The long and winding roa.., p.1
The Long and Winding Road, page 1
About the Book
From the condemned slums of Southam Street in West London to the corridors of power in Westminster, Alan Johnson’s multi-award-winning autobiography charts an extraordinary journey, almost unimaginable in today’s Britain. This third volume tells of Alan’s early political skirmishes as a trade-union leader, where his negotiating skills and charismatic style soon came to the notice of Tony Blair and other senior members of the Labour Party.
As a result, Alan was chosen to stand in the constituency of Hull West and Hessle, and entered Parliament as an MP after the landslide election victory for Labour in May 1997. But this is no self-aggrandizing memoir of Westminster politicking and skulduggery. Supporting the struggle for justice of his constituents – the Hull trawlermen and their families – comes more naturally to Alan than do the Byzantine complexities of Parliamentary procedure. But of course he does succeed there, and rises through various ministerial positions to the office of Home Secretary in 2009.
In The Long and Winding Road, Alan’s characteristic honesty and authenticity shine through every word. His book takes you into a world which is at once familiar and strange: this is politics as you’ve never seen it before . . .
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
Picture Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
Also by Alan Johnson
Copyright
The Long and Winding Road
Alan Johnson
For Natalie, Emma, Jamie and Oliver
Chapter 1
I KNEW I shouldn’t have gone. It was my sister Linda who persuaded me. Seven years after emigrating to Australia, she and her husband Chas were returning to England for the first time, to attend the wedding of our half-sister Sandra on 25 August 1990.
Sandra’s father would be ‘giving her away’. The problem was that Sandra’s father, Stephen Johnson, was also my father. He was, of course, Linda’s father, too, but while she had re-established contact with him, I had not. In a different context I suppose he gave us away, or at least left us to our own devices. I was eight when he walked out and thirteen on the only other occasion I’d seen him since, at my mother’s funeral, where he’d hovered on the periphery. It seems over-dramatic to say that, as far as I was concerned, I didn’t have a father; as if I’d grown up emotionally damaged by his departure, by his rejection of my mother, Lily, and of us. But I bore no shoulder chips, carried no burden; there were no scars on my body, or on my soul. I was completely and entirely at ease with being fatherless. I accepted it as my natural state, like having blue eyes and dark chestnut hair – the colour of Lily’s. Steve’s was ginger.
It wasn’t as if Steve had broken some kind of bond between us when he left. We’d never been close. And Linda had always said that she hated our father. Indeed, she’d once tried to stab him with her Girl Guide’s penknife. He was a boozing, gambling womanizer who abused our mother physically as well as mentally. If he hadn’t been so feckless she wouldn’t have had to ruin her already fragile health by scrubbing and cleaning other people’s houses for a pittance. Yet hatred was not an emotion I ever felt capable of summoning up. Lily had ensured that the misery in her life didn’t transfer to mine. She and my sister absorbed it. They’d kept things from me so that I wouldn’t be aware of the full extent of Steve’s behaviour. Still, I knew enough to feel elated when he left. No more shouting matches that could be heard by all the other families living around us in our west London slum. No more attacks on my mother. No more creeping around in silence on a Saturday morning while he slept off the excesses of the night before.
At that time, in the 1950s, the Home Service would broadcast appeals for information about missing people. Every morning our big, old wireless, hired from Radio Rentals, would solemnly urge the likes of ‘Mr Gerald Smith, formerly of Sunbury-on-Thames’, to please ‘get in touch with his mother, Gladys Smith, who is seriously ill’. I remember wondering if, one of those mornings, just after ‘Lift Up Your Hearts’ and before the eight o’clock news, would come the plea: ‘Will Mr Stephen Arthur Johnson, of Southam Street, North Kensington, London W10, return home, where his wife, Lilian May Johnson, is waiting to hear from him.’ Steve had slipped away on a Saturday morning in 1958 while the three of us were ‘down the lane’ in Portobello Road market. My mother had no idea where he’d gone.
