, leaving little time for anything else.  By the time the reader gets to The Long and Winding Road we know where the story is going, but the narrative drifts into meeting people such as Tony Blair who are going to become famous and blokes we’ve never heard of, but are salt of the earth type. It gets cliched and boring. But that’s my opinion. You May think otherwise. I’m sure when I wake up tomorrow Teresa May will still be Prime Minster, but not my Prime Minster and she’ll write a book in later years about her Long and Winding Road. Yawn.

Alan Johnson (2015) This Boy, A Memoir of Childhood.

This Boy is a prequel to Alan Johnson’s Please Mr Postman, set before he started his working life spent, mostly, in the Post Office and via his union involvement access to the Labour Party, becoming an MP and becoming Home Secretary in Tony Blair’s government. Our current Prime Minster Teresa May, was, of course, a former Home Secretary. Her father was a vicar. Alan Johnson’s father was an arsehole. In the prologue we’re shown a black and white picture of the happy married couple, January 1945. Stephen Arthur Johnson and Lillian May Gibson.

His smile is slight, betraying a determination not to show his teeth. The beautifully knotted beret – angled slightly too high on one side – covering his red hair. She seems happy. A pretty, petite Liverpudlian with a Doris Day nose (what she called her ‘titty nose’, which she insisted I had inherited); smart in her cockade hat, placed at the same rakish angle as his beret…He was small, she was smaller – not much more than five feet.

Part 1, Steve and Lily recalls how his sister Linda and he were born in different epochs. Linda was born before the creation of the NHS in 1947 and he was born after it in 1950 into a boom economy. His mother was advised to have no more children. Living in slum housing that had been condemned in the 1930s they had the luxury of two rooms. One for eating in and one for sleeping in, gas mantle for lighting a communal toilet in a yard with Paddington Station as a backdrop to early life in Kensal Town, Notting Hill. In the 1960s they moved up in the world, three rooms and a communal cooker on the landing for tenants where Lily burned things. Lily spent her short life hoping for the luxury of a council house.  Food, or lack of it, played a big role in Alan’s early life. Free school milk and filling up on free school dinners were a big part of his upbringing.

Cash was always tight. Steve worked intermittently as a painter and decorator, but had a gift for music and could play any tune he heard on the piano. Pubs were his natural environment and the wages he made was spent on his entertainment. Lily, to get by, worked for pin-money in the fancy houses in Ladbroke Grove and South Kensington, worked in shops and cafes and it was Linda, his elder sister’s job to take care of her brother, while their mother worked. Pin money was their only source of income and Steve, when drunk, which was much of the time, was violent. The harder she worked the worse her health got. Lily had a heart condition which killed her, but a consultant might advise her to take it easy and rest but Lily often had to pray to God for a shilling to put in the meter and asked local, family-run, shops to give her tick. Even when they said no, she’d go back, and try and wear their resistance down. She had to work in the same way that the kids had to eat.

Steve had his playtime with one of his mate’s wife. He was a lady’s man as they said in those days. Steve left Lily for Elsie and Alan never found out until years later he had a half-brother, David. The bad news for Linda and Alan was that the breakup of their mum and dad’s marriage was temporary. He came back to live with them, but that was temporary too. He disappeared on a day when they out, all his clothes, open razor, stubby shaving brush and belonging gone and moved in with another fancy piece. Impoverishment was not just monetary, but of Lily’s hopes. She believed in marriage being for life and Steve leaving aged her.

From an early age Linda taught her younger brother how to duck down and hide away from the windows when the tallyman came knocking at the door looking for money. Lily, like most others, did the pools, religiously, every week. In 1957 her luck was in. She won around £90, the equivalent of around three-month’s wages for a manual worker. No more ducking down needed and downpayments on a three-piece suite, a sideboard, a kitchen table, a Spanish guitar for Alan and a Dansette record player for Linda. Lily was in her early thirties, but luxury never lasts. She was, in effect, a single parent.

Alan measures his life against some of his school friends. Tony Cox’s father, for example, had also been in the war, and he wished he was his dad too. He was steady, decent, hardworking and provided the kind of life Alan could only dream of,  ‘they had an entire room that you had neither to eat or sleep in’ and it was ‘gloriously warm’. Tony Cox also had the great merit of being the best fighter and best sportsman in their neck of the woods, which offered Alan a kind of protection.

Reading was Alan’s thing and by some fluke that was enough to get him a pass in the Eleven-Plus and place in Grammar School. Only around a quarter of kids were offered places, but it wasn’t quite as simple as that. They had to find a Grammar School that would take Tony, waive the fees and Lily would have to pay for extras like school uniforms. Getting Alan into Grammar school was the be and end of all of her ambition and Alan admits he didn’t really do much when he was there. His great interest was music. This resurfaces in Mr Postman, when he gets to play the guitar in a band and dreams of stardom. Of course all their gear got nicked from the pub where they kept it. Echoes of his past, when the guy he delivered milk for presented him with nicked guitar from a selection in his basement.

