JOHN
LENNON
THE LIFE
PHILIP NORMAN

To Jessica

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

PART I THE COUNTRY BOY

1 WAR BABY

2 THE NORTHERN CONFEDERACY

3 THE OUTLAWS

4 SHORTSIGHTED JOHN WIMPLE LENNON

5 THE GALLOTONE CHAMPION

6 BUDDIES

PART II TO THE TOPPERMOST OF THE POPPERMOST

7 MY MUMMY’S DEAD

8 JEALOUS GUY

9 UNDER THE JACARANDA

10 MACH SCHAU

11 THE SINGING RAGE

12 SHADOWLANDS

13 LUCKY STARS

PART III A GENIUS OF THE LOWER CRUST

14 LEATHER TONSILS IN A THROAT OF STEEL

15 THE BIG BANG

16 THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN

17 REAL LIFE IN CINEMASCOPE

18 A MOST RELIGIOUS FELLOW

PART IV ZEN VAUDEVILLE

19 BREATHE

20 MAGIC, MEDITATION AND MISERY

21 THERE’S A GOOD LITTLE GURU

22 BACK TO VIRGINITY

23 BEDLAM

24 WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOMS

25 BEATLEDÄMMERUNG

PART V PIZZA AND FAIRY TALES

26 THE YIPPIE YIPPIE SHAKE

27 TROUBLE WITH HARRY

28 BEAUTIFUL BOY

29 HOMEBODY

30 STARTING OVER

POSTSCRIPT SEAN REMEMBERS

INDEX

Acknowledgments

Other Books By

Copyright

About the Publisher

Other Books By

ALSO BY PHILIP NORMAN

FICTION

Slip on a Fat LadyPlumridgeWild ThingThe Skaters’ WaltzWords of LoveEveryone’s Gone to the Moon

BIOGRAPHY AND JOURNALISM

The StonesThe Road Goes On ForeverTilt the Hourglass and Begin AgainYour Walrus Hurt the One You LoveAwful MomentsPieces of HateThe Age of ParodyThe Life and Good Times of the Rolling StonesElton JohnDays in the Life: John Lennon RememberedShout!: The Beatles in Their GenerationRave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly

PLAYS

The Man That Got AwayWords of Love

PART I THE COUNTRY BOY

1 WAR BABY

I was never really wanted.

John Lennon was born with a gift for music and comedy that would carry him further from his roots than he ever dreamed possible. As a young man, he was lured away from the British Isles by the seemingly boundless glamour and opportunity to be found across the Atlantic. He achieved that rare feat for a British performer of taking American music to the Americans and playing it as convincingly as any homegrown practitioner, or even more so. For several years, his group toured the country, delighting audiences in city after city with their garish suits, funny hair and contagiously happy grins.

This, of course, was not Beatle John Lennon but his namesake paternal grandfather, more commonly known as Jack, born in 1855. Lennon is an Irish surname—from O’Leannain or O’Lonain—and Jack habitually gave his birthplace as Dublin, though there is evidence that his family had already crossed the Irish Sea to become part of Liverpool’s extensive Hibernian community some time previously. He began his working life as a clerk, but in the 1880s followed a common impulse among his compatriots and emigrated to New York. Whereas the city turned other immigrant Irishmen into labourers or police officers, Jack ended up as a member of Andrew Roberton’s Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels.

However brief or casual his involvement, this made him part of the first transatlantic popular music industry. American minstrel troupes, in which white men blackened their faces, put on outsized collars and stripey pantaloons, and sang sentimental choruses about the Swanee River, ‘coons’ and ‘darkies’, were hugely popular in the late 19th century, both as performers and creators of hit songs. When Roberton’s Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels toured Ireland in 1897, the Limerick Chronicle called them ‘the world’s acknowledged masters of refined minstrelsy’, while the Dublin Chronicle thought them the best it had ever seen. A contemporary handbook records that the troupe was about 30-strong, that it featured some genuinely black artistes among the cosmetic ones, and that it made a speciality of parading through the streets of every town where it was to appear.

For this John Lennon, unlike the grandson he would never see, music did not bring worldwide fame but was merely an exotic interlude, most details of which were never known to his descendants. Around the turn of the century he came off the road for good, returned to Liverpool and resumed his old life as a clerk, this time with the Booth shipping line. With him came his daughter, Mary, only child of a first marriage that had not survived his temporary immersion in burnt-cork makeup, banjo music and applause.

When Mary left him to work in domestic service, a solitary old age seemed in prospect for Jack. His remedy was to marry his housekeeper, a young Liverpool Irishwoman with the happily coincidental name of Mary Maguire. Although 20 years his junior, and illiterate, Mary—better known as Polly—proved an ideal Victorian wife: practical, hardworking and selfless. Their home was a tiny terrace house in Copperfield Street, Toxteth, a part of the city nicknamed ‘Dickens Land’, so numerous were the streets named after Dickens characters. Rather like Mr Micawber in David Copperfield, Jack sometimes talked about returning to his former life as a minstrel and earning fortunes enough for his young wife, as he put it, to be ‘farting against silk’. But from here on, his music-making would be confined to local pubs and his own family circle.

Jack’s marriage to Polly gave him a second family of eight children. Two died in infancy, a fact that the superstitious Polly attributed to their Catholic baptism. The next six therefore received Protestant christenings, and all survived: five boys, George, Herbert, Sydney, Alfred and Charles, and a girl, Edith. Polly did a heroic job of feeding them all on Jack’s modest wage. But their diet of mainly bread, margarine, strong tea and lobscouse—the meat-and-biscuit stew from which Liverpudlians get their nickname Scousers—was chronically lacking in essential nutrients. This had its worst effect on the fourth boy, Alfred, born in 1912, who as a toddler developed rickets that stunted the growth of his legs. The only remedy known to paediatrics in those days was to encase both legs in iron braces, hoping the ponderous extra weight would promote growth and strength. Despite years burdened by the braces, Alf’s legs remained puny and foreshortened, and he failed to grow any taller than 5′4. He was, even so, a good-looking lad, with luxuriant dark hair, merry eyes and the distinctive Lennon family nose, a thin, plunging beak with sharply defined clefts over the nostrils.

Jack’s musical talents were passed on to his children in varying measure. George, Herbert, Sydney, Charles and Edith all had passable singing voices, and the boys played mouth organ, the only instrument young people in their circumstances could afford. Alf, however, showed ability of an altogether higher order, allied to what his brother Charlie (born in 1918) called ‘that show-off spirit’. He could sing all the music-hall and light operatic songs that made up the First World War hit parade; he could recite ballads, tell jokes and do impressions. His speciality was Charlie Chaplin, the anarchic little tramp whose film comedies had created the unprecedented phenomenon of an entertainer famous all over the world. At family gatherings, Alf would sit on his father’s knee in his Tiny Tim leg irons, and the two would sing ‘Ave Maria’ together, with sentimental tears streaming down their faces.

Jack died from liver disease, probably caused by alcoholism, in 1921. Unable to survive on the state widow’s allowance of 5 shillings per child per week, Polly had no choice but to take in washing. It meant backbreaking, hand-scalding work from 4 a.m. to dusk, scrubbing other people’s soiled linen on a washboard, then squeezing out the sodden coils through a heavy iron mangle. Even so, as her granddaughter Joyce Lennon remembers, the cramped little house remained always spotless with ‘floors you could eat your dinner from’, the kitchen range cleaned with graphite religiously every Monday morning, the front step scoured almost white, then edged in red with a chip of sandstone. Polly ruled her five sons like Mrs Joe in Great Expectations, not hesitating to chastise them with a leather strap even when they were nearly grown men. Like many down-to-earth people, she had a contrasting mystical side, believing herself a psychic able to read the future in spread-out playing cards or the pattern of tea leaves in an empty cup.

As hard as Polly worked, the task of supporting her six-strong brood proved beyond her. Fortunately, a means was found to take Alf and Edith off her hands without breaking up the family or damaging her fierce self-respect. Both were offered live-in places at Liverpool’s Bluecoat Hospital (charity school) in Church Road, Wavertree, a stone’s throw from a then-obscure thoroughfare called Penny Lane. Founded in 1714, the Bluecoat still attired its male pupils in an 18thcentury costume of gold-buttoned blue tailcoat, breeches, stockings and cravat. The educational standard was high, the regime not unkindly, and any child granted admittance was considered fortunate. Alf and Edith, even so, found it traumatic to leave their cosy, soapy home in Copperfield Street and the mother they worshipped. Of the two, cheery Alf adjusted better to institution life: he did well at lessons, became mascot of the football team, and entertained his dormitory mates with the same song-and-dance and Charlie Chaplin skits he used to do for his family and neighbours.

From earliest childhood, his one wish had been to follow his father into show business. It very nearly came true one night when he was 14, and his brother Sydney took him to the Empire Theatre in Lime Street to see a troupe of singing, dancing juveniles called Will Murray’s Gang. After the show, Alf talked his way backstage and performed an impromptu audition for Will Murray, the Gang’s adult ringmaster, who there and then offered him a job. When his brothers Herbert and George, now in loco parentis, refused to entertain the idea, Alf ran away from the Bluecoat Hospital and joined up with the Gang en route to Glasgow for their next appearance. But a Bluecoat teacher came after him, led him back in disgrace and subjected him to ritual humiliation in front of his assembled schoolmates.

A year later, the Bluecoat sent him out into the world, equipped with a good education, plus two suits with long trousers to confirm his entry into manhood. He spent a few unhappy weeks as an office boy before realising that a far preferable career—one, indeed, almost comparable with going on the stage—lay right under his nose. For this was the golden age of transatlantic liner travel, when Liverpool vied with Southampton as Britain’s busiest passenger port. Huge, multi-funnelled ships daily nosed up the River Mersey to be met by emblazoned boat-trains from London, packed with rich people, their furs and cabin trunks. In Ranelagh Place, the splendiferous Adelphi Hotel had just been built to provide a painless transition from shore to ship, with its Titanic-size palm court, bedrooms like staterooms, below-waterline swimming pools, hairdressers and masseurs.

So Alf went off to sea as a bellboy on the SS Montrose. It was, as he soon discovered, a life he seemed born to lead. His friendly, cheery nature made him popular with passengers and his superior officers and kept him on the right side of the gay mafia who ran the ships’ catering departments. ‘Lennie’—his onboard nickname—rapidly won promotion to restaurant waiter on the cruise vessels plying between Liverpool and the Mediterranean. In off-duty hours, he would entertain his fellow workers with songs and impressions in their cramped, foetid communal cabins or in the crew bar, known on every ship as the Pig and Whistle. His speciality (one his father Jack would have especially appreciated) was blackening his face with shoe polish and ‘doing’ Al Jolson, the minstrel offcut whose schmaltzy anthems to ‘Mammy’ and ‘Dixie’ sold records by the million in the 1920s and early 30s.

He could think himself always in a kind of spotlight, whether serving rich food to ‘nobs’ in his gleaming white mess jacket and gloves, or crooning Jolson’s ‘Sonny Boy’, down on one knee, with clasped hands, to the beery delight of his shipmates, or returning home to Copperfield Street laden with the contraband ship’s delicacies that are every steward’s God-given perk. Between voyages, too, in some dockside saloon-bar or other, he could always find an audience eager to be regaled with stories about the exotic places and peoples he had seen and the racy shipboard life of a single young waiter.

Despite all his lurid sailor’s yarns, there had only ever seemed to be one woman for Alf Lennon. Sometime in 1928, not long after leaving the Bluecoat Hospital, he was strolling through Sefton Park resplendent in one of his two new suits, topped off by an outsized bowler hat and smoking a cheap Wild Woodbine cigarette fixed dandyishly into a holder. Seated alone on a bench beside the ornamental lake was a girl with fluffy auburn hair and the facial bone structure of a young Marlene Dietrich. When Alf moved in to chat her up, he was met with gales of derisive laughter. Realising that his top-heavy bowler was the cause, he whipped it off his head and sent it skimming into the lake. So began his long, troubled relationship with Julia Stanley.

In Julia—variously known as Juliet, Judy, or Ju—destiny had paired Alf with a character whose craving for glamour and urge to entertain were almost the equal of his. Julia, too, had a better than average singing voice and, unlike Alf, was a practised instrumentalist. Her grandfather, yet another stagestruck Liverpool clerk, had taught her to play the banjo; she also could give a passable account of herself on the piano accordion and the ukulele.

Julia’s musical talent, personality and enchanting prettiness made her an obvious candidate for the professional stage. But the hard slog entailed by a career on the boards was not for her. When she left school, aged 15, it was merely for an dull office job in a printing firm. She quickly gave this up to become an usherette at Liverpool’s plushest cinema, the Trocadero in Camden Street. Like Alf’s role at sea, it was a life of glamour by proxy, working amid deep pile carpets and soft lights, clad in a trim Ruritanian uniform with cross-buttoning tunic and pillbox hat.

Her looks won her many admirers, and even the manager of the Trocadero, a magnificent personage who wore evening dress all day, made periodic attempts to woo his prettiest usherette by leaving gifts of stockings or chocolates in her locker. For such a siren, Alf Lennon with his Chico Marx hat and little legs seemed not much of a catch. But their happy-go-lucky natures and zany sense of humour were exactly in tune. They also shared a passion for dancing—which in those days meant the ‘strict tempo’ ballroom variety. Waltzing or quickstepping in each other’s arms, they would imagine themselves the most famous dancing couple of the cinema screen, with redheaded Julia becoming Ginger Rogers while Alf metamorphosed into Fred, as in Astaire.

To outward appearances, Alf and Julia might seem to have been from roughly similar backgrounds. Both belonged to large families—she having as many sisters as he had brothers—and both were offspring of men in shipping. Like every other stratum of British life, however, the seafaring world in those days was governed by rigid class distinction. And it happened that Julia’s father, George Stanley, known to his family as Pop, stood several notches above Alf in the rigidly defined mercantile hierarchy. He had trained as a sailmaker in the not-so-distant days when many ships putting into Liverpool still relied on canvas as a supplement to steam. After many years at sea with the White Star Line, he had joined the London, Liverpool and Glasgow Tug Salvage Company, helping to retrieve the wrecks that storms or human error frequently caused in the treacherous deeps between the Mersey estuary and the North Wales shore.

Pop Stanley therefore mingled on equal terms with ships’ captains and pilots, the bluebloods of the sea. His other four daughters, though lively and strong-willed, all comported themselves in a manner befitting this social eminence, keeping company with young men destined to be navigators or marine engineers. Only Julia had ever dragged down the family by going out with ‘a mere steward’ like Alf Lennon. In his displeasure, Pop found strongest support in his oldest daughter, Mary, known as Mimi. ‘Why she picked [Alf] I’ll never know,’ Mimi would still lament at the very end of her life. ‘I couldn’t believe she ended up with a seaman. He was a good-for-nothing…the type to have one in every port. Fly-by-night is what I called him.’

Alf himself, unfortunately, possessed the same sharp wit and withering bluntness that would be among his future son’s strongest characteristics. Mingling as he did with actual bluebloods every day of his nautical life, he found the Stanleys’ attitude ludicrous, and made no bones about saying so. Whenever Julia tried to introduce him into her tight-knit family circle, there would invariably be some upset—if not with Pop then with Mimi—that ended with his leaving the house or being ordered out of it. Had the pair been left alone, Julia probably would have tired of Alf and found someone her family considered worthier of her. But, true to her nature, the more he was snubbed and criticised, the greater became her determination to hang on to him.

So their courtship meandered on through the 1930s, kept fresh when it might otherwise have staled by Alf’s periodic long absences at sea. He grew reasonably friendly with Julia’s sisters Elizabeth, Anne and Harriet, and liked her mother Annie (née Millward), a woman so sweet-natured and kind that she would sometimes buy shoes for children she saw running barefoot in the street. But Pop (whom even Mimi described as ‘a bully’) always remained bristlingly hostile. Like most young courting couples of that time, with nowhere to meet but pubs, family front parlors and park benches, Alf and Julia reached their early twenties without having experienced any physical intimacy beyond kissing and petting. In spite of Mimi’s dark suspicions about ‘one in every port’, Alf always swore he remained faithful to Julia on his travels, and wrote to her at every opportunity. The Stanleys accused Alf of being work shy—‘swallowing the anchor’ in nautical slang. However, he seems to have remained employed more successfully than a great many others in Liverpool during that era of grinding economic depression. His official Board of Trade seaman’s employment record gives the standard of his work and personal conduct for voyage after voyage as a consistent VG. At one point, Julia’s family made a highly disingenuous move to ‘help’ him by finding him a place aboard a whaling ship, which would have had the blessed result of taking him away for about two years. When Alf refused to consider the idea, Pop Stanley ordered him out of the house once again.

Alf and Julia finally married in December 1938, when he was 26 and she 24. A few weeks earlier, then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from Munich waving the piece of paper that ‘guaranteed’ peace with Hitler’s Germany in return for abandoning Czechoslovakia to invasion and genocide. The mood of national euphoria, while it lasted, produced a sharp surge in the marriage rate as many young people felt their future to be more secure. But Alf and Julia took their belated plunge with no more thoughts of the future than they ever had. According to Alf, she dared him to do it one night at the pub, and he was never one to refuse a dare.

