Читать книгу Understanding John Lennon - Francis Kenny - Страница 13

chapter 5

1950–55

Mendips

THE WARTIME age of austerity was coming to a close, employment and consumerism were on the march, and the Port of Liverpool was buoyant in its trade with the Americas and the Empire. The port shipped in and out more cargo than the next-largest eight ports combined. The city’s population stood at nearly 800,000, almost half of these crammed into the dockland zones and the city centre. The housing stock within the city was as bad as ever. The rapid rise of the port in the 19th century had left in its wake a swathe of jerry-built slum housing – a legacy of heavy immigration.

In the early post-war years, the Ministry of Housing identified 26,959 unfit houses in Liverpool, with conditions deemed so bad that they were marked for demolition. A further 61,724 required major repairs, making a total of 88,683 substandard dwellings. This, together with demobilisation and the consequent return home of thousands of servicemen, a high birth rate caused by the post-war ‘baby boom’ and a scarcity of construction materials all contributed to a severe post-war housing shortage. In 1949, John’s mother and Bobby (who now had two daughters, Julia and Jackie) were more than fortunate to gain a three-bedroom, front and back garden semi of their own, just a few miles from Newcastle Road. After Pop had died in 1949, the owner of Newcastle Road offered Julia and Bobby the opportunity to buy the house. Financially, the couple weren’t in a position to take up the offer. Instead, they were provided with a new home by Liverpool Corporation in the Allerton area of the city at 1 Blomfield Road.

As post-war Britain progressed into the 1950s, it reverted to Tory rule, with Winston Churchill becoming Prime Minister once again. The developing Cold War’s blanket of suspicion and fear divided many in Britain into those who supported the established order and hoped to maintain Britain’s colonies, and those against, who were deemed unpatriotic. This divide slowly grew, and as a further blow to national pride came the realisation that there were now two world superpowers, and Britain wasn’t one of them. The cultural impact of such radical changes led to a reaffirmed belief in and commitment to pre-war family values. Any behaviour seen to be challenging the conventional wisdom of the established order, especially by the young, was anathema to those in authority and to trenchant parents alike – those brought up on a diet of King, Empire and Class. American influence on British culture, meanwhile, was deemed vulgar and shallow.

But the allies’ victory in Europe meant not just a change in power relations, but also to the development of a post-war USA bringing cultural hegemony to much of western Europe. The UK in particular witnessed the arrival of American culture, from fashion to cinema and in language and music. Ten miles from Liverpool stood RAF Burtonwood Air Force Base, the largest American air base in Europe, where 12,000 American servicemen lived only a short ride from the city. At an age when teenagers were expected to be mini replicas of their parents with regards to fashion, music and outlook, the sharply dressed, ‘Hollywood talking’ American GIs became an instant hit with the teenagers of the city. Tied to this was the presence of the ‘Cunard Yanks’, the thousands of Liverpool seamen who manned the great transatlantic liners.

Liverpool was a great attraction to the GIs and became a welcome alternative to the staid environment of barrack life at Burtonwood. The Toxteth district of the city in particular, with its large immigrant population, provided a variety of (illicit) nightclubs, dodgy characters and music spots which presented a ‘safe haven’ – an exciting night out for many Afro-American GIs, especially given that these men enlisted in the war on racially segregated lines in terms of the units they belonged to. Figures by the Colonial Office and League of Coloured People at this time reveal that a third of Britain’s ‘coloured’ population were packed into the decaying Georgian and Victorian town houses of the city’s south end.

Mendips was not immune to such shifting cultural perceptions. Philip Norman reveals that, of all the British comics (such as The Victor, The Lion, The Commando and The Tiger), Mimi only allowed The Eagle comic into Mendips. According to Norman, ‘Mimi had forbidden [John] comics, except perhaps the high-minded Eagle’,¹ which was edited by a clergyman. American comics with what Mimi deemed to be their lurid and sensational storylines were banned outright. The Eagle, though, was the only one to escape her censorship. ‘Moral seriousness made The Eagle stand out from the silly high jinks of its American rivals, but it did not dent its appeal’, Dominic Sandbrook pointed out. Indeed, The Eagle

was a good example of the way in which old notions of patriotic duty and Christian service were reinvigorated rather than abandoned after the war; although Dan Dare’s adventures take place in the far future, he retains the services of a batman and the International Space Fleet is identifiably a British hierarchical organisation.²

The battle was not just for the hearts and minds of children, but for the broader values of British culture, the concern for which would stretch to debates in the House of Commons. Motions were put down which sought to ban the sale of American comics, supported by the National Union of Teachers convention. But to children like John, who were oblivious to such events, being brought up in Britain during this period was to be brought up in what many saw as the golden age of childhood. With the war finally over and rationing gradually phasing out (although it took until 1954 for the end of sugar rationing and therefore sweets and chocolate to be made freely available), many children of this generation looked back to an idyllic time of their lives.

