Please, Mr Postman by Alan Johnson (Bantam Press £16.99)
In strict category terms, This Boy, the first volume of memoirs by the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson, is what used to be known in the trade as a “Labour autobiography”—a once abundant genre, now rather more restricted in its scope. Like the Labour Party itself, the Labour autobiography started making its presence felt something under a century ago.
Though written by all sorts and conditions of men—Red Clydesiders superannuated from the backbenches, trades unionists elevated to the House of Lords, middle-class intellectuals bent on revising the party constitution—such books were generally united by their reliance on the symbolic moment. The author might have ended up in parliament by way of Grimepit Colliery Secondary School and the National Union of Mineworkers, or Winchester College and guilt-appeasing mission-work in the East End slums, but invariably there would come a chapter in which our hero was blacklisted by his former employer, browsed his way through Das Kapital, or, in the case of the middle-class intellectual, got to grips with the Oxford Philosophy, Politics and Economics course, and divined that here was the crucible in which his beliefs were being forged.
The distinguishing mark of Johnson’s account of his formative years in the back-streets of old ungentrified Notting Hill was how little it conformed to this elemental pattern. Even more than Tony Blair’s apologia pro vita sua, it was an almost wholly apolitical work, devoid of point-scoring, figurative interludes and those asides in which the circumstances of the struggle are discreetly set against an appreciation of that struggle’s rewards. Johnson might have used the memory of his teenage sacking from a branch of Tesco to observe that “not only should the voices of workers be heard but they needed some protection against exploitation” but that was about as far as his political awareness went.
What we got instead was an unvarnished and absolutely un-self-pitying description of an early life lived out in conditions of extreme poverty and familial crack-up (absconding father, ailing mother) with only the resourcefulness of his elder sister, Linda, to keep the social workers at bay. It was a terrific book, neither sentimental nor self-serving (both snares into which Labour autobiographies are sometimes inclined to tumble) and deserved every award it got, not least this year’s Orwell Prize.
Please, Mr Postman, which moves Johnson’s life-story on from 1968 to the mid-1980s is, necessarily, a very different piece of work. With one significant exception, most of the traumas of his upbringing are over. Here in the aftermath of the Summer of Love, our 18-year-old Mod and Queen’s Park Rangers fan is tying the knot with his girlfriend Judy, adopting the daughter of her first marriage, raising a family and bidding farewell to the job in the supermarket in favour of a poorly-paid but comfortable berth at the Post Office. Existence, as he more than once concedes, has lost most of its sharp edges and become a conveyor belt. This comparative lack of drama is, inevitably, the book’s drawback. This Boy’s tension turned on matters of life and death. Would his mother die? What would happen when she did? How would he avoid being taken into care? While the routines of the Barnes sorting office and Johnson’s later career as a trades union official are not without all intrinsic interest, as Anthony Powell might have said, they can seem horribly mundane when set against the account of the Christmas Day when, with mum in hospital, Alan and Linda are forced to fend for themselves.
To do Johnson justice, he seems faintly aware of this discrepancy, and parts of Please, Mr Postman strike an oddly apologetic note. “I do understand how soporific that must sound” he notes of a three-day postal workers’ union rules revision conference in Brighton, “but for me it was truly exciting. It was another chance to absorb the cut and thrust as people much like me, doing the same job, got together to debate important issues affecting our lives…”
Even the one epiphanic moment—that Friday night in 1974 when he and his friend Mick, at leisure in the Slough Supporters Club, decide to join the Labour Party—is decidedly downbeat. This, after all, is the party of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan and the decade in which Labour’s uneasy relationship with its trades union paymasters will be cruelly exposed. There are no more Keir Hardies or Jarrow marchers, and some of Johnson’s most ironic remarks are reserved for the middle-class activists of Militant and the Workers’ Revolutionary Party who, as he puts it, talk posh but dress scruffy whereas he and his colleagues stick to sharp suits and dropped aitches.
By this time Johnson and his growing family are part of the post-1960s London diaspora, detached from the seedier end of Ladbroke Grove and installed in a housing estate on the outskirts of Slough. The estate is disparaged by the local policemen but to Alan and Judy it is a kind of Elysian field—full of friendly neighbours, communal weekend entertainment and, you suspect, a vision of life as the future Labour politician imagines it ought to be lived, where right old knees ups and trips to Loftus Road alternate with autodidactic forays into literature. Significantly, Johnson’s heroes in his scramble up the trade union movement’s greasy pole tend to be hard-drinking, hard-swearing, self-educated working-class men to whom pub-haunting and poetry-quoting are part of the same cultural framework. Equally significant, perhaps, is the sight of the Britwell estate’s solidarity being broken down from the moment the Tory government of 1979 offers tenants the right to purchase their council houses. Johnson, however, is always a realist in these matters, and “didn’t feel in any way morally superior to the people desperate to own their own homes who saw Mrs [Margaret] Thatcher as a liberator.”
