John Lennon: The Life

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.