John Lennon: The Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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