Garlanded with near-uniform five-star reviews on its publication last year, Alan Johnson’s ‘Memoir of a Childhood’, This Boy, is now out as a Corgi paperback guaranteed to impress and amaze anyone with the sense to read it.

This might not include those with an antipathy towards politicians. Would the book be another tedious parade of milestones en route to the Cabinet table (in Johnson’s case as Home Secretary in the Brown government and, before that, Blair’s Health Secretary)?

Fear not: the words Labour Party and politics are scarcely mentioned, if mentioned at all. The author’s later achievements likewise go unalluded to; they hover, however, in the mind of the reader, who must be asking: how could anyone rise so far from such beginnings?

Born in 1950, in slummy Kensal Town, Alan was the second (and last) child of Lily and Stephen Johnson. His mother was a decent, hard-working Liverpudlian who had moved south in the later stages of the Hitler war to become the wife of a feckless painter and decorator.

Rarely at work because regularly in pubs, where he played piano, Steve was well-practised in the traditional vices of his sort which, besides booze, included betting and birds. Soon he abandoned his family altogether, leaving them in abject poverty in a verminous hovel which, in Johnson’s vivid description, seems almost Dickensian in its horrors. Eventually, with the author still in his early teens, Lily died following an unsuccessful operation to deal with a long-standing heart condition, aggravated by a punishing round of charring duties.

All this might suggest that we are looking here at a ‘misery memoir’.

Not a bit, for this is an inspiring tale of triumph over adversity from which Johnson’s plucky elder sister, Linda, emerges as a heroine as she battles with officialdom, at just 16, to keep a home for them together.

Compensations in life for Alan included pop music. The book’s title comes from a Beatles song, and Johnson writes warmly of the Fab Four. This reviewer, however, feels obliged to point out that their early singles cost 6s 8d and not the 7s 6d mentioned here. Similarly, Guards cigarettes didn’t come with coupons, as Johnson thinks, and there were no Ford Cortinas in the 1950s.

* Alan Johnson will be at Chipping Norton Literary Festival on April 26.