John Lennon: The Life

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 (#ulink_3b846728-6dc4-5ab7-92c3-89c796a4d5fd)

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:

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