In the end, he was tracked down to Upland Road, East Dulwich, the home of Vera, the barmaid at the Lads of the Village, one of the various pubs across Kensal Town where Steve played piano to an appreciative audience. It was always a mystery to me how Vera managed to get to and from work in North Kensington from East Dulwich, which must have been at least ten miles away. Aged eleven, and an avid collector of football programmes, I once made the journey to a shop in Dulwich where, I was reliably informed by Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly, there were thousands for sale. The bus ride took so long that I was amazed to find I was still in London. Having no understanding of population density or the vastness of the city south of the river, the whole time I was there I was nervous I might bump into Steve.
And now the wedding invitation arrived from that same house in Upland Road. ‘Mr and Mrs Stephen Johnson request the pleasure of the company of . . .’ After thirty-two years he wanted the pleasure of my company. Linda was coming all the way from Perth, Western Australia for Sandra’s special day – and she had been so afraid of flying that even when she and Chas emigrated she’d insisted on going by sea. Apparently, she had conquered her phobia on several holiday flights to Bali, but this was a gruelling journey just to attend a wedding.
‘Sandra’s our sister,’ Linda reiterated needlessly over the phone. ‘Our flesh and blood. It would make her day if we could be there for her.’ She was as determined and as persuasive as ever. I was cornered. Against my better judgement, for Sandra’s sake, I would have to go.
I wouldn’t have as far to travel. By 1990 I was living and working in south London myself. My job with the Union of Communication Workers was based in Clapham, and home was a flat in the urban sprawl of Thornton Heath, at St Christopher’s Gardens, a new development bordering the A23, the Brighton Road. I was a forty-year-old divorcee and grandfather, my daughter Natalie having given birth to her own daughter, Carmel, in 1987. If I could summon up hatred for anything it was that word ‘grandfather’. It made me feel like an ancient clock, or a grey-haired pensioner in a misshapen cardigan pottering in his garden.
I didn’t tell my children, Natalie, Emma and Jamie, now aged twenty-four, twenty-two and (almost) twenty, about the wedding invitation. They had shown no curiosity about their family history. In truth neither their mother, Judy, nor I had encouraged it. We’d never been keen to talk about our childhoods. We had created a new family, far from the deprivation of North Kensington. Why would we want to dwell on the snapped branches of our family tree?
Now one of those branches had blown back from a world of gaslit streets and damp, crumbling houses. I was about to be reunited with my father. Were there any fond memories I could dredge up to help me to prepare myself for the ordeal? One scene constantly recurred. We are in the kitchen at Southam Street. I am sitting on the cracked lino as Steve stands talking to my mother. From my perspective, he seems tall. For once they are not arguing, but talking; discussing something face-to-face, close to one another. He has come home from his intermittent work as a painter and decorator, his red hair flecked with paint. Wearing a crumpled brown gabardine mac boasting more buttons than are strictly necessary, he is smoking a cigarette and speaking earnestly. I can smell Steve’s familiar musk – a mixture of putty, tobacco and alcohol – but he isn’t drunk, or angry. Perhaps it is the rare civility of this encounter that imprinted the image on to my memory, me with my head tilted towards the flyblown ceiling on that evening long ago, gazing at a father I could for once look up to.
Could I disinter any other benign images? Yes. There was the trip to Walton-on-the-Naze. A friend of Steve’s had hired a car. Lily, Linda, Steve and I squeezed into its leather interior with Steve’s friend and his wife to be driven to the Essex coast. I could recall the excitement of anticipating the treat as much as the treat itself. It was my first journey in a car and only my second visit to the seaside. Snapshots from that outing floated up from the depths of my memory. Linda and Steve eating cockles and whelks while I devoured an ice-cream wafer, a large block of ice cream sandwiched between two brittle biscuits; the men removing the elasticated armbands that held their overlong sleeves in place in order to roll them up to catch the sun.
