I grew up in grinding poverty in North Kensington, London. We lived in two rooms in a tenement, which was declared unfit for human habitation while we were living there. My mother, Lily, supplemented our fuel by gathering coal dropped by horse-drawn carts in the streets. We had urine buckets in the bedrooms and the house was riddled with cockroaches. I will never forget the hunger.
Mum, a Scouser, never stopped working – cleaning and scrubbing houses in South Kensington – but she had a heart condition that, like her relationship with my father, Steve, became progressively worse. Her pay was a pittance and Steve – I can’t bring myself to call him Dad – probably gambled in a day as much as she earned in a week.
Steve did the odd bit of painting and decorating, and a good deal more piano playing in pubs. He was out every night and disappeared at weekends. There is no doubt he could be a charmer, but he was less charming when he was unfaithful to my mother and knocked her around. In 1958, he walked out on us for the last time to live with a barmaid. It was a happy day. My fear wasn’t losing a father, it was having one.
In 1963, our world collapsed when Mum died during heart surgery, aged 42. Two weeks after her funeral, a letter arrived, addressed to my mother, informing us that our building had been earmarked for demolition and we were being offered a new three-bedroom house in Welwyn Garden City. This might have saved Mum if it had been offered earlier. But, instead, my sister Linda was told by a social worker that because she was 16 and I was 13 we wouldn’t be able to take it up. Instead, I would be taken into care and Linda could continue her childcare studies at a Dr Barnardo’s home. Linda exploded and told him it was unacceptable. On the strength of that one meeting he decided the risk of letting us stay together was worth taking.
In 1964, we were relocated to a council flat near Wandsworth bridge, which was pure luxury. Linda paid the rent, fed the meters, bought the food, washed and swept, all with minimal help from me. The social worker called one evening a week when Linda would cook a proper meal to underline the success of our domesticity. She was remarkably mature and courageous.
Linda’s next plan was to marry Mike, her fiance, who had a good job and a semi-detached in Watford, and for me to move in with them. But I messed everything up by leaving school at 15, with no hope of becoming a draughtsman as my mother had wished, and, at 18, got engaged to Judith, a single mum. Linda was horrified. She had nothing against Judy, but because Mum wasn’t around she felt she had a duty of care to me.
After Steve turned up uninvited at my mother’s funeral, I saw him only once more – at my half-sister’s wedding in the late 80s. But I didn’t want to know. Steve had helped kill my mother and I don’t think he was too interested in us, but never showed any remorse. He died in 2004.
Linda now lives in Australia, but the bond is still there – as it would be from those circumstances. I send her all the lovely letters I receive, which are prompted by what I wrote about her in my first volume of memoirs. She did a magnificent job that needed to be recorded.
My political career would be unbelievable to Mum. Nothing in her background would have prepared her, but she would have been so proud. She would have been proud of Linda, too, with all that she has achieved as a nursery nurse and foster mother. Mind you, I can hear Linda saying: “Yes, you became home secretary, but you didn’t become a draughtsman.”
• Please, Mister Postman: A Memoir by Alan Johnson is published by Bantam Press, £16.99 and available for £12.74 from bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846
