John Lennon: The Life

The car that struck Julia had been driven by an off-duty policeman, 24-year-old Eric Clague of 43 Ramillies Road, Liverpool 18. The matter therefore became the subject of an internal police inquiry by a team that included John’s friend Pete Shotton, currently on attachment to the CID from training college. The officer was only a learner driver and so should not have been out in a car by himself. Since the police of those days were rigorous in prosecuting their own, an accusation of causing death by dangerous driving seemed likely. But no criminal charge of any kind resulted. The whole matter was dealt with by the inquest, four weeks later—though, unusually, this was conducted before a jury, and its proceedings were closed to the press.

Clague attested that he had not been driving carelessly and had been doing no more than 28-mph in the 30-mph zone. Nigel Walley, the only eyewitness, testified that Clague’s car seemed to have been travelling at abnormal speed and to have swerved out of control on the steep camber of the road as Julia suddenly stepped through the hedge. Though himself the son of a police superintendent, he sensed that the court regarded him as too young to be taken seriously. ‘The Coroner seemed to be bending over backwards to help this man who’d killed Julia,’ Mimi remembered. ‘It emerged that he was driving too fast, but you could see it was a bit of a men’s club really.’ When the young policeman was exonerated of blame, Mimi exploded in fury and threatened him with a walking stick. ‘I got so mad…That swine…If I could have got my hands on him, I would have killed him.’

The findings were reported in a further brief Echo news item:

DASHED INTO CAR

Misadventure Verdict on Liverpool Woman

A verdict of misadventure was returned by the jury at the Liverpool inquest today into Mrs Julia Lennon, aged 44, of 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, who died after being struck by a motor car while she was crossing Menlove Avenue on July 15.

A witness, the Coroner (Mr J.A. Blackwood) told the jury, had said that Mrs Lennon had not appeared to look either way before she walked into the roadway. Then she saw the approaching car, made a dash to avoid it, but dashed into the car.

Julia’s death left Bobby Dykins a broken man, ridden with guilt over his past drunken misuse of her and vowing tearfully never to touch alcohol again. Even after all these years, her sisters had never brought themselves to like or accept Dykins; their opinion of him now sank to rock bottom when—echoing his first panic-stricken cry to John—he announced he couldn’t cope with raising his two young daughters by Julia. The sisters’ mutual support group then swung into action to look after 11-year-old Julia and 9-year-old Jackie, much as it had for John 12 years earlier. Since Mimi had more than enough on her plate this time around, it was decided that the girls should live with their Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert in Edinburgh.

In an attempt to soften the blow, Julia and Jackie were told that their mother was merely ill in hospital, and then packed off to Edinburgh on a supposed holiday with Mater and Bert. Within a short time, however, Mater decided she had bitten off more than she could chew, and Julia and Jackie were brought back to Woolton to live with Harrie at the Cottage, having still not been told that Julia was dead. The deception somehow struggled on for weeks more, until Harrie’s husband, Norman, could bear it no longer and blurted out, ‘Your Mummy’s in Heaven.’

Unable to stay on at 1 Blomfield Road without Julia, Dykins moved to a smaller house on the outskirts of Woolton, eventually acquiring a new woman friend and a dog. But he maintained contact with his daughters and kept Harrie well supplied with money for their keep. He also continued to feel a stepfatherly obligation towards John, giving him a key to the new house and encouraging him to use it whenever he pleased. When Dykins subsequently became relief manager at the Bear’s Paw restaurant, he got John a summer job there and ensured that a large share of the tips always went his way.

However deficient the Echo’s inquest report, it at least gave Julia her proper surname. For her marriage to Alf Lennon had never been officially dissolved, any more than Mimi’s custody of John had been officially ratified. Her death in such shocking circumstances might have been expected to reconnect John with the long-absent father who nonetheless was still his legal guardian. But the family could not have got in touch with Alf even if it had wanted to.

Since leaving the merchant navy, Alf had, in his own romantic parlance, become ‘a gentleman of the road’, the once-immaculate saloon steward now a semi-vagrant whose only employment was occasional menial jobs in hotel and restaurant kitchens. He was washing dishes at a restaurant called the Barn in Solihull when his brother Sydney sent him the Liverpool Echo cutting about Julia’s death. He did not return to Liverpool until just after the following Christmas, having spent the preceding weeks in a London Salvation Army hostel recovering from a broken leg. It was at the hostel that a Liverpool solicitor finally contacted him and told him that, as Julia’s legal next of kin, he was heir to the whole of her small estate. Alf duly returned north and presented himself at the solicitor’s office, but only to give up his right to Julia’s few possessions in favour of John. He made no attempt to see or communicate with John, however, and after a few days disappeared on his travels again. His reasoning was that, thanks to Mimi’s years of propaganda, John would regard him as nothing but ‘a jailbird’.