Neither of their families was told in advance what they had decided. On 3 December, Julia left home as if it were just another working day and at noon met with Alf at the register office in Bolton Street, behind the Adelphi Hotel. The only witnesses to the ceremony were Alf’s brother Sydney, whom he’d let into the secret at the last moment, and one of Julia’s usherette colleagues. Afterwards, Sydney stood the new Mr and Mrs Lennon drinks and a meal of roast chicken at a pub over the road called the Big House; they spent the evening at the cinema, watching a Mickey Rooney film (which happened to be about an orphanage), then separated to spend their wedding night at their respective homes. Mimi was never to forget the heart-sinking moment when Julia walked in, threw her wedding certificate onto the table and said, ‘There, I’ve done it! I’ve married him.’

Pop Stanley’s initial reaction was also one of explosive horror and disgust. But, under the gentler influence of his wife, Annie, he accepted that there was nothing that could be done—indeed, that as a conscientious father he must try his best to give the newlyweds a proper start in life. Swallowing his feelings, Pop volunteered to leave the family flat in Berkeley Street and rent more spacious accommodation so that Julia and Alf could move in with Annie and him. The chosen property was number 9 Newcastle Road, a bay-windowed terrace house a few minutes’ walk from Penny Lane and Alf’s alma mater, the Bluecoat Hospital.

The four coexisted in relative harmony throughout 1939, as war with Germany drew nearer and Britain succumbed to a fever of gasmask issuing, child evacuation and air-raid precautions. For Pop Stanley in particular, it was an eventful time. In June, a brand-new Royal Navy submarine, the Thetis, sank during her trials in Liverpool Bay. Pop joined the massive operation to recover the vessel, whose stern was initially visible rising vertically from the water. The crew considered themselves in no great peril, tapping out cheerful Morse messages to their rescuers on the steel hull as cables were passed underneath to drag it to the surface. But at the crucial moment, the cables snapped and the submarine disappeared for good, taking 71 men with her.

Alf had gone to sea again, on the SS Duchess of York, but returned home in time for the first Christmas of the Second World War. His only child with Julia was conceived at 9 Newcastle Road one day in January 1940. Finding themselves, unusually, alone in the house for a couple of hours, they made love on the kitchen floor. They had not been trying for a baby, and Julia’s immediate pregnancy was equally dismaying to them both. ‘Ninety per cent of people [of my generation] were born out of a bottle of whisky on a Saturday night, and there was no intention to have children,’ the baby would one day observe bitterly. ‘I was never really wanted.’

Julia’s pregnancy coincided with the bleakest months in Europe’s history, as Hitler’s mechanized armies swept across Belgium and France, the battered remains of the British Expeditionary Force were evacuated from Dunkirk, and RAF fighters whirled like fiery gnats around the Luftwaffe’s incoming swarms of heavy bombers. Alone and braced for invasion, the country often seemed to have nothing to sustain it but the voice of Winston Churchill, whose bulldog-like mien and gift for blood-igniting oratory made the most desperate moments seem somehow glorious.

In August, Alf sailed away again on the SS Empress of Canada. With London under nightly bombing and Britain seemingly defenceless, the RAF made a surprise hit-and-run raid on Berlin—an event that the Luftwaffe’s commander, Hermann Goering, had boasted could never happen. A furious Hitler promised to retaliate by razing all Britain’s other major cities. As a key port for the nation’s vital Atlantic food convoys, Liverpool prepared for the worst.

Julia’s sister, Mimi, would often relate how the baby’s arrival on 9 October was marked by an especially ferocious German night attack. According to Mimi, when news came that Julia had been delivered of a 71/2-pound boy, the air-raid sirens were wailing and all public transport, as usual, had ground to a standstill. Such was her excitement that she ran the 2 miles from her parents’ home to the Oxford Street maternity hospital, oblivious of bombers and their parachute-borne land mines. The worst that Hitler could do seemed trivial by comparison with this marvellous event.

The week in question was certainly a bad one for Liverpool. The records of its Watch Committee show that on the night of 7-8 October, high-explosive bombs fell on Stanley Road and Great Mersey Street in the city centre, and on Lichfield Road and Grantley Road, Wavertree, causing damage to houses and demolishing the Welsh Chapel. The next night came two separate raids, hitting Everton Valley, Knotty Ash, Mossley Hill and Mill Street in the first, and the Anfield area in the second. On the night of 11-12 October, two more raids dropped tons of high explosive on the City and North Docks first, then on Alexandra and Langton Dock, causing serious damage to the Harbourmaster’s House, sheds, railway tracks, Admiralty stores and four ships.

But on the night of 9-10 October, the Luftwaffe unaccountably stayed away. As Mimi hurried towards Oxford Street, she would undoubtedly have seen the results of previous bombing, in rubble, shattered glass and white-helmeted ARP wardens. On later visits to Julia, the situation could have been as she remembered that first night, with a land mine falling next to the hospital and the new baby being wrapped in a rough blanket and put under his mother’s bed for safety. Uppermost in Mimi’s thoughts on 9 October was concern for her sister, mingled with delight that a boy had entered the overwhelmingly female Stanley family. Possibly it was the strength of her own emotion when she first held her nephew in her arms that helped give the scene its apocalyptic quality in her memory.

E M Forster once wrote that ‘there is a battle fought over every baby.’ The battle over this particular Liverpool baby was to be fiercer than most—revealing not that he ‘wasn’t wanted’, as he came to believe, but that too many people wanted him too much. Nor would it become clear for some little time who had won him.

About his name, at least, there was no conflict. Julia decided to call him John, which pleased Alf as a tribute to his paternal grandfather, the sometime Kentucky minstrel, but was also classically middleclass, suggesting every quality the Stanleys most admired—plain, upright, steady, predictable, uncomplicated. And, with fierce wartime patriotism in common, neither side of the family could object to his mother’s giving him the middle name Winston, in honour of the Prime Minister.

Alf’s long absences from home would later brand him in his son’s eyes as feckless, selfish and unloving, but it should be remembered that as a merchant sailor he was doing one of the most vital and dangerous jobs in Britain’s war effort. Thousands of other Liverpool men were in his situation, facing the same dangers from German U-boats—drowning in icy seas or turning into oil-soaked human torches—while, back at home, children they barely knew were raised by committees of women. Undoubtedly, for all its hazards, the sea provided an escape from dull routine and responsibility, where Alf could turn into ‘Lennie’ and live out his fantasies as an entertainer (now adding a skit on Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers to his repertoire of Jolson and Eddie Cantor). Another deterrent to seeking a safer shore job was that he was climbing the ladder of his profession. In September 1942, he gained promotion to saloon steward, the shipboard equivalent of headwaiter.

At the time, it appears, the most hostile of his in-laws no longer found anything to criticise about his nautical station, especially as he always returned home laden with booty from the ships’ pantries, meat and butter and fresh fruit otherwise impossible to obtain under wartime rationing, which he would share out liberally among them. While at sea, he would send programmes of ships’ concerts featuring himself for Julia to show to John, who for years afterwards would associate his father’s name with a mysterious number called ‘Begin the Beguine’.

Alf was at sea as saloon steward on the SS Moreton Bay from 26 September 1942 to 2 February 1943. Though air attacks on Liverpool had diminished since the horrendous ‘May blitz’ of 1941, the city centre was still considered a danger area. To make a safer as well as cleaner environment for John, Mimi persuaded Julia to move from 9 Newcastle Road out to suburban Woolton, where she herself had recently settled with her husband, George Smith. For several months, mother and son occupied a small house named the Cottage in Allerton Road, a short walk from Mimi’s home. It was here that John formed the first definite impressions of Julia as she sang him to sleep at night. ‘She used to do this little tune…from the Disney movie,’ he would remember. ‘ “Want to know a secret? Promise not to tell. You are standing by a wishing-well…” ’

The move was to put the first serious stress on a marriage that had never exactly been founded on maturity or trust. After being paid off by the Moreton Bay, Alf drew a stretch of shore leave long enough for him to register for fire-watching duties at Liverpool docks. Expecting Woolton to be a quiet retreat for Julia, he discovered that, on the contrary, she had acquired the habit of visiting local pubs, getting tipsy and flirting with unattached men while Mimi or a neighbour named Dolly Hipshaw looked after John. One day, Alf answered the door to a noisy group of Julia’s new friends, who plainly had no idea she was even married. A furious argument followed, in which Julia poured a cup of hot tea over Alf’s head. He lashed out and caught her across the face, making her nose bleed.

John’s maternal grandmother, the sweet-natured Annie Stanley, had died earlier in 1943, before she could imprint any but the vaguest picture of herself on his mind. Reluctant to stay on alone at 9 Newcastle Road, Pop Stanley decided to turn the house over to Julia and Alf while he moved in with relatives. For a time, at least, the rent was paid by Alf’s older brother, Sydney. The anonymous little bay-fronted house, duplicated a thousand times in neighbouring streets, became for John ‘the first place I remember…red brick…front room never used, always curtains drawn…picture of a horse and carriage on the wall. There were only three bedrooms upstairs, one on the front of the street, one in the back and one teeny little room in the middle…’ He was already sharply observant, as Alf had realised the previous Christmas, when every department store in central Liverpool advertised its own Santa Claus grotto. ‘How many Father Christmases are there?’ John had asked.

In July 1943, Alf travelled to New York to work on Liberty Ships, the prefabricated merchantmen that America was mass-producing to replenish Britain’s battered Atlantic convoys. He would be absent for 16 months on a bizarre journey that took him halfway around the world, showed him the inside of two prisons, saw an ominous amendment on his employment card from VG to D (Declined comment) and put the collapse of his marriage into overdrive. No ‘lost weekend’ his son would experience in future years even came close to this.

Alf later portrayed himself as the innocent victim of circumstance, bad advice from superiors and his own trusting nature—and, to be sure, the hysteria and malign happenstance of the war itself seems to have been as much blameworthy as any misdeed or mistake of his. In New York, he was kept waiting so long to be assigned a berth that he found a temporary job at Macy’s department store, acquired a Social Security card, and drank and sang his way through most of the better-known Broadway bars. Finally ordered to report to a Liberty Ship in Baltimore, he discovered he had been demoted to assistant steward. His only hope of keeping his proper ‘rate’, so a colleague advised, was to stay with the vessel until her first port of call, New York, then jump ship and take his problem to the British consul. Alf naïvely adopted this strategy and was promptly arrested for desertion and locked up for two weeks on Ellis Island.

On his release, he was ordered to accept a berth as assistant steward on a ship named the Sammex, bound for the Far East. When the Sammex docked in Bône, Algeria, Alf was arrested for the ‘theft by finding’ of a bottle of whisky and, by his own account, chose to take the rap rather than betray the friend who actually had committed the offence. He spent nine days in a horrific military prison, where he was forced to scrub latrines and was threatened with death should he ever speak about the conditions he had witnessed. Turned loose into the city’s dangerous casbah district, he met a mysterious Dutchman, known only as Hans, who not only saved him from being robbed and possibly murdered but also helped him rough up the British official he held partly responsible for his incarceration.

Finally, in October 1944, exhausted and half starved, with only a couple of dollars and his US Social Security card in his pocket, he managed to scrounge passage back to Britain as a DBS (Distressed British Seaman) on the troopship Monarch of Bermuda. In Liverpool, meanwhile, the shipping company had ceased paying his wages to Julia, who had no idea whether he was alive or dead. When he reached home, she informed him she was pregnant by another man. She had not been deliberately unfaithful, she said, but had been raped. She even gave Alf the name of the man she held responsible, a soldier stationed out on the Wirral Peninsula. Today the police would instantly be called in; back then, the proper course was for Alf to confront the alleged rapist and demand what he had to say for himself.

Fortunately, Alf’s brother Charlie, by now serving with the Royal Artillery, was on hand to lend moral support. Charlie would later recall the episode in terms rather like a deposition to a court-martial: ‘[Alf] told me he had come home and found [Julia] six weeks gone, but not showing. She claimed she’d been raped by a soldier. She gave a name. We went over to the Wirral where the soldier was stationed…Alfred wasn’t a violent man. Hasty-tempered but not violent. He said to him “I believe you’ve been having affairs with my wife and she accuses you of raping her.” No such thing, says the soldier. It wasn’t rape—it was consent.’

The upshot was that soft-hearted Alf took a shine to the soldier, a young Welshman named Taffy Williams, listening sympathetically to his protestation that he loved Julia and wanted to marry her and bring up the baby on his family’s farm (though John seemed to feature nowhere in this plan). Alf decided he had no option but to step aside—a decision that possibly did not come too hard after Julia’s recent behaviour. He persuaded Williams to accompany him back to 9 Newcastle Road, where, over a conciliatory pot of tea, he told Julia he was willing to let her go. No more inaccurate reading of the situation could have been possible. ‘I don’t want you, you fool,’ she told her erstwhile lover disdainfully, recommending him to finish his tea and then ‘get lost’.

To Alf’s credit, he expressed himself willing to take Julia back and bring up the baby as his own. But Pop Stanley, fearing the inevitable public disgrace, insisted it must be put up for adoption. On 19 June, 1945, five weeks after the war’s end, a girl was born to Julia at Elmswood, a Salvation Army maternity home in North Mossley Hill Road. Victoria Elizabeth, as Julia had named her, was adopted by a Norwegian couple named Pederson, who renamed her Ingrid Maria and took her off to Norway, out of her real mother’s life for ever.

This period of crisis and upheaval in the Stanley family saw four-year-old John, for the one and only time, handed over to the care of his Lennon relatives. During Julia’s pregnancy and confinement, he was sent to live with Alf’s brother Sydney, a man whose respectability and drive to better himself even Mimi had come to acknowledge. Sydney, his wife Madge and their eight-year-old daughter Joyce welcomed John to their home in Maghull, a village between Liverpool and Southport. He was left with Sydney and Madge for something like eight months. The life they provided for him was stable and loving and, as time passed, they assumed that they’d be allowed to adopt him officially. So confident were they of this outcome that they put his name down to start at the local primary school the following autumn. Then Alf turned up one night without warning and announced he was taking John away. Despite Sydney’s protests about the lateness of the hour, he insisted they had to leave immediately. All the family were distraught at losing John, Madge in particular. Soon afterward she adopted a six-week-old baby boy to fill the void he had left.

If Alf had hoped his display of magnanimity over Victoria Elizabeth would save his marriage, he was to be disappointed. In 1946, he returned from another cruise to find Julia openly involved with a sleek-haired hotel waiter named John—aka Bobby—Dykins. This time, however, the cuckolded husband wasn’t prepared to take it lying down. A furious night altercation took place at 9 Newcastle Road between Alf, Julia, her new man friend and Pop Stanley after Julia announced she was setting up home with Dykins and taking John with her. Awoken by the angry voices, John came to the stair head in time to see his mother screaming hysterically as Alf manhandled Dykins out the front door. When Alf himself awoke the next morning, John had been spirited away by Pop Stanley, and Julia was moving out her furniture, helped by a female neighbour. Alf pitched in to help them, telling Julia with the ostentatious self-pity of a country-and-western ballad to leave him only ‘a broken chair’ to sit on.

The sea, his old comforter, beckoned as alluringly as ever, and in April 1946 he found a berth as night steward aboard the Cunard company’s flagship, the Queen Mary, plying between Southampton and New York. The ship was within an hour of sailing when he received a telephone call from his sister-in-law, Mimi Smith, urging him to return to Liverpool immediately.

It was not an easy call for Mimi to make, and it doubtless caused even the unvengeful Alf a measure of quiet satisfaction. For the Stanley family’s hostility towards Julia’s new man friend Bobby Dykins was more virulent than anything he himself had ever suffered at their hands. According to Mimi, Julia and John had moved back into 9 Newcastle Road, and Dykins was also now in residence there, confronting John with the daily spectacle of his mother—in the accepted phrase—‘living in sin’. Of most immediate concern was that John seemed not to like his ‘new daddy’ and had turned up on Mimi’s doorstep in Woolton, having walked the 2 miles from Newcastle Road on his own. Despite all her hostility to Alf, she had been forced to concede that he missed and needed his real father. Alf then spoke to John, who asked him excitedly when he was coming home. He replied that he couldn’t ‘break Articles’ by deserting his ship, but promised to come as soon as the Queen Mary returned to Southampton, two weeks later.

He duly made his way back up north, arriving at Mimi’s late one night after John was in bed and asleep. The homecoming mariner was not offered a meal, only a cup of tea, which Mimi served to him accompanied by a further angry recital of Julia’s misconduct with Bobby Dykins. She also presented Alf with a bill for various necessities which she said she’d had to buy for John since his arrival. Fortunately, thanks to profitable black-market dealings in nylon stockings and other contraband, Alf had plenty of cash with him. He gave Mimi £20, and in that moment—so he would afterwards claim— decided he had no alternative but to abduct his son the following day. As he would later write, ‘I finally made up my mind that I would take [John] to Blackpool with me, making some excuse that I was taking him shopping or to see his granny.’

Alf stayed overnight at Mimi’s and the next morning was awoken by an exuberant John bouncing up and down on his chest. His suggestion that the two of them should go out together for the day was greeted with wild excitement. Mimi offered no opposition, believing the purpose of the outing was to buy some new clothes for John. Father and son then caught a tram into Liverpool, where Alf took his older brother Sydney into his confidence, swearing him to secrecy. Sydney reiterated his own willingness to adopt John, though Alf later claimed never to have seriously considered this option.

