This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (30 page)

If reminiscing about the Coxes’ living room brings back feelings of warm contentment, it is the kitchen that dominates my memory of their home and carries the most comforting associations. It’s difficult to describe my obsession with food without sounding melancholic and sentimental. It was simple, really. I’d never been able to eat as much as I wanted to. I was a skinny kid who had relied on those free school meals to an unhealthy degree. At work, the luncheon vouchers ensured I had one meal a day, which was basically all I was used to. One meal a day. It was never enough for an active teenager who was fast developing into a man, and hunger gnawed away at me perpetually like a dull toothache.

Now I was included in Mr Cox’s big, hot breakfasts. Every morning, once we were allowed into the kitchen after Carole’s strip wash at the sink (there was no bathroom at Lancaster Road), Mr Cox would preside over the meal while his wife scampered around polishing her youngest son’s shoes, which always struck me as over-indulgence. Albert wore an immaculate white vest tucked into a thickly belted pair of trousers. He always had a tea towel tossed casually over one shoulder. Porridge bubbled on the stove for starters, to be followed by egg, bacon and tomatoes and a constant pot of freshly brewed tea. Albert cooked, cleared the table, washed up and went to work – planting a firm kiss on Pat’s lips before he left.

The month Linda and Mike got married, Ronnie Handley handed in his notice at Tesco. He was leaving to become a rep for Smith’s Crisps. Reps were an integral part of supermarket life then. They were always men, wore suits and drove company cars. Their job was to try to persuade managers to buy more of their products and to give them a more prominent position in their shops.

The manager of Tesco in King Street was a large ex-copper of capricious nature called Mr Dawson. When Ronnie announced his departure, Mr Dawson asked if I’d take over temporarily as warehouse manager. I asked if I could temporarily receive Ronnie’s wages, too, but he said it would only be for a couple of weeks and not worth the disruption to the payroll. There was nobody to temporarily assist me, but the biggest
disappointment was that I would not be allowed to wear the manager’s natty jacket. Even temporarily.

None the less I carried on doing my job and Ronnie’s, loading and unloading produce, taking it up in the lift to the warehouse floor, collecting and compressing acres of cardboard and dealing with the paperwork from orders and deliveries. September passed, then October, with no sign of a replacement for Ronnie or anyone to help me. I’d always felt a pay rise was a vain hope but I did think Mr Dawson would at least release me from the nylon smock.

The situation hadn’t changed by the time ‘Christmas pressure’ began in early December. That was always a time of chaos in the warehouse, with the surge in demand on the shop floor matched by frantic activity behind the scenes.

Ten days before Christmas the regional manager paid a surprise visit and obviously had words with Mr Dawson about the performance of the store. At the start of my lunch break at 12.30, I was walking down the stairs from the warehouse, putting on my coat, when I met Mr Dawson coming up the other way. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ asked my foul-tempered manager, in full sergeant-major mode.

‘I’m going to lunch.’

‘No you’re not. You’ll go to lunch when you’ve tidied the warehouse.’

‘I’ll tidy the warehouse when I’ve had my lunch,’ I replied.

By now, Mr Dawson had reached the top of the stairs and I was at the bottom. His voice boomed down at me. ‘If you don’t come back now,’ he fumed, provoked by my defiance, ‘you won’t have a job to come back to.’

I’m not proud of my rejoinder. I wanted it to be succinct and
wittily scathing, to encapsulate in a pithy sentence my months of frustration at doing a manager’s job without the pay, without an assistant and, most importantly for my morale, without that cream linen jacket. A Wildean one-liner so wounding that Mr Dawson would fall sobbing to the floor, pleading for my forgiveness through his tears. But all I managed was: ‘Stick the job up your fucking arse.’

In high dudgeon, I marched off to have my lunch at the pub Andrew and I had begun to frequent along with the more senior Tesco butchers and greengrocers. Andrew came over later with a message from Mr Dawson. ‘He says if you apologize you can come back.’ He added that he thought I should stand my ground against an unpopular manager and that everyone was on my side.

I stood my ground. I had another job within a fortnight, though admittedly the pay was 10 shillings a week less than I had been earning, and there were no luncheon vouchers. Andrew had told Ronnie Handley what had happened, and he alerted me to the availability of a job at a small Anthony Jackson’s supermarket in the Upper Richmond Road, East Sheen. By New Year’s Day 1967, I had started work there. Thankfully, I wasn’t asked for a reference from Tesco. They would no doubt have insisted that they’d sacked me, whereas as far as I was concerned, I’d resigned on a point of principle. Either way, my sense of outrage remained with me, as did the conviction that not only should the voices of workers be heard but they needed some protection against exploitation.

Mr Dawson went on to become the manager of the biggest Tesco store in the country, but there is an interesting codicil to this story. A few years after our showdown I read in a Sunday
tabloid about a Tesco manager who had claimed his family had been held to ransom by masked bandits demanding that he hand over the store’s takings. The masked bandits did not exist. It was a hoax he had devised himself in a bid to rob Tesco of thousands of pounds. The miscreant was none other than Mr Dawson. I rest my case.

I was happy stacking shelves at Anthony Jackson’s, which wasn’t much more than a large corner store. Ironically, it’s now a shoe shop called Johnson’s. There was one girl, Kath, on the till, two shelf-stackers (myself and Sandra, a cheery redhead with a permanent cold) and a workaholic manager, a Maltese guy called Johnny Farugia. Johnny was about thirty-five years old, short with a significant paunch that defied all sartorial attempts to contain it. He was for ever either hitching up his trousers – a task he insisted on performing with his elbows while at the same time checking his flies with his fingers. It was an awkward manoeuvre and one he repeated every thirty seconds or so.