For Mimi herself, the blow went beyond losing her sister and seeing John lose his mother. Now that John was approaching manhood, she had realised she must prepare for a time when he would longer need her. For the first time in her dutiful, self-sacrificing life, she could think of herself—and bring her relationship with Michael Fishwick into the open. Fishwick had been offered a three-year research post in New Zealand, where, as it happened, several of Mimi’s mother’s family had emigrated. Not long after George’s death, an uncle out there had died and left her a property worth £10,000. Mimi’s plan, confided to no one, had been to follow Fishwick and live with him in the house she had inherited. ‘If it hadn’t been for Julia’s death,’ Fishwick says, ‘she’d have been gone by the end of ‘58.’

Now there was nothing in the world that could have made her leave John. ‘I worried myself sick about [him] then,’ she remembered. ‘What he would turn out to be…what would happen if it was me next.’

Despite Mimi’s suspicions, police constable Eric Clague did not get off scot-free. He underwent a period of suspension from duty and, soon afterwards, resigned from Liverpool Constabulary to begin a new career as a postman. By a horrible coincidence, one of the delivery routes he was later assigned included Forthlin Road, Allerton. Many times as John sat in the McCartneys’ living room, he would have heard their afternoon mail drop onto the front doormat, little suspecting that ‘Mister Postman’ was his mother’s killer.

8 JEALOUS GUY (#ulink_4e99b715-c182-590c-b6b5-4cc09639c721)

I was in a blind rage for two years.

I was either drunk or fighting.

Late-fifties Britain had none of the aids to coping with personal tragedy that we so depend on today. There were no family bereavement counsellors to help John come to terms with his loss; no therapists, support groups, helplines, agony aunts, confessional television shows or radio call-ins yet existed to tell him that the most private emotions are better made public and that broken hearts heal quicker if worn on one’s sleeve.

In 1958, Britons throughout the whole social scale still observed the Victorian Empire-builders’ convention of the stiff upper lip. Tears were the prerogative of females only and, for the most part, shed in decent seclusion; males were expected to show no emotion whatever. The closest members of a stricken family rarely expressed their feelings to one another, let alone to strangers. Such reticence had always been strongest in the north, strongest of all in those northern parts where privet hedge grew and hallways were half-timbered. Thus the shock and pain and outrage of Julia’s death would stay bottled up in John until their release like a howling genie more than a decade into the future.

Among Julia’s four sisters, there certainly was no weeping or wailing, only the most modest, muted signs of heartbreak. On the day after the tragedy, she had been due to go and see her sister Nanny at Rock Ferry. In anticipation of the visit, Nanny already had deck chairs set out in the back garden. She took a photograph of the unused chairs, and kept it always beside her until her own death in 1997.

Mimi herself was never seen to cry, although Nanny’s son, Michael Cadwallader, often saw silent tears well in her eyes. John would put his arms around her and say ‘Don’t worry, Mimi…I love you.’ But such moments were never shared with outsiders. Three days after Julia’s death, Michael Fishwick had had to report back to his RAF station, missing the funeral and not returning until the end of the year. Close though he was to Mimi, she never mentioned the events of 15 July to him, nor did she and John ever discuss them in his presence. In her traumatised state, the secret affair could hardly continue and, by unspoken agreement, she and Fishwick returned to being just friends. His visits became more infrequent until finally he met a young woman his own age and married her in 1960, ensuring that henceforward there would be only one man in Mimi’s life.

The boys who had known John since toddlerhood were all equally at a loss about what to say to him. Pete Shotton, to whose house a distraught Nigel Walley had run immediately after the accident, could manage only a muttered ‘Sorry about your mum, John’ when they met in Woolton the next day. As the last person to speak to Julia, Nigel himself would always harbour a lingering sense of guilt. He felt John blamed him for not saying the extra couple of words that might have stopped her crossing the road when she did.

It was, in fact, a new and still largely untried friend who most empathised with John’s situation. For barely a year had passed since Paul McCartney had lost his own mother to breast cancer. ‘We had these personal tragedies in common, which did create a bond of friendship and understanding between us,’ he says. ‘We were able to talk about it to some degree [and] share thoughts that until then had remained private…These shared confidences formed a strong basis for our continuing friendship and insight into each other’s characters…’ They could even summon up a weak smile at their common predicament after bumping into an acquaintance of Paul’s mother Mary who also knew Julia, but had no idea that either had died. Having first blunderingly enquired of Paul how his mother was, the acquaintance turned to John and asked him the same question.

