Please, Mister Postman Read online

  Christmas 1968. My first experience of ‘Christmas Pressure’ at the Post Office: the period from early December when the normal working rhythms and processes would be changed to cope with the tidal wave of festive greetings that would be washed up on our sorting-office shore. Entire battalions of casuals, mostly students, were recruited throughout the country. You could hardly cross a sorting-office floor anywhere in Britain without tripping over a sociology undergraduate from Sheffield University or an Oxbridge scholar waiting to be shown how to tie a bundle of letters.

  At most offices, the students delivered the mail while the permanent staff stayed in the office, sorting and preparing.

  All the regulars were put on twelve-hour shifts but, as the reserves, Billy Fairs and I picked up nights. Over Christmas all the Barnes mail had to be sorted at our office rather than at Wandsworth. Our two regular night sorters were supplemented by ten others, roughly reflecting the increase in the volume of mail.

  Every afternoon Judy would wake me at about 4.30pm, whereupon I’d eat whatever she and Nan were going to be having for dinner as my breakfast. Then I’d watch Jackanory with Natalie and lounge about reading for an hour or so. I’d rejoined Ladbroke Grove Library, where our mother had first signed up Linda and me as toddlers, and had become obsessed with books on modern history – subjects such as the police strikes of 1918-19, the General Strike of 1926 and the Suez Crisis, which had impinged on my consciousness as a child but which I’d never understood.

  I’d cycle to Barnes to start work at 8pm. After a couple of hours’ sorting most of us would retreat to the Sun, the ancient pub facing Barnes Green, to down a couple of pints before it closed at half-past ten. Then we’d sort through the night, breaking off periodically to prep the walks ready for when the casuals started at around 7.30am (normal service standards were suspended over Christmas).

  I loved Christmas Pressure. For a start it was a chance to earn more money. That first year, Judy had stopped work, with the baby imminent, and money was tight. I volunteered for an extra two hours’ overtime every morning cleaning the office toilet, so I was working a fourteen-hour shift in total.

  Christmas was also unusual in that it brought an influx of people of my own age. Apart from Andrew, there was only one other man under thirty on the regular staff – Brian Green, a fellow Queens Park Rangers and Beatles devotee. ‘Hey Jude’ had been released as a single in the summer, and the seminal LP The White Album a month before Christmas. I’d valued having someone at work with whom I could share my utter astonishment that music as wonderful as this could be produced by four working-class kids from Liverpool. With the exception of Andrew, none of my other workmates was interested.

  Our older colleagues were constantly wondering what we were doing in the Post Office when there were so many better-paid jobs around. We were on about £10 a week, including London weighting (the additional allowance that acknowledged the higher cost of living in the capital), but structured on the ‘incremental scales’ that were typical of the civil service. This meant that your pay would rise in increments every year until the maximum was reached at a certain age (twenty-four for postmen; much older for clerical staff and telephonists). So, ludicrously, somebody joining as a postman aged twenty-five or older went straight on to maximum pay, earning much more than younger colleagues who might have been been doing the job for six or seven years. It was age discrimination, pure and simple, and I was seized by the sheer injustice of it.

  Brian Green, two years older than me, was equally outraged. He was also about four stone heavier (I was as skinny as I’d always been, weighing around ten and a half stone), which made me a bit nippier when we went for a kick-around at a local park after finishing work some lunchtimes. Like me, Brian revered Rodney Marsh and we’d spend hours trying to replicate the exotic skills of our hero with a plastic football before I mounted the Moulton to cycle home. Rangers had made it to Division 1 that season for the first time in the club’s history, though with Rodney injured we would be heading straight back down again after an abject showing in the top flight.

  Brian joined Billy Fairs and me on the Christmas night shift, which finished on Christmas Eve. A year earlier to the day I’d been stacking shelves at Anthony Jackson’s and living alone in a rented room, dreaming of rock stardom. In just twelve months I had been transformed into a married postman with one child and another due any minute.

