John Lennon: The Life (7 page)

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 red-quilted bed almost as much as to a theatrical performance or movie. As he later remembered, he always dreamed in brilliant color 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.”

I
n 1951, two new Liverpool University students arrived at Mendips to share the bay-windowed room next to John’s. One of them was a nineteen-year-old biochemistry student from Leeds named Michael Fishwick, the other a medical student named John Ellison. Fishwick was to become Mimi’s favorite 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 behavior 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 favor 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 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 lionized even more than the youngest of his cousins. He had somehow realized 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 neighbors to “look in,” as the phrase went, filling their living rooms with extra seats, extinguishing lights and drawing blinds to create a cinemalike 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 popularized 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 favorite was George Formby, a chipper Lancastrian with an outsize grin who strummed a banjolele while singing songs of innocent double entendre about Chinese laundries and window washers. “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 suboperatic 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 hard-case 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, fun-loving 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 favorite 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.

T
hese were days when the Eleven Plus examination regulated every British child’s progress through the state educational system like traffic lights, sending the brightest to grammar schools and the less bright 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 on 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 modeled itself on a high-echelon school like Harrow or Winchester, with black-gowned masters, a house system, and a general air of tradition and antiquity.

Tuition might be gratis, but each pupil’s family was expected to supply the compulsory uniform of black blazer and cap and black-and-gold striped tie. The blazer was an especially natty affair, with its breast-pocket badge of a gold stag’s head above the Latin motto
Ex Hoc Metallo Virtutem
—“from this rough metal [comes forth] manhood.” The cuffs were decorated like those of a junior naval officer, with a raised black stripe surmounted by a ring of gold stags’ heads. The blazers were costly enough when bought from the school’s official outfitter, Wareings in Smithdown Road. Mimi, however, preferred to have John’s made to measure by his Uncle George’s tailor for the whopping sum of £12 apiece, nearly as much as George had paid for the new bike. No real parents could have been more dotingly insistent that he had the best of everything.

The start of a new academic epoch scattered the Woolton Out
laws in widely different directions. Academically gifted and hardworking Ivy Vaughan had won a place at Liverpool Institute, the most renowned of the inner city’s grammar schools. Nigel Walley was bound for the Bluecoat School, near Penny Lane, the former Bluecoat Hospital where Alf Lennon had been a pupil thirty years earlier. But happily for John, his arch crony Pete Shotton also had got into Quarry Bank. “We went through it like Siamese twins,” Pete would remember. “We started together in our first year at the top and gradually sank together into the sub-basement.”

John himself later maintained that he arrived at grammar school determined to do well and be a credit to Mimi and Uncle George. All such good resolutions melted away at his first sight of his new classmates, tearing and whooping around Quarry Bank’s playground. “I thought ‘Christ, I’ll have to fight my way through this lot, having just made it at Dovedale. There were some real heavies there. The first fight I got in, I lost. I lost my nerve when I really got hurt. If there was a bit of blood, then you packed it in. After that, if I thought someone could punch harder than me, I said, ‘OK, we’ll have wrestling instead.’…I was aggressive because I wanted to be popular. I wanted to be the leader. It seemed more attractive than just being one of the toffees. I wanted everyone to do what I told them to do, to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss.”

Quarry Bank’s founding head, R. F. Bailey, had been an outstanding educator with a special talent for spotting the potential in offbeat or eccentric boys. He had retired five years before John’s arrival, handing over the reins to an austere ex-serviceman and Methodist lay preacher named Ernest R. Taylor. Quarry Bank pupils of “Ernie” Taylor’s era remember him as an unapproachable figure, striding along corridors lost in aloof, headmasterly thought, his black gown billowing out behind him.

As at most boys’ school of that era, corporal punishment was routinely administered. Pete Shotton never forgot the first time John and he were called to the head’s study to be caned. While they waited outside together, John reduced the nervous Pete to tucks by speculating that the head’s cane might be produced like some royal regalia from a case studded with jewels and lined with velvet. They
were called in separately to receive their punishment, John going first. A few moments later, the door opened and he emerged on his hands and knees, groaning melodramatically. What Pete didn’t realize was that a small lobby lay between the head’s study and the corridor, so Ernie was quite unaware of this performance. “I was laughing so much when I went in that I got [the cane] even harder than John had.”

