Grace and a Great Heart

I am not a frequenter of churchyards, but there is one grave I wish I could visit. It belongs to a London charlady who died in 1964 at the age of 42. She worked in the posh houses of Ladbroke Grove and South Kensington, and was a devoted mother and a battered, and then abandoned, wife. She could never make ends meet, and her health was poor. She shed more tears in her short life than most of us who live for twice as long. Her name was Lilian May – ‘Lily’ – Johnson. She was a heroine.

When, in 2013, the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson’s childhood memoir was published, reviewers raved. Johnson was already, for many, the best prime minister we never had, but here was proof that he was also an exceptionally gifted writer. In This Boy he looked back on a childhood of eye-stretching deprivation in a way that was never mawkish or self-pitying, and even sometimes humorous. Johnson was born on 17 May 1950, in slum tenement housing in North Kensington that had been condemned since the 1930s. The five giant evils that the new Welfare State was just setting out to tackle – squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease – seemed to fester and breed in a neighbourhood dominated by the notorious Polish landlord Peter Rachman. Johnson evokes a vanished world in which the lives of his parents, his brave, spirited sister Linda, and himself were defined by what they did not have: there was no front door, no electricity, no fridge, no phone, no bathroom, no loo (a tin bucket instead, emptied out in the back yard), no blankets and, warned off by signs stuck up in windows, ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs’. There were almost no cars. The ‘Vinegar Man’ toured the streets with a huge barrel mounted on a horse-drawn cart, and coal was delivered in the same way. The Johnsons could not afford coal, so they trailed after the cart, pushing a collapsing pram and collecting the small lumps that fell on to the road. For Linda – to whom this book is dedicated – and Alan, there was very often no mother, and no father either. Rheumatic fever as a child had left Lily with a damaged heart valve, and she was in and out of Hammersmith Hospital. On Christmas Eve, when Alan was 7 and Linda 10, she was carted off in the afternoon and didn’t come back. She had been paying her few shillings into the ‘Christmas club’ for a hamper, and the children waited for their ne’er-do-well father to come home and cook the chicken. When he didn’t appear, Linda put the bird in the oven. She had no idea it needed to be removed from its plastic wrapping, and so it was ruined. Then the children went, still hungry, to visit their mother in hospital, and there bumped into their father Steve, reeking of beer and cigars. ‘Don’t tell Mum that I didn’t come home,’ he ordered. ‘Tell her we had a nice dinner together. If you say anything else it will upset her and she’ll have a heart attack and die.’ Johnson’s descriptions – of Jeyes Fluid in the hospital corridors, of Steve’s teeth stained by roll-ups, of damp potato sacks in the windows – awaken all the senses: as you turn the pages, you catch the warm whiff wafting out of the pie-and-mash shop; you hear the gas meter furiously gobbling sixpences until there are none left, and the evening has to be spent by candlelight. You shiver in the bone-chilling cold of the 1963 Great Freeze, when Alan and Linda were forced to huddle under the old coats they used for bedclothes. Lily tried to inject some magic into the misery: to persuade them they were in a ‘warm cave’, and that the lamplighter who progressed down Southam Street every evening was the Sandman, ‘come to send us to sleep’. There were cockroaches, beetles and, in summer, swarms of flies: ‘Like the trains clanking past at all hours on the line in and out of Paddington, we’d only have noticed them if they’d disappeared.’ So what did they have? A shared cooker on the landing, second-hand clothes from Portobello Market and relentless debt. Steve Johnson was supposedly a painter and decorator, but instead he played the piano in the local pub, drank and gambled. So Lily was forced to take out loans from the Provident, who demanded that you pay back the money you’d borrowed, plus interest, in weekly instalments. Eat as much as you can at school, she urged her children: she couldn’t afford to feed them at home. Tea was generally stale bread floating in a dissolved Oxo cube. When I interviewed Johnson just after the publication of This Boy I was impressed by his straight-talking serenity. It was almost as if a childhood throughout which he was permanently undernourished had left him with no appetite for anything but the plain truth. Children are self-conscious about poverty. At his grammar school, Johnson qualified for free school meals, so every week when Mr Woosnam, who collected the dinner money, called his name, he was obliged to respond by calling ‘Free, Sir’. ‘It was an embarrassment akin to asking Mr Berriman to put Lily’s groceries “on tick” in front of a shop full of customers.’ When he was taken to Denmark by the Children’s Country Holidays Fund, he packed his clothes in a cardboard box. It was not impossible to live happily, even in such grinding poverty. Mr and Mrs Cox, who had rooms above the Johnsons, were a devoted couple who cuddled up blissfully on the sofa every evening with tots of whisky. Albert Cox, when he wasn’t doing shifts for London Underground, cultivated an allotment, bringing home boxes of vegetables on his sit-up-and-beg bike. He made his family a cooked breakfast every morning before going off to work. But Lily and Steve Johnson’s marriage was desperate. When drunk, Steve was violent, and, in the early hours of the morning, Alan and Linda would hide under their piles of coats trying to block out the screaming, fearing for Lily. ‘Steve was a dark shadow in our lives.’ And then, suddenly, in the autumn of 1958, Steve was gone: his few possessions – his shaving brush, his Brylcreem, his porn magazines – disappeared. Alan and Linda were euphoric; Lily sat down and wept – for the wasted years, for her now fatherless children, for the hardship that lay ahead. In those days stigma attached to wives abandoned by their husbands, irrespective of where the fault lay. Women were chattels: ‘After my dad left,’ Johnson told me when we met, ‘Mum found she couldn’t hire a wireless from Radio Rentals without his signature.’ Lily was still in her thirties when Steve left, and she’d have liked to find love. But, wounded by neglect and battle-weary, she was losing her Liverpool-Irish prettiness. The drugs she took for her heart made her put on weight, and she developed bunions and varicose veins. So she directed her efforts instead towards Linda and Alan. She had always taught them to be polite and helpful, running errands for elderly neighbours without taking payment. And from when they were small she had taken them to the Ladbroke Grove public library, so that Alan grew up loving books. She also insisted that they work hard. From when he was barely a teenager, Alan worked as a milkman’s assistant. His rounds took him to 10 Ruston Close, formerly 10 Rillington Place, where the serial killer John Christie had murdered at least seven women, including his own wife, and the baby daughter of one of his victims. ‘No matter what the time or season,’ Johnson writes, ‘10 Ruston Close was always dark. There was no natural light on the landings or bulbs in the light fittings. An awful smell of decay and mould, stale food and detritus seeped from the walls.’ Alan earned 10 shillings a week on his milk rounds, money Lily could well have done with. Instead, she gave him a piggy bank and insisted he save it up. She knew that Alan and Linda were likely soon to be motherless. Her last words to her children were, ‘What if I die? What will happen to you?’ Lily died, after major heart surgery, in March 1964. A rose bush in Kensal Green Cemetery marked the spot where her ashes were buried. Five years later, when Linda and Alan could not afford to renew the subscription, the rose bush was removed. It’s impossible now to locate Lily’s resting-place. Perhaps this doesn’t matter. Perhaps, as this extraordinary book seems to suggest, it is more important to reflect on Lily’s grace than on a grave – for, as George Eliot writes, ‘the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Maggie Fergusson 2025