Removal from his mother, followed immediately by a change of school, had begun a confusing and distressing time for the five-year-old John. The effects of the absence of both parents came to the surface in the playground and classroom, where belligerent and hurtful behaviour began to emerge. This attitude would ebb and flow throughout John’s whole life. From very early on, John was at war with the world and at war with himself. He recalled later:

I did fight all the way through Dovedale, winning by psychological means if ever anyone looked bigger than me. I threatened them in a strong enough way that I would beat them or they thought I could.³

An interesting comment of John’s that gives an unintended insight into his own childhood came with his view on Ringo’s childhood. It appeared in Michael Braun’s The Beatles, the first book to be written on the group, Author: ‘We talked about Liverpool.’

Paul: ‘There is a certain awareness about some people in Liverpool. Like Ringo; he’s never been to school except two days. Three times they told his mum he was going to die.’ ‘Anyway,’ said John, looking at Ringo, ‘to be so aware with so little education is rather unnerving to someone who’s been to school since he was fucking two onwards.’⁴

On first reading it seems that John is insulting Ringo, but it’s quite the opposite. He’s criticising his own extensive education process and admiring Ringo’s street smartness and lack of schooling.

During his time at Dovedale School, John found a fellow malcontent in the shape – somewhat ironically – of a policeman’s son, Pete Shotton. They became fast friends, bonded by their commitment to refuse education. The two ‘refuseniks’ came across to their schoolmates as a double act. They delivered comic relief, the latest rude words and pranks, all sprinkled with a generous smattering of kicks to the shin, Chinese burns and forearm smashes. The bully in John was helped by his being upwards of 11 months older than some of the other pupils in his year. Since Pete lived close by to Mendips, the two would become inseparable. Pete’s limited acceptance by Mimi was no doubt entirely due to the position of his father as a high-ranking officer in the local police force.

In post-war Mendips, Mimi continued her commitment to a lifestyle of listening to Woman’s Hour and Mrs Dale’s Diary on the radio. This alternated with broadcasts of classical music and her reading of ‘quality fiction’. Cynthia Lennon recalls:

Early on it became apparent to me that Mimi was something of a snob: she was faux middle-class with upper-class aspirations and one of her favourite words was ‘common’.⁵

But for all her attempts to bolster what she saw as cultured, suburban living, she had forgotten one key factor in achieving upward social mobility – acceptance from the community.

Mimi, still seething from her failed attempt at further social mobility, fell back on her rigid values and opinions, an attitude of bitterness and resentment which would, after a time, seep into the mind-set of young John. This sowed the seed of many of his destructive perceptions in his teenage and adult life. John would later talk of having a ‘chip on the shoulder’. ‘But on the other hand,’ he continued, ‘I want to be loved and accepted. That’s why I’m on stage, like a performing flea. Because I would like to belong.’⁶ Life in Mendips didn’t equip John to be comfortable within himself. Compassion wasn’t in great supply at 251 Menlove Avenue. Mimi built up a strong sense of dependency in John, stemming from her own deep insecurities, and she cajoled, intimidated and bribed him into following the ‘right path’.

John spent most of his time between school and his small bedroom. The emotionless environment in which John found himself forced him to suppress his feelings for fear of further rejection. He sought security in an imaginary world of The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland and Jabberwocky: a world created and maintained through the nurturing of his precious reading, writing stories and poetry. The birth of John’s creative genius lies here, in this refuge of his imagination.

Up to the beginning of secondary school, John was limited in his involvement with other children outside of school. There was a radio in Mendips that could have helped pass the time, but Mimi had forbidden John to use it. He was later to recall:

In our family the radio was hardly ever on, so I got to pop later: not like Paul and George, who’d been groomed in pop music coming over the radio all the time. I only heard it at other people’s homes.⁷

Uncle George would play board games with John, but his night shifts limited the amount of time he could spend with his nephew. The cinema could have been used as a treat and escape from Mendips, but Mimi regarded the cinema as ‘vulgar’, only allowing John a trip to the Picturedrome (as she called it) twice a year, taken by Uncle George at Easter and Christmas to catch a Disney feature. Mimi’s view of the local picture house was perhaps coloured by her own upbringing. Neighbourhood cinemas were home to a frequently boisterous audience whose behaviour contravened and undermined the culture of the day with their mocking of authority figures such as the clergy, police and politicians. In essence, John’s access to the local cinema was blocked due to the legacy of it being seen as an arena which was ‘dark and dangerous’. The only resource left to combat this isolation and his own internalised loss of his mother and father was a young boy’s creativity and imagination.