Most of his fellow art students did not learn what had happened until the college reconvened for its autumn term, two months after Julia’s death. ‘Hey, John,’ a tactless girl shouted to him on registration day, ‘I hear your mother got killed by a car.’ Onlookers thought it must be some kind of sick joke until he nodded and muttered, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ The only person not mortified by the faux pas seemed to be John himself. ‘He didn’t choke on it,’ a witness of the incident remembers. ‘He didn’t register anything. It was like someone had said “You had your hair cut yesterday.”’

The only person let under his guard was Arthur Ballard, the prizefighter-turned-professor in whom he seemed to find some of the reassuringness of his beloved Uncle George. Ballard was always to remember climbing the main college staircase and finding a red-eyed John sprawled miserably on the big window ledge halfway up. ‘I think he cried on Arthur’s shoulder,’ June Furlong, the life model, says.

Unable to express, let alone share, his feelings, he turned to Liverpool’s well-tried method of anaesthetising them. Most afternoons, he would stagger back to college from Ye Cracke with Jeff Mohammed, helplessly drunk and bent on ever more mindless disruption and devilment. One day, Arthur Ballard found him trying to urinate into the lift shaft. The verbal cruelty he had always used on even his best friends seemed to grow still sharper and more unpredictable as he sensed their pity and confusion. ‘He tried it on with me,’ Bill Harry says. ‘But I came from a tough background; I told him to fuck off, and never had any trouble with him again. Stu Sutcliffe was different, though. John admired his work, but he could be terrible to him on a personal level. He’d make fun of Stu for being small…go on and on about it. And Stu never seemed to answer back.’

The truth was that Stu possessed a maturity and wisdom beyond his 18 years. He recognized that the price of John’s friendship were these occasional venomous outbursts, and decided that it was a price worth paying. ‘John came to rely on that,’ says Stu’s sister Pauline. ‘He knew Stuart could be pushed, but that he’d never be pushed away.’

Almost everyone Stu met ended up being drawn or painted by him, and John was a subject he seemed to find more fascinating than most. A pencil sketch, made not long after they first met, shows John hunkered down with what looked like a skiffler’s washboard—faceless yet still unmistakable. In a Sutcliffe oil painting of the student crowd at Ye Cracke, he dominates the foreground, seated on a barstool in a tan sweater and blue (suede?) shoes, clutching his pint glass and staring off into the distance, lost in his own acrid thoughts.

The experience of knowing John also inspired Stu temporarily to forsake paint and charcoal for prose. In late 1958, he began writing a novel whose central character was named John and was very obviously drawn from life: ‘capricious, incalculable and self-centred, yet at the same time…a loyal friend.’ The novel seems never to have had a title, and it petered out after a few hundred words in Stu’s meticulous italic handwriting. The surviving fragments read less like fiction than a case study of its hero and the ‘terrible change’ that comes over him nine months after the narrator meets him. (It was about nine months after Stu first encountered the real-life John that Julia was killed.)

Even Aunt Mimi, never one given to idle praise, would later call Stu the best and truest friend John ever had.

The first steady girlfriend he had found at college was Thelma Pickles, a stunningly attractive Intermediate student whom he met through Helen Anderson. Thelma was as much of an individualist as he, and their relationship, while it lasted, was often stormy. ‘He could be very unbearable at times,’ she would remember. ‘He was never violent…but he would say things to hurt you. I think it was a defence thing, because he could be vulnerable at times [like] when you talked about his mother. He would become almost dreamy and very quiet. It was his weak spot…’ She also had a tongue every bit as sharp as John’s, and did not hesitate to use it if ever he tried to vent his anger and anguish on her. ‘Don’t blame me,’ she once lashed back at him, ‘just because your mother’s dead!’

Of all possible successors to Thelma, Cynthia Powell seemed the least likely. A year older than John, she was a mildly pretty, bespectacled girl of the hard working and conformist type he termed ’spaniels’. At college she had impinged on his notice only as an object of ridicule, thanks to her school head-prefecty Christian name and the fact that she came from Hoylake, on the Cheshire Wirral, a supposed bastion of suburban gentility and decorum. ‘No dirty jokes please, it’s Cynthia,’ he would admonish his cronies sarcastically when she approached, seldom failing to make her blush to the roots of her mousy, permed hair.

She was not in John’s workgroup but in Jeff Mohammed’s and thus shared a classroom with him only in a few general activities such as Lettering. For this detested but unavoidable weekly penance, he would slouch in late, his guitar slung troubadour-style on his back and, somehow, always take the seat immediately behind her. He never had any of the proper equipment, so would have to borrow her meticulously kept pencils and brushes, usually going off with them afterwards and not bothering to return them.

