Category: Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday: Please, Mister Postman by Alan Johnson

whatcathyreadnext4 Comments

ThrowbackThursday

Please, Mister PostmanAbout the Book

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. 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.

Alan 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. 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 …

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. 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 …

Format: Hardcover (327 pp.)    Publisher: Bantam Press
Published: 17th September 2014   Genre: Autobiography, Non-Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Please, Mister Postman on Goodreads

My Review

I’m attending several events at this year’s Henley Literary Festival (which runs from 29th September to 7th October),  and one of them is ex-Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson talking about In My Life, the latest volume of his award-winning memoirs.  Before entering parliament in 1997, Alan had a career in the Post Office and was General Secretary of the Communication Workers’ Union.     My husband also worked for the Post Office around the same time and knew some of the people that Alan mentions in his books.  In preparation for the event, we’ve both been reading earlier books in the series: The Long and Winding Road (my review to follow) and Please, Mister Postman (which my husband reviews below).

***

Alan Johnson’s second volume of memoir, Please, Mister Postman, covers his time as a postman in Slough and describes family and community life on the Britwell Estate in the 1970s and 1980s.  I found the account of working life at Slough Post Office vivid, very interesting and enlightening.  The daily banter between colleagues (familiar to me) was funny but often wise, and incidents on the postmen’s rounds (known as ‘walks’) could be revealing!

This, of course, was an important period of transformation when the Post Office was reorganized to become a corporation and no longer a government department, and telecommunications split from the postal side of the business.  Alan joined the Union of Communication Workers very early on and became Branch Chairman in Slough before being elected to the National Executive Council of the UCW.

The book ends at a pivotal moment in Alan’s personal life.

Alan Johnson is appearing at Henley Literary Festival on 30th September 2018 (event sold out at time of writing) 

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Wry, fascinating, honest

Try something similar…This Boy by Alan Johnson

Alan JohnsonAbout the Author

Alan Johnson was born in May 1950.  He was General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union before entering Parliament as Labour MP for Hull West and Hessle in 1997. He served as Home Secretary from June 2009 to May 2010.  Before that, he filled a wide variety of cabinet positions in both the Blair and Brown governments, including Education and Health.

His first memoir, This Boy, was published in May 2013 and won the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Orwell Prize.  Alan’s latest book, In My Life: A Music Memoir, was published in September 2018.

Connect with Alan

Website  ǀ  Goodreads

Buchan of the Month/Book Review: Castle Gay (Dickson McCunn #2) by John Buchan

whatcathyreadnext

Buchan of the Month

Castle GayAbout the Book

Retired Glasgow provisions merchant and adventurer, Dickson McCunn, first seen in Huntingtower, features for a second time in Castle Gay.

His group of boys known as the ‘Gorbals Die-Hards’ have gone on to Cambridge University. Now Dougal and Jaikie embark on ‘seeing the world’.

Their escapades involve Castle Gay, its occupant Mr Craw, and all manner of interesting characters.

Format: ebook (237 pp.)    Publisher:
Published: [1930]  Genre: Fiction, Adventure

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com 
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Castle Gay on Goodreads

My Review

Castle Gay is the ninth book in my Buchan of the Month reading project.  You can find out more about the project plus my reading list for 2018 here.  You can also read a spoiler-free introduction to the book here.   Castle Gay is also one of the books on my Classics Club list.

Retired middle-aged Glasgow grocer, Dickson McCunn, first introduced in Huntingtower, returns for a second adventure in Castle Gay.  This time he plays a less prominent role in proceedings (but ultimately no less significant, as it turns out).  Instead, two of the group of boys known as the ‘Gorbals Die-Hards’ – Dougal and Jaikie –  now young men making their way in the world, find themselves in the midst of an adventure involving a reclusive press baron and the political machinations of rival factions in the fictional central European country of Evallonia.

Unlike Huntingtower, there’s no damsel in distress but there is a besieged Scottish manor house and a gang of baddies who are not only foreigners but – even worse – possibly Bolsheviks.   Throw in a few cases of mistaken identity (accidental and deliberate), some makeshift disguises, the laying of false trails and a few fortunate escapes on bicycle or on foot and you have a lighthearted entertaining adventure.   Buchan also finds an opportunity to introduce a scene involving an impromptu political speech like that first seen in The Thirty-Nine Steps.  As in Huntingtower,  Buchan has chosen to render some of the dialogue in broad Scots, but, thankfully, in Castle Gay, this is confined to just one or two characters.

The book includes two recurring features of Buchan’s adventure stories: a villain who has a great brain but no scruples to go with it; and a female character whose attractions, along with her beauty, include tomboyish tendencies, courage, the ability to move through the countryside undetected and skills as a horsewoman.   Once again Dickson McCunn plays a part in proceedings that demonstrates his calm, sensible and business-like approach to problems and that appeals to his sense of history and romance: ‘At last – at long last  – his dream had come true.  He was not pondering romance, he was living it…’.

Along the way, the previously mentioned reclusive press baron undergoes a sort of conversion.  Shorn of the luxuries of life and the protective carapace he has built around himself, not to mention a few days’ experience of ‘roughing it’ in the Scottish countryside,  he becomes a man of action rather than just populist rhetoric. ‘There were unexpected depths in him.  He was a greater man than he had dreamt, and the time had come to show it.’

Next month’s Buchan of the Month is Witch Wood.  Look out for my introduction to the book at the beginning of October and my review of Witch Wood towards the end of that month.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Adventure, action, romance

Try something similar…The Island of Sheep  by John Buchan

John BuchanAbout the Author

John Buchan (1875 – 1940) was an author, poet, lawyer, publisher, journalist, war correspondent, Member of Parliament, University Chancellor, keen angler and family man.  He was ennobled and, as Lord Tweedsmuir, became Governor-General of Canada.  In this role, he signed Canada’s entry into the Second World War.   Nowadays he is probably best known – maybe only known – as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps.  However, in his lifetime he published over 100 books: fiction, poetry, short stories, biographies, memoirs and history.

You can find out more about John Buchan, his life and literary output by visiting The John Buchan Society website.