This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (5 page)

Steve smoked roll-ups. His fingers were permanently stained a brownish yellow, as were his false teeth. He played the piano with a roll-up dangling from the side of his mouth. Lily wouldn’t have dreamed of smoking roll-ups: it would have offended her sense of femininity. An essential element of the image of the film stars she admired, like Bette Davis and Grace Kelly, was the elegant way they held a cigarette, sloping upwards from between the first and second fingers. Lily loved ‘the pictures’. When we were little she went at least once a week – without Steve, needless to say. Her daily working uniform of wraparound floral overall and turban would be discarded, her lovely, chestnut wavy hair brushed and styled with the help of a platoon of pins, grips and clips. Face powder would be dabbed on, creating little clouds of perfumed dust. Finally she’d apply glamorous bright red lipstick, using a broken hand mirror held at an angle directly under the naked light bulb. The results would be checked in the full-length mirror on the inside of the door of the dark wooden wardrobe.

I loved seeing Lily fully made up and glowing with
anticipation. Those cinema trips were one of the few bits of happiness in her life. When we all slept in the same room at 107 Southam Street, I remember Lily’s scent as she bent over to kiss me goodnight before escaping for the evening to Hollywood or Pinewood. Linda would be left in charge of me, since Steve was always out. Sharing Lily’s excitement, I tried, but usually failed, to stay awake so that when she returned she could tell me all about the films she had seen.

We were used to being left alone from an early age because poor Lily never stopped working. Cleaning and scrubbing for Mrs McLean and Miss MacDougal, a widow and spinster, who ran an upmarket residential boarding house off Church Lane in South Kensington; up on a chair, dusting lampshades for Mr and Mrs Dehn, of Lansdowne Crescent; polishing the furniture and disinfecting toilets in the spacious flat in Notting Hill Gate where she cleaned for three young brothers, a solicitor, a journalist and a stockbroker, whose mother had hired her to tidy up after them. And in the evenings she would often be pressed into service at those dinners in the big houses between Ladbroke Grove and Kensington Park Road.

The nightly rows with Steve were invariably about money and his failure to contribute very much, if anything, to the household budget. He had very quickly returned to his old ways and seemed to consider it Lily’s responsibility to put a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs and food in our bellies. He even resented the few pennies she spent on going to the pictures. Her hourly rate for cleaning would have been a pittance and Steve probably gambled in a day as much as she earned in a week.

A myth seems to have taken root in our retrospective view of
the 1950s that women didn’t work outside the home and that the husband was always the breadwinner. That may have been the convention in middle-class households, but it certainly wasn’t the case in the working-class families in our street. As for us, if we’d depended on Steve to win the bread, we’d have starved. Even if he backed the winner in the 3.30 at Kempton Park, it didn’t translate into bread for us. Yet if any woman shouldn’t have been working in 1950s London it was Lily, given her heart condition which, like her relationship with Steve, was becoming progressively worse.

There is no doubt Steve could be a charmer. Those who heard him play at the Earl of Warwick, the Mitre or the Lads of the Village must have thought we were lucky to have ‘Ginger’ Johnson as a father. And we were proud to see how respected he was when, as tots, we were taken to wedding receptions to sit on top of the piano, taking care not to knock over the line of pints of mild and bitter that grew longer as the evening wore on.

We were also proud of him at the Cobden Club children’s Christmas party, which for some reason was always held in January, where he was the master of ceremonies. The Cobden Club, on Westbourne Grove, later became a trendy private club and music venue: my son Jamie played there with his band a few years ago. In the 1950s, however, it was a working men’s club, and Steve, as its regular pianist, hosted its annual children’s treat.

He was rather less charming when he lay in bed all morning after a night of entertaining, surfacing only when it was time to put his bet on. Every morning we would have to take him up a cup of tea, only to find the previous one untouched, cold and congealing by his bedside, next to his dentures, which smiled
up at us from the glass of water they were kept in overnight. The bold and brave Linda took to putting salt in the tea as an expression of her increasing bitterness. It was a futile gesture since he never drank it anyway.