The five houses in which the boys were grouped supposedly fostered loyalty and brotherhood as well as giving a competitive edge to sporting activities. Each house was named after one of the adjacent suburbs and consisted only of pupils from that neighborhood, so perpetuating the rivalries and social snobberies that existed between them. Woolton house, which claimed John and Pete, lay about midway in this social microcosm, not quite so select as Childwall or Allerton, but a decided cut above Wavertree and Aigburth.

Also among Quarry Bank’s 1952 intake was Rod Davis, their former classmate at St. Peter’s Sunday school. All three were put into the “A” stream of boys considered most intelligent and promising of the batch. From there, while Rod went from strength to strength, John and Pete were quickly downgraded to the “B” and thence with minimum delay to the “C” stream, stopping at that point only because there was nowhere lower to go. “I never really understood how that happened,” Rod Davis says. “It was always obvious that John was just as bright or a good bit brighter than anyone else around. But right from the beginning it was obvious he’d made up his mind not to subscribe to the system in any way.”

A strong contributory factor was his extreme nearsightedness, coupled with his obstinate refusal to wear the glasses he so detested. Rather than risk being taunted as a “four-eyes” or a “drip,” he preferred to walk around in a state of such mole-like myopia that he could read the number on a bus stop only by shinning halfway up the pole. Davis, it so happened, had even weaker sight but made sure he missed nothing on the blackboard by reading it through opera glasses. John, however, was content to skulk with Pete Shotton at the back of the room, letting sentences, dates, mathematical equations, and chemical formulae all swim together into the same untranslatable blur.

Pete’s analogy with Siamese twins may have been more telling than he knew, for John, the one-off, the super-original, never liked acting alone. As he would prove time and again in the future, to flourish at his most individualistic he needed a partner—a kindred spirit perfectly tuned to his special wavelength, acting simultaneously as a stimulus and an audience. Wherever some school rule was most flagrantly broken, the resultant hue and cry would be after “Lennon and Shotton,” which John turned into “Shennon and Lotton” to symbolize their inseparability and unanimity of purpose, or purposelessness. Like two chain-gang escapees handcuffed together, neither of them could do anything without the other helplessly following suit.

Over the following terms, Quarry Bank’s punishment book thronged with the diverse crimes of Shennon and Lotton: “Failing to report to school office”…“Insolence”…“Throwing backboard duster [eraser] out of window”…“Cutting class and going AWOL [Absent Without Leave]”…“Gambling on school field during house [cricket] match…” Sometimes their offenses went off the scale even of Quarry Bank’s draconian punishments, leaving Ernie Taylor no choice but to call in their respective families. Back home at Mendips, Mimi grew to dread the peal of the telephone during school hours. “A voice would say, ‘Hello, Mrs. Smith, it’s the [head’s] secretary at Quarry Bank here…’ ‘O Lord,’ I’d think. ‘What’s he done now?’”

The duo were more or less permanently in detention, either writing out hundreds of lines beginning “I must not…” or engaged in military-style fatigues around the school grounds. It was during such a work detail that they learned the untruth of the axiom “Crime does not pay.” While emptying rubbish into a trash can, Pete came upon three bulky brown envelopes addressed to the headmaster. Inside were used dinner tickets, the vouchers purchased by boys at a shilling apiece to exchange for their school lunch (a meal still commonly known as dinner throughout northern England). Used tickets being indistinguishable from unused ones, Shennon and Lotton could resell the whole cache at sixpence each, a bargain that left the purchaser half his daily lunch allowance to spend as he pleased. “We had fifteen hundred dinner tickets up in John’s bedroom,” Pete remembered. “They were worth £75, which was like almost £1,000
today. We were rich. We even gave up shoplifting while that was going on.”

Any teacher showing less than drill-sergeant ruthlessness could expect no mercy from Shennon and Lotton. One afternoon when they returned to Ernie’s study to be carpeted yet again, they found the head absent and his mild little deputy, Ian Gallaway, facing them over the magisterial desk. As Mr. Gallaway bent forward to peer at the punishment book, John began gently tickling the few wisps of hair on the deputy head’s cranium. Thinking a fly had landed there, he brushed absentmindedly at it without looking up. “John was laughing so much that he actually pissed himself,” Pete Shotton remembered. “Then Gallaway said, ‘What’s that puddle on the floor?’ John said, ‘I think the roof must be leaking, Sir.’”