Blackpool was Alf’s chosen destination not only as a northwestern seaside resort of fabled child appeal but also as the hometown of his shipmate and fellow black-marketeer Billy Hall. For something like three weeks, he hid out there with John, staying with Billy’s parents and spending his abundant spare cash on every carnival ride and sticky treat the little boy could desire. The kindly Halls also found themselves added to the waiting list of John’s would-be guardians. Alf’s initial idea was that, when his money ran out and he returned to sea, John should stay on with the Halls in Blackpool. When it transpired that they were about to sell their home and emigrate to New Zealand, a more complex scheme took shape. Mr and Mrs Hall would take John with them, posing as his grandparents; a little later, Alf, Billy Hall, and Billy’s brother would obtain their own passage to New Zealand free of charge by signing on to some Australasianbound liner, then jumping ship when it reached Wellington.

The plan had no chance to mature any further. Julia had by now picked up Alf’s trail and, one sunny June day, turned up at the Halls’ house, accompanied by Bobby Dykins, to take John back. Initially her demand was not backed up by any real force. When Alf outlined the New Zealand scheme, she agreed it could be the start of a wonderful new life for John and indicated her willingness to let him go, merely asking to see him one last time. When John was brought into the room, his first reaction, after their days of fun and intimacy, was to climb into Alf’s lap. But when Julia admitted defeat and turned to leave, he jumped down and ran after her, burying his face in her skirt, sobbing and begging her not to go. To break the impasse, Alf pleaded with her to give their marriage another chance, but Julia would have none of it.

Alf then told John he must choose between going with Mummy or staying with Daddy. If you want to tear a small child in two, there is no better way. John went to Alf and took his hand; then, as Julia turned away again, he panicked and ran after her, shouting to her to wait and to his father to come, too. But, paralysed once more by fatalistic self-pity, Alf remained rooted in his chair. Julia and John left the house and disappeared into the holiday crowds.

That evening, good-hearted Mr and Mrs Hall sought to cheer Alf up by taking him to a pub called the Cherry Tree and persuading him to do his Al Jolson routine for its assembled customers. His all-too-appropriate song choice was Jolson’s ‘Little Pal’, a eulogy to some angelic Sonny Boy tucked in a soft, safe nursery as his faithful dad watches adoringly over him. Instead of ‘Little Pal’ in each verse, Alf sang ‘Little John’. It made tears stream down his cheeks, although—ever the pro—he sang the song to its end, amid a storm of clapping and whistling. Unlike the little pal he had given up, Alf Lennon would never find crowds oppressive nor applause wearisome.

2 THE NORTHERN CONFEDERACY

Shall I call you Pater, too?

Britain emerged from the Second World War looking far more like a defeated nation than a victorious one. Crippled financially as well as bombed to ruins, the country remained in a state of crisis and privation long after the lights had begun to go on again all over the rest of Europe—even in Germany. Meat, butter and sugar continued to be doled out in miserly amounts dictated by coupons from dun-coloured ration books. Clothes were drab, shapeless and as devoid of individuality as the uniforms they had replaced. Every day seemed to bring some fresh shortage or restriction or appeal by the grim-faced new socialist government for self-sacrifice or thrift. In the pervading climate of shabbiness, inconvenience, chilblains and snot-green smog, the young and the old were almost indistinguishable. Youth had been permanently cancelled, it seemed, along with any kind of frivolity, spontaneity or joy.

Yet despite the icebound grip of this so-called Austerity era, life went on in much the same way it always had. The class system still operated as feudally as ever, the Royal Family was still sacred, the aristocracy still revered. Authority received unquestioning trust and respect, whether manifested in politicians, doctors, lawyers, the clergy, the armed forces or the police. Newspapers voluntarily suppressed anything that might upset the status quo. While rapidly dismantling their colonial Empire, Britons continued to regard themselves as masters of the world, despising all foreigners, treating as natural inferiors all races with skins darker than theirs, and using terms like nigger and wog (not to mention Jewboy and yid) without a qualm. Endemic class snobbery came from beneath as much as from above. Most people on even the lowest social rungs aspired to speak a little ‘better’ than they really could, taking as their model the clipped enunciation of royalty, prime ministers, Shakespearian actors and announcers on the BBC.

Like all great cities of the north, Liverpool lay in ruins for so long that grass grew over the bomb sites and wildflowers sprang up around the disused shelters and the giant letters SWS (for Static Water Supply). An Ealing Studios film called The Magnet, shot on location there and released in 1950, shows how, five years after Victory in Europe, whole districts around the docks still consisted of nothing but craters and rubble heaps, the latter now used by children as unofficial playgrounds.

Seaports by their very nature tend to be individualistic places where life is lived in tougher, freer, more eccentric ways than in the non-mercantile hinterland. Even in the pungent company of Britain’s ports, Liverpool has always stood alone. Its particular character dates back to the 18th and early 19th centuries, when Liverpool merchants were the mavericks of the shipping world, earning fortunes on the infamous Triangle route that transported black slaves from Africa to the Americas, then brought home the proceeds as cotton, sugar and tobacco. In the American Civil War, while the rest of the country maintained uneasy neutrality, Liverpool sided firmly with the slave-owning South, gave it space to open an embassy (which has never been officially closed), and built its most famous warship, the Alabama. Indeed, the final episode of the conflict did not take place in America at all, but in this faraway safe haven for rebels and secessionists. As defeat for the Stars and Bars became inevitable, another Confederate warship, the Shenandoah, appeared in the River Mersey. Rather than turn her over to the victorious Yankees, her captain had crossed the Atlantic to surrender to Liverpool’s lord mayor.

Such was the attitude Liverpool would maintain into the 20th century—its back turned to the rest of Britain, its gaze fixed admiringly, yearningly, above all knowingly, on America. America came and went each day in transatlantic liners like the Queen Mary and Mauretania, and in the savoir faire of Liverpudlian crews whose easy familiarity with fabled cities far away earned them the nickname Cunard Yanks. Even the skyline that greeted ships as they came up the Mersey had a touch of New York’s. It was composed of a wide riverfront piazza called the Pier Head and an acropolis of three giant grey stone buildings known as the Three Graces, respectively the headquarters of the Docks and Harbour Board, the Cunard organisation, and the Royal Liver (pronounced ‘ly-ver’) Insurance Company. The last named was embellished fore and aft by a pair of matching green domes, on each of which a stone ‘Liver Bird’ flapped its wings defiantly at the encircling gulls.

For all this incurable New World bias, Liverpool was also the quintessential northern city, epitomising Victorian civic pride with its central cluster of Athenian-style public buildings dominated by St George’s Hall (called by John Betjeman ‘the finest secular hall in England’) and equestrian statues of the Queen-Empress and Albert the Prince Consort. Apart from the bomb sites, everything still looked very much as in Atkinson Grimshaw’s famous waterfront scene of the 1890s—the stately trams known as Green Goddesses, the pinnacled hotels, theatres and variety halls, the gilt-encrusted chemists’ shops with giant globes of blue liquid in their windows, the grocers displaying enamel signs for Bovril or Mazawattee Tea.

To people down south, it was a vaguely sleazy and menacing place, whose Lime Street was famously a beat for the folk-ballad prostitute Maggie May, and whose polyglot mix of Welsh, Irish, Chinese and West Indians hinted at the nameless perils and vices of some coldwater Barbary Coast. Almost equal ill fame sprang from its reputation as a hotbed of extreme left-wing politics and trade-union militancy, not only on the docks but in the factories and car plants that made up Merseyside’s industrial sprawl. For many years, its most prominent personality was Bessie Braddock, Labour Member of Parliament for Liverpool’s Exchange district, a battleship of a woman whose abrasive rhetoric seemed to convey all the grimness of her home city as much as it did her government’s zeal to make everyone as uncomfortable and miserable as possible.

However, there was another, very different Liverpool, far removed from the world of wharves and warehouses and teeming, brawling dockside pubs. The shipping industry also employed a vast white-collar class of executives, managers and clerical workers, as keen in their social aspirations as any other section of the bourgeoisie. Outside the city’s grimy hub and across the Mersey in Cheshire lay neat, decorous suburbs where the Scouse accent was barely detectable—self-contained middle-class communities, kept in pristine order by benign local authorities and well supplied with high-class shops, leafy parks, golf courses and first-rate schools.

The Magnet, the Ealing film mentioned earlier, recounts the adventures of a well-spoken small boy from such a suburb who gets mixed up with some riotous street kids in tough downtown Liverpool. With hindsight, it seems prophetic.

The oft-repeated tale of how Mimi Smith came to assume sole responsibility for bringing up her six-year-old nephew, John Lennon, could not be simpler or more heart-warming. Mimi was of the type that people of earlier generations called a ‘good sort’ or a ‘brick’, a modern-day Betsey Trotwood whose exterior brusqueness camouflaged a heart of purest gold. When John’s real father and mother proved deficient, she took it on herself to fill the role of both together, making it her single-minded mission to give him, in her own words, ‘what every child has a right to—a safe and happy home life.’

That was the version of events John himself always firmly believed. ‘My parents couldn’t cope with me,’ he was to tell countless interviewers in those words or similar ones, ‘so I was sent to live with an auntie…’ Nothing can detract from Mimi’s care and self-sacrifice in the years that followed. But the background circumstances were rather more complicated than either of them remembered, or cared to remember.

Born in 1906, Mimi was one of those people, very like Betsey Trotwood and other sinewy Dickens females, who seemed never to have known youthful passion or indiscretion. She was a person of exceptional intelligence, highly articulate and an omnivorous reader, who should have gone on from school to university, and might have done equally well as a lawyer, doctor or teacher. Instead, she had always been expected to act as an extra parent to her four younger sisters and to regard the values of home and family as paramount. In young womanhood, the brisk and practical side of her seemed to promise more than the intellectual one. When she was 19, she enrolled as a student nurse at Woolton Convalescent Hospital, staying on there after she qualified and eventually reaching the rank of ward sister. During the early 1930s, she became engaged to a young doctor from Warrington whom she had met on the wards, but before wedding plans could be made, her fiancé died from a virus passed on to him by one of his own patients.

Not that her early life was without its exotic moments. At the convalescent hospital, her charges included some former employees of a wealthy industrialist named Lynton Vickers, who remained conscientiously concerned for their welfare and came regularly to visit them. Between the caring plutocrat and the angular young ward sister there developed a mutual respect and affection. At Vickers’ invitation, Mimi took a sabbatical from nursing to become his secretary, living in at his Gothic mansion in Betws-y-Coed in North Wales.

Such diversions came to an end with her marriage to George Smith, at the mature age of 33 in 1939. The Smith family were dairy farmers in Woolton, a place which at that time, with its open fields and leafy lanes, resembled a country village more than a big-city suburb. George first got to know Mimi because the convalescent hospital where she worked was part of his morning milk round. The dairyman’s thoughts soon turned to marriage, but Mimi proved more cautious, declaring herself unwilling to be ‘tied to a gas stove or a sink’ and regarding George as no more than a reliable standby ‘whenever I was hungry or stuck in town’. Even for that buttonedup time and place, theirs was a relationship singularly lacking in romance. When Mimi finally did agree to get engaged, it was sealed with a businesslike handshake rather than a kiss. ‘George was different from me…chalk and cheese, really,’ she would remember. ‘I was always filibustering about, but he was a quiet man. Set in his ways a bit, but a kind man.’ She recalled, too, how George’s mild nature made him easily controllable, without resort to ‘filibustering’. ‘I used to give him a look and he’d know all right if he’d upset me. Just give him The Look and he’d know.’

Possibly in reaction to their domineering father, all the Stanley sisters but Julia had ended up with quiet, unassertive men whose sole function in the family was to be breadwinners and who took little or no part either in its management or its complex internal politics. Elizabeth, the second eldest, known as Mater, had first married a marine surveyor named Charles Molyneux Parkes; after Parkes’ death in 1944, she had married a Scottish dentist, Robert (‘Bert’) Sutherland. Anne, the third in seniority, known as Nanny, had married a Ministry of Labour official named Sydney Cadwallader. Harriet, known as Harrie, the second-youngest of the five sisters and most adventurous of the quartet, had first married an Egyptian engineering student named Ali Hafez and emigrated with him to Cairo. Just prior to the war, Hafez had died of septicaemia after a routine tooth extraction, and Harrie had returned to Liverpool with their daughter, Liela. Having given up British nationality, Harrie was classed as a foreign alien and obliged to report regularly to the authorities. A judiciously swift remarriage to Norman Birch of the Royal Army Service Corps restored her UK passport to her.

Mimi, Mater, Nanny and Harrie were recognisably a clan. Though none was as strikingly pretty as Julia, all four had a rangy, suntanned elegance—not the Marlene Dietrich type so much as the Katharine Hepburn. All dressed immaculately, never setting foot out of doors without hats, gloves and matching shoes and handbags; all were immensely house-proud, capable, talkative, humorous and forceful. Later in John’s life, he would talk of writing a story on the lines of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga about the ‘strong, intelligent, beautiful women [who] dominated the situation in the family. I was always with the women. I heard them talk about the men and talk about life. They always knew what was going on. The men never ever knew.’ Their husbands were categorised, even openly referred to, as outsiders—a tag that would also be given the marriage partner of every child in the family.

But of the four, only Mimi had remained childless. Her explanation was that she’d had to be a mother to the others during their girlhood, and didn’t want to go through it all again. She was, in fact, thought not to care very much for small children, preferring them when they grew older and could join in intelligent conversation about things she cared for, such as reading and music.

From gentle George Smith, Mimi received social standing as a farmer’s wife in a salubrious part-rural area, and a home that more than met her exacting standards. This was a house named Mendips, at 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton, where the couple took up residence in 1942. Even to someone less attuned to nuances of class, the dwelling proclaimed its superiority in diverse ways: the fact that it was semi-detached rather than terraced; that, instead of plain brick, it was coated in knobby grey pebble dash; that it stood on an avenue, so much more exclusive-sounding than a mere street or road; above all that, far from being just a number on the postman’s round, it also had a name, grandiosely identifying it with the range of hills in far-off Somerset.

On the inside, Mendips was designed to suggest an Elizabethan manor house. Its entrance hall had a half-timbered finish, the lower beams serving as display shelves for Mimi’s prized collection of Royal Worcester and Coalport china. The baronial-looking staircase ascended past a large stained-glass window inset with a Tudor rose motif. The remaining windows had stained-glass borders decorated with Art Nouveau flowers. In addition to the ground-floor living room and dining room, there was the country-manor touch of a morning room, a space rather more modest than its title suggests, immediately adjacent to the kitchen. When the house had been built in 1933, its first owners would have employed a uniformed housemaid rather than just an occasional cleaning lady. Above the morning-room door still hung a board with a row of five panels, indicating where electric bells once summoned the maid to the dining room, drawing room, front door, front bedroom or back bedroom. Yes, the future self-proclaimed working-class hero grew up in a house equipped with servants’ bells.

Mimi always described her acquisition of John solely in terms of family duty—the habit ingrained since childhood of straightening out her younger sister’s muddles. ‘Julia had met someone else, with whom she had a chance of happiness,’ she would say. ‘And no man wants another man’s child.…’ In fact, the relationship between Julia and her headwaiter, Bobby Dykins, had never excluded John in any way. Far from discriminating against ‘another man’s child’, Dykins was prepared to bring John up as if he were his own. He was serious enough about this to have persuaded Julia to move out of 9 Newcastle Road with John and into a small rented flat in Gateacre, where the hoped-for family unit might evolve with less pressure from her relatives.

But for Mimi, Julia’s ‘living in sin’ so publicly with Dykins threatened to make her sister the object of scandalised gossip such as even Alf Lennon had never visited on the super-respectable Stanley family. Julia might be old enough to lead her own life, but little John should not have to live in such an atmosphere of moral laxity.

Mimi had other motives, too, compounded not only of her unassailable moral certitude but also her reluctance or inability to have a baby by the usual channels, and the almost mystical affinity she had felt with John since first seeing him newly born in his mother’s arms. ‘She decided she wanted him,’ her niece Liela Harvey says. ‘And who could blame her, because he was the cutest little fellow you ever saw.’

Mimi therefore enlisted her father in a campaign against Julia and Dykins that today might almost be defined as harassment. One day, she and Pop Stanley both turned up unannounced at the Gateacre flat, declaring it an unfit place for John to live and demanding to remove him. But Julia, supported by Dykins, refused to give him up. Mimi then sought the intervention of a Liverpool Corporation child-welfare officer, who visited the flat and expressed concern that John was sharing Julia and Dykins’ bedroom. Even by the puritanical ethos of 1940s welfare services, this was not sufficient reason to separate him from his mother. Such a decision could only be Julia’s.

Despite the Stanleys’ disparaging nickname of Spiv (war slang for a small-time shyster), Dykins was generally a kindly and civilised man. However, when he took a drink too many, the suave, decorous headwaiter turned into an all-too-typical Liverpool male who could ‘lose his rag’ in an instant, bellowing abuse at Julia, sometimes hitting her. And, as ever in times of emergency, her oldest sister was her first port of call. One day while John was with Mimi at Mendips, his mother came in, as he later remembered, ‘wearing a black coat and with her face bleeding’. He was told she had had an accident, but clearly suspected something more sinister. ‘I went out into the garden,’ he recalled. ‘I loved her, but I didn’t want to get involved. I suppose I was a moral coward. I wanted to hide all feelings.’