Cynthia’s future at this point seemed as neatly laid out as the materials on her desk. She had a steady boyfriend named Barry, whom she planned to marry before pursuing her chosen career of art teacher. She was not in the market for any new beau, least of all one whose ways were so turbulently and distastefully unlike the ways of Hoylake. Yet John had a powerful, half-fearful fascination for her. On a couple of occasions, she watched him perch on a desk and play his guitar, and was stirred by the very different look this brought to the usually hard, mocking face. ‘It softened…All the aggression lifted,’ she would recall. ‘At last there was something I had seen in John that I could understand.’

Her feelings clicked into focus one day in the college lecture theatre when she was seated a few places away from John, and saw the attractive Helen Anderson suddenly start to stroke his hair. There was nothing between Helen and him; she was simply bewailing his greasy Teddy Boy locks and urging him to have them shampooed and cut shorter. Nonetheless, Cynthia felt a sudden, irrational surge of jealousy.

From that moment, rather than avoiding John’s eye, she set out to catch it. She grew her hair down to her shoulders in the fashionable bohemian manner and exchanged her mumsy woollens and tweed skirt for the white duffle jacket and black velvet slacks favoured by college sirens like Thelma Pickles. She also gave up wearing the glasses, which, as she thought, most condemned her as a swot and spaniel to John. Since she was extremely shortsighted and could not afford contact lenses, then still an expensive novelty, this aspect of her makeover brought its problems. In the morning, her bus regularly carried her far beyond the art college stop when she failed to recognise it in time.

One day she and John were in a group of students who began a game of testing one another’s vision. To her amazement, Cynthia discovered that he was as myopic as she was, and equally self-conscious about wearing glasses. He in turn discovered that, only a year earlier, Cynthia’s father had died of lung cancer, leaving her as devastated as he now was himself. Better than all the clear-sighted people around, this shy, prim Hoylake girl knew just what he was feeling.

The end of the 1958 winter term was celebrated by a midday gettogether in one of the lecture rooms. A gramophone was playing, and, egged on by Jeff Mohammed, John asked Cynthia to dance. Thrown into confusion by this unexpected move, she blurted out that she was engaged to a fellow in Hoylake. ‘I didn’t ask you to fuckin’ marry me, did I?’ John snapped back. After the party came a drinking session at Ye Cracke, which John persuaded the usually abstemious Cynthia to join. They ended up spending the rest of the afternoon alone together at Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray’s flat in Percy Street.

Among their fellow students—the female ones at least—there was no doubt as to who had the better bargain. ‘Cynthia was a catch for John,’ Ann Mason says. ‘She could have had anyone she wanted. She had lovely eyes and the most beautiful pale skin. And she was the sweetest, nicest person you could ever meet.’

She was different indeed from the strong-willed, caustic females who had hitherto dominated John’s life. She was soft, gentle and tranquil (although secretly prone to bouts of paralysing nerves). She also possessed the notions of male superiority shared by many young women in the late fifties, which could have won them unconditional employment in a geisha house. She deferred to John in everything, never questioning or arguing, always complying with what she later called his ‘rampant’ demand for sex. Normally he might quickly have tired of such a companion, but in the desolation of Julia’s death, Cynthia answered his deepest unspoken needs. ‘I think [she] offered him a kind of mother thing,’ the former Thelma Pickles says. ‘She was so warm and gentle. She was the kind of person anyone would have been proud to have as a mother.’

The two began dating in a manner reflecting their suburban backgrounds as much as their bohemian student life. Since both of them still lived at home, they had nowhere to be together in private, unless Stu and Rod Murray both tactfully absented themselves from the Percy Street flat. Their trysts therefore consisted mainly of cinema-going or sitting for hour after hour in a coffee bar, holding hands over their foam-flecked glass cups. At John’s insistence, Cynthia stayed in town until the latest possible moment each night, catching the last train from Lime Street to Hoylake amid home-going drunks and hooligans ‘[for] the longest 20 minutes of my life,’ then walking unaccompanied through the dark streets to her home.

Everything he asked, she gave unstintingly. Her eight-shilling (40p) daily subsistence allowance kept him in coffees, fish-and-chips, Capstan Full-Strength cigarettes and replacement guitar strings. She did his college work for him when he could not be bothered to finish—or begin—it and neglected her own whenever he demanded attention. To please him, she changed her whole appearance into one hopefully resembling his ultimate fantasy woman, Brigitte Bardot, dyeing her hair blonde and wearing tight skirts and fishnet stockings with garter belts. Waiting for John in such attire at their usual rendezvous, outside Lewis’s department store, she would dread being mistaken for a tart.