The curious thing about this stubborn ne’er-do-well was that, away from the classroom and its hated compulsion, he was a bookworm whose taste in literature far outpaced Quarry Bank’s English syllabus and who, left to his own devices, spent hours in the posture of the most conscientious student, reading, writing, or drawing.

Quarry Bank’s head of English, Lancelot (“Porky”) Burrows, was never one of his classroom targets and, indeed, regarded him as a stimulus to other pupils rather than a distraction. Porky dealt with John by appealing to his sense of the absurd, for example instituting a punishment known as whistling detention: if John persisted in whistling when told not to, he would be kept in after school and forced to whistle for ten or so fatiguing minutes. Porky also artfully fostered his interest in poetry via his talent for art. An English exercise book from his junior year at Quarry Bank—neatly covered in brown paper and titled MY ANTHOLOGY—demonstrates what pains he would take if his enthusiasm were aroused. Quotations from classic poems like Longfellow’s
Song of Hiawatha
and Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur” are framed by watercolor cartoons showing a remarkable maturity of line and grasp of perspective as well as their unmistakable scatty humor. Porky kept the book to show future generations of juniors the standard they should aim for.

Two comic artists, one British, one American, were to have a profound influence on John’s style. He loved the intricate, scratchy technique of Ronald Searle, whose sadistic St. Trinian’s schoolgirls were
modeled on Searle’s guards as a Japanese prisoner of war in Burma. And, thanks to Aunt Mimi, he became a devotee of James Thurber, both the writings for
The New Yorker
and the cartoons, whose surreally wavering lines were a product of Thurber’s own near-blindness. John later said he began consciously “Thurberising” his drawings from about the age of fifteen.

He kept a special exercise book for caricatures of his teachers and classmates, organized with a meticulous care that would have astonished Quarry Bank staff other than Porky Burrows. Pete Shotton (“A Simple Hairy Peters”) popped up repeatedly, with his pale curls and rosy face, shaking a baby’s rattle or peeping from a garbage can. There was even a portrait of the artist himself, wearing his hated National Health glasses and self-deprecatingly captioned “Simply A Simple Pimple Shortsighted John Wimple Lennon.” In this case, “Wimple” did not mean a medieval veil but was the name of a character in one of John’s favorite radio programs,
Life with the Lyons
.

The book was passed around among John’s cronies each time a new character was added to it. Harry Gooseman was once even allowed to take it home overnight to show to his family. John liked to regard it as a campaign of subversion that would bring authority’s direst wrath on his head if it were ever discovered. In fact, Quarry Bank’s teachers were no less sorely in need of some comic relief than the boys, and they tended to laugh just as loudly if they chanced to see his lampoons of them. One summer term, during preparations for the school’s fund-raising garden fete, he even found his subversion co-opted to official ends. Half facetiously he proposed decorating squares of card with caricatures of his teachers, then pinning them up for people to throw darts at—but to his amazement, the idea was accepted. The game attracted a large crowd and Shennon and Lotton were later commended for raising more money than any other stall, despite having kept back £16 of the take for themselves.

Even the po-faced early fifties had not quite extinguished a time-honored British trait, handed on from Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear to W. S. Gilbert and P. G. Wodehouse—that of using all one’s intelligence to be unbelievably silly. Until John reached his teens, he was like a prospector, panning through the drab shale of logic
and common sense that constituted his daily life at Quarry Bank and Mendips for those few stray, gleaming nuggets of absurdity. The school library introduced him to Stephen Leacock, Canadian author of “nonsense novels” like
Q: A Psychic Pstory of the Psupernatural
and
Sorrows of a Supersoul, or the Memoirs of Marie Mushenough (Translated out of the Original Russian by Machinery)
. Early children’s television programs featured occasional appearances by “Professor” Stanley Unwin, a pious-looking man who told fairy stories in innuendo-laced gibberish, such as “Goldiloppers and the Three Bearlodes.” English lessons at Quarry Bank provided an unexpected seam in the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
(“When that Aprille with his shoures soote…”) so often like Stanley Unwin speaking from the fourteenth century.