Like the council-house buyers of the Britwell estate, our man is fast turning out to be a case study in one kind of postwar upward mobility: likely lad, branch chairman; a fixture of the Union of Post Office Workers (UPW) annual conference; the protégé of the moustache-twirling General Secretary, Tom Jackson; and, in his early thirties, elected to the union’s National Executive.
As a working-class pragmatist, Johnson’s view of the early 1980s Labour Party schisms is witheringly acute. He distrusted former cabinet minister Tony Benn’s cult of personality and criticises miners leader Arthur Scargill for his galloping monomania. There is a memorable moment at a mid-1980s Trades Union Congress conference when, with the great man fulminating from the rostrum, a senior National Union of Mineworkers official is heard to mutter “Listen to him, all ‘I, me, mine,’ never ‘we, us, ours.’” Meanwhile, democracy, for Johnson, remains a wonderful thing, provided all those involved are in pursuit of the same desirable aims. And so the man who on page 234 complains that in one local school “parental interest was discouraged, performance standards were opaque and achievements were not measurable by any meaningful comparison” is also the man who on page 233 laments that his local MP can’t come out against the grammar schools because the parents like them, and fails to see the incongruity.
By this point in the proceedings, Please, Mr Postman has already declared itself to be a rather lop-sided affair. The fascination of a certain kind of old-style Labour autobiography lay in the revelations brought from the smoke-filled cabinet rooms of long ago. The personal stuff of dear wives met at Fabian summer schools and bright-eyed grandchildren playing on the farmhouse lawn was usually deadly dull. Here, the interest lies in the personal stuff—notably the calamity of Johnson’s brother-in-law’s secret alcoholism and suicide—while the accounts of dancing attendance on Tom Jackson, the former General Secretary of the UPW, though invaluable to historians of Thatcher-era trades unionism, are likely to leave the general reader lukewarm.
Meanwhile, the simple, plain man style that worked so well in This Boy has a habit of degenerating into cliché, as when Johnson observes, painfully, of some self-educated chum with a tendency to mispronounce words he had never heard spoken, “As an autodidact myself, I just about steered clear of the pitfalls inherent in this form of self-education by virtue of having been such an avid listener to the BBC Home Service when I was growing up.”
At the same time, none of these longueurs detracts from Please, Mr Postman’s significance as a piece of socio-political testimony from the third quarter of the British 20th century. Johnson confirms what social historians have long begun to suspect, which is that the swinging 60s were pretty much confined to two or three miles of central London.
He excuses his absence from the Rolling Stones’ Hyde Park concert on the grounds that he and his wife had something more important to do: “While the flower children were listening to Mick Jagger’s recitation of Shelley in homage to Brian Jones, who’d died a couple of days earlier, we were loading our possessions into a small removal van to be driven 30 miles west to Slough.”
As for les Événements of 1968—the protests and strikes that broke out across France—the Trafalgar Square demonstrations and the marches on Grosvenor Square, “for Judy and me and millions like us, these events might just as well be taking place in a parallel universe for all the difference they made to us.”
Johnson Part II can be usefully read alongside the volumes of David Kynaston’s postwar history, much of whose trajectory it shares, and together with Fred Inglis’s recent biography of Richard Hoggart, who died earlier this year only a few months after it was published. The thesis of Hoggart’s 1957 masterpiece The Uses of Literacy is that new-style, and mostly American-inspired, consumer materialism was robbing working-class life of its solidarity, its communality, its traditions and, by extension, its cultural value.
Johnson is not only an acute observer of the changing patterns of working-class life—the Sunday suits giving way to casual dress, the greater acceptance of diversity—but, in some sense, a disprover of the Hoggart theory: a man whose deep-dyed materialism (“I didn’t want to abolish money” he remarks in response to Tariq Ali’s economic proposals, “I needed to earn the bloody stuff”) never robbed him of an awareness of who he was and where he came from, or—even more important—turned him into a Conservative.
Please, Mr Postman may not be a conventional Labour autobiography, but its view of the social background to contemporary politics makes it required reading for any Labour politician who assumes that there will still be a market for such things 20 or 30 years hence.