The upshot was a furious argument between the sisters, as Mimi herself later recounted, which yet again dragged up Julia’s wartime affair with the Welsh soldier, and baby Victoria Elizabeth. ‘[Julia] was looking for sympathy but as far as I was concerned she’d made her bed and had to lie on it, and I told her “You’re not fit to be a mother.” She reacted like I’d slapped her in the face. I just said I think I should have John…[it] just seemed to make sense. George was very fond of him. In many ways our house was a lot quieter than the places he’d been living in and we could give him some stability. He’d had a bit of a bumpy ride up till then.’

In Mimi’s version, Julia was by now ready to agree willingly, even thankfully. But John’s cousin Liela, who was also in the room, saw a very different end to the long tug-of-love. ‘I remember Mimi standing in front of John and telling Julia, “You’re not having him.”’

Once she had won him, Mimi devoted herself completely to John’s care. What little social life she and George used to enjoy she willingly sacrificed; in later life it would be her proud boast that ‘for 10 years [after John was in bed] I never crossed the threshold of that house at night.’ She was careful always to leave a light on outside his room, until a voice sternly called after her, ‘Mimi…don’t waste light!’

Mimi gave John’s life an order and structure he had never known with easy-going Julia—meals served as regularly as clockwork, bed at the same fixed (early) hour each night, baths and shampoos a regular ritual in the house’s single bathroom with its black-and-white chequered lino and freestanding claw-footed tub. Before meals—usually served in the morning room but sometimes in the rather sombre rear dining room—he would be called on to say grace. He was not allowed to come to the table without first washing his hands, or to leave it without asking, ‘May I get down?’

Above all, Mimi was determined that he should speak like a nice middle-class boy from the suburbs, not a coarse, raucous ‘wacker.’ Under her tutelage, there was soon not the slightest taint of innercity Liverpool in John’s voice. ‘I had high hopes for [him] and I knew you didn’t get anywhere if you spoke like a ruffian. I remember once he came home from town on the bus and he’d heard these Liverpudlians talking to each other—Scouse, you know—and he was shocked, he couldn’t understand what they were talking about…I told him he should avoid people like that…He was a country boy…he would never meet [them] except if anyone came to the house to mend something. It was a world away really.’

Yet Mimi’s care, for all its scrupulousness, was not maternal. She remained at heart a hospital nurse who ran her home, and its occupants, with the brisk efficiency of her old ward. Once, John asked her why he still called Julia ‘Mummy’ and her ‘Mimi’ even now that Julia was the less dominant figure in his life. ‘Well, you couldn’t have two mummies, could you?’ Mimi answered with impermeable grown-up logic. Back then, it was quite rare for a child to receive dispensation to call an adult—other than perhaps a nursemaid or other domestic servant—by their first name. With Mimi and John it did not denote intimacy, but a certain measure of distance between them.

With his burly, jovial Uncle George, by contrast, John developed what was probably the most uncomplicatedly loving relationship of his whole life. George, quite simply, treated him like the son he may well have yearned to have with Mimi. In the early war years, when the dairy farm was still active, he would take John around Woolton with him on the milk cart, showing him off to customers as proudly as if he were his own. John loved to go with him to the milking parlour or to the field where Daisy the cart horse spent her leisure hours. When he came home at night, he would open his arms, and John would fly into them, as Mimi remembered, ‘like two trains colliding in the doorway’. They were always kissing each other, a ritual John called ‘giving squeakers’.

George’s career as a cow-keeper (his description on his business card) had ended with his call-up for military service at the late age of 38. During his absence with the army in France, his brother Frank had run down the dairy business, and its fields had been swallowed by a factory making Bear Brand nylon stockings. For a time, George had tried an alternative career as a bookmaker, working out of Mendips in contravention of current gaming laws, which allowed bets to be placed only with licensed operatives at racecourses. He soon abandoned the venture, persuaded jointly by the risk of police prosecution and Mimi’s distaste for the kind of people it brought traipsing through her home. After that, the only work he could find was as night watchman at the Bear Brand factory; the most minor of employees on property his family had once owned.

This meant that he was around the house all through the day, to play with his small nephew and soften or undermine his wife’s strict regime. Although John already loved the cinema, Mimi had a fierce mistrust of ‘picturedromes’, possibly a result of Julia’s former employment in one. John was therefore limited to seemly entertainments such as the periodic Disney screen epics Bambi or Snow White, and the Christmas pantomime at the Liverpool Empire. Sweets were still issued by ration-book ‘stamps’, as they would be until 1953: John’s daily allotment was a single piece of health-giving barley sugar each evening at bedtime.

But George would defy the wifely Look that otherwise ruled him by taking John to Woolton’s little cinema or smuggling sweets or chocolate upstairs to him after lights-out. Mimi felt almost envious—though it was beyond her to admit as much—when she saw the two of them flying paper aeroplanes in the back garden or hugging each other and laughing. Even John’s tendency to tell fibs never clouded the sunshine of their relationship. ‘Tell you what,’ George would say to Mimi with a chuckle. ‘He’s never going to be a vicar.’

As Julia had before him, John soon identified Mimi’s weak spot: her sense of humour. In summertime, while she sat in the back garden in a deck chair, he would stealthily open an upstairs window and flick water onto her head in artfully small, irregular amounts, so that she’d keep thinking she felt raindrops but would never be quite sure. Despite her combustible temper, she did not smack him when he misbehaved; instead, they had shouting matches more suited to combative siblings than aunt and nephew. Afterwards, exhausted as well as exasperated, Mimi would flop down in the easy chair beside the morning-room window. John would creep around the side path, then suddenly rear up and make monster noises at her through the glass. ‘However cross I was, I’d find myself roaring with laughter,’ Mimi recalled. ‘He could always get me going, the same way Julia could.’

His education, too, assumed an even keel that gave Mimi every hope for his future. In November 1945, just after his fifth birthday, his father had enrolled him at Mosspits Lane Infants School in Woolton. But he remained there only five months, leaving at the end of the spring term in 1946. It would later be claimed that the upheavals in his family life had caused some serious behavioural problems and that he was expelled from Mosspits Lane for bullying other children. However, the school’s logbook makes no mention of any expulsion, giving the only reason for his premature departure as ‘left district’.

When Mimi took charge a year later, she sent him to Dovedale Primary School, near the Penny Lane traffic roundabout. After a few initial bus journeys there together, John insisted on going by himself. ‘He thought I was making a show of him [making him look foolish],’ Mimi remembered. ‘Imagine that! So what I used to do was let him get out of the house and then follow him to make sure he didn’t get into any mischief.’ Dovedale proved the perfect choice. After only six months, he was reading and writing with complete confidence. ‘That boy’s as sharp as a needle,’ Mr Bolt, the head teacher, told Mimi. ‘He can do anything as long as he chooses to do it.’ Uncle George had helped by sitting John on his knee each night and picking out words in the Liverpool Echo—thus fostering what would become a lifelong addiction to newsprint.

He had always loved to draw and paint, begging to be bought pencils, paint boxes and paper rather than toys, spending hours wrapped up in worlds of his own creation. At Dovedale he won several prizes for art, including a book entitled How to Draw Horses, which he was to treasure for years afterward. His choice of subjects could sometimes startle teachers accustomed to normal infant renditions of pussycats or ‘My Mummy’. The notable example was a painting he once did of Jesus Christ—a long-haired and bearded figure like a psychic vision of himself 20 years into the future. But mostly his work tended to be caricatures of his classmates and teachers, crazily distorted yet instantly recognisable, which made their models, child and adult alike, howl with laughter. Though good at running and swimming, he was less successful at team sports like football and cricket, owing to a disinclination—and, it soon proved, genuine inability—to keep his eye on the ball. He had inherited his mother’s extreme shortsightedness, and by age seven was pronounced to be in need of glasses. Under the new National Health Service, these were available free of charge. But John so hated the standard issue, with their round wire frames and pink nosepieces, that Mimi agreed to buy him whatever kind he liked. He was taken to a private optician and allowed to choose an expensive pair with more comfortable plastic frames. He could not abide wearing even these, however, and left them off whenever he could.

As a result, his view of the world was largely created by sheer myopia—the weird new forms that everyday people and things can take on for the shortsighted and the wild surrealism that can flow from printed words misread. In addition, he possessed the very Liverpudlian traits of a fascination with language and an irresistible compulsion to play around with it. If his weak eyes did not misrepresent some word accidentally, his quick mind did so deliberately, missing no chance of a pun, a spoonerism or double entendre; he was an instinctive cartoonist in speech as well as on paper. When he suffered a bout of chicken pox—his childhood’s one serious ailment—he called it ‘chicken pots’. Away on holiday, with pocket money in short supply, he sent Mimi a postcard saying, ‘Funs is low.’

Small boys in glasses tend to have a weak and vulnerable air. But with John, the opposite was the case. Also at Dovedale, although not in the same class, was a boy named Jimmy Tarbuck, like himself destined one day to write Liverpool’s name across the sky. ‘If ever there was a scrap in the school yard, John was likely to be involved,’ Tarbuck says. ‘And I’ll always remember the way he looked at you. His glasses had really thick lenses, the kind we called bottle-bottoms. At school, we used to have this thing, if you were out for trouble with another kid you’d say “Are you lookin’ at me?” But John’s lenses were so thick, you could never tell if he was looking at you or not.’

Julia and Bobby Dykins, meanwhile, had settled on the Springwood council estate in Allerton, just a couple of miles from Menlove Avenue. Whatever his faults in Mimi’s eyes, Dykins was at least a hardworking man, and a provident one. He now had the prestigious job of headwaiter in the Adelphi Hotel’s sumptuous French restaurant. And, notwithstanding her misadventures with two children thus far, he had persuaded Julia to become a mother again. They were to have two daughters together; Julia, born in 1947, and Jacqueline Gertrude, born in 1949, although Alf Lennon’s continued failure to begin divorce proceedings would prevent them from ever becoming man and wife.

Mimi had initially discouraged Julia from seeing too much of John, fearing that she might upset the wholesome new habits instilled at Mendips. But as time passed, the frost gradually thawed. Dykins was never allowed to join the meek males on the family’s bottom rung, but his daughters were fully accepted by Mimi—and the other sisters—and John was allowed to spend unrestricted time with Julia.

It would have been difficult to do otherwise, since the sisters operated as a team, not merely supporting and confiding absolutely in each other, but helping run one another’s domestic affairs and look after one another’s families. As well as Mendips, therefore, John had the run of three alternative homes, all equally welcoming, happy, and secure. His Aunt Harrie lived only a short walk away at the Cottage, the old Smith dairy farmhouse where Julia and Alf Lennon had briefly settled during the war. His Aunt Mater lived ‘across the water’ at Rock Ferry, Cheshire, in a rambling house with a large garden. When Mater married Bert Sutherland and moved with him to his native Scotland, the house was taken over by her sister, Nanny.

The cousins with whom John played during these regular family get-togethers ranged from his Aunt Nanny’s and Harrie’s toddler sons, Michael and David, to Stanley, the only child of Mater’s marriage to Charles Parkes, who was seven years John’s senior. Stanley had been responsible for the sisters’ eccentric pet names, first mispronouncing Mary as ‘Mimi’, calling Anne ‘Nanny’ when she’d looked after him during the war, and dubbing his own mother ‘Mater’, in tune with her fastidious elegance, when he went away to boarding school and began learning Latin. John extended the habit by calling his Uncle George ‘Pater’. Alf Lennon’s most abiding memory from their ill-omened flight to Blackpool was of a small boy who spoke ‘like a gentleman’ and gravely inquired, ‘Shall I call you Pater, too?’

He was especially fond of his cousin Liela, the daughter of Aunt Harrie’s Egyptian first marriage, a stunningly pretty girl with a smile that can still light up a 40-year-old sepia snapshot. Liela was only three and a half years John’s senior, so she became his most regular playmate and accomplice inside the family. Liela remembers a sunny-natured, affectionate small boy who had no inhibitions about hugging and kissing her. ‘Think of all those songs about love that John wrote before he was even 21,’ she says. ‘How could he have done that if he hadn’t had a lot of love in his own life?’

He seemed to remember little of the war that had been waged over him, or of being passed around competing would-be parents like a parcel. Mimi volunteered little information, replying to his questions in only the briefest anodyne fashion. ‘[She] told me my parents had fallen out of love,’ he would recall. ‘She never said anything directly against my mother and father. I soon forgot my father. It was like he was dead.’ But Alf was very much alive and, to begin with at least, still a very real threat to Mimi’s guardianship. She had not officially adopted John, nor would she ever do so; Alf remained married to Julia and in a position of moral ascendancy as far as the law was concerned. At any moment, he could have walked through the front door and demanded that his son be returned to him.

This danger was soon neutralised, in large part thanks to the hapless Alf himself. After parting from John in Blackpool, he had drowned his sorrows at sea again, signing aboard the Royal Mail steamer Andes on her maiden voyage to Argentina. Buenos Aires had produced another of those apocalyptic misadventures that only seemed to happen to him. Picked up with some other British mariners in a routine police sweep, he found himself held in solitary confinement for two days. The explanation was that his captors had misread the page in his passport where his signature, ‘ALennon’ was immediately preceded by the name of his next of kin, given simply as ‘John’. He was therefore assumed to be ‘John Alennon’. A notorious murderer in Argentina at the time also bore that name, and the police had mistaken Alf for him. On regaining his freedom and returning to Britain, he resumed service, on the Dominion Monarch, but in posts of declining importance, first as Assistant Boots (shoe cleaner), then as Silverman (custodian of restaurant silverware).

By his own later account, he still cherished hopes of winning John back and carrying out their Blackpool scheme of emigrating to New Zealand. When the Dominion Monarch returned to Tilbury in December 1949, he resolved to catch a train from London to Liverpool and have it out with Julia again. On his way to Euston Station, however, he was diverted by some shipmates into a Soho pub crawl. This ended in the early hours of the following morning with a riotously drunken Alf smashing the display window of a West End shop and attempting to waltz with the mannikin inside. Hauled before an unsympathetic magistrate, he was sentenced to six months in Wormwood Scrubs.

Alf’s plight could not better have suited the purposes of his unofficial judges in Liverpool. According to his brother Charlie, Mimi wrote to him while he was in prison, threatening to tell John his father was a ‘jailbird’ if ever he tried to contact him again. The possession of a criminal record also effectively ended Alf’s career at sea. Defeated and dejected, he took a menial job as a dishwasher in a hotel kitchen and seemed to give up all thought of ever contacting John again.

Not only his father but the whole Lennon side of his family was now firmly airbrushed from John’s consciousness. For the rest of his life, he would have no idea what decent, brave and loyal people also bore his surname. His grandmother, the redoubtable Polly, had refused to leave her house throughout the war, even though Toxteth was in one of the worst-blitzed quarters of Liverpool. John had been wont to visit Copperfield Street only with his father or during his stay with his Uncle Sydney and Aunt Madge. After the parting from Alf, his visits there ceased. When Polly died in 1949, of stomach cancer, she had not seen him for something like three years. ‘That side of John’s family was never mentioned,’ his cousin Liela remembers. ‘As children, we didn’t even know it existed.’

Even when no aunts and cousins happened to be visiting, Mendips was always a lively and crowded place. To supplement George’s small income, Mimi took in a succession of boarders—‘paying guests’, as they were known in the 1950s—whom she provided with meals as well as bed-sitter accommodation in the bay-windowed front bedroom. These lodgers, exclusively male, were usually students at Liverpool University and tended to become part of the family, helping out in the garden, keeping George company at his local pub and joining in John’s games. The household also included three animals: a large black-and-white cat named Samuel Pepys, which always sat on George’s lap, a Persian cross named Titch, and an adoring mongrel bitch named Sally.

John adored cats as much as did Mimi and George. One snowy night when he was no more than seven or eight, he returned home carrying a bedraggled brown-and-white Persian kitten, which he said he had been unable to dissuade from following him. He begged to be allowed to keep the kitten, but Mimi said that, since it was obviously valuable, they must first advertise for its owner in the Liverpool Echo. No owner came forward, so the kitten stayed and was given the name Tim. ‘We had Tim for 20 years,’ Mimi recalled. ‘Wherever he was in the world, John was always wanting to know what Tim was up to.’

As well as its country cottages and Art Deco villas, Woolton had many curious old houses, nestling in woodland or behind forbidding stone walls, carved from Liverpool’s native sandstone and embellished with the turrets and gargoyles of fairy-tale castles. The most familiar to John, being only a short walk from Mendips, was a gloomy Gothic mansion bearing the anomalous name of Strawberry Field. No strawberries grew in its extensive grounds, and few were ever tasted in its interior, now a refuge for orphan girls run by the Salvation Army. The inmates attended various schools in the locality but wore their own distinctive uniform of blue-and-white striped dresses and summertime straw hats trimmed with red.

On walks with Mimi or Uncle George, John would always linger outside Strawberry Field, peering through its heavy iron gates and up at its windows as if he felt some affinity with the less fortunate children who lived there. He never missed the chance to visit the home each summer when it held a fund-raising garden fête with homemade cake stalls and games offering prizes of plaster Scottie dogs, peppermint rock candy or lone goldfish suspended dejectedly in water-filled jam jars.

‘I’d give him sixpence to spend on the stalls,’ Mimi remembered. ‘He’d hear the Salvation Army band and he’d pull me along, saying, “Hurry up, Mimi! We’re going to be late!”’

3 THE OUTLAWS

I’d say I had a happy childhood…

I was always having a laugh.