In the absence of cinema, radio and friends outside of the school playground, John continued with his ferocious love of books. He particularly cherished his ‘comics’, through which, like his hero William and his gang of Outlaws, he could emulate William with his own gang. He soon began writing his own stories, many of which featured himself as the hero, enjoying similar escapades to those as his fictional heroes. With Uncle George’s support and encouragement, he ploughed through the books Swallows and Amazons, Biggles, The Famous Five adventures and Doctor Dolittle. When visiting John, a teenage Paul McCartney discovered fully laden bookcases, one of which included the full life’s works of Sir Winston Churchill, gold inlaid and leather bound. Paul was suitably impressed. It was this love and wonderment of the world of stories and words in which John would immerse himself. Later, it would form the basis for much of his songwriting and art. John’s unhappiness led him towards an inner world of fantasy in which emotional satisfaction was gained by escapism. By engrossing himself in the creative world of the written word, he sought to protect himself from the stern and flinty figure of Mimi.

At Dovedale, meanwhile, John’s interest in learning continued to be minimal, and it was only after threats from Mimi that he applied himself to prepare for the ‘Eleven Plus’ exam, the determinant of whether a child went to a grammar school or one of the newly instituted comprehensive schools or technical colleges. John passed his exam and gained a place at Quarry Bank, located a mile from Mendips. The grammar school, with its rigid practices and competitive measured outputs, didn’t necessarily help matters. Far better for him emotionally, perhaps, had he failed the exam and found a place at a local comprehensive or technical college, with its progressive emphasis on the individual student’s progress rather than exam results. Indeed, arguments raged throughout the 1950s with regards to the impact of this educational selection process. Fienberg argued that:

It is socially pernicious. Taking the Grammar school cap is a more potent emblem of privilege than the old school tie. Public school snobbery affects a few children. The snobbery of the local Grammar school sets the tone in every city and country.⁸

If it wasn’t hard enough for John to be rejected by his parents and find himself being brought up in a dispassionate household, now he had to be forced into a pressure cooker of continuous grading and have his behaviour and manners measured by masters in gowns who wished to ape the public school system.

Pete Shotton, John’s ‘partner-in-crime’, also passed the Eleven Plus and they found themselves once again as classmates at Quarry Bank. Both carried on where they left off at Dovedale: causing havoc. John and Pete rekindled their ‘adventures’ outside of school hours too, with Pete becoming a kind of Milhouse to John’s Bart. The reason behind John’s behaviour is simple. Any serious attempt at his lessons could end in disappointment, and due to the corrosive attitude of Mimi, he was already a ‘reject’ and therefore a failure. John’s older cousin Stanley Parkes recalled that ‘John was afraid of Aunt Mimi, as she’d tear into him if he didn’t behave’.⁹ As Mimi wasn’t into physical punishment, this ‘tearing’ into John was on a psychological level.

John’s now deeply entrenched insecurity meant that he wasn’t going to set himself up for another fall. It was better to be punished at school for not trying, using the smokescreen of bad behaviour, than to go through the mental turmoil of academic failure. John was torn between what was expected of him by school and Mimi, and rebelling against what a young boy perceived as the unfairness of it all. The conflict and contradictions in John’s life at this time are reflected by the fact that as well as being a fighter, petty pilferer and bully, he was also a church-going choirboy and (like his hero Just William) a boy scout. In every area of every town, there were rogues like young John. It was rebellion, suburban style.

After John’s move to senior school, there began first a trickle and then a flood of mixing with other children outside of school hours. It was at this time that John discovered his mother’s address, not 20 minutes away from Mendips – a discovery that was to cause a further radical change to his outlook. Visits to his mother’s house were barred by Mimi – Blomfield Road was strictly off limits. Mimi successfully rewrote John’s childhood with comments like:

Of course things couldn’t have worked out better if we’d have planned it because George and I loved him madly and every day Julia would come over and play with him, so really he has two mothers in a way.¹⁰

Stanley Parkes, John’s older cousin by six years, remembers it differently. Stanley lived in Scotland and would travel down to Liverpool for the summer holidays, and in many ways he acted as a big brother to John, taking him and his cousin Leila on trips to the park and days out to New Brighton beach. All in all a good egg, he looked out for his younger cousin, who had already been through so much. Stanley asked on John’s behalf if they could visit Julia, a request which Mimi refused. Stanley then used subterfuge. Asking Mimi if he would be allowed to take John and Leila to his Aunt Harriet’s, Mimi agreed. Stanley risked the wrath of Mimi by ‘smuggling’ John on a visit to his mother’s house. Stanley recalls:

John tolerated Aunt Mimi. She was a bit of tyrant. She kept a tight rein on his activities, but he would rebel against her.¹¹

Len Garry, John’s friend at this time, goes further:

Mimi was a cat lover … She loved her cats more than she loved kids, that’s for sure. She was a frightening woman. She wasn’t homely, she was more like a headmistress, librarian type person. And you were scared to knock on the door.¹²

Little wonder that as John grew up he would gravitate towards Blomfield Road.

At various times in his life, John