What life as a postman taught me

Alan Johnson explains how his years working as a postman left a lasting impression on him – and how the job still plays a crucial role in the community.

Alan with his daughters Natalie and Emma.

I have a friend who is a postman in Hull but had never delivered a letter until recently. City postmen these days work on either Processing (indoor work), Distribution (driving) or Delivery. Andy spent ten years as a processor and only recently applied to transfer. In my time postmen and women were all singing and all dancing.

Perhaps above all it taught me the value of public service.

In the course of writing Please, Mister Postman I realised that I’d managed to acquire a breadth of experience which was unusual even then – delivering in the City and the countryside, on foot, by bike, by moped and in a van. I was even a Postman Higher Grade for a while, responsible for clerical work and more specialised sorting. PHGs could be discerned by the gold crowns in the lapels of their uniform jacket but the grade is now defunct.

What did the Post Office teach me?

A simple response is that it taught me to drive. Amazingly, instead of me paying a Driving School to learn, my employer paid me. And they paid for the test at the end (or five tests in my case – eight counting the three I took on a moped before I passed).

But it also taught me the value of what we now call teamwork. With absolute precision and hardly any machinery the two dozen odd postmen of Barnes sorted, delivered, collected and dispatched all the mail for our small corner of London day in and day out. There were supervisors whose job it was to watch over us but their presence was largely superfluous.

Perhaps above all it taught me the value of public service. In London we were trusted servants of a vast organisation which was essential to society because, like links in a chain, it was connected to every community in the land.

In the countryside we were a lifeline bringing goods and services that couldn’t be accessed any other way (such as the newspapers I delivered every morning).

None of this has changed. My friend Andy may wear shorts instead of the old blue serge uniform and he may only provide one delivery per day rather than two but he and his colleagues still pass every address in the country six days a week.

Recent privatisation may well change all that to the extent that one day we’ll look back with nostalgia to another important aspect of our national life that has gone for good.

Alan Johnson, for Waterstones.com/blog