Thanks in largest part to his minstrel grandfather and his would-be minstrel father, but also to numerous others on both sides of his family, John could be fairly said to have had music in his bones. Yet in his early years the odds seemed weighted against his becoming a musician at all, let alone the one he finally did.

In early-fifties Britain, music was something most people got along without. The technology for listening to it in the home consisted of gramophones with manually cranked turntables, and thick wax 78 rpm (revolutions per minute) discs the size of car hubcaps, which came in plain brown paper covers and broke when dropped. Rare was the household whose record collections numbered more than about a dozen of these sepia-wrapped, dust-attracting monsters.

Back then, one did not hear music playing incessantly in shops, office buildings, airports, station concourses, doctors’ surgeries or lifts, as a background to news bulletins or from the earpieces of telephones. Portable radios were hulking battery-powered objects designed to look like small suitcases. Tape recorders for private use were almost unknown. Sound came in mono only and did not travel. In public places like parks or beaches, the only noise would be human hubbub. Most residential areas passed their days and nights in the same unbroken silence.

Television was still a fabulously expensive novelty, enjoyed in only a few thousand homes and served by a solitary BBC channel offering a scanty Programme in the afternoon and early evening. Radio, likewise the BBC’s monopoly and better known as the wireless, broadcast music largely as a public duty, to keep the factories running and the food queues quiet. So afraid was the corporation’s Light Programme of overexciting its listeners that records with the faintest sexual frisson were banned from the airwaves, and continuity announcers forbidden to use such inflammatory terms as hot jazz. Professional musicians were a tiny faction who had mastered their complex craft only after years of study, possessed little personality outside their playing, and in general projected an aura that was at once middle-aged, irritable and foreign.

For Mimi Smith, nothing more clearly defined the Alf Lennon world from which she had rescued John than people enjoying raucous-accented singsongs in their front parlours or—worse still—in the pubs wrapped around a thousand and one inner-Liverpool street corners. The only music Mimi cared for was the classical kind, as played by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Manchester’s revered Hallé, and BBC radio’s cathedral-solemn Third Programme (whose announcers wore dinner jackets even though visible to none but their own studio staff). Between classical and popular music in this era there was no possible meeting point. Pop lovers regarded classical as impossibly difficult and highfalutin; classics lovers regarded pop as just so much horrible noise.

In John’s family as now constituted, there was only one person of any musical ability. His mother Julia, though otherwise not noted for consistency, still kept up the banjo and piano accordion she had learned as a girl. She was a natural entertainer, liable at the slightest encouragement to break into impromptu performance. ‘Judy [the children’s name for her] played the banjo and accordion really well,’ her niece Liela remembers. ‘She had a lovely singing voice that I can only compare to Vera Lynn’s. And she was a wonderfully witty and entertaining person to be with. She could keep going for hours at a time, singing, telling jokes, doing impersonations, and you’d never get tired of it.’

From John’s earliest childhood, his response to music was instant and visceral. In 1946, just before his sixth birthday, the BBC Light Programme started the nightly 15-minute adventures of Dick Barton, Special Agent, an Austerity forerunner to James Bond, introduced by a melodramatic theme tune called ‘The Devil’s Gallop’. Mimi remembered how deathly white John’s face always went each evening at 6:45 as its frantic strains echoed through the house.

Under the Stanley sisters’ mutual support system, he would spend a long holiday in Scotland each summer with his Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert. The high point of his stay was the Edinburgh Tattoo, an extravagant military band display with the city’s medieval castle as its dramatic backdrop. Among the red-coated phalanxes playing ‘Annie Laurie’ or ‘Scotland the Brave’, there would sometimes be an American Air Force band in the Glenn Miller mould that—as John later recalled—‘swung like shit’. He never forgot his emotion during the Tattoo’s closing ritual, when all the lights went out and a lone set of bagpipes wheezed and wailed its valediction for another year.

Mendips, of course, boasted nothing so newfangled and showy as a television set. The only wireless stood on the morning-room sideboard: an imposing artefact with a lacquered wood cabinet, gold knobs and a dial that could theoretically find European stations like Limoges and Hilversum. Kindly Uncle George wired it to an extension speaker in John’s room so he could listen while lying in bed. But that was mainly to the comedy shows that came after his 7.30 lightsout—Take It from Here, Variety Bandbox, Much-Binding in the Marsh, or Stand Easy. His favourite was Life with the Lyons, a sitcom about an American family in London, featuring the thirties’ screen stars Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon with their real-life children Barbara and Richard.

Aged seven or eight, he took up the mouth organ, just as both his parents—not to mention several of his uncles—had done at roughly similar ages. The epiphany occurred when a medical student who was boarding at Mendips casually took one of the little silver oblongs from his pocket and blew a few notes on it, to John’s huge fascination. The student offered to buy him a mouth organ of his own, provided he learned to play a tune on this one by the next morning. John disappeared with it and in no time had learned to play two.

The mouth organ revealed that he had a natural musical ear just like his mother’s, his father’s and most of those unknown Lennon uncles. He soon outgrew his first cheap little instrument, graduating to a chromatic model—with a sliding bar for changing key—and buying a teach-yourself manual, The Right Way to Play Chromatic Harmonica by Captain James Reilly. With Captain Reilly’s help, he mastered dozens of tunes, from old English airs like ‘Greensleeves’ to film music like the theme from Moulin Rouge. Travelling by Ribble Company bus from Liverpool up to Mater’s in Edinburgh, he sometimes would hardly stop playing for the whole six-hour ride. On one of these journeys, the driver offered to give him a mouth organ that had been left behind by a previous passenger if he would come to the Edinburgh bus depot next day to collect it. John kept the appointment, chaperoned by his cousin Stanley, and duly received a magnificent top-of-the-line chromatic Hohner. ‘I believe it was the same mouth organ he played on his records,’ Stanley says.

He quickly progressed to tinkering on any piano he encountered, at school or in friends’ houses, discovering the same instant facility in his fingers as on his lips. But Mimi, so indulgent in every other way, refused his plea to have his own piano at Mendips. ‘I wouldn’t have it,’ she remembered. ‘ “We’re not going down that road, John,” I told him. “None of that common sing-song stuff in here.”’

In the house overlooking Mendips’ back garden lived Ivan Vaughan, a Dovedale Primary classmate whom John had instantly dubbed Ivy. The two would communicate with whistles or on scraps of paper stuffed into tin cans and swung back and forth by the rope that hung from John’s tree house. A few doors along from Ivan in Vale Road lived Nigel Walley, a cheerful, enthusiastic boy John had met while briefly attending Mosspits Lane school. Nigel, too, became his eager follower, receiving the nickname Walloggs.

The favourite meeting place for local children was a dirt field known as the Tip, in prewar years the site of an artificial lake. It was here that John first encountered a fellow seven-year-old whose rubicund face was topped by a mat of curly hair so sandy pale as to be almost albino. His name was Pete Shotton.

Pete had previously regarded Ivan and Nigel as his gang, and felt some hostility to the kid from Menlove Avenue who seemed to be taking them over. Discovering that John’s middle name was Winston, he began taunting him as ‘Winnie, Winnie, Winnie!’ The resultant scuffle ended with Pete on the ground on his back and John kneeling on his shoulders, pinning down his arms. There he was willing to let matters rest so long as Pete promised never again to call him Winnie. Pete gave his promise and was released—but, once at a safe distance, broke out again with ‘Winnie, Winnie, Winnie!’ John was at first so angry that he couldn’t speak. Then, at the sheer effrontery of it, his face broke into a grin. He had found his first soul mate.

In those days, children roamed freely out of doors for hours on end without their families feeling the least anxiety. And Woolton and its environs offered many inviting places for John and his friends to explore. Across from the Tip was a rugged open space called Foster’s Field, with thickets of blackberry bushes and a pond where they caught tadpoles, newts and frogs and paddled a homemade raft. There were meadows that frothed creamily with cow parsley in summer, and tracts of dense woodland haunted by cuckoos and corncrakes. Calderstones Park and Reynolds Park lay within easy walking distance, as did the grounds of Strawberry Field and of a vanished stately home named Allerton Towers. On the opposite side of Menlove Avenue from Mendips stretched the greens and bunkers of Allerton Golf Course.

Their games were fuelled by make-believe, demanding vigorous activity rather than the modern child’s sedentary trance. The favourite of all was cowboys and Indians, with the participants shooting each other and falling down ‘dead’ with no conception of pain, and Native Americans cast as villains in obedience to Hollywood mythology. But John’s version was different. ‘He always wanted to be the Indian,’ Mimi recalled. ‘That was typical John, to support the underdog. And because he was leader of his little group, the Indians always won.’ Rather than white Western icons like Buffalo Bill or Wild Bill Hickok, his hero was Sioux Chief Sitting Bull. Mimi would stain his face with gravy browning and daub it with lipstick for war paint. From their local butcher’s shop she begged cock-pheasant feathers to make him a chief’s headdress. ‘He loved it,…he never took it off. I can see him in it now, dancing around Pete Shotton, tied to a tree in our garden.’

The centre of Woolton village, socially as well as spiritually, was its Anglican church, St Peter’s, a sandstone edifice with a square Norman-style clock tower. John attended Sunday school in its church hall, as did Pete, Ivy and Walloggs, plus a boy named Rod Davis from King’s Drive and a precociously pretty little girl named Barbara Baker. On leaving home after Sunday lunch, they would each be given a few pennies to put into the collection plate or the cottageshaped money box for Dr Barnardo’s homes. At John’s instigation, they spent the money on chewing gum instead, masticating it showily through their couple of hours’ Bible study.

His pure treble singing voice quickly won him a place in the church choir, to which Nigel Walley also belonged. At first, he seemed to enjoy the ritual of dressing up in a white surplice and turning out for services twice every Sunday as well as Saturday weddings, which meant a half crown (12.5p) payment for each chorister. He was also mysteriously drawn to St Peter’s little churchyard (or the bone orchard, as he called it) where mossy, weather-beaten tombstones traced Woolton families back two centuries and more. He would read and reread the etched inscriptions with their familiar local names, their forgotten tragedies between the lines and their soft euphemisms for death:

Also ELEANOR RIGBY

THE BELOVED WIFE OF THOMAS WOODS

AND GRANDDAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE

DIED 10TH OCTOBER 1939, AGED 44 YEARS

ASLEEP

Mimi would later remember how comforted John seemed by the notion in Eleanor Rigby’s epitaph that ‘it wasn’t gone for ever…just asleep.’

The rector of St Peter’s was a middle-aged Welsh bachelor named Morris Pryce-Jones, known to his younger parishioners as Pricey. Far from the grim stereotype of his race, Pricey was a kindly and tolerant man, prepared for boys to be boys up to a point. But he was utterly unprepared for boys to be anything like John Lennon. One Sunday during a particularly arduous sermon, John’s fellow chorister David Ashton began surreptitiously reading a Boy Scouts’ Pocket Diary, which included the maxim ‘A Boy Scout is Thrifty.’ John produced a pen and altered it to ‘A Boy Scout is Fifty,’ sending everyone around them ‘into tucks’—the Liverpool term for laughter so uncontrollable that it puckers up the entire body as if by some invisible drawstring. Both boys were docked their next wedding payment.

One Sunday school teacher, ‘Ma’ Davies, had an altercation with John during a lesson about Jesus’s encounter with the Scribes and Pharisees. So incensed was he by the story that he announced that Christ’s persecutors ‘must have been Fascists’. Ma Davies told him that Fascists were far worse than Scribes or Pharisees, but John refused to be convinced. The teacher might have given him some credit for such strong emotions on behalf of the Redeemer; instead, she excoriated him for ‘making trouble’ and ordered both him and David Ashton, who had supported him, to report to Pricey for punishment.

Deciding that a mere telling-off would have no effect, the rector decided to take the rare step of caning them. Unfortunately, the nearest to a cane he could find was an umbrella belonging to a female chorister named Bertha Radley, a relative of the Eleanor Rigby memorialized in the churchyard. Her umbrella was an ornate one, covered in crocodile skin, with a handle shaped like a crocodile’s head. ‘John got it first, one on each hand,’ Ashton remembers. ‘Then when Pricey hit me, the handle broke off. I remember to this day Bertha saying “Oh, my poor crocodile!”’

The choicest of this rich crop of misbehaviour and insubordination occurred, suitably enough, at Harvest Festival time. Woolton still remained agricultural enough for harvesting to have real significance, and St Peter’s always rose to the occasion, decorating its altar lavishly with grain sheaves and offerings of vegetables and fruit from local greenhouses and garden plots. When Pricey emerged from the vestry to lead the singing of harvest hymns like ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’, he found the altar fruit depleted as if by a flock of predatory crows. A glance along the giggling choir stalls was sufficient to identify the pilferer. John was expelled from the choir, and he and Pete Shotton were banned from the church altogether.

Mimi urged him to beg reinstatement, but in vain. ‘I told him “It’s all part of your education, John.” But he just shouted back “kayshuedshun, kayshuedshun!” He was always inventing daft words. And he used to make me laugh by taking off the choirmaster—he’d pull a funny face and conduct the cats.’

His bedroom, situated directly above the front porch, was a tiny elongated space, almost filled by a single bed with a blue-green canopy, pushed against the right-hand wall. A diminutive clothes cupboard and a table and chair by the window were its only other furniture. John would always classify himself as ‘a homebody’, and this was where he spent as many contented boyhood hours by himself as he did in the open air with his friends. At such times, the house would fall so utterly silent that Mimi presumed he was out. Then she’d push open his bedroom door and find him on his bed with a book, in a position of seeming perverse discomfort. He would lie flat with his body twisted round and his legs resting up the wall. All his life, he could never fully savour print without first folding himself into that awkward hairpin shape.

He had caught Mimi’s love of reading—though with John it was always to be more like an insatiable physical hunger. Years later, his aunt would mimic the half-truculent way he used to scoop a volume from a shelf and turn away, his eyes already devouring the print like twin piranhas. Children’s literature in the early fifties offered a limited choice compared with what would come later—A A Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, Hugh Lofting’s adventures of Doctor Dolittle. The genre was dominated by Enid Blyton, with her prolific adventures of the Famous Five and the Secret Seven and her chronicles of the girls’ boarding schools Mallory Towers and St Clare’s. Lying on his red quilt, with his feet higher than his head, John read them all.

The two outstanding favourites of his youngest years were Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. He loved the pure anarchy that lay behind their prim Victorian façade, the incessant punning and spoonerising, the lunatic logic, always spelled out in flawless syntax and perfect scansion; the songs whose hypnotically simple refrains (‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?…’) needed no setting to music. In Carroll’s fabulous bestiary, if he had known it, lay several future incarnations of himself—the hyperactive Mad Hatter, the sleepy Dormouse, the Caterpillar puffing smugly on its hookah, the derisively grinning Cheshire Cat, Alice herself, as she experiments with life-transforming pills and potions, and the Walrus on that nightmare beach where the sun never goes down, sweet-talking a school of baby oysters into becoming hors d’oeuvres. Most influential of all was the mock-epic poem entitled ‘Jabberwocky’—to the boy with his legs up the wall, nothing less than a tutorial in how nonsense can be made infinitely more descriptive than sense:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe…

Through the Looking-Glass ends with a coda, which runs:

A boat beneath a sunny sky

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July…

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

Twenty-five years in the future there would be a song about that same phantom girl, that same ‘boat on the river’, and ‘marmalade skies’ recalling the Orange Marmalade jar Alice sees during her fall into the White Rabbit’s burrow.

At the opposite end of the scale, he devoured the weekly boys’ comics that existed in huge quantity in the early fifties, from the Rover, Wizard and Hotspur, which contained serial stories (usually about wartime Nazis going ‘Himmel!’ and ‘Donner und Blitzen!’) to the all-cartoon periodicals the Beano, the Dandy, Radio Fun, Film Fun and Knockout. Along with sweets and picturedromes, Mimi had forbidden him comics, except perhaps the high-minded Eagle (edited by a clergyman), but his Uncle George would defy the Look by smuggling Beanos or Dandys up to him—and in any case they were freely available at the homes of his friends.

He would write his own adventure stories, like the ones in Wizard and Hotspur, but with himself as their hero, and invent his own cartoon strips like the ones in the Beano and Knockout. At the age of seven he handwrote and drew a whole magazine entitled ‘Speed and Sport Illustrated’ by J W Lennon, with portraits of football players in action, cartoon strips, and the beginning of an adventure serial. ‘If you liked this,’ the first instalment ended, ‘Come again next week. It’ll be even better.’ But of all the diverse high and low cultural sources that fed his imagination—and shaped his character for ever—none could compare with William Brown.

William was the creation of Richmal Crompton Lamburn (1890-1969), a Lancashire classics teacher who switched to writing under the name Richmal Crompton after being stricken by polio. Her 11-year-old hero had originally been intended for an adult readership, but children quickly latched on to him, ensuring his continuance through 37 story collections. William was the archetypal naughty small boy in the innocent decades before vandalism, mugging, joyriding and alcopops changed the agenda. Incorrigibly noisy and untidy, his pockets bulging with catapults, marbles and live frogs, he is the bane of his conventional parents, his uptight older brother and sister, and every schoolteacher, clergyman and nervous elderly spinster in his orbit. He has three companions, Ginger, Douglas and Henry, with whom, in a gang known as the Outlaws, he roams the countryside, trespassing, bird’s-nesting, playing Red Indians, waging guerrilla war against his sworn enemy, Hubert Lane, and dodging his besotted follower, a prototype groupie named Violet Elizabeth Bott. The Outlaws form an unbreakable blood-brotherhood against repressive and pompous adults: they have their own private language, secret signs and sacred rituals, and their own cavernous hideout-cum-auditorium, the Old Barn.

