The second volume of Alan Johnson’s memoirs start where the first, the much-lauded This Boy, left off. Our 18-year-old hero leaves shelf stacking and takes a job as a postman, first in Barnes, west London, and then in Slough on the capital’s edge. This is the life for him. And why not? Even a poorly educated and unambitious working-class youngster in the 1960s could be certain of a job with a fairly predictable, modest and agreeable trajectory. (Johnson’s ambition to be a pop singer is thwarted when his band’s uninsured instruments are stolen.) Stability and a reasonable wage were especially important to him: he had married a single mother, four years his senior. Please, Mister Postman may not have the pathos of that first book, though Johnson writes movingly of th