We hated having to go into that dark, dank room, heavy with the stench of alcohol, but it contained the only mirror we owned, on the inside of one of the wardrobe doors. Though Lily, to guard against any tendency to vanity, warned us that if we stared into a mirror for too long we’d see the devil, we did occasionally have to go in to check that we were suitably presentable while Steve lay comatose in the bed.

The rudest thing I’d ever seen was in that wardrobe. It was a hardback book, the size of a comic annual, which belonged to Steve. Every page contained a series of photographs of a naked woman. I doubt if it qualified as pornography, even in the more innocent 1950s. The women had waxed pudenda and posed artistically like blonde statuettes. I don’t know where the book came from or whose work it contained, but I dare say that in the big houses at the Holland Park end of Portobello Road it would have been considered art and probably displayed on a coffee table. To us, though, it was truly shocking.

It was Linda, as usual, who initially made this discovery and urged me on to self-corruption. When Steve and Lily were out, I’d sneak in, open the wardrobe, with its rows of Steve’s ties hanging on a wire across the inside of the other door, the one without the mirror, stand on the little wooden chair that served as a bedside table and stretch into the dark recess at the top. I would then ogle the pictures for as long as I dared.

Impressed as we were by Steve’s talent for music, he made no effort to share it with us. There was always a battered old piano
taking up precious space in our rooms – hardly any furniture, but always a piano – and yet not only did he never try to teach us how to play, he made sure we couldn’t teach ourselves, either. He kept the keyboard locked and possessed the only key.

He did come home once with a cardboard box full of old 78rpm records that he’d bought in Portobello market. These huge, pre-vinyl discs, made of shellac, were extremely brittle. For a long while we had nothing to play them on. All we could do was treasure them and read the labels: ‘In a Shady Nook by a Babbling Brook’ by Donald Peers, on Columbia; ‘With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm’, ‘Tap Your Feet and Sing Bop Dee Bop Dee Doo’ by a forgotten orchestra, and a spoken-word recording of ‘The Giant’s Beanstalk’.

In the meantime our only source of entertainment was the wireless, rented by Lily from Radio Rentals, which was cabled into a brown Bakelite switch fixed to a window frame. It had three BBC settings – the Home Service, Light Programme and Third Programme. I grew up listening to
The Archers
,
Mrs Dale’s Diary, Letter from America, Down Your Way
and
Have A Go
, with Wilfred Pickles (‘Put your feet on the mantel shelf, tune in your wireless and help yourself’). Over the years Lily must have paid out enough rental fees to buy a hundred radios, but renting was her only option.

We wanted to listen to our ancient records, too, but no money meant no gramophone.

Then Lily won the pools.

LIKE A HUGE
percentage of the population, Steve and Lily did the football pools every week (Steve with Vernons, Lily with Littlewoods). It’s difficult to grasp now how important the pools were to families, regardless of wealth and background. When, many years later, I became a postman in leafy, prosperous Barnes, we had to do special deliveries to clear the mountain of stubby, thick brown envelopes sent from the big Merseyside duo of Vernons and Littlewoods, along with Zetters and Cope.

When the football results were broadcast on the wireless on
Sports Report
at 5pm on a Saturday afternoon, they were listened to with hushed reverence across the nation, and nowhere more so than in Southam Street. Those who criticize the poor for spending some of the little money they have on the pools, or nowadays more often on the National Lottery, can never have experienced the profound motivational force of the prospect of a win.

Lily relied on the ‘tick’ for groceries, the ‘never-never’ – or hire purchase, as it used to be called – for anything more substantial and the tallyman for loans she had no hope of fully
repaying. The designation ‘tallyman’ covered anyone who offered credit and then came to collect the repayments. As well as the Provident, which had funded our holiday in Liverpool, Lily borrowed from the Prudential and it was their tallyman, the most persistent, with whom we were most familiar. When we heard four knocks on the front door, we knew the caller was for us (the custom was one knock for the ground floor, two for the first and so on – and the third floor was us). Invariably it would be a tallyman of one stripe or another.