William is a many-sided character: a leader whose authority over his followers is absolute; a daydreamer who imagines exotic careers as a big-game hunter, secret agent or circus clown; a virtuoso of scorn and sarcasm and an inventive liar; an exhibitionist, given to singing at the top of his voice, playing mouth organs and trumpets at high volume, dressing up in exotic clothes and wearing elaborate false beards and mustaches; a hustler, forever trying to raise money for new water pistols or cricket bats; a tender-hearted animal lover; a tireless novelty-seeker and observer of new trends and fashions; an indefatigable writer of lurid stories, dramas and poems in his own individual spelling; and organizer of plays, shows and exhibitions in his bedroom or the Old Barn. His greatest joy is to escape from his own genteel environment and run around with ’vulgar’ workingclass children, swapping his nice clothes for their scruffy ones and trying to imitate the fascinating crudeness of their speech. His spirits are never lower than when he is discovered among these unsuitable companions and restored to the outraged bosom of his family.

Having gobbled up the few red clothbound William books on Mimi’s bookshelf, John began to collect them, following their hero through the twenties, thirties and Second World War to the threshold of the space age. He loved the caustic prose style, which made no concession to young readers, freely using words such as inamorata and rhododendron, yet always sided with William against a largely risible grown-up community of choleric retired colonels, ditzy vicars’ wives, dimwitted policemen and sandal-wearing vegetarians. William’s world, moreover, was uncannily like the one that John himself inhabited—same ‘village’ surrounded by countryside, same genteel home with servants’ bells. He identified totally with William’s rebelliousness, his audacity, his humour, his flights of fantasy, his need always to be the kingpin yet always to have companions, his share-and-share-alike generosity, his proneness to hilarious misspellings and mispronunciations, even his preference for Red Indians over cowboys and addiction to playing the mouth organ. And it was William who inspired him to create his first gang of four, united against the world.

The Outlaws have an unchanging hierarchy, with William at the top, supported by his ‘boon companion’ Ginger, and Henry and Douglas forming a less essential second division. In John’s Vale Road following, Ivy Vaughan and Nigel ‘Walloggs’ Walley corresponded to Henry and Douglas, while albino-blond Pete Shotton, his prime accomplice and audience, was a natural Ginger.

With John as their leader, they devoted after-school hours, weekends and holidays to reincarnating William and the Outlaws in Woolton. Many of their escapades were dastardly only in their own eyes—walking on grass in defiance of KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs, entering and exiting wherever NO ENTRY or NO EXIT was proclaimed, drinking from taps marked NOT DRINKING WATER, and—in the words of their Sunday school classmate Rod Davis—‘running into Marks and Spencer’s and shouting “Woolworths!”’ At other times, they flouted authority and risked life and limb in ways that would have caused apoplexy in their respective homes. One of their favourite games was to hang on behind the trams that clanked up and down Menlove Avenue. Another was to climb a tree over a busy main road and play a version of Chicken with the double-decker buses passing beneath. When a bus approached, one of them would poke a leg into its path and dangle it there until the last possible moment before impact. Whoever kept his nerve for longest was the winner. If anyone’s shoe actually touched the bus roof, that counted as bonus points.

Lennon’s gang, as people soon took to calling them, became the curse of a district otherwise blessedly free from persecution or disturbance. They trespassed on Allerton Golf Course, annoying the grave businessmen at play there and conducting riotous games of their own. They crept in through the back entrances of cinemas without paying and disrupted performances until ejected by furious usherettes. Their ‘scrumping’ of apples from other people’s gardens became so pestilential that one enraged grower appeared with a shotgun and fired both barrels at John’s fleeing form.

Like William, he became a Boy Scout, joining the 3rd Allerton troop, but also like William, he had little time for the Scout code of duty and respectfulness. David Ashton, his companion in the troop’s ‘Badgers’ section, recalls the alternative marching chorus he encouraged the others to sing as they tramped along in their shorts, bush hats, and neckerchiefs: ‘We are the Third! The mad Third! We come from ALLeerTON and we are MAD! MAD!’

A frequent background for William’s and the Outlaws’ adventures are summer fêtes and garden parties. Their Woolton disciples, too, were invariably to be found when some local church or institution set out its innocent fund-raising paraphernalia of raffia stalls, lucky dips and kiddies’ fancy-dress parades. They would sneak into the tents where home-made cakes and pies or lovingly nurtured raspberries awaited the judges’ inspection, and make off with whatever they fancied. Once stuffed to the gills, they would entertain themselves by mocking the well-meaning people who were attempting to raise money for good causes, and the families innocently enjoying themselves. Nigel Walley has a mirthful recollection of one garden fête ‘run by the nuns’ where they spotted a group of monks seated together on a bench. ‘Somehow John got hold of this robe and dressed himself up as a monk. He was sitting with the other monks, talking to them in all these funny words while we were rolling about under the tent, in tucks.’

The portrayal, however, contained one major departure from character. Whereas William, for all his lawlessness, never stoops to intentional larceny, John—egged on, as always, by Pete—became a habitual and dedicated shoplifter. Confectioners in those days would often trustingly display sweets and chocolate on their counters in open boxes or arranged in glass dishes with paper doilies. ‘We’d go into this certain place that was run by a little old lady,’ Nigel Walley remembers. ‘John’d point to things he said he wanted on the top shelf, and all the time he’d be filling his pockets from the counter. He did the same at a shop that sold Dinky Toys in Woolton, opposite the Baths. He’d put a tractor or a little car in his pocket while the bloke was looking the other way. We went back to that same shop later, but this time John hadn’t got his glasses on. He couldn’t understand why his fingers couldn’t get at the Dinky cars. He couldn’t see that the bloke had covered them with a sheet of glass.’

Mimi was generous with pocket money, giving John a weekly allowance of five shillings (the same amount received by William’s pampered arch-foe, Hubert Lane), on condition that he did certain household jobs, such as mowing the lawn. Like William, he shared whatever he had with his ‘boon companions’. He found it impossible to hang on to money, just as he would all his life; nor was he willing to earn a bonus by legitimate means. The one time he ever received physical chastisement from Mimi was when she found he’d stolen some cash from her handbag. ‘I was always taking a little, for soft things like Dinkies,’ he would recall. ‘This day I must have taken too much.’

In contrast with his kind heart and impulsive generosity, he could show a lack of sensitivity and compassion that even roistering Liverpool boys sometimes felt to be going too far. This was not an era of verbal tact toward the physically and mentally handicapped, but John seemed to find all forms of affliction hilarious. His drawings teemed with hideously misshapen, obese or skeletal figures, endowed with too few or too many limbs and covered with warts or sores. A blind person tapping along with a white stick, or a child-on-crutches collection box would reduce him to giggles—a device with which many people try to disguise fear or repugnance. He often entertained his followers with what they called his ‘cripple act’ when he would shamble and cavort like Quasimodo, grinning with the blank-eyed oblivion of a simpleton and holding one hand crookedly like a claw.

Even then, when nothing in his daily life even hinted at it, he seems to have had premonitions of his strange destiny, almost as if his grandmother Polly’s reputed psychic powers were reaching out to him, too. So vivid and exciting were his dreams that he looked forward to going to sleep in his blue-quilted bed almost as much as to a theatrical performance or movie. As he later remembered, he always dreamed in brilliant colour and weird shapes that gave his subsequent first encounters with painters like Salvador Dalí and Hieronymus Bosch the shock of déjà vu.

The most prophetic of his dreams recurred time and again. In one, he was circling in an airplane above Liverpool, looking down at the Mersey, the docks and the twin Liver Birds on their towers, climbing higher and higher with each circuit until the city disappeared from view. In another, he was engulfed by seas of half crowns, the big old predecimal silver coins with milled edges that used to be worth 12.5p but had purchasing power equal to £5 today. In yet another, he recalled ‘finding lots of money in old houses—as much of the stuff as I could carry. I used to put it in my pockets and in my hands and in sacks, and I could still never carry as much as I wanted.’

In 1951, two new Liverpool University students arrived at Mendips to share the bay-windowed room next to John’s. One of them was a 19-year-old biochemistry student from Leeds named Michael Fishwick, the other a medical student named John Ellison. Fishwick was to become Mimi’s favourite paying guest—though as yet neither of them dreamed what that would ultimately entail—and, from his privileged insider’s position, was to share in both the great tragedies of John’s childhood.

The boarders paid £3 5s—which, as Fishwick remembers, was ’slightly above the odds’—for their accommodation and (very good) meals on the gateleg table in the morning room, which Mimi always served in a sitting apart from George and John. He recalls John as a friendly, ‘malleable’ boy, whose behaviour at home gave little hint of the tearaway he was outside, and who spent most of his time reading or drawing pictures of ‘wart-infested trolls’ or caricatures of the new lodgers. Both students at this point seemed to be equally in Mimi’s favour for their good manners, their upmarket love of rugby football, and their willingness to help out with the gardening, sometimes aided by a reluctant John. The pair would sometimes take him out for the day, their usual destination Hoylake on the Cheshire Wirral, where the shipping consisted of graceful white-sailed yachts rather than the Mersey’s dredgers and tugs.

Even the family circumstances that singled him out from other boys seemed in those days more a bonus than a deprivation. With Mimi taking care of him, his mother close at hand, his three other aunts in ever-dependable backup, John lived in an atmosphere of feminine admiration and solicitude, petted and lionised even more than the youngest of his cousins. He had somehow realised that Mimi’s title to him was only of the most tenuous, unofficial kind; as time passed, he became adept at exploiting her constant fear of losing him. If aunt and nephew had a particularly explosive argument, over the state of John’s room, for instance, he would stomp off to Julia’s in Allerton for the night, sometimes the whole weekend, throwing dark hints over his shoulder that he might never come back again.

The little council ‘semi’ at 1 Blomfield Road where Julia lived with Bobby Dykins could not have been more a contrast to Mendips. For Julia shared none of her eldest sister’s devotion to tidiness, routine and domestic protocol. At Julia’s one did not have to wipe one’s feet or hang up one’s coat in the proper place; meals kept no fixed schedule, but might appear on the table at any time. ‘That’s not to say she wasn’t a good housekeeper,’ her niece, Liela, remembers. ‘There was always a stew or a casserole on the stove. And if anyone came to the door when we were about to sit down, an extra place would automatically be laid.’

John seemed to feel no jealousy of the two half-sisters, Julia and Jackie, who enjoyed his mother’s attention seven days a week; they in turn regarded him as a big brother, nicknamed him Stinker, bounced up and down on him in the morning as he lay in bed, and loved the tales of monsters and Mersey mermaids he told them, and the dancing skeletons he would cut out of paper. ‘Julia always made it clear how much she adored him,’ Liela says. ‘She had photographs of him all over the house.’ Just the same, he would have been conscious at every minute that she was no longer really his.

Julia was one of the first in John’s circle to have television, another powerful reason to visit her. In those times, anyone so blessed was under obligation to invite friends and neighbours to ‘look in’, as the phrase went, filling their living rooms with extra seats, extinguishing lights and drawing blinds to create a cinema-like darkness. Early television variety shows sometimes featured elderly survivors of the music hall and even the minstrel eras—Hetty King, singing ‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor’; Leslie Hutchinson, aka Hutch, who had first popularised Alf Lennon’s beloved ‘Begin the Beguine’; and Robb Wilton, the Liverpool-born ‘confidential comic’ whose quavery monologues always began ‘The day war broke out…’ Julia’s favourite was George Formby, the chipper Lancastrian with outsized grin who strummed a banjolele while singing songs of innocent double entendre about Chinese laundries and window cleaners. ‘Judy adored Formby, and John caught it from her,’ Liela says. ‘I remember one day when he was on TV, and the money in the electric meter suddenly ran out, Judy almost went mad.’

At Julia’s, the wireless was always on, tuned to the Light Programme and blaring out the dance music that Mimi could not abide. She also had a gramophone and came home almost every week with a brand-new 78 rpm single in its dull brown wrapper. Thanks to her, John knew everything that was happening on Britain’s early pop music chart—called the Top 12 before it became the Top 20—in particular, whenever the effortless dominance of American performers like Guy Mitchell and Nat King Cole was briefly broken by some homegrown upstart like Ruby Murray or Dickie Valentine.

In the very early fifties, the blood of a British boy was most likely to be stirred by Frankie Laine, who sang sub-operatic arias with cowboy themes, like ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ and ‘Gunfight at OK Corral’. John relished the over-the-top showmanship of Laine and also of Johnnie Ray, who wore a hearing aid and ostentatiously burst into tears during his big hit, ‘Cry’. Surprisingly, though, the hardcase Woolton Outlaw also liked sentimental ballads, even when sung by the ‘old groaner’, Bing Crosby. One Crosby song included a play on words that instantly stuck to the flypaper of his mind: ‘Please…lend your little ears to my pleas…Please hold me tight in your arms…’

During John’s visits, Julia was always the bright, carefree, funloving person he looked on more as an elder sister than a mother. But after he had gone, her daughter Julia remembers, she would sit down in the suddenly quiet living room, open up the gramophone, and put on the record that, for obvious reasons, was her favourite one of all: ‘My Son John’, by the British tenor David Whitfield. During the climactic closing verse, with its eerily accurate prophecies—‘My son John…who will fly someday…have a wife someday…and a son someday…’ her eyes would fill with tears, as though, somehow or other, she guessed she would never see it.

4 SHORTSIGHTED JOHN WIMPLE LENNON

I thought, ‘I’m a genius or I’m mad. Which is it?’

These were days when the Eleven Plus examination regulated every child’s progress through the state educational system like traffic lights, sending those who passed the exam to grammar schools and rest to either secondary modern or technical schools. Throughout John’s latter years at Dovedale Primary, as he would recall, the idea had been ceaselessly drummed into him that ‘if you don’t pass the Eleven Plus you’re finished in life…So that was the only exam I ever passed, because I was terrified.’

For boys who brought such distinction on themselves and their families, the traditional reward was a brand-new bicycle. Uncle George, in no doubt that John would sail through, had picked out a bike for him long before the joyous news reached Mendips. It was an emerald green Raleigh Lenton—almost his own surname—fitted with luxurious extras like a Sturmey-Archer three-speed gear, a dynamo-operated front lamp and a matching green leather saddlebag. True to the spirit of their extended family, John’s cousin Liela could not be allowed to feel left out, so Mimi and George bought her a new bicycle at the same time.

John’s achievement gave him the pick of several excellent grammar schools in central and suburban Liverpool. Mimi’s choice was Quarry Bank High School in Harthill Road, an easy bicycle ride from Mendips via the path across Calderstones Park. He started there at the beginning of the 1952 autumn term, shortly before his twelfth birthday.

Quarry Bank’s designation as a ‘high school’ implied no affinity with the mixed-gender informality of American high schools but rather was a subtle hint of elevation above other boys’ grammar schools in the vicinity. Founded in 1922, it took its name from the local sandstone quarries that had begotten so many major Liverpool buildings, including the Anglican cathedral. The school itself was housed in an ornately neo-Gothic sandstone mansion, built in 1867 by a wealthy merchant named John Bland. Although part of the state system, and charging no fees, it modelled itself on a public school like Harrow or Winchester, with black-gowned masters, a house system and a general air of tradition and antiquity.

Tuition might be gratis, but each pupil’s family was expected to supply the compulsory uniform of black blazer and cap and black-and-gold striped tie. The blazer was an especially natty affair, with its breast-pocket badge of a gold stag’s head above the Latin motto Ex Hoc Metallo Virtutem—‘from this rough metal [comes forth] manhood.’ The cuffs were decorated like those of a junior naval officer, with a raised black stripe surmounted by a ring of gold stags’ heads. The blazers were costly enough when bought from the school’s official outfitter, Wareings in Smithdown Road. Mimi, however, preferred to have John’s made to measure by his Uncle George’s tailor for the whopping sum of £12 apiece, nearly as much as George had paid for the new bike. No real parents could have been more dotingly insistent that he had the best of everything.

The start of a new academic epoch scattered the Woolton Outlaws in widely different directions. Academically gifted and hardworking Ivy Vaughan had won a place at Liverpool Institute, the most renowned of the inner city’s grammar schools. Nigel Walley was bound for the Bluecoat School, near Penny Lane, the former Bluecoat Hospital where Alf Lennon had been a pupil 30 years earlier. But happily for John, his arch crony Pete Shotton also had got into Quarry Bank. ‘We went through it like Siamese twins,’ Pete would remember. ‘We started together in our first year at the top and gradually sank together into the sub-basement.’

John himself later maintained that he arrived at grammar school determined to do well and be a credit to Mimi and Uncle George. All such good resolutions melted away at his first sight of his new classmates, tearing and whooping around Quarry Bank’s playground. ‘I thought “Christ, I’ll have to fight my way through this lot,” having just made it at Dovedale. There were some real heavies there. The first fight I got in, I lost. I lost my nerve when I really got hurt. If there was a bit of blood, then you packed it in. After that, if I thought someone could punch harder than me, I said, “OK, we’ll have wrestling instead.”…I was aggressive because I wanted to be popular. I wanted to be the leader. It seemed more attractive than just being one of the toffees. I wanted everyone to do what I told them to do, to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss.’

