Alan Johnson's memoir of London slum childhood wins £10,000

[TrueBlueTerrier]

Alan Johnson's memoir of London slum childhood wins £10,000 Ondaatje prize

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Judges say evocative language of ex-home secretary's This Boy helps readers 'smell the pie and mash' of postwar Notting Hill

Alan Johnson's memoir of his childhood in the slums of west London has won the former home secretary and Labour MP the £10,000 Ondaatje prize, an unusual literary award which goes to the book that best evokes the spirit of a place.

Johnson's This Boy, said judge and poet Imtiaz Dharker, "makes you walk the postwar streets with him, smell the sixpenny pie and mash, and hear the sound of the meter gobbling shillings in the condemned housing of Notting Hill". Johnson beat shortlisted authors including Patrick Barkham, the Guardian journalist whose Badgerlands tells of our relationship with badgers, and Nadeem Aslam's novel The Blind Man's Garden, set in post 9/11 Pakistan and Afghanistan, to win the Royal Society of Literature prize on Monday.

"There are no grand flourishes here. He uses language that is bare, stripped to the bone, to evoke a place that changes as much as he does from one day to the next," said Dharker of Johnson's writing. Fellow judge and author AL Kennedy called This Boy a "remarkable autobiography" that is "filled with the geography of childhood and the taut interiors that poverty produces".

"We all thought it was a wonderful book and it was particularly strong on the landscape that poverty creates," said Kennedy of the choice. "Effectively poverty forces you to live in another country, to be alien in your own country and your own neighbourhood, and Johnson captured that exceptionally well, described impossibly uninhabitable rooms and that constant pressure to feed the meter if you wanted gas or electricity.

"He was also fantastic in his descriptions of women and particularly his mother. Without being sentimental, he really conjured up the essence of a remarkable woman living under intolerable stress."

Biographer and publisher Jenny Uglow, completing the judging panel, said that Johnson succeeded both in letting his readers "see and almost smell every room" and in capturing "the elusive spirit of place that imprints itself on a child, and is never forgotten".
Alan Johnson at Bevington primary school c1958 Johnson at Bevington primary school in the late 1950s. Photograph: Transworld

Johnson writes of how his mother, Lily, raised him and his sister, Linda, and how, after their mother's death, Linda fought to keep the family out of social care. The family lived in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, in a condemned block owned by a housing trust, a place of "peeling plaster, rotten window frames and cracked panes", and they were usually hungry. "I've never forgotten that emptiness and craving for food," writes Johnson.

"When I was born the trust gave us two rooms on a higher floor. One for sleeping in and one for eating in. Everyone used the same front door and the single decrepit toilet in the small concrete yard that backed on to the railway line in and out of Paddington station. There was no electricity in the house – or outside, for that matter," writes Johnson in This Boy. "The street was lit by gas lamps, which a man on a pushbike came to light every evening. Lily told us he was the Sandman, come to send us to sleep."

Collecting his award, Johnson said he had "tried to recapture north Kensington from Notting Hill", as "Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant were not often seen down our way", reported the Bookseller. "People lived 16 in a house, but you were forced into a community, and [were] looking after people who couldn't look after themselves." He told the Guardian: "To win any award is great, but to win this very special award, essentially for the art of evocation, is deeply satisfying. I set out to recreate the streets of my childhood, and this prize encourages me to believe I succeeded."

He admitted his evocative skills would be more challenged by the second volume, which he is now writing. It has the more prosaic setting of Slough, where he got his first job as a postman.

The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje prize is awarded to a novel, work of non-fiction or poetry collection. Previous winners range from last year's Scenes from Early Life, Philip Hensher's fictionalisation of his husband's childhood, to James Meek's Siberia-set novel The People's Act of Love, and Edmund de Waal's piecing together of his family history, The Hare With Amber Eyes.

[redneck]

Another gentleman personally driven into Thatcherite ways by his desire to get away from the 'slum'. Pro-privatisation, pro-free market capitalism, his roots and the causes long forgotten.

[5plusbonusball]

Could be talking about life today in this kn*ckered country.

[baldrick]

He admitted his evocative skills would be more challenged by the second volume, which he is now writing. It has the more prosaic setting of Slough, where he got his first job as a postman.

Will he say what his workload was then, and how long it took him to complete?

[Tman]

No electricity in the street and gas street lamps sounds a little far-fetched for the late 1950s.

[Lounge Lizard]

No electricity in the street and gas street lamps sounds a little far-fetched for the late 1950s.

"smell the sixpenny pie and mash, and hear the sound of the meter gobbling shillings in the condemned housing of Notting Hill".
Aye, when I were a lad we'd dream of pie and mash but we were 'appy.

[JaneM]

Found it quite engrossing and his mother and sister were immense characters,Alan was very fortunate to have them in his corner.

[Lounge Lizard]

Found it quite engrossing and his mother and sister were immense characters,Alan was very fortunate to have them in his corner.

Yes, and Alan came across quite well on the "What makes us human?" slot on Radio 2's Jeremy Vine unlike Vince Cable who could only talk about dancing .

[Lounge Lizard]

On a discussion about trade unions recorded on 1st May and broadcast on Radio 4 last evening Alan Johnson said "My trade union is doing fine"

[dvbuk55]

On a discussion about trade unions recorded on 1st May and broadcast on Radio 4 last evening Alan Johnson said "My trade union is doing fine"

I presumed from that statement he was talking about the privileged select few on the parliamentary gravy train, mind you not unfamiliar surroundings from his real union days.