In strict category terms, This Boy, the first volume of memoirs by the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson, is what used to be known in the trade as a “Labour autobiography”—a once abundant genre, now rather more restricted in its scope. Like the Labour Party itself, the Labour autobiography started making its presence felt something under a century ago.
Though written by all sorts and conditions of men—Red Clydesiders superannuated from the backbenches, trades unionists elevated to the House of Lords, middle-class intellectuals bent on revising the party constitution—such books were generally united by their reliance on the symbolic moment. The author might have ended up in parliament by way of Grimepit Colliery Secondary School and the National Union of Mineworkers, or Winchester College and guilt-appeasing mission-work in the East End slums, but invariably there would come a chapter in which our hero was blacklisted by his former employer, browsed his way through Das Kapital, or, in the case of the middle-class intellectual, got to grips with the Oxford Philosophy, Politics and Economics course, and divined that here was the crucible in which his beliefs were being forged.
The distinguishing mark of Johnson’s account of his formative years in the back-streets of old ungentrified Notting Hill was how little it conformed to this elemental pattern. Even more than Tony Blair’s apologia pro vita sua, it was an almost wholly apolitical work, devoid of point-scoring, figurative interludes and those asides in which the circumstances of the struggle are discreetly set against an appreciation of that struggle’s rewards. Johnson might have used the memory of his teenage sacking from a branch of Tesco to observe that “not only should the voices of workers be heard but they needed some protection against exploitation” but that was about as far as his political awareness went.
What we got instead was an unvarnished and absolutely un-self-pitying description of an early life lived out in conditions of extreme poverty and familial crack-up (absconding father, ailing mother) with only the resourcefulness of his elder sister, Linda, to keep the social workers at bay. It was a terrific book, neither sentimental nor self-serving (both snares into which Labour autobiographies are sometimes inclined to tumble) and deserved every award it got, not least this year’s Orwell Prize.
Please, Mr Postman, which moves Johnson’s life-story on from 1968 to the mid-1980s is, necessarily, a very different piece of work. With one significant exception, most of the traumas of his upbringing are over. Here in the aftermath of the Summer of Love, our 18-year-old Mod and Queen’s Park Rangers fan is tying the knot with his girlfriend Judy, adopting the daughter of her first marriage, raising a family and bidding farewell to the job in the supermarket in favour of a poorly-paid but comfortable berth at the Post Office. Existence, as he more than once concedes, has lost most of its sharp edges and become a conveyor belt. This comparative lack of drama is, inevitably, the book’s drawback. This Boy’s tension turned on matters of life and death. Would his mother die? What would happen when she did? How would he avoid being taken into care? While the routines of the Barnes sorting office and Johnson’s later career as a trades union official are not without all intrinsic interest, as Anthony Powell might have said, they can seem horribly mundane when set against the account of the Christmas Day when, with mum in hospital, Alan and Linda are forced to fend for themselves.
To do Johnson justice, he seems faintly aware of this discrepancy, and parts of Please, Mr Postman strike an oddly apologetic note. “I do understand how soporific that must sound” he notes of a three-day postal workers’ union rules revision conference in Brighton, “but for me it was truly exciting. It was another chance to absorb the cut and thrust as people much like me, doing the same job, got together to debate important issues affecting our lives…”
Even the one epiphanic moment—that Friday night in 1974 when he and his friend Mick, at leisure in the Slough Supporters Club, decide to join the Labour Party—is decidedly downbeat. This, after all, is the party of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan and the decade in which Labour’s uneasy relationship with its trades union paymasters will be cruelly exposed. There are no more Keir Hardies or Jarrow marchers, and some of Johnson’s most ironic remarks are reserved for the middle-class activists of Militant and the Workers’ Revolutionary Party who, as he puts it, talk posh but dress scruffy whereas he and his colleagues stick to sharp suits and dropped aitches.
By this time Johnson and his growing family are part of the post-1960s London diaspora, detached from the seedier end of Ladbroke Grove and installed in a housing estate on the outskirts of Slough. The estate is disparaged by the local policemen but to Alan and Judy it is a kind of Elysian field—full of friendly neighbours, communal weekend entertainment and, you suspect, a vision of life as the future Labour politician imagines it ought to be lived, where right old knees ups and trips to Loftus Road alternate with autodidactic forays into literature. Significantly, Johnson’s heroes in his scramble up the trade union movement’s greasy pole tend to be hard-drinking, hard-swearing, self-educated working-class men to whom pub-haunting and poetry-quoting are part of the same cultural framework. Equally significant, perhaps, is the sight of the Britwell estate’s solidarity being broken down from the moment the Tory government of 1979 offers tenants the right to purchase their council houses. Johnson, however, is always a realist in these matters, and “didn’t feel in any way morally superior to the people desperate to own their own homes who saw Mrs [Margaret] Thatcher as a liberator.”