  The banter in the office that morning centred on Norman Reid, who had one of the best walks in Barnes – Queen’s Ride, where the richest, most distinguished residents lived. I’d covered his walk for a fortnight when he was on leave and considered it to be the easiest I’d ever done. Norman used the abundance of spare time he had after finishing his delivery to good effect. He would marshal the rubbish bins for collection and reunite them with their owners when the dustmen left them abandoned on the pavement; he’d run errands, collecting prescriptions or fetching groceries for the wealthy elderly folk who formed the majority of his customers.

  As a result, Norman always, I was told, received a small fortune in ‘Christmas boxes’, tips from grateful customers, and would be subjected to a tirade of (mostly) good-humoured ribbing from his fellow postmen. Small and wiry with a natural wit, Norman would defend his obsequiousness vigorously.

  This Christmas Eve Norman had become a national figure. One of his customers was the famous Daily Mirror writer and agony aunt Marjorie Proops. She had devoted an entire page in the paper’s Christmas edition to the man she named as the finest postman in Britain: Norman Reid. Poor Norman had to run the gauntlet of a barrage of insults – though they carried, it has to be said, a note of pride at the reflected glory he had brought to Barnes PDO.

  I laughed all the way through my final two hours of toilet-cleaning on overtime, put the Daily Mirror into the pannier of the bike and cycled home through the foggy Christmas Eve dawn.

  I found the house at Camelford Road quiet and deserted. A note was propped against a sauce bottle on the kitchen table. It was from Nan, and as might be expected, contained no niceties – just a simple message in large letters: ‘Judy in labour. Taken her to St Charles hospital with Natalie.’

  I sat down to wait it out. I didn’t have much of a clue what I was supposed to do but I had a pretty good idea that I wouldn’t be welcome at the hospital. Even if I’d been at home when Judy had gone into labour there would have been no question of me being with my wife at the birth of our child. Attitudes might have been starting to change, but for the most part these were still the days when the father was expected to stay well out of the way, preferably in a pub buying his mates beer and cigars. I wasn’t in the pub but I was certainly well out of the way, waiting at Camelford Road for news as Judy gave birth to our daughter Emma Jane Johnson on Christmas Eve 1968 about a mile down the road.

  Although I was tired out from the long hours of Christmas Pressure, Emma’s birth reinvigorated me with an energy fired by the intense joy of fatherhood and the pride I took in having created this beautiful blonde child.

  The 1960s were entering their final year. Andrew and I leaned over the railings of Hammersmith Bridge as if watching that eventful decade floating away beneath us.

  There was much for us to talk about as we savoured the acrid taste of the day’s first cigarette in those precious ten minutes before our working day began.

  Andrew and Ann were to be married in April: a proper church wedding in Ann’s adopted home town of Aylesbury. I’d expected to be his best man, as he had been mine, but now he broke the news to me that his parents were insisting his brother John should fulfil that role. I was miffed. Why did he have to do what his parents said? It was his wedding, his life, his decision. But I kept my counsel, as usual, greeting this development with a casual shrug and a drag on my fag.

  My silent protest certainly didn’t extend to a boycott of the wedding. I would be on parade that spring in a light blue woollen suit I’d saved for (the second suit I’d owned – the first was of black and white Doneg
al tweed). I always left the third button of the three-button jacket undone to allow me to plunge my hands into the straight-front pockets of the trousers, drawing the jacket back into two flaps to reveal the intricate lining. Matters of dress protocol were important to me. My only other jacket had been a blue collarless one in the ‘Beatles’ style, purchased with money I’d saved from my milk and paraffin rounds when I was thirteen. I didn’t wear it for long because as soon as the Beatles saw how ubiquitous their trademark jackets had become they stopped wearing them, which meant that we devotees had to drop them as well.

  Did Andrew and I ever discuss politics in those Hammersmith Bridge conversations? I don’t think that we did, but we both had a growing sense that we were perfectly entitled to be heard in any discussions between the men around us at Barnes, including their frequent heated political debates, even though we knew we wouldn’t have been considered worthy participants if we had interjected. I recall Brian Green once having the temerity to offer an opinion one morning in the canteen, where an argument was raging over some event in the news. The reaction was swift, with Frank Dainton retorting rather pompously that this ‘was not a conversation for juveniles’.

