John Lennon: The Life (3 page)

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 whiskey and, by his own account, chose to take the rap rather than betray the friend who actually had committed the offense. He spent nine days in a horrific military prison, where he was forced to scrub latrines and threatened with death if he ever spoke 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 U.S. Social Security card in his pocket, he managed to scrounge passage back to Britain as a D.B.S. (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 behavior. 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 June 19, 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 forever.

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 neighbor. 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 toward 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 two 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 afterward 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 Australasian-bound 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, paralyzed 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.

B
ritain 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-colored 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 canceled, it seemed, along with any kind of frivolity, spontaneity, or joy.

Yet despite the icebound grip of this so-called Austerity era, British 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 nonmercantile hinterland. Even in the pungent company of Britain’s ports, Liverpool has always stood alone. Its particular character dates back to the eighteenth and early nineteenth 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 twentieth 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 gray stone buildings known as the Three Graces, respectively the headquarters of the Docks and Harbour Board, the Cunard organization, 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.

For all this incurable New World bias, Liverpool was also the quintessential northern city, epitomizing 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, theaters, 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 cold-water 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 Britain’s 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.

T
he 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 English 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 be
lieved. “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 college, 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 nineteen, 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 thirties, 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’s invitation, Mimi took a sabbatical from nursing to become his secretary, living in at his Gothic mansion in Bettwys-y-Coed, in north Wales.

Such diversions came to an end with her marriage to George Smith, at the mature age of thirty-three 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 con
valescent 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 buttoned-up 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’s 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 septicemia 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 recognizably 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 categorized, 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 gray 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 a 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.