Like the council-house buyers of the Britwell estate, our man is fast turning out to be a case study in one kind of postwar upward mobility: likely lad, branch chairman; a fixture of the Union of Post Office Workers (UPW) annual conference; the protégé of the moustache-twirling General Secretary, Tom Jackson; and, in his early thirties, elected to the union’s National Executive.
As a working-class pragmatist, Johnson’s view of the early 1980s Labour Party schisms is witheringly acute. He distrusted former cabinet minister Tony Benn’s cult of personality and criticises miners leader Arthur Scargill for his galloping monomania. There is a memorable moment at a mid-1980s Trades Union Congress conference when, with the great man fulminating from the rostrum, a senior National Union of Mineworkers official is heard to mutter “Listen to him, all ‘I, me, mine,’ never ‘we, us, ours.’” Meanwhile, democracy, for Johnson, remains a wonderful thing, provided all those involved are in pursuit of the same desirable aims. And so the man who on page 234 complains that in one local school “parental interest was discouraged, performance standards were opaque and achievements were not measurable by any meaningful comparison” is also the man who on page 233 laments that his local MP can’t come out against the grammar schools because the parents like them, and fails to see the incongruity.
By this point in the proceedings, Please, Mr Postman has already declared itself to be a rather lop-sided affair. The fascination of a certain kind of old-style Labour autobiography lay in the revelations brought from the smoke-filled cabinet rooms of long ago. The personal stuff of dear wives met at Fabian summer schools and bright-eyed grandchildren playing on the farmhouse lawn was usually deadly dull. Here, the interest lies in the personal stuff—notably the calamity of Johnson’s brother-in-law’s secret alcoholism and suicide—while the accounts of dancing attendance on Tom Jackson, the former General Secretary of the UPW, though invaluable to historians of Thatcher-era trades unionism, are likely to leave the general reader lukewarm.
Meanwhile, the simple, plain man style that worked so well in This Boy has a habit of degenerating into cliché, as when Johnson observes, painfully, of some self-educated chum with a tendency to mispronounce words he had never heard spoken, “As an autodidact myself, I just about steered clear of the pitfalls inherent in this form of self-education by virtue of having been such an avid listener to the BBC Home Service when I was growing up.”
At the same time, none of these longueurs detracts from Please, Mr Postman’s significance as a piece of socio-political testimony from the third quarter of the British 20th century. Johnson confirms what social historians have long begun to suspect, which is that the swinging 60s were pretty much confined to two or three miles of central London.
He excuses his absence from the Rolling Stones’ Hyde Park concert on the grounds that he and his wife had something more important to do: “While the flower children were listening to Mick Jagger’s recitation of Shelley in homage to Brian Jones, who’d died a couple of days earlier, we were loading our possessions into a small removal van to be driven 30 miles west to Slough.”
As for les Événements of 1968—the protests and strikes that broke out across France—the Trafalgar Square demonstrations and the marches on Grosvenor Square, “for Judy and me and millions like us, these events might just as well be taking place in a parallel universe for all the difference they made to us.”
Johnson Part II can be usefully read alongside the volumes of David Kynaston’s postwar history, much of whose trajectory it shares, and together with Fred Inglis’s recent biography of Richard Hoggart, who died earlier this year only a few months after it was published. The thesis of Hoggart’s 1957 masterpiece The Uses of Literacy is that new-style, and mostly American-inspired, consumer materialism was robbing working-class life of its solidarity, its communality, its traditions and, by extension, its cultural value.
Johnson is not only an acute observer of the changing patterns of working-class life—the Sunday suits giving way to casual dress, the greater acceptance of diversity—but, in some sense, a disprover of the Hoggart theory: a man whose deep-dyed materialism (“I didn’t want to abolish money” he remarks in response to Tariq Ali’s economic proposals, “I needed to earn the bloody stuff”) never robbed him of an awareness of who he was and where he came from, or—even more important—turned him into a Conservative.
Please, Mr Postman may not be a conventional Labour autobiography, but its view of the social background to contemporary politics makes it required reading for any Labour politician who assumes that there will still be a market for such things 20 or 30 years hence.