We were well practised in ducking down away from the windows and remaining silent as soon as we heard four knocks, and lying low until the tallyman gave up. We also knew we had to walk straight past the house if we saw one of them on the doorstep. They were easy to spot with their uniform belted raincoats and the thick, black ledgers they all carried.

The Man from the Pru, however, wouldn’t be content to knock four times. When that elicited no response he would persevere by knocking once, twice or three times to get someone else to open the door, then stride up to our floor and rap on the two doors leading off the landing, where the stove was. If we were very quiet he’d go away, and to his credit, he never opened the doors to look inside. But he caught Lily often, particularly if she happened to be using the stove.

Small wonder Lily did the pools every week, and dreamed of the better life that over twenty-two points on the coupon could provide. The first thing she’d buy if she ever won, she used to say, was a house. She always longed to have her own front door. We once had an offer of a council house that would have taken us out of the slums and through a front door that was exclusively ours. The trouble was that the front door in
question was in Crawley, in Sussex. The offer was probably made during a push to populate the new towns being built to ease the housing shortages after the war. Steve was adamant: he had no intention of moving out of Notting Hill, let alone going anywhere near a new town.

Since Lily had no roots in West London, and given her desperation to improve our circumstances, I’m pretty sure we’d have decamped to Crawley if it had been up to her. She consoled herself with the thought that at least our landlords were the respectable Rowe Housing Trust and not the notorious Peter Rachman, who was by then busy enriching himself by driving out sitting tenants in Notting Hill, who had statutory protection against high rents, in order to exploit the growing demand among new immigrants from the Caribbean for cheap housing. At that time new tenants did not have the same protection as sitting tenants, and people arriving from the West Indies after the war in response to the call for workers in Britain found it almost impossible to find a place to live. They had no alternative but to accept poor conditions and extortionate rents, and Rachman packed as many of them as he could into shared accommodation by subdividing houses into multiple small rooms.

Rachman’s domain never extended to Southam Street, or at any rate, not to our end of it, largely because our houses were already so overcrowded and mainly under the control of housing trusts. His principal area of operation was the streets south of Westbourne Grove, including Powis Square, Colville Terrace and Talbot Grove.

So Crawley was rejected and we remained in Southam Street with the Rowe Housing Trust. I used to go with Lily from time
to time to their offices in the Portobello Road to pay the rent. There was a funny wooden, concertina-style hinged door that led directly into the offices from the street. We’d push it open and walk up a couple of floors where we queued to talk to a woman behind a steel and glass grille. I can still vividly remember the cream woodwork, brown lino and the smell of disinfectant.

The pools were Lily’s only flutter, although she did embrace bingo a few years later, once the Betting and Gaming Act of 1960 paved the way for the bingo halls that began to spring up in towns and cities across the country. For Steve, though, the pools were a mere Saturday diversion from the horses. I think he must have placed a bet every day there was a horse to bet on. Had he lived in today’s world of easy access to gambling on anything and everything, he might well have taken it up as a full-time occupation.

Before the 1960 Act, off-course cash betting on the ‘gee-gees’ was illegal and there was no such thing as a licensed high-street betting shop. Linda and I would be press-ganged into running Steve’s bets. He would collar whichever one of us he found first and send us off with a little parcel of money tightly wrapped in the scrap of paper on which his bet was written. We would be instructed to keep it clutched firmly in the palm of our hand and not to let go of it until we passed it to one of the bookies. These men – invariably, in my memory, fat men with trilby hats on their heads and fags in their mouths, reminiscent of the famous silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock – would lurk in doorways in St Ervans Road or Tavistock Crescent. We never knew their names, and the transaction, which was conducted in complete silence, was over in seconds. You’d hand over the bet
and the bookie would give you a piece of paper, which Linda or I had to hand back to Steve to prove the bet had been laid. I do not recall ever collecting any winnings on Steve’s behalf, which means either he wasn’t very good at picking winners or that, on the rare occasions when he did win, the walk to find the bookie suddenly became less onerous for him.