Quarry Bank’s founding head, R F Bailey, had been an outstanding educator with a special talent for spotting the potential in offbeat or eccentric boys. He had retired five years before John’s arrival, handing over the reins to an austere ex-serviceman and Methodist lay preacher named Ernest R Taylor. Quarry Bank pupils of ‘Ernie’ Taylor’s era remember him as an unapproachable figure, striding along corridors lost in aloof, headmasterly thought, his black gown billowing out behind him.

As at most boys’ school of that era, corporal punishment was routinely administered. Pete Shotton never forgot the first time John and he were called to the head’s study to be caned. While they waited outside together, John reduced the nervous Pete to tucks by speculating that the head’s cane might be produced like some royal regalia from a case studded with jewels and lined with velvet. They were called in separately to receive their punishment, John going first. A few moments later, the door opened and he emerged on his hands and knees, groaning melodramatically. What Pete didn’t realise was that a small lobby lay between the head’s study and the corridor, so Ernie was quite unaware of this performance. ‘I was laughing so much when I went in that I got [the cane] even harder than John had.’

The five houses in which the boys were grouped supposedly fostered loyalty and brotherhood as well as giving a competitive edge to sporting activities. Each house was named after one of the adjacent suburbs and consisted only of pupils from that neighbourhood, so perpetuating the rivalries and social snobberies that existed between them. Woolton house, which claimed John and Pete, lay about midway in this social microcosm, not quite so select as Childwall or Allerton, but a decided cut above Wavertree and Aigburth.

Also among Quarry Bank’s 1952 intake was Rod Davis, their former classmate at St Peter’s Sunday school. All three were put into the ‘A’ stream of boys considered most intelligent and promising of the batch. From there, while Rod went from strength to strength, John and Pete were quickly downgraded to the ‘B’ and thence with minimum delay to the ‘C’ stream, stopping at that point only because there was nowhere lower to go. ‘I never really understood how that happened,’ Rod Davis says. ‘It was always obvious that John was just as bright or a good bit brighter than anyone else around. But right from the beginning it was obvious he’d made up his mind not to subscribe to the system in any way.’

A strong contributory factor was his extreme shortsightedness, coupled with his obstinate refusal to wear the glasses he so detested. Rather than risk being taunted as a ‘four-eyes’ or a ‘drip’ he preferred to walk around in a state of such mole-like myopia that he could read the number on a bus stop only by shinning halfway up the pole. Davis, it so happened, had even weaker sight but made sure he missed nothing on the blackboard by reading it through opera glasses. John, however, was content to skulk with Pete Shotton at the back of the room, letting sentences, dates, mathematical equations and chemical formulae all swim together into the same untranslatable blur.

Pete’s analogy with Siamese twins may have been more telling than he knew, for John, the one-off, the super-original, never liked acting alone. As he would prove time and again in the future, to flourish at his most individualistic he needed a partner—a kindred spirit perfectly tuned to his special wavelength, acting simultaneously as a stimulus and an audience. Wherever some school rule was most flagrantly broken, the resultant hue and cry would be after ‘Lennon and Shotton’, which John turned into ‘Shennon and Lotton’ to symbolise their inseparability and unanimity of purpose, or purposelessness. Like two chain-gang escapees handcuffed together, neither of them could do anything without the other helplessly following suit.

Over the following terms, Quarry Bank’s punishment book thronged with the diverse crimes of Shennon and Lotton: ‘Failing to report to school office’…‘Insolence’…‘Throwing backboard duster out of window’…‘Cutting class and going AWOL [Absent Without Leave]’…‘Gambling on school field during house [cricket] match…’ Sometimes their offences went off the scale even of Quarry Bank’s draconian punishments, leaving Ernie Taylor no choice but to call in their respective families. Back home at Mendips, Mimi grew to dread the peal of the telephone during school hours. ‘A voice would say, “Hello, Mrs. Smith, it’s the [head’s] secretary at Quarry Bank here…” “Oh Lord,” I’d think. “What’s he done now?” ’

The duo were more or less permanently in detention, either writing out hundreds of lines beginning ‘I must not…’ or engaged in military-style fatigues around the school grounds. It was during such a work detail that they learned the untruth of the axiom ‘Crime does not pay.’ While emptying rubbish into a trash can, Pete came upon three bulky brown envelopes addressed to the headmaster. Inside were used dinner tickets, the vouchers purchased by boys at a shilling apiece to exchange for their school lunch. Used tickets being indistinguishable from unused ones, Shennon and Lotton could resell the whole cache at sixpence each, a bargain that left the purchaser half his daily lunch allowance to spend as he pleased. ‘We had 1,500 dinner tickets up in John’s bedroom,’ Pete remembered. ‘They were worth £75, which was like almost £1,000 today. We were rich. We even gave up shoplifting while that was going on.’

Any teacher showing less than drill-sergeant ruthlessness could expect no mercy from Shennon and Lotton. One afternoon when they returned to Ernie’s study to be carpeted yet again, they found the head absent and his mild little deputy, Ian Gallaway, facing them over the magisterial desk. As Mr Gallaway bent forward to peer at the punishment book, John began gently tickling the few wisps of hair on the deputy head’s cranium. Thinking a fly had landed there, he brushed absent-mindedly at it without looking up. ‘John was laughing so much that he actually pissed himself,’ Pete Shotton remembered. ‘Then Gallaway said, “What’s that puddle on the floor?’ John said, “I think the roof must be leaking, Sir.”’

The curious thing about this stubborn ne’er-do-well was that, away from the classroom and its hated compulsion, he was a bookworm whose taste in literature far outpaced Quarry Bank’s English syllabus and who, left to his own devices, spent hours in the posture of the most conscientious student, reading, writing or drawing.

Quarry Bank’s head of English, Lancelot (‘Porky’) Burrows, was never one of his classroom targets and, indeed, regarded him as a stimulus to other pupils rather than a distraction. Porky dealt with John by appealing to his sense of the absurd, for example instituting a punishment known as whistling detention: if John persisted in whistling when told not to, he would be kept in after school and forced to whistle for ten or so fatiguing minutes. Porky also artfully fostered his interest in poetry via his talent for art. An English exercise book from his junior year at Quarry Bank—neatly covered in brown paper and titled MY ANTHOLOGY—demonstrates what pains he would take if his enthusiasm were aroused. Quotations from classic poems like Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha and Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ are framed by watercolour cartoons showing a remarkable maturity of line and grasp of perspective as well as their unmistakable scatty humour. Porky kept the book to show future generations of students the standard they should aim for.

Two comic artists, one British, one American, were to have a profound influence on John’s style. He loved the intricate, scratchy technique of Ronald Searle, whose sadistic St Trinian’s schoolgirls were modelled on Searle’s guards as a Japanese prisoner of war in Burma. And, thanks to Aunt Mimi, he became a devotee of James Thurber, both the writings for The New Yorker and the cartoons, whose surreally wavering lines were a product of Thurber’s own near-blindness. John later said he began consciously ‘Thurberising’ his drawings from about the age of 15.

He kept a special exercise book for caricatures of his teachers and classmates, organised with a meticulous care that would have astonished Quarry Bank staff other than Porky Burrows. Pete Shotton (‘A Simple Hairy Peters’) popped up repeatedly, with his pale curls and rosy face, shaking a baby’s rattle or peeping from a dustbin. There was even a portrait of the artist himself, wearing his hated National Health glasses and self-deprecatingly captioned ‘Simply A Simple Pimple Shortsighted John Wimple Lennon.’ In this case, ‘Wimple’ did not mean a nun’s veil but was the name of a character in one of John’s favourite radio programmes, Life with the Lyons.

The book was passed around among John’s cronies each time a new character was added to it. Harry Gooseman was once even allowed to take it home overnight to show to his family. John liked to regard it as a campaign of subversion that would bring authority’s direst wrath on his head if it were ever discovered. In fact, Quarry Bank’s teachers were no less sorely in need of some comic relief than the boys, and they tended to laugh just as loudly if they chanced to see his lampoons of them. One summer term, during preparations for the school’s fund-raising garden fête, he even found his subversion co-opted to official ends. Half facetiously he proposed decorating squares of card with caricatures of his teachers, then pinning them up for people to throw darts at—but to his amazement, the idea was accepted. The game attracted a large crowd and Shennon and Lotton were later commended for raising more money than any other stall, despite having kept back £16 of the take for themselves.

Even the po-faced early fifties had not quite extinguished a timehonoured British trait, handed on from Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear to W S Gilbert and P G Wodehouse—that of using all one’s intelligence to be unbelievably silly. Until John reached his teens, he was like a prospector, panning through the drab shale of logic and common sense that constituted his daily life at Quarry Bank and Mendips for those few stray, gleaming nuggets of absurdity. The school library introduced him to Stephen Leacock, Canadian author of ‘nonsense novels’ like Q: A Psychic Pstory of the Psupernatural and Sorrows of a Supersoul, or the Memoirs of Marie Mushenough (Translated out of the Original Russian by Machinery). Early children’s television programmes featured occasional appearances by ‘Professor’ Stanley Unwin, a pious-looking man who told fairy stories in innuendo-laced gibberish, such as ‘Goldiloppers and the Three Bearlodes’. English lessons at Quarry Bank provided an unexpected seam in the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (‘When that Aprille with his shoures soote…’) so often like Stanley Unwin speaking from the 14th century.

All this was mere marginalia, however, in comparison with The Goon Show, which had begun its first series on BBC radio in 1951 but hit full stride in 1953, the year of the Queen’s coronation. Scripted almost single-handedly by Spike Milligan, it superficially harked back to the Second World War (Goons had been Allied prisoners’ nickname for their German guards) and to a Conan Doyle-esque world of spies, intrigue and derring-do. But in content it was mouldbreakingly anarchic, a mélange of demented voices and lunatic situations such as had never before been offered to a British audience, least of all on the sanctified airwaves of the BBC.

Together with a then little-known variety comedian named Peter Sellers, Milligan created a gallery of characters who often seemed to have only the most nodding acquaintance with the human race—the decrepit Colonel Bloodnok, the quavery duo of Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister, the moronic Eccles, the supersmooth Grytpype-Thynne, the whining hermaphrodite Bluebottle. Embedded in the madness like hooks in blubber were jibes against previously inviolable national institutions such as the army, the church, the Foreign Office and even the BBC itself (which the corporation, amazingly, seemed never to notice).

The Goons’ most besotted fans were middle-class pre-adolescent schoolboys, those over-serious war babies who had hitherto believed the oppressive sanity of life to be everlasting. For John, between 1953 and 1955, they were the brightest spot in his whole existence. Nothing could unstick him from the wireless on evenings when the cut-glass voice of announcer Wallace Greenslade presaged another Milligan free-form fantasy such as ‘Her’ (a parody of H Rider Haggard’s She) or ‘The Sinking of Westminster Pier’, featuring Minnie and Henry as oyster-sexers, with frantic musical interludes by Dutch harmonica player Max Geldray. John could do the voices and catchphrases of every character, from Minnie’s senile gurgle to Bluebottle’s scandalised shrieks of ‘I do not like dis game’, ‘Dirty, rotten swine!’ and ‘You deaded me!’

As the terms passed, ‘Cutting class and going AWOL’ became an ever more frequent charge against Shennon and Lotton in Quarry Bank’s punishment book. The bicycles that had been a reward for scholastic excellence allowed them to escape far from the school precincts and any likelihood of detection. By their third year, they had discovered smoking, a habit then practised almost universally by adults and attended by no health warnings. The usual routine was to filch a packet of Wild Woodbines or Players Weights from some unsuspecting tobacconist, then repair to Reynolds or Calderstones Park, rest their bikes on the grass, and smoke all ten ‘ciggies’ at one go, while John blew salvoes on his mouth organ or shouted in Bloodnok or Bluebottle voices at passers-by or the ducks on the lake.

He was not irrevocably twinned with Pete Shotton. Sometimes on weekends or in the school holidays, he would forsake Pete and his Raleigh Lenton and go for a long bus ride by himself, past the Penny Lane roundabout and through the descending suburbs into central Liverpool. His usual destination was the Kardomah coffeehouse in Whitechapel, where he had a favourite stool at the ledge along the street window. He would sit there for so many hours, sketching in his book and on the steamed-up window or, as he put it, ‘just watching the world go by’, that Mimi nicknamed him the Kardomah Kid.

To Mimi, his drawings and poems were no more than timewasting distractions from school work. Often he would come home and find she had conducted a guerrilla raid on his bedroom and thrown every piece of paper she could find into the kitchen wastebin. There would be a furious argument in which even his usual ally, Uncle George, dared not take his side. “I used to say [to Mimi] ‘You’ve thrown my fuckin”’ poetry out and you’ll regret it when I’m famous,” John remembered. ‘I never forgave her for not treating me like a fuckin’ genius.’

Prior to John’s 15 year, the British had regarded the process of growing up as perfectly straightforward. The system was that children went on being children until puberty was well advanced; then, virtually overnight, they turned into grown-ups, wearing the same kind of clothes as their parents, aspiring to the same values and seeking the same amusements. The effect of rioting hormones on immature and impressionable minds had yet to be studied in any depth by scientists or sociologists. The continuance of wartime’s mass conscription claimed all able-bodied males at age 18 and put them through two years of military discipline that, in most cases, left a permanent mark. Only university students, then accounting for just 2 per cent of young people, were permitted an interlude of free will and indulgence—even some public unruliness—before assuming the burdens of adulthood.

American films made John and his friends enviously familiar with a society that, on the contrary, recognised the years between 13 and 20 as a distinct season of life and catered to it with superabundant lavishness. A blissful interlude it seemed, with its open-to-all college campuses, its high schools so very different from Quarry Bank, its giant-lettered boys’ jerseys, its girls’ ponytails, its hamburgers, Coca-Cola, cheerleaders and hops. Long before it had any personal relevance for him, John had picked up on the fundamental cultural difference: ‘America had teenagers…Everywhere else just had people.’

American young people as Hollywood projected them—which, of course, meant young white people—had always been gee-whiz happy and healthy-minded and, if possible, even more respectful and conformist than their British counterparts. But since the war, ominous cracks had begun to appear in this cornerstone of American life. The year 1951 saw publication of J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, a novel written in the voice of a 17-year-old boy, Holden Caulfield, alternately mocking and reviling the Utopia into which he had been born. In 1953 came The Wild One, a film about the terrorising of a small town by a group of leather-clad teenage motorcyclists (collectively known as the Beetles). ‘What are you rebelling against?’ a woman character demands of the young Marlon Brando as the pack’s leader. ‘Whaddaya got?’ he replies.

All these vague, discontented mutters and hormonal stirrings first took definite shape in James Dean, a young stage actor from the Midwest, schooled with Brando in the Method technique and then picked up by Hollywood. Gaunt and melancholic, Dean was the first star with specific appeal to teenagers of the new troubled and troublesome variety. He wore their to-hell-with-it uniform of T-shirts and shabby jeans, suffered their same agonies of uncertainty and hypersensitivity, spoke in their same surly or shy mumble. Their feeling of alienation from a seemingly bountiful and indulgent world was perfectly expressed in Rebel Without a Cause, the 1955 film that was both Dean’s apotheosis and farewell. That same year, he died in an car accident in his Porsche sports car, thereby achieving immortality.

In Britain also, the postwar years had seen rising concern over what was still patronisingly termed ‘the younger generation’. Juvenile crime increasingly dominated newspaper headlines, from the Craig-Bentley murder case (in which a London policeman’s 16-year-old killer was judged too young to face otherwise automatic capital punishment) to the rise of so-called ‘cosh-boys’ as a threat to formerly safe urban streets.

But the first generalised outbreak of deviancy among the younger generation occurred in no place more sinister than tailors’ fitting rooms. During 1955, a proportion of British youths rejected the tweed jackets and baggy grey flannels prescribed for them almost by statute, and took to going about in knee-length coats with black velvet collars, frilled shirts, leopardskin waistcoats, bootlace ties, ankle-hugging ‘drainpipe’ trousers, fluorescent orange or lime green socks and chukka boots raised on two inches of spongy rubber. The style being reminiscent of Edwardian dress, its adherents were dubbed Teddy Boys, though dandified Wild West heroes like Wyatt Earp or Wild Bill Hickok also represented a strong influence. Their most radical departure from convention was their hair—no longer planed into an army-style short back and sides and flattened with Brylcreem, but blow-dried into a flossy forelock, backswept over long sideburns, and interleaved at the rear into a DA, or duck’s arse.

Teddy Boys were exclusively working-class young men who by rights should have been welcomed as symbols of growing national affluence. Since no men’s outfitters stocked such outlandish garments, they had to be expensively tailor-made, often to the client’s own design. Unfortunately, some (though by no means all) of these style pioneers were also apt to get into street brawls, using weapons like coshes, brass knuckles and bicycle chains. As a result, for a decade to come, unusual suits and long hair would be synonymous in the British mind with proletarian criminality and riot.

In Woolton, John and his circle were too young—albeit by just a whisker—to be swept up in James Dean mania or join the first wave of Teddy Boys. For John, the latter were no more than comic curiosities to be recorded in his sketchbook (like a Scotsman with a ‘drainpipe kilt’). Liverpool ‘Teds’ took their reputation as hard men with special seriousness, none more so than John’s old Dovedale Primary schoolfellow Jimmy Tarbuck, now very big and tough and disinclined to any humour where his wardrobe was concerned. ‘We were all dead scared of Tarbuck,’ Len Garry remembers. ‘He’d only got to say “Are you looking at me?” and we’d run…John the fastest of all.’