  Granted, back then ‘juvenile’ was just a synonym for ‘young’, whereas nowadays it tends to be used more pejoratively to suggest a lack of maturity. Football clubs advertised reduced entry fees for ‘juveniles’; teenage miscreants were ‘juvenile delinquents’. Today he probably would have said ‘kids’ – but today he’d have been less likely to voice such a sentiment at all.

  Strange as it may sound, although I bought The Times regularly I never read it in front of anyone at work. I would keep it stashed in the sack or the pannier of my bike and take it home to peruse later. To have sat reading it in the canteen would have looked pretentious, as if I were showing off; it would have suggested I felt somehow superior to colleagues who mostly read the Mirror or the Express (apart from Ted Philpott who, when he wasn’t thrashing someone at snooker, quietly puffed on his pipe behind a copy of the Daily Telegraph).

  It seemed natural for Ted to be reading a ‘quality’ paper, whereas in my case it would have been incongruous. So I hid mine as if it were a pornographic magazine. In truth there was much in The Times I found incomprehensible, such as many of the leader columns and articles opposite them which seemed to be written in a code I didn’t know but which I was intent on deciphering.

  I supplemented my daily dose of current affairs with magazines such as Punch and Newsweek. Not that I paid for them. The population of Barnes were great subscribers to magazines, which would be sent out to them in the post protected only by a brown paper sleeve with the name and address of the recipient slipped over each folded copy. I would slip them out and have a read as I sat on my delivery frame with a cup of tea before heading off to start the walk.

  I loved the look and feel of these magazines as well as the content, which I found so interesting that when I saw an advertisement for a free news magazine, delivered at no charge to your home each month, I applied for it straight away. When the first copy plopped through the letterbox at 2 Camelford Road, it quickly became apparent, to my dismay, that it was no more than religious propaganda masquerading as some competitor to Time magazine. The title of the magazine escapes me but it was a printed version of the kind of fiery sermons by the American evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong that had been broadcast before the pop shows on Radio Luxembourg when I was a kid. I know it would have disappointed my mother but I’d already decided I was an atheist. Even if I hadn’t, this dogma-soaked version of the news might well have made me one.

  As Andrew and I stood chatting in the early dawn of 1969 we were about to become part of a news story ourselves. The Post Office was preparing to go on strike.

  One morning that January, when I returned to the office after the first delivery, Reg was waiting to usher us all upstairs for a union meeting. In my seven months as a member of the UPW I’d never been to such a gathering, nor had I heard of any being called to which I could have gone. Billy Fairs and Reg Allen distributed the union’s monthly magazine, the Post, but I can’t claim to have paid nearly as much attention to that as I did to my newspaper and my customers’ current-affairs periodicals.

  It was a wet day and, after removing our waterproofs in the drying room on the ground floor, we were keen to be up in the canteen getting a hot breakfast inside us. Instead we were being directed to a room on the third floor where, according to Reg, officials of the union’s London District Council (LDC) were waiting to speak to us.

  In we trooped, cold and bedraggled. There were no chairs, so we remained on our feet as Billy Fairs introduced the main speaker, Dickie Lawlor, the secretary of the LDC, a man with a powerful presence and a strong voice. He told us we were going to be called out on a one-day strike on 30 January.

  Among the ranks of Post Office workers was a group of 3,000 highly skilled operatives known as overseas telegraph officers, or OTOs, who handled the long-distance transmission of electronically derived textual messages, otherwise known as telegrams. Revolutionary in the nineteenth century, this was still a significant, albeit declining, form of communication in the late sixties.

  Dickie Lawlor told us how disgracefully these ‘brothers’ had been treated. The civil-service grades to which their pay was linked had received a 5 per cent increase the previous June but a demand for a similar rise for OTOs had been met with an insistence by the Post Office that they accept productivity ‘strings’, which were not attached to the settlement for other grades. The OTOs had voted to go on strike but their action had failed to convince management to drop the ‘strings’.

