Free This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood by Alan Johnson Page B

entire length of this long road without once appearing on the pavement. We knew all the gaps that allowed us to move from one secluded front garden to the next; indeed we’d created many of them ourselves, to the chagrin of the residents.
    By the time we emerged 400 yards away at the junction with St Marks Road, there was no sign of our tormentor. I never told Lily or anyone else about this encounter. What was the point? It would only have worried her. For all his threats, I had only a scratch on my cheek to show for the ordeal, though for the remaining year or so of my time at Bevington Primary, I was constantly looking out for Mr Psychopath and had my escape routes planned in advance.
    When Tony and I vanished into Cambridge Gardens, Dereck Tapper ran in the opposite direction, across Ladbroke Grove towards the room in Tavistock Crescent where he lived with his mother. Dereck was the only other boy who was with me at all three of the schools I attended. I’d first met him at Wornington Infants and we would go on to attend grammar school together. If my childhood was not exactly a bed of roses, Dereck Tapper had a much harder time of it. Dereck Tapper was black.

Chapter 5
    THE 1951 CENSUS recorded that 12.7 per cent of the population in the area around Southam Street lived at a density of more than two people per room compared to a London average of 2.5 per cent. That figure must have risen as landlords like Peter Rachman exploited those arriving from countries such as Trinidad and Jamaica at the behest of a government keen to fill the many vacancies in public services, notably transport and the NHS. Most came alone, and at first they were mainly men: young men without family commitments or married men keen to establish a home before bringing over their wives and children.
    As a result there can have been few, if any, other black kids at our school when Dereck Tapper began his education, along with me, at Wornington Road Infants. If there were others I don’t remember them, and I can recall only two besides Dereck at Bevington, which we attended from 1957 to 1961. I have no memory, either, of any black people living at our end of Southam Street, although one house at the eastern end, number 27, was home to a large number of West Indian men.With hindsight, it seems quite likely that it was one of the outposts of Rachmanism.
    The West Indians came under an immigration policy that allowed free entry from Commonwealth and colonial nations. They saw Britain as the mother country and they were proud of it and loyal to its institutions. Theirs was a culture of relaxed conviviality, and they must have been expecting at least a welcoming hand. What they found, too often, was a brandished fist.
    Into our decaying streets they came, useful scapegoats for the overcrowding, the appalling conditions, the poverty, the absence of hope and aspiration. One of Roger Mayne’s 1956 photographs brilliantly captures the cultural collision. Four West Indian men are pictured sauntering into Southam Street (perhaps they were heading for number 27), relaxed but wary. One looks at Mayne’s camera with amusement, two are half-smiling. But the man in front is on the look-out for trouble as they head towards a group of young guys gathered round the steps leading up to a front door. Youths with grey, pinched faces who don’t yet seem to have noticed the quartet ambling towards them.
    The black men are dressed in stylish jumpers and jerkins, baggy trousers and wide-brimmed hats, set at just the right angle. Four little white boys stare, glued to the spot as if they were witnessing a Martian invasion. I was six when that photo was taken, living in that exact location at that exact time. I remember very well the cards in newsagents’ windows (we were instructed to check them on our way to school to see if anything interesting and cheap was being offered for sale). Those headed ‘Rooms to let’ were, like most of the rest, handwritten,but the legend