On bus journeys he would choose a seat behind some balding elderly passenger and softly tickle the fluff on the man’s cranium, withdrawing his hand and assuming an expression of blank innocence each time his victim turned around. Then the laughter would fade in Cynthia’s throat as he sighted some human infirmity more pitiable than baldness—a blind beggar or mentally handicapped child—and instantly went into his own pitiless-seeming over-parody, crooking his back, freezing his face into an idiot stare, inverting his hands into claws. ‘John had a great need to shock and disgust people, and certainly shocked me on these occasions,’ she would remember. ‘Of course when his mates were around, he was the star turn.’

The real terror of illness and suffering that underlay this apparent callousness showed itself one afternoon when the two were alone together in Stu Sutcliffe’s bedroom-studio at Percy Street and Cynthia suddenly collapsed with excruciating stomach pains. John’s idea of tender loving care was to rush her to Lime Street and put her on a train to travel back to Hoylake on her own. When a grumbling appendix was diagnosed, he could not bring himself to visit her in hospital without bringing George Harrison along for support. Having pined for days to spend time alone with him, Cynthia produced a rare show of temperament by bursting into tears. Love was still new enough for John to bundle the bewildered George out of the ward and spend the rest of his visit assiduously making amends to her.

As ‘going out with’ moved into its next phrase, ‘going steady’, the time came for John to introduce Cynthia to Mimi. Woolton and Hoylake being spiritually so close, and Cyn being of so obviously superior a class to other art-school girls, he expected only wholehearted approval. And certainly, the welcome at Mendips seemed warm—expressed in the usual Mimi fashion of an enormous egg-and-chips high tea with mounds of bread and butter, served on the morning room’s gateleg table. Unfortunately, the hand that hospitably poured the tea had also marked Cyn’s card in terms that nothing she could say or do hereafter would alter. In her, Mimi saw a rival for John’s affections who, even at this early stage, was unscrupulously dedicated to taking him away for ever.

Cynthia’s widowed mother, Lilian, was the opposite of Mimi: a small, hyperactive woman who cleaned their Hoylake home only at long intervals and spent much of her time buying secondhand furniture and knick-knacks at local auction sales. With her two sons now grown up and living away from home, she focused her whole attention on Cyn, much as Mimi did on John, and had definite ideas about which young men were and were not good enough for her. When Cyn first brought John home to tea, she dreaded the sharp maternal comparisons that were likely to be made with his predecessor, the so-eligible, so-Hoylake Barry. However, John was polite and respectful, as he could be when he liked, and the occasion went better than Cyn had dared to hope.

Under the rules of going steady, the next step was for Lilian and Mimi to meet. Mimi accepted an invitation to tea at the Powell home, turning up in her usual immaculate coat, hat and gloves, and, for a time, all went well. Then, in her abrupt fashion, she began complaining to Lilian that Cyn was distracting John from his college work. Lilian naturally defended Cyn, and in no time a furious argument was raging between the two women. John, who had a horror of domestic confrontation—no doubt implanted by all he had seen as a small boy—simply jumped up and bolted from the house. Cyn found him cowering at the end of the street, so she later said, ‘in tears’.

This whiff of adversity took the relationship to a level for which Cyn had been totally unprepared. John became obsessed with her, sometimes filling an entire letter with declarations of his love, bewailing their midnight farewells at Lime Street station until she agreed to throw away her last Hoylake scruples and spend whole nights with him in town. Fortuitously, Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray’s landlady at 9 Percy Street had rented the whole ground floor to a new tenant who in turn sublet its large back room to Rod. This made Rod and Stu’s first-floor studio-cum-bedsit more regularly available as a refuge for John and Cynthia. She would tell her mother she was staying with her college friend, Phyllis McKenzie; he would tell Mimi he was sleeping over with one of the Quarrymen after a late gig.

Although Cynthia showed John nothing but devotion, he became increasingly possessive and insecure. She had only to smile at another boy in the most casual, friendly way to throw him into anguished fantasies that it might be some kind of secret code for an affair in progress or about to begin. At one college hop, he punched a fellow student who’d merely asked her to dance. As they sat together, he would hold on tightly to her hand, as if afraid she might fly away at any moment. Cynthia later said that he often showed symptoms of a nervous breakdown—a diagnosis with which John himself later concurred. ‘I demanded absolute trust[worthiness] from her because I wasn’t trustworthy myself. I was neurotic, taking out all my frustrations on her.’