John Lennon: The Life

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.