  Ours was an amalgamated union and although this issue didn’t affect postal workers, we must show solidarity with a minority grade. That was what trade unionism was about: standing together in support of each other and not allowing those with the least muscle to be picked off.

  The UPW executive council had decided that all grades in the nineteen largest cities and towns in Britain would be called out on strike in support of the OTOs. It would be the first national strike in the union’s almost fifty-year history.

  Dickie Lawlor spoke eloquently enough. He and his two colleagues from the LDC were visiting every London sorting office over the next few days so were pressed for time. Were there any questions? Would there be any strike pay? somebody asked. No, came the firm answer. It was neither affordable nor desirable in a short strike of this nature. A few men, including Billy Fairs, reinforced Dickie’s message. OTOs would be expected to support us if we were in dispute, so now we must support them.

  Just as the meeting was about to finish, Ted Philpott raised his hand. He wanted to know why we hadn’t been balloted. Surely the union’s rules stipulated that we be consulted in this way as the OTOs had been? Dickie replied that the rules didn’t require a ballot. They vested the power to make that decision in the executive council, which consisted mainly of lay members like us, elected annually. If we wanted to change the union’s rules to make a ballot obligatory there was a conference every year where such things were decided. ‘This is your union,’ he told us. ‘You make the rules.’ He pointed out that a ballot would take weeks to organize and that it would weaken the union’s ability to protect its members if such a measure were insisted upon in all circumstances.

  Ted put his pipe back in his mouth and reflected on this response as we all trooped down to the canteen for a truncated breakfast break. There was a bit of muttering about the high wages the OTOs were paid compared with ours and the fact that we’d had nothing approaching a 5 per cent rise the previous year, but in general these ex-soldiers had decided that there was a battle to be won, they’d received their orders and they understood what was expected of them.

  Chapter 4

  WHILE I WAS still tiptoeing around Nan at Camelford Road, Linda had managed to put some distance between herself and her difficult mother-in-law by persuading Mike to move to Tring. Linda was pregnant with their second child and mor
e space was needed.

  That January we went over to visit Linda and Mike in their new three-bedroomed house. Mike picked up Judy, myself, Natalie and baby Emma from Camelford Road in his Rover and conveyed us all to Tring considerably more slowly and safely than he’d driven me to Watford at Christmas just over a year earlier.

  We loved the house – detached with a long back garden and overlooked by the verdant hills of Hertfordshire. Natalie and her cousin Renay (Linda had chosen the name after hearing the Area playing ‘Walk Away Renée’ in its original pre-Four Tops version, amending the spelling in a bid to ensure it wasn’t mispronounced) fussed over baby Emma, who was already beginning to sprout what would become a mass of blonde curls.

  Mike and I left the two women and three little girls shortly after our arrival. He wanted to show me his new local, the Anchor on Tring High Street. The landlord already seemed to know him well and had begun to pull his pint even before he’d settled himself into his usual spot at the corner of the bar.

  I was more of an observer than a talker but I’d always relished talking to Mike. Sometimes I was conscious of talking at him as I attempted to impress him with bits of information and lines of argument I’d gleaned from my surreptitious reading of my customers’ magazines and odd snatches of the few Times leaders I had managed to understand. Eternally patient, Mike would absorb my half-formed teenage gibberish before setting out his own considered view of whatever subject it was I raised.

  He was a working-class Tory whose politics had been forged by the history books he’d read. He had emphatically condemned Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech the previous year, in which the Conservative MP had denounced Commonwealth immigration, when most of the adult voices I heard at the time had been speaking up for Powell. But he couldn’t see how there could be equality without repression. The monarch was a natural head of state, in his view; a presidency was a contrived construct that would serve only to undermine a parliamentary democracy. He felt that our Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, was taking the country backwards whereas Ted Heath, the leader of the opposition, whom he greatly admired, would, if elected, take us forward into Europe, where our destiny lay. I was never confident enough at that stage to test my own political view against Mike’s softly spoken wisdom.