I very much enjoyed the first part of Alan Johnson's memoirs - 'This Boy'. 'Please Mister Postman' takes over from where the first book leaves off, and details his long career in the Post Office, first as a postman, and latterly as an increasingly politicised union official. Perhaps that was the problem for me. On the whole, the book was about Johnson's developing career. He touched on the lives of his sister and family, and on his own home life, but barely. He may have written the book he wanted to, but it wasn't necessarily the book I wanted to read. A book I read willingly enough, as it was well-written and quite absorbing, but not the winner that his first volume was for me. ( )

A great read. This is the second of the three memoirs of Alan Johnson the former Labour politician.

The book starts at the age of 17 when Alan's life is about to change, within a year there was a career, children and marriage. He had 3 children by the time he was 21, worked all hours as a postie and moved to Slough.

Some hilarious moments, such as accidentally delivering soft porn to a nunnery, and immensely sad moments like the suicide of his brother in law Mike. One of his postmen duties took him past the Home Secretary's official residence Dorney wood. I'd like to do that job he remarked, meaning the security officer on duty, not thinking in a million years he'd be home secretary.

Loved the passages also about 1970s working practices, the hard drinking and smoking culture, with mum's expected to do all child rearing duties.

We end the book in the days of Thatcher, the right to buy policy that changed the prospect ts for the better of so many of his neighbours on their council estate. Alan has a job on the national council of his union which takes him all round the country, a job he finds extremely fulfilling. However his marriage suffers and the book ends with their marriage coming to an end.

A rip roaring read. Highly recommended. ( )

Brilliant further installment covering his move to Slough as a Postman and gradual climb up the ladder of the Post Office union to becoming a full-time union official and leaving Slough. ( )

Johnson is clearly a decent and inoffensive witness, whose earlier memoir ‘Boy’ had real drama and adversity, but this account covers merely humdrum domestic and work experiences from the ‘70s. His career as a trade unionist gets going, providing a welcome demonstration to our era of partisanship and the gig economy that industrial relations and indeed politics could be conducted purposefully and sensibly without being in thrall to ideology. He reels off a few modest anecdotes, and there is some interest and evident integrity here, but nothing very surprising. ( )

This is the second volume of memoirs by the former Labour Cabinet Minister and trade union leader, covering the period from his becoming a postman and getting married at the age of 18, through his early years of growing union and political awareness. Near the start of their married life, he and his wife Judy are given an opportunity to move into a decent council house in Slough, a move which would have been a dream for his mother, one that she was finally only tragically offered two weeks after her funeral; it is this opportunity that he wanted to preserve for future generations that led him to oppose the forced sale of council housing stock under the Thatcher government. As he rose up the ranks of the union, he established himself as moderate and pragmatic, wanting to use his influence to better the position of the members he represented, seeing the union movement at its best as being "at a philosophical level.... a bulwark against discrimination, a counterweight in the balance of power between employer and employee and an essential element of a mature democracy", while at the same time being suspicious of much of the hard left posturing from some union activists, for whom "every human hope and aspiration, every object of art and beauty, had to be pickled into an all-embracing dogma that would guide our lives". He worked hard to improve working practices that were outdated, through persuading members of the benefits change could bring, and working to avoid disputes as far as possible. He describes tellingly the antics of the hard left within the Labour Party in the early 80s, "where a form of collective frenzy had taken hold ever since Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the 1979 election", especially the Bennite cult which nurtured "a culture of betrayal against anybody connected with the previous Labour government"; all of which is very similar to the effect that Momentum is having in the Labour Party in 2016 under Corbyn.

Outside politics and trade union activities, while building a secure future for him and his family - so crucial to him given the appalling lack of such security in his childhood as described in This Boy - there were still tragedies along the way, in particular the suicide of his alcoholic step-brother Mike, husband of his sister Linda who brought him up; and the death of his childhood friend Andrew from a brain tumour at the age of 33. His children's education suffered to some extent from the iniquitous effects of the selective system of education as it operated in the area the family lived. As this volume ends, it is the late 1980s and he and Judy have drifted apart, his children now grown up or well on the way to independence, and his sister Linda has emigrated to Australia with her second husband and their combined brood of children. Thus the stage is set for the next stage in Johnson's life. As with the first volume, this is a straightforwardly written and engaging memoir. ( )