Please please mr postman1/7/2024 Sometimes rhyme begat rhyme so that a trail had to be followed to get to the source. The newpaper, or linen (linen draper), was paid for with coins from Ernie's sky (sky rocket - pocket). So those dazzling teeth were Hampsteads (Hampstead Heath), a piece of fish would be a Lillian (Lillian Gish) and chips Staffords (Stafford Cripps). I may have been a Londoner through and through but I was in west London, not east, and the cockney lingo could be confusing, not least because it generally uses two words to represent one, and it is the second word, the one that is often not spoken, that rhymes. "Ernie was the only person I've ever known who spoke cockney rhyming slang completely naturally. Herewith two of my favourite extracts from the book. I also felt I really learnt a bit about what it was like to be a postman and a union rep - and that was good too. He has a wonderfully observant eye for everything going on around him, and thus the ability to light up pretty well anything he chooses to write about. I also liked his description of his life in Slough in the 1970s. I found his description of the post office union, the friends he made there, and the politics of the union, interesting. In this second part of his biography he describes his marriage and family, his life as a postman and his rise through the ranks of post office union, as a union rep. He had a very tough childhood, described brilliantly in his earlier biography This Boy. Moving, hilarious and unforgettable, Please, Mister Postman is another astonishing book from the award-winning author of This Boy.Īlan Johnson is a UK Labour politician - in 2009/10 he was Home Secretary in Gordon Brown's government. But as Alan’s life appears to be settling down and his career in the Union of Postal Workers begins to take off, his close-knit family is struck once again by tragedy… Please, Mister Postman paints a vivid picture of England in the 1970s, where no celebration was complete without a Party Seven of Watney’s Red Barrel, smoking was the norm rather than the exception, and Sunday lunchtime was about beer, bingo and cribbage. It was hard work, but not without its compensations – the crafty fag snatched in a country lane, the farmer’s wife offering a hearty breakfast and even the mysterious lady on Glebe Road who appeared daily, topless, at her window as the postman passed by… The Britwell Estate in Slough, apparently notorious among the locals, in fact came as a blessed relief after the tensions of Notting Hill, and the local community welcomed them with open arms.Īlan had become a postman the previous year, and in order to support his growing family took on every bit of overtime he could, often working twelve-hour shifts six days a week. In July 1969, while the Rolling Stones played a free concert in Hyde Park, Alan Johnson and his young family left West London to start a new life.
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