In My Life by Alan Johnson

Author:Alan Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2018-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

There was no music at our wedding at Hammersmith Register Office on 27 July 1968. I don’t remember if it was even the done thing at civil ceremonies, which were pretty basic and businesslike then – I left all the details to Judy – but in the days of record-players and reel-to-reel tape-recorders it wouldn’t have been very easy to organise even if it was permitted. Andrew was my best man and the bride travelled to her wedding by tube with her nan and Natalie – three generations of women with a genealogical gap where Judy’s mother should have been. My sister took some photographs before we all repaired to a pub by the Thames for a lunchtime drink.

Having gone home for the afternoon, my wife and I were back in Hammersmith that evening to celebrate with a meal out with Andrew and Ann. This in itself was a novelty. The closest I ever got to a restaurant were my visits to a cafeteria in my lunch breaks at Remington’s to make use of the 3s (15p) daily luncheon vouchers issued as part of my wages.

On the evening of my wedding I ordered a mushroom omelette. It was the only thing on the menu I was sure about, there being no steak pie and chips.

I returned once again to North Kensington to live with Judy at her nan’s house in Camelford Road, which snaked between Ladbroke Grove and St Marks Road. The four of us, Judy, Nan, Natalie and me, plus Suzie the dog, occupied the top two floors of yet another condemned house. Andrew’s girlfriend Ann took over my room at Mrs Kenny’s, having decided to move to London from her home town of Aylesbury to be closer to Andrew. They were married the following year.

I was now working for the Post Office, not in North Kensington, or at Sham’s comradely workplace in Islington, but in Barnes, London SW13, the leafy, upmarket area through which I’d passed on the bus every day from Hammersmith to Anthony Jackson’s in East Sheen. I’d liked the look of Barnes.

A few months later, Andrew decided he’d had enough of butchering and followed me into the GPO. His parents had paid for him to have driving lessons for his eighteenth birthday the previous December. He passed his test first time and came to our little sorting office on Barnes Green as a postman/driver.

To get to work by my starting time of 5.30am I cycled the four miles from Ladbroke Grove to Barnes, relishing the empty streets going in and dodging the heavy traffic coming back. All of my thirty or so new workmates were men. Most of them were much older than me and a majority had fought in the Second World War – a generation who were now into their forties or fifties. At Barnes they appreciated the military overtones of Post Office life and wore their blue serge uniforms with pride.

My ex-forces workmates didn’t talk to me about what they’d done in the war, let alone boast about it.

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