Gritty reading: "This Boy" by Alan Johnson

Though it is not long since he was a lauded cabinet minister and touted as a possible Labour Party leader (shame that didn't work out), Alan Johnson's account of his early life in This Boy does not betray much in the way of political careerism. If he had professional dreams as a youngster, they were of being a writer or a pop star, with the latter possibility actually coming far closer to reality than the former as he entered his twenties. Instead, famously, he became a postman, in order to be able to support the young family he was starting, and presumably it was in the workplace that his - practical and moderate - political interests began to take concrete form. 

As for being a writer, well, of course, he did that, albeit much later, by writing this superb memoire, a memoire moreover that only occasionally and tangentially makes any sort of explicit reference to politics, though, naturally, what he describes in itself carries an implicit and hefty political clout. So this is no typical political memoire, doing what such books do, taking us behind the scenes at the meetings of the great and good, dishing the dirt on colleagues, justifying one's own actions and all the rest. This is rather a personal story, perhaps above all a tribute to two deeply remarkable women and a tale of survival in the most abject of circumstances. Rather than resembling a political memoire, This Boy puts me more in mind of a book like Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, though to be frank, this book feels more honest and distinctly less self-promotional.

Succinctly, This Boy is the story of a young Alan Johnson growing up in an area of West London (Notting Hill, North Kensington or Kensal Town - take your pick, the terms elide) in a family blighted by extreme poverty. Though his father, a jobbing musician, Steve, is around some of the time in the early days, his contribution to the family is practically non-existent, indeed negative, to the extent that, when he finally walks out on them his children rejoice and his wife, though bereft, is also more than anything relieved. The work of holding the family together, and (just) fed, is done first by young Alan's mother, Lily, and, subsequently, increasingly by the utter force of nature that is his older sister, Linda. 

It beggars belief that, at recently as the 1950s and 1960s conditions such as those described by Johnson could exist in London. The house in which the Johnsons lived had already been declared as unfit for human habitation in the 1930s, though the intervening war had stopped anyone doing anything about it. Initially, there is no electricity, just gas, no indoor sanitation and, of course, no heating. The walls are damp, the fabric of the house disintegrating. The Johnsons' "kitchen" is on the landing. The environment is horribly unhealthy, especially for Lily who suffers from a chronic heart condition. Nonetheless, she battles on, just about able to support her family through an accumulation of heavy cleaning jobs (which her doctors consider dangerous for her, living life on tick (hence steadily accumulating debts and arrears), and, as time passes the increasingly critical contribution of Linda, who grows up extraordinarily fast to deal with the the situation. It is a family story of cold and hunger, of debt and being cut off, of scrimping and saving. For example, one of Lily's systems for keeping the house warm is to follow the trail of customers of the local coal merchants and pick up all the odd bits of coal they drop in the street along the way. Through such devices, the family keeps its head above water.


It's not all doom and gloom. This Boy also tells the stories of  individuals, a community, and a wider world. We follow young Alan and Linda as they grow up, their struggles with school, their vicissitudes with girlfriends and boyfriends, their interests... In Alan's case, he is at the same time bookish and enraptured by the new phenomenon of pop music, starting with the Beatles - hence the two career options he dreams of. He also begins a lifetime of supporting Queens Park Rangers, which brought at least some recompense in that period. In the wider world, we see the steady growth of the affluent and permissive society in the sixties (though from the outside, as the Johnsons are largely excluded), with wonders such as TVs, cars and domestic labour saving devices slowly becoming commonplace at least in other peoples' lives. More grimly, we see the impact of the first arrivals of West Indian immigrants, many of whom fell foul of the exploitative slum landlord Peter Rachman, whose manor included much of Notting Hill at that time. Johnson is open-eyed about the unwillingness of the white community to accept the newcomers, and speaks frankly about the demeaning treatment and provocations they received from a fair proportion of the local populace, which led almost inevitably to riots and, on a notorious occasion, the murder of a black man, Kelso Cochrane, by a group of teddy boys on the Johnsons' street corner, an act witnessed by Lily. In a similar vein, we are told of Oswald Mosley's 1950s attempt to rekindle fascism in what he thought fertile territory. Though he failed utterly, it is disconcerting to read about this, as I had never thought of Mosley as anything other than a pure pre-war occurrence.

The remarkable Alan Johnson

Perhaps the most famous element in the Johnson 'back-story", as it is occasionally and rather condescendingly known, centres on the death of Lily, at the age of only 42, when, after a particularly severe bout of illness, she finally takes the plunge to try an experimental heart operation to cure her condition. It fails, and Lily never comes round after the operation, leaving her two children, Linda, 16, and Alan, 13, fending entirely for themselves. Again, it seems incredible from today's perspective that two adolescents not only find themselves in this situation, but that the state - social services et al - should allow the situation to persist. Indeed, the state was deeply unhappy about the situation, but once you've read the book, understood the Johnson family dynamic and, above all, come to know the unbelievably tenacious character of Linda, you can understand how a sixteen year-old girl could convince the Council to allocate them independent housing and successfully manage the arrangement thereafter. In truth, the Johnson children had lived independently for long periods before this.  In fact, they had rarely had such an easy life as at this time. 

I "read" this book as an audiobook, narrated by Johnson himself, on my long drive back from holidays. I guess I missed some pictures (I have caught up since - there are few pictures anyway, as it turns out), but otherwise the format was perfect for absorbing this very personal story. Johnson writes evocatively and well, and is a fine reader of his own work. There is absolutely no self-aggrandisement here, actually he is rather hard on his younger self, but there is no doubt that you cannot read this book without developing a serious admiration for the man. Though we often forget, politicians are human beings too, but few can have come through formative experiences like Johnson's. That he emerged from such a background to occupy a senior government position does him considerably greater credit than in most cases, and one might even regret that he didn't rise even higher.