The hole in his life, was, of course, his mother’s early death. She dithered whether to have the operation that would extend her life, but died before she could see her daughter married and her son grow into a man, courting his sister’s friend at 17 and married with a stepchild at 21. Life over. Yeh, that’s how is seems when we’re young. But there’s a lot of living still to do. Johnson has a follow up book, The Long and Winding Road. This is a Home Secretary who did know about poverty and the stigma of being a single mother. I’m sure it shames him as it shames me that so many children live in poverty and are reliant on Food Banks. We seem to be going backwards and not forward in time.

Alan Johnson (2014) Please Mister Postman. A memoir.

I’d a vague notion of who Alan Johnson was. I read this book because I wanted to chart his journey from ordinary working-class bloke—when the book begins, ‘a seventeen-year old shelf stacker at Anthony Jackson’s supermarket on the Upper Richmond Road in East Sheen’— to becoming an MP in the Conservative government under Thatcher, or John Major. I couldn’t remember which Prime minister it was. Alan Johnson became a Labour MP and severed in the Cabinet under Tony Blair. Same difference some of you might say. The journey is still the same one. But back then as he shows time and time again we had vague notions about equality. Government wasn’t entirely a more-it-tocracy increasingly serving the rich and their own interest. Economics wasn’t entirely about funnelling money from the poor to the rich under the pretence that it made the country stronger and more self-sufficient. The difference between Labour and Tories couldn’t be reduced to a simple equation of sacking as many workers as possible, make the remainder work harder to increase productivity and sell, pass the parcel of the company on, as quickly as possible to get an increased profit for the rich without the holes in the balance sheet and in people’s lives showing. Labour were for more and better government. Think about it for a second. Labour grew out of trade unions demanding rights for workers. It’s easy to forget that with this lot going to the same public schools, the same Oxbridge education and hob-nobbing with the Tories. Same old Tories, then as now, but we at least had a partial alternative.  The Tories were for less of everything, light-touch regulation and less being spent on things that didn’t and no longer matter to rich folk. Common things like having a home, being able to heat it and having food on the table. These were to be left to the market.

So I got it wrong he was in the different carriage of a train and got off at different station. Alan Johnson Labour MP. But here he is. ‘It’s Christmas Eve 1967. A Saturday. Four o’clock in the afternoon. I’m waiting for Mike.’ Mike’s married to Alan’s sister. An all-round good guy who likes a good drink. Back then drink driving was a laughable offence of finding your car key and being able to open the car door, rather than a criminal offence. Everybody did it. It never did you any harm school of tough love. Mike’s loveable, but his sister Linda is a little mum, their own mum, Lilian May Johnson, born 1921 had died 1964. Mike was his hero, but Linda provides the quiet corner of his life in which he can stretch and grow. Alan isn’t just a shelf-stacker. He writes songs, has started a band and hopes to hitch on the sixties zeitgeist and become a pop star.

The future Alan has planned out hits a speed-bump. He meets Judith Elizabeth Cox. He’s seventeen. She’s an older woman, twenty-one, with a child to another man. Melodrama. Not really. They are young and in love. They get married. Linda’s pregnant three months after the wedding. Thoughts of being the next Rolling Stone get shoved aside. He needs a steady job and a council house for his growing family.

Alan Johnson become a postman. He cycles from his digs in Notting Hill to Barnes Green, one of the smaller postal delivery routes in London. He’s a natural, it’s a steady job, a lot of ex-forces personnel. No corner cutting. No excuses.  The mail gets delivered come what may. He’s found a vocation. Something he’s good at.  But the money’s not too good. Overtime is the answer. Postman can work night and day, their job never ends (or so it seemed then).

Fast forward a few years. Alan’s got a council house in Slough. A little green were ten council houses nestled.  He can’t quite believe his luck. He can still cycle to work in Slough. Their neighbours are posh, the get-up-and-go type. And they do. When council houses are given away by the government they take theirs and move on. So does Alan.

Alan becomes a union rep. It’s not something he’s thought about a great deal, but he like to read and think. Only a fool can see that the workers were being screwed. It wasn’t all politics. Working class men had their clubs and after they put the politician in themselves to bed they had a shindig. Characters like ‘Big Joe Menzies’ a former railway worker from Perth, were both an inspiration and a role model. He tapped into reservoir of people that had worked with their hands and workers with fine minds that wanted to serve others like them.

Alan finds he’s spending more time on his union duties than on his postman’s job. He keeps working. He need to keep in touch with his colleagues. Their gripes are his gripes. Their causes his causes. He finds a sponsor and is promoted to full-time union officer. He travels the country. He’s a natural union rep as he was a postman. It’s a good combination, but his marriage suffers. He divorces. But life’s on the up and up.  But there’s a reminder that life isn’t something you can plan. Mike, his sister’s husband and one of his best friends, loses his job, admits he’s an alcoholic and hangs himself. Sobering.

But the years ahead with Cameron and his cronies gaining the levers of power are even more so. This book is a reminder that we once did things for ourselves, paid a decent(ish) wage, took pride in our work and did it well.  Perhaps that is the lesson that needs to be re-learned. No more to the robber-barons of government share issues, like the selling off of the post office, and an increasingly large share of any enterprise to the bloated and rich that produce nothing but stir the pot of the poor and take the honey. Alan Johnson’s memoir, it seems like Dickensian times now, rather than then.