Woolton did not offer much encouragement to would-be Teddy Boys. The village’s two barber’s shops, Ashcroft’s and Dicky Jones’, both treated their teenage clientele merely as so many sheep to be sheared. John and his friends preferred to have their hair cut at Bioletti, in the little parade of shops off the Penny Lane roundabout. The proprietor and sole operator was an elderly Italian who had also cut John’s father’s hair—though John had no idea of this—when Alf Lennon was at the Bluecoat Hospital in the 1920s. Signor Bioletti’s hands were famously shaky, but his trembling scissors would make at least a stab at more modish styles. And in his shop window—as a song would one day commemorate—were head shots of satisfied customers triumphantly coiffured like James Dean, Tony Curtis or Jeff Chandler.

One sunny evening during that June of 1955, Mendips’ most regular boarder, Michael Fishwick, was finishing supper in the morning room, and Uncle George was due to take his place at the table before starting night-watchman duty at the Bear Brand factory. Suddenly, as Fishwick recalls, there was ‘a terrible bang on the stairs’. On his way down, George had collapsed from what the biochemistry student recognized as massive internal bleeding. He was rushed to Smithdown Road Hospital but died soon after admission; the cause was given as a haemorrhage of the liver.

John was away in Scotland with Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert, and knew nothing of what had happened until his return home a couple of days later. As Mimi would remember, ‘He came bouncing in, his usual excitable self, and asked where George was. When I told him he was dead [ John] just went very quiet. He didn’t cry or anything like that. He just went up to his room. If there was any crying to do, he would do it on his own. He wouldn’t want anyone else to see him like that.’

The family member thought best suited to keep John company at such a devastating moment was his Aunt Harrie’s daughter, Liela. She remembers arriving at Mendips to find Mimi ‘sitting outside on the coal-bunker, looking lost.’ Alone in his bedroom with this trusted childhood ally, John could at last give vent to his emotions, which he did not do by crying but by cackling with uncontrollable laughter. ‘We both had hysterics,’ he later remembered (though Liela has no recollection of joining in). ‘We laughed and laughed. I felt very guilty afterwards.’

George’s death had a devastating effect on Mimi, made worse, perhaps, by recollecting how little overt affection she had shown him in return for his generosity, good nature and ever-dependable kindness. ‘Our world was never the same,’ she would remember. ‘John took it on the chin…but never the same. The place seemed empty, but we muddled on. I mean, you don’t give up, do you?’

George had never been much of a businessman and—so the family always maintained—had been denied his fair share of the Smith dairy farm when his brother Frank sold it for development in the latter war years. Mimi thus found herself left with little in the way of capital to continue educating and providing for John and maintaining the comfortable home to which he was accustomed. She did not discuss these financial anxieties with him, and he never dreamed that at least once a year she discreetly visited a pawnbrokers in Smithdown Road and pawned her diamond engagement ring.

In that era, a woman widowed in her early fifties was expected to regard her life as over. Although Mimi was only just over forty, the thought of remarriage—or any other relationship with a man—never crossed her mind. From here on, so she thought, her only raison d’être would be the care and protection of John.

Her main support were the four sisters whose lives and families remained as closely meshed as ever. And ironically, the one she turned to most frequently for consolation was Julia, the ‘baby sister’ whose unreliability she had so often deplored. Though Mimi still could not bring herself to accept Bobby Dykins, she formed a closer bond with Julia than had existed since their childhood; henceforth a day seldom passed when Julia did not drop in at Mendips for a cup of tea and a chat.

Coping singlehandedly with 14-year-old John was a task that required all Mimi’s old hospital-bred toughness as well as her bottomless reserves of diligence and self-sacrifice. He was always to remain in awe of her flights of temper, when she would pick up anything at hand and fling it at him, regardless of consequences. Rather than provoke her ire over neglected homework or unsuitable friends, he often preferred to tiptoe noiselessly out of the house on stockinged feet; for the rest of his life, he would retain this habit of padding around as noiselessly as a cat. But more often than not, just as he reached the back door and liberty, a stern voice from above would call, ‘Is that you, John?’

The lack of a man about the house was accentuated by John’s inability to perform even the simplest domestic tasks. When his two small cousins, Michael and David, arrived for a visit, Mimi would give them the many overdue little jobs that were beyond him. ‘I remember often changing the light-bulb in John’s bedroom,’ Michael Cadwallader says. ‘He’d never even learned to do that.’

Mimi’s straitened finances increased her reliance on her student boarders. Fortunately, Michael Fishwick was now preparing for a biochemistry PhD and so needed accommodation for most of the year rather than just a regular student’s three terms. He was allotted the back bedroom Mimi had formerly shared with George, while she moved into the larger bay-windowed one adjoining John’s. Considering Fishwick an old friend, as well as a link with George, she took to confiding in him as she seldom had in anyone outside the immediate family. When she visited a solicitor to probate George’s will, she asked Fishwick to accompany her, and also recounted the circumstances that had brought John into her care. Once she even showed him a letter from John’s father, Alf, sent from prison, which all these years later still ‘made steam come out of her ears’.

The loss of George’s kindly, understanding masculine influence could not have come at an unluckier time, with John poised on the edge of adolescence and clamouring for information, advice and reassurance. Sex education did not feature on Quarry Bank’s syllabus, and Mimi could not be interrogated on such matters in other than the most general and theoretical terms. Like most of his generation, John had to piece together the facts of life from dirty jokes and diagrams on the walls of public urinals.

It was still almost universally believed that masturbation called down the same heavenly wrath as the Old Testament’s Onan suffered for ’letting his seed fall on the ground’. Boys who wanked, tossed off, beat their meat, pulled their wire or gave themselves a hand-shandy did so at the supposed risk of going blind, growing hair on their palms or being permanently shut away in psychiatric institutions. As a Boy Scout, John had been bombarded with such warnings via Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys manual, with its puzzling metaphors about rutting stags and its advocacy of fresh air and exercise to stave off any inclination to ‘beastliness’.

He became a dedicated wanker, undeterred by any fear of heavenly retribution and, as always, in company with his arch-crony, Pete Shotton. It was a further symbol of their closeness, without any suggestion of the homoerotic; they wanked together as an act of Shennon-Lotton rebellion, defiance and mutual showing off. John proved to have a particular aptitude and near-inexhaustible stamina. Once, he accepted Pete’s challenge to do it ten times in a single day, the prize being unlimited access to the Shotton family’s television set. He failed to reach this target, but only by one go.

The wider circle of Lennon followers would also sociably wank all together, stimulating themselves and their neighbours by shouting out the names of sex goddesses like Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida. Sometimes at the critical moment, John would call out ‘Winston Churchill’ or ‘Frank Sinatra,’ and the onanists would collapse into giggles.

As if there were not enough going on in 1955 already, the nation’s wankers were presented with a riveting alternative to ‘tit’ magazines like Spick and Razzle. Twenty-one-year-old Brigitte Bardot, already well known to French cinemagoers, made her first English-language film, Doctor at Sea, and changed every preconception of sexuality on the big screen. Whereas conventional Hollywood sirens like Ava Gardner or Lana Turner were remote, untouchable and curiously ageless, Bardot seemed hardly more than a schoolgirl with her startled-doe eyes and dimpled chin, as dewily innocent as she was knowingly voluptuous. Her very nickname, ‘the sex kitten’, was almost enough to bring her overheated young admirers to spontaneous orgasm. John became obsessed by her, cutting her picture from a magazine and pasting it to the ceiling above his bed.

He was by now intensely aware of the strong sexual atmosphere between his mother and ‘Twitchy’ Dykins at 1 Blomfield Road. Once, as he would always remember, he accidentally walked into their bedroom while Julia was fellating Dykins, half-covered by a sheet. As his hormones began to run riot, he also became increasingly conscious of Julia’s physical allure, the more so as she had always treated him in a jokey, flirtatious manner, more like a sportive young aunt. One afternoon when he was playing truant from Quarry Bank as usual, he lay on her bed next to her as she took an afternoon rest. He never forgot what she was wearing: ‘a black Angora short-sleeved round-necked sweater, not too fluffy, maybe it was that other stuff, Cashmere, soft wool anyway, and, I believe, that tight dark green and yellow mottled skirt’. As they lay there, he accidentally touched Julia’s breast, ‘and I was wondering if I should do anything else. It was a strange moment because at the time I had the hots, as they say, for a rather lower-class female who lived on the opposite side of the road. I always think I should have done it. Presumably she would have allowed it.’

Early that summer, Ivy Vaughan asked one of his classmates at Liverpool Institute, a lanky, humorous boy named Len Garry, to come and meet John and the Woolton gang. Len agreed but did not rush to take up the invitation: he had several more-pressing social commitments, among them cinema-going with another Institute classmate, Paul McCartney.

Finally Len made the trip from his Wavertree home on the bicycle he’d been given for passing his Eleven Plus. He met Ivy walking along Vale Road toward Menlove Avenue in a little group that also included John. He recalls: ‘John had a piece of paper in his hand that he was showing to the others. When Ivan introduced us, he didn’t say much, just gave me a look. I got the feeling I was being weighed up.’

The newcomer quickly proved himself made of the right stuff. He was an aficionado of William books and the Goons, he knew the words to Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine songs and, as a bonus, could reproduce the hideously drawn-out jungle cry of Tarzan the Ape Man as portrayed in films by Johnny Weissmuller. It wasn’t long before John felt sufficiently at ease with Len to show him the piece of paper that the others had been passing around and chortling over. This was not just a drawing but a miniature newspaper singlehandedly written and illustrated by John. Entitled ‘The Daily Howl’, it consisted of gossip-style paragraphs, single cartoons and comic strips, hand-lettered, ruled and coloured with all their creator’s usual extra-curricular care. There were running jokes about celebrities like Fred Emney, Stanley Unwin and the bald TV magician David Nixon; about John’s own middle name of Winston; and, inevitably, about black people and ‘cripples’, some phrases being phoneticised (‘Thik ik unk’, for instance, meaning ‘This is a’) to signify a speech impediment. Despite all the work that went into each edition, their author kept ‘Daily Howls’ coming at the rate of several per week.

Len Garry joined the group of bike riders that John led like a squadron of cavalry around the quiet Woolton lanes, looking for girls to chat up. Almost invariably, this feminine quarry would also be out with bikes and also dressed in school uniforms but, by the game’s unwritten rules, walking and pushing rather than riding. Between cavalry and giggling infantry, sooner or later, the right signal would be sent and answered, and the varicoloured school blazers and bikes would come together.

John was not good-looking in any conventional sense, with his slanted eyes and plunging beak of a nose. Yet he invariably proved the most successful, both in the chatting-up ritual and the encounters that followed. When the riders compared notes later, it would be John who described feeling right inside a heavily engineered brassiere, or sniffed ostentatiously at the lingering aroma of what Liverpudlians call finger pie. Part of every almost adolescent boy’s experience is to see small girls he has hitherto ignored or taken for granted suddenly grow into desirable young women. For John this happened spectacularly with Barbara Baker, whom he had known since they were toddlers together, seated on the floor at Mrs Clark’s Sunday school. For years, he had regarded Barbara with the contempt that William Brown always showed to little girls, but at the age of 15, she’d suddenly metamorphosed into a curvaceous strawberry blonde who deliberately modelled her hair and clothes on cinema sex sirens—and even had the mystic initials BB. In Reynolds Park one day, she and a girlfriend found themselves being followed in a meaning way by John and Len Garry. On this occasion, it was Len who first made the running. ‘Len asked me to join him on a walk a few nights later, and I said “Yes,”‘ she remembers. ‘But I could see John watching me.’

She soon dropped Len and became John’s first ‘steady’ girlfriend, as the sedate fifties phrase had it. In many ways, theirs was a relationship straight out of Enid Blyton: they would go for bike rides together or ice-skating at the Silver Blades rink in central Liverpool. Barbara got to know John’s mother and Aunt Mimi, and was often taken home to tea at Mendips, joining Michael Fishwick, and any aunts and cousins who were visiting, around the lavishly spread gateleg table. She remembers John as a romantic, naturally chivalrous boy, who bombarded her with love notes and drawings, was definitely not a Teddy Boy, and, thanks to Mimi’s hard verbal schooling, still did not speak with a Scouse accent.

As a rule, the courtship rituals went on without adult interference. A line was crossed one day, however, when a group including John, Barbara and David Ashton went for a petting session into the field owned by St Peter’s Church—i.e., virtually hallowed ground. Because John and Ashton were still members of the 3rd Allerton Scout Troop, both were summoned to explain their sacrilege before an official Scouts board of inquiry. ‘My Dad had been a scoutmaster, so the court was held at my house,’ Ashton remembers. ‘As I was coming home beforehand, I met John. “Don’t you fuckin’ tell what you know,” he said, and then hit me over the eye. I had a black eye for days afterwards.’

Len Garry shared John’s fondness for music—the ‘pop’ aimed squarely at their parents’ generation—but for neither was it anything resembling a passion. As they cycled around, they would sing out loud, trying to outdo each other in the number of current hit songs they knew and in their skill as impersonators. ‘I was always better at ballads,’ Len says. ‘But John was better at the uptempo stuff. A song he particularly liked was Mitchell Torok’s “Caribbean.” I remember how, even when he was riding against the wind, standing up on his pedals, he always got the timing just right.’

They had little initial interest, therefore, in the Bill Haley phenomenon, which reached the first of several climaxes during that summer. Michigan-born Haley had been an obscure country-and-western singer until 1951, when he recorded a song called ‘Rock the Joint’, exchanging his usual cowboy yodel for the style and intonation of black rhythm and blues. America’s racial situation being what it was, the disc could be marketed only if no biographical details about Haley were given. His country music public would have been appalled by the idea of a white man singing a ‘negro tune’, while no black listener would have taken the performance seriously.

Three years later, by now fronting a group named the Comets, Haley recorded ‘Rock Around the Clock’, an exuberant piece of horological nonsense that was already a year old, with one unsuccessful version by black vocalist Sunny Dae on the market. Haley’s reinter-pretation caused equally little stir until added to the soundtrack of The Blackboard Jungle, a film on the timely subject of delinquency in a New York high school. This change in context produced a devastating effect throughout America; wherever Haley’s voice rang out with ‘One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock RAHK…’ the gritty drama on the screen was totally eclipsed by mayhem among the audience. Boys and girls alike went literally berserk, shrieking like banshees, tearing at the fabric of their seats, lurching out to dance in the aisles or engage in mass brawls that required dozens of police to contain them.

The separate terms rock and roll had always existed in black music as synonyms for rhythm-enhanced sex. Who exactly first joined them together to define the keening saxophone and hand-thwacked double-bass beat of Haley and his Comets can never be known for certain. The most likely contender was a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed, who billed his show on station WJW as The Moondog Rock ‘n’ Roll Party.

Britain’s press, to begin with, treated rock ‘n’ roll as merely another bizarre American novelty, like pie-eating contests, pole-squatting or wedding ceremonies at the bottom of swimming pools. The mood changed as it became clear that Teddy Boys—and their scarcely less bizarre and repugnant Teddy Girls—were Haley’s most fanatical converts, and seemingly intent on destroying just as many cinemas as had their American cousins. Screenings of The Blackboard Jungle were cancelled wholesale, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was banished both from radio and television, and dance halls banned the jitterbuggy dance that went with it. The result was as might have been expected: Haley’s record shot to number one in the Top 20 in May 1955, remaining on the chart for 22 weeks. The following October, it made number one again, and stayed on the chart a further 17 weeks.

With hindsight, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ looks like a kind of Phoney War—a warm-up for the cultural blitzkrieg soon to follow. Most of the excitement it generated was damped down by the sight of Bill Haley himself, a man already pushing 30, with a cherubic smile and query-shaped kiss curl on his too-high forehead, who looked little different from the parents who so condemned him.

To capitalize on sales of the ‘Rock Around the Clock’ recording, a film of the same name was rushed out, featuring Haley and the Comets with other emergent rock-’n’-roll celebrities like Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, the Platters, and ‘Moondog’ Alan Freed. John went to see it expecting a life-changing experience but came away disappointed. ‘I was very surprised’. he would recall. ‘Nobody was screaming and nobody was dancing in the aisles like I’d read. I was all set to tear up the seats, too, but nobody joined in.’

As if to prove the fad had done no serious harm, John’s school report for the 1955 summer term was considerably less of a disaster than usual. English: ‘He is capable of good work and has done quite well…a good knowledge of the books.’ History: ‘He has tried hard and worked well.’ Art: ‘Very satisfactory.’ Handwork: ‘Satisfactory progress.’ Physical training: ‘(height 5, 6 and a half, weight 9 st, 4 lbs) F[airly] satisfactory.’ Geography: ‘Undoubtedly trying harder.’ General science: ‘An encouraging result. His work has been satisfactory but his behaviour in class is not always so.’ The only wholly negative entries were for French (’disappointing’ through fondness for ‘obtaining a cheap laugh in class’) and Religious Knowledge (‘His work has been of a low standard’).

‘The best report he has had for a long time,’ noted a surprised Ernie Taylor in the space reserved for headmaster’s comment. ‘I hope this means that he has turned over a new leaf.’

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