I’ve never known anyone work as hard as Johnny Farugia. He helped on the tills, squabbled with the reps, flattened cardboard boxes, stacked shelves, often doing all four jobs simultaneously while smoking a cigarette, conducting staccato conversations with several people at once and executing the ritual that stopped his trousers falling down.

Johnny loved his wife, England, Anthony Jackson’s and his car, in that order. He’d worked his way up to a nice semi-detached in Sutton and had acquired a cream-coloured Rover upon which he lavished the love and attention he’d have devoted to a child, if he’d had one. It was washed and polished every few days. Odour-repellents, a miniature George Cross and a Union Jack adorned
the inside. On the outside it boasted every modern gadget known to man: wing-mirror extensions, AA badges, a gleaming roof-rack and windscreen-wiper enhancements.

His favourite pastime at work was standing on a table at the rear of the store so that he could monitor the shop floor for light-fingered customers through the two-way mirror. He happened to be doing this on the day we were the victims of a robbery. Kath had opened the till to give some change when the man she was serving leaned across her and snatched up all the banknotes. She screamed and the guy rushed out and jumped into a car waiting for him outside, its engine running.

Johnny came charging out from the back of the shop like a bull on to the streets of Pamplona. As the getaway car pulled away from the kerb, he flung himself across the windscreen, clutching on to the wipers. He managed to cling on for about five minutes as the driver accelerated, swinging the steering wheel from side to side and reversing to try to shake him off. When he succeeded and the pair sped away through the quiet avenues of East Sheen, Kath, Sandra and I ran outside to help Johnny out of the gutter into which he’d been thrown. Up he bounced, shouting, swearing and hauling up his trousers. The local paper carried the story of the robbery on its front page (not a great deal happened in East Sheen) and Johnny sent a copy home to his parents in Malta, proud of his contribution to law and order in his beloved England.

Pat Cox had been a true friend to Lily. Her generosity in taking me into her already over-populated home is something for
which I will be eternally grateful. However, I was well aware that it couldn’t last.

Notting Hill was beginning its biggest phase of demolition since it suffered the unwanted attentions of the Luftwaffe during the war. Most of Southam Street was already no more. All that remained of our end was the Earl of Warwick on the corner and, further along on the other side of the road, Southam House, a small block of flats built in the 1930s. The eastern end, on the other side of Golborne Road, had disappeared completely. On the corner where the bagwash had once been, the Brutalist-style Trellick Tower, thirty-one storeys high, was slowly rising in its place. By 1972 – when the social problems of high-rise tower blocks were already emerging – it would be casting its gaze across the capital like the Eye of Mordor. Walmer Road was now being laid to waste and soon the bulldozers would be descending on our end of Lancaster Road, the next area to be flattened to make room for the Westway.

When Albert Cox removed the Old Holborn roll-up from the side of his mouth (where it usually managed to cling on even when he was speaking) and cleared his throat, I knew he had something difficult to tell me. We were alone in the big front room at Lancaster Road, early in the winter of 1967. Mr Cox explained that he’d received a letter offering the family the council house for which they’d been waiting for so long. It was on the Roehampton estate, near my old school’s playing fields.

The hard part for kindly Mr Cox was breaking the news that I couldn’t go with them. I had never expected this arrangement to last, so it wasn’t as devastating as the Coxes evidently thought it would be. I could picture Mrs Cox urging Albert, in
whispered conversations, to have a talk with me while there was nobody else around, which wasn’t easy. The house was seldom quiet, and I’d never known it quieter than it was that afternoon. Perhaps the rest of the family had been instructed to keep out of the way. I imagine the uncomplaining Tony would have wanted his bedroom to himself in their new house. Transplanting our cramped sleeping conditions to Roehampton wouldn’t have suited either of us.

I found somewhere else to live very quickly. Mrs Kenny, an elderly Irish widow, advertised for a tenant to rent a furnished room in her spacious flat in Hamlet Gardens at the Chiswick end of King Street in Hammersmith, close to where I had worked for Tesco. This was not the kind of flat I was familiar with. That is to say it was nothing like Pitt House. The front door opened on to an apparently endless hallway. The accommodation was L-shaped, and my room was on the left as you turned into the lower part of the ‘L’. It was thirty paces – I counted them once – from my door to the kitchen, at the very top of the ‘L’.

Mrs Kenny was a warm and maternal woman. She didn’t ask for a guarantor, even though I was still only sixteen, telling me merely that I could move in whenever I liked. The room, equipped with a wash basin, bed, wardrobe, standard lamp and a plush armchair, would cost me £2 a week and there was a separate meter I would have to feed with shilling coins for my electricity supply. I was invited to join her and her grown-up son, who also lived there, in the living room to watch TV whenever I liked.

I rarely laid eyes on Mrs Kenny after that first meeting. I left my rent on the kitchen table for her every Friday, and beyond that there was no necessity for our paths to cross. I was shy and
uncomfortable in the company of strangers. As for her son, he might have been a phantom for all I knew, because I never saw him once. When I came back from work I’d stay in my comfortably fusty room, leaving it only to make the occasional foray to the kitchen, or to use the bathroom next door. I would hear the television as I sneaked past the living room on my way up and down the hall, but I never crossed its threshold. Johnny Farugia let me take the portable radio home from the back of the shop every evening and I’d listen to that for entertainment, or read one of my collection of books, which I kept in a large coffin-shaped cardboard box – the most substantial item I’d brought with me from Lancaster Road.