At the end of that hot day, on the road home, Linda and I were left in the back of the car outside a pub while the four adults went inside. Lily came out with bottles of lemonade and bags of crisps for us. There was only one brand of crisps in my childhood: Smith’s. A factory in our part of west London gave local women a chance to earn some money putting salt into little pieces of blue waxed p aper and twisting them into tiny sacks to be dropped into the packets of crisps as optional seasoning.
Yes, that was a good day at Walton-on-the-Naze – a pleasant memory; something to savour (literally, in the case of the crisps). And surely it must have been Steve who gave me the little plastic submarine, fuelled by baking soda, that I so cherished. You put the plug in the butler sink, filled it with water and the submarine would sink, gradually dispelling bubbles from its hold.
Then there was the trip to the barber’s. Perhaps my first. The barber’s was a man’s world. I knew this instinctively, sensing that the whispered conversations, like the masculine soapy fragrance, were the hallmarks of a male domain. A plank of wood would be placed across the thickly padded black leather arms of the barber’s chair to bring small boys up to the required height for hair-cutting. Steve sat smoking and reading the newspaper, probably picking out the horses he would bet on, as he did every single day that horses anywhere were running races.
And there was that word Steve would use in jest when adopting a mock upper-crust tone. What was it? Invariably? No, it wasn’t that. Indefinitely? Indubitably? That was it. On a Sunday Lily might say, ‘Aren’t you going to see your mother this morning?’ and Steve, in a good mood as he prepared to embark on his meticulous weekend toilette (he always liked to look smart), would reply: ‘Indubitably, my dear.’ A posh word uttered lightheartedly as a dig at those who led a very different life from ours. Indubitably.
I would run these childhood scenes through my head as the reunion approached, trying to dispel any negative thoughts. Sure, Steve had left us, but I was a grown man now who understood how relationships could break down. Steve would have been about thirty-seven when he’d decamped – the same age I’d been when I drove away from the Britwell estate in Slough and my marriage to Judy. It was true that I’d retained a close relationship with my kids and that the divorce had been as amicable and as painless as we were able to make it. But hadn’t my mother tried hard to encourage me to stay in touch with Steve? She’d even gone to the extraordinary lengths of offering to accompany me on a visit to Dulwich; to humiliate herself by entering the comfortable domesticity of Steve’s new life with Vera just to ensure that I maintained contact. ‘A boy needs a father,’ she would insist. But to no avail. So the fault, if fault there was, for my fatherless state was mine as much as his.
I said nothing about this DIY cognitive therapy to Linda in the phone calls from Australia that became increasingly frequent as she pressed her case. I’d already surrendered and said I’d go but she was suspicious that I’d cry off with a late excuse. I said nothing, either, to my girlfriend, Laura.
I’d met Laura when she worked at UCW House as a personal assistant to the general secretary of the union, Alan Tuffin. Laura was tall, attractive and the funniest woman I’d ever met. She lived in Herne Hill, a south London girl from a family dominated by women. She was one of two sisters and her glamorous mother was one of three. They all loved a wedding. Laura would be coming with me, while the rest of the matriarchy planned to attend the church in Dulwich to see the show.
Laura had been born the year before my mother died. She was looking forward to meeting Linda for the first time and thought it wonderful that I’d see my half-sister at last and my father after such a long separation. I had neither the inclination nor the emotional vocabulary to explain the trauma that was creeping up on me as the day grew nearer.
Linda looked thin and drawn. In the seven years since she had left for Australia she had sent me the odd photograph but I hadn’t realized how much weight she’d lost. We wrote to one another regularly, long letters on flimsy, blue airmail paper, folded inwards and sealed to form an envelope. I’d written of Natalie’s marriage, Carmel’s birth, Jamie and Emma’s exploits, the end of my marriage. She related the success of her Magic Moon nursery, the Australianization of her children, Renay, Tara and Dean, and Chas’s immersion in the local community of Armadale in the Perth suburbs.
