The day I came face to face after 30 years with the feckless, abusive father who left without a word
Unbearably moving, searingly honest, beautifully written: the former Minister shares the deeply personal trauma of being forced to confront the father who was dead to him
He slipped away one day and moved in with Vera the barmaid
A FATHER who abandoned him and a mother who worked herself into an early grave… the first part of Alan Johnson’s autobiography was an enthralling account of growing up in Dickensian-style poverty in post-war Britain. Here, the former Labour Cabinet Minister takes up the story, recounting a traumatic reunion with the man who walked out of his life three decades earlier. This moving extract from his new book is a masterpiece, as brilliant as it is emotionally compelling…
IKNEW 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 August 25, 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 Linda 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 13 on the only other occasion I’d seen him since – at my mother Lily’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, 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.
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 penknife. He was a boozing, gambling womaniser 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.
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 BBC’S Home Service would broadcast appeals for information about missing people. I remember wondering if, one of those mornings, just after the programme 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 slipped away on a Saturday morning in 1958 while the three of us were ‘down the lane’ in Portobello Road market. 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. 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 32 years, he wanted the pleasure of my company. Linda was coming all the way from Perth for Sandra’s special day. ‘Sandra’s our sister,’ she reiterated. ‘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. I’d have to go. I DIDN’T tell my three children 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 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 gas-lit 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 talks to my mother. From my perspective, he seems tall. For once they are not arguing, but talking; discussing something face-to-face. 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. Then there was the trip to the barber’s, perhaps my first. A plank of wood would be placed across the thickly padded black leather arms of the 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? Indefinitely? Indubitably? That was it.
On a Sunday Lily might say: ‘Aren’t you going to see your mother this morning?’ 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.
Steve would have been about 37 when he’d decamped – the same age I was when I drove away from my home on 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? ‘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. SANDRA had a fine day for her marriage to Eamman Horgan. 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 69 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.
Looking on from the congregation, I was already suppressing emotions that had welled up. Swirling among them was self-pity, for sure, and a deeper anger than I ever thought I could harbour. 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 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. I went for option three.
Outside the church, in the latesummer sunshine, guests and onlookers stood around in their late1980s fashionable gear, all wide shoulders and big jewellery. I was sporting a pale blue suit that I couldn’t have worn three years earlier or three years later. It had shoulder pads, a single-button jacket, turn-ups and no vents.
Steve stood in a family circle with his wife Vera, her son Michael from a previous liaison, and two of Steve’s brothers, my uncles. The three Johnson men were all short, about 5ft 4in, I’d guess. One of them, Uncle Jim, had always been kind to my mother, and it was Jim who’d agreed to act as guarantor for Linda and me when our social worker somehow managed to secure a council flat for us in Battersea after Lily died. The same could not be said for the other brother, Wally, from whom Lily had sought help when Steve abandoned us. He had told my mother that ‘we all have our problems’ and shut the door in her face.
Eventually the radiant Sandra came across with Eamman and insisted on taking us over so that I could be introduced to my father. She had me firmly by the arm, and suddenly I was face-to-face with Steve. He was impeccably turned out, as he had always been on Sundays and holidays, or when playing the piano in the pubs and clubs of West London. His suit was early 1950s demob style, so we were each sartorially representative of our different eras.
He said: ‘Hello, son.’ I said ‘Hi’ but we didn’t shake hands and, thankfully, at almost that precise moment, the photographer shouted ‘Bride’s family!’ and began to muster us.
It was only when I departed that we made any physical contact, shaking hands in the functional way one does when saying goodbye.
Vera said: ‘Now we’ve got together again, we need to stay in touch.’ I nodded and smiled. Nod and smile, that was me. I recognised deep emotions but refused to articulate them.
At least I could have left Steve in no doubt about my hostility. I could have been honest with him, told him man to man what I thought of him; forced him to regret in some way his treatment of Lily. But instead we shook hands limply.
He was aware that I was divorced. Maybe there was a knowing look in his green eyes that said: ‘Now you know about relationships, and how they can wax and wane.’ Perhaps he expected his 40-year-old son to demonstrate the same maturity as his eldest child. But here’s the thing about Steve: I don’t believe he actually thought about it very much at all. He’d settled with the woman he loved and that woman wasn’t Lily. I could take it or leave it. Just as I never wanted any kind of relationship with him, he didn’t particularly want one with me.
IN 2004, just as I was appointed to my first Cabinet position, I had a call from Linda to tell me that our father had died. Nothing much stirred inside me. A man I didn’t know had lived into his 80s, longer than both his wives. Twice as long, in fact, as his first wife, my mother.
Linda wouldn’t be going to the funeral and neither would I.
When I closed my eyes I was back in the crumbling, squalid dystopia of London W10. Steve, Lily, Linda and me in our two gas-lit rooms in Southam Street. Then I thought of Lily’s final days in Hammersmith Hospital, her hopes of a happy future with Steve long gone.
I can’t remember if Lily was still alive when I saw an episode of Coronation Street in which Ena Sharples and Elsie Tanner argued fiercely in the street. Ena, in her overcoat and hairnet, shouted at Elsie: ‘There’s something wrong with a woman who can’t hang on to her man!’ Now I realise how much that statement encapsulated the attitudes of the time in working-class communities.
I pictured Lily confronting her heart condition with a fragile bravery. An abandoned woman.
Linda had sat with her in intensive care after her operation. A tracheotomy had been performed to help Lily breathe and she was in an induced coma, but the nurse said she would know Linda was there and would be able to hear her. So Linda talked about how successful the surgery had been. We both knew, my sister and I, that if our mother had come round, if she had been able to think at all, the only thing she would have been thinking about was what would become of us.
If only Lily could have glimpsed what the future held for the other three occupants of those two dank, condemned rooms into which I’d been born. Steve had a happy second marriage. Even at the end, his life was contented. As for Linda and me, thanks to my sister we battled through the dreadful aftermath of our mother’s death to lead fulfilling lives and never forgot the values she’d instilled.
I so wish our mother could have been reassured in those final hours. Everything will be all right, Lily, all right for all of us. Really, it will.
The Long And Winding Road, by Alan Johnson, is published by Bantam Press on September 22, £16.99. Offer price £13.59 (20 per cent discount) until September 18. Pre-order at www.mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640 – p&p is free on orders over £15.
I could have left Steve in no doubt about my hostility towards him