Now she was back in London, speaking with a slight Aussie twang. She and Chas came to stay with me in my two-bedroomed flat in St Christopher’s Gardens the night before the wedding. Jamie joined us. He was a student at Roehampton Institute and lived with some fellow undergraduates in a former council house on the vast Roehampton estate. When Laura arrived at 8pm we all walked round to a nearby Italian restaurant. Over dinner the five of us talked about everything under the sun except the next day’s event. Linda was as voluble as ever, making sure that the conversation didn’t flag and that everyone in turn was properly interrogated – she wanted to be fully informed about our lives. She also planned to visit her old friend Judy, my ex-wife. It was through Linda that I’d met Judy – they had studied and worked together as nursery nurses. Judy was also about to be married. Jamie was going to be best man. Everything, we agreed, had turned out fine – in the end.
Linda touched only once on the subject we were all avoiding when she asked Jamie if he didn’t feel the urge to come to the church the next day to see his grandfather. I was relieved when he said he felt no draw or obligation whatsoever. He and his sisters had lived a life devoid of grandparents as neither their mother nor father could produce a parent between them. Jamie had better things to do the following day. For a start, Queens Park Rangers were playing at Nottingham Forest. Two of the passions I had inherited from Steve – support for Rangers and love of music – had been passed on in turn to Jamie but neither of us had any desire to follow the river back to its source.
Linda didn’t comment, or make any reference to our childhood, confining herself tactfully to some general remarks about how happy Sandra had been when she’d told her we’d be there. Laura went home and Jamie, Linda, Chas and I returned to St Christopher’s Gardens, where I spent a sleepless night on the sofa while my sister and her husband occupied the master bedroom and Jamie slept on a Postman Pat Z bed, provided for his comfort in the tiny spare room.
Sandra had a fine day for her marriage to Eamman Horgan. As the church organ thundered out ‘Here Comes the Bride’ and we all stood up, she passed me on the arm of her father. It was the first time I had ever seen her. I couldn’t discern much of a family resemblance, though she did have Linda’s eyes, through which an equally vivacious personality shone out. As for Steve, I’m ashamed to say that the first thing I noticed about him was his full head of hair. At sixty-nine years of age, the ginger had turned grey but it was Brylcreem-slicked into the same style he’d always worn, combed back from the forehead. Given the hereditary nature of baldness (and my vanity), this was the happiest possible revelation. I could live with being a grandfather as long as I wasn’t destined to be a bald one.
Looking on from the congregation, I was able to scrutinize him while remaining unobserved. I was already suppressing emotions that had welled up with an almost overwhelming suddenness. Swirling among them was self-pity, for sure, and a deeper anger than I ever thought I could harbour at this stranger who was said to be my father. I couldn’t help but think of Lily and her longing for a stable marriage, reasonable health and a house with her own front door. Most of all I felt a compelling urge to avoid the embarrassment of meeting a man I’d be expected to call ‘Dad’ but who meant nothing to me. Of one thing I was certain: in the midst of all this angst there was not a smidgen of regret that I had never followed Lily’s advice to forge a bond with my father.
Linda was standing on the other side of Chas, one place away. Every so often during the ceremony she’d lean forward to smile at me and, I think, to check how I was coping. I wondered how she could look so cheery. Why weren’t we marching out together, hand in hand, publicly refusing to have anything to do with our father’s glowing pride at crowning the achievements of his life without us by offering his youngest daughter’s hand in marriage?
I decided that I had three options. Leave now and spoil Sandra’s day. Stay and be sucked into a family relationship that repelled me. Or get through the wedding and the reception afterwards with as little contact with Steve as possible.
I would never have Linda’s maturity or magnanimity and I couldn’t find the words to talk to her or to Laura about how I felt. Fortunately, we had to leave the reception early anyway as I’d agreed to drive Linda and Chas to Essex, where they were to stay with Chas’s daughter. So I went for option three and steeled myself to endure the next few hours with a smiling face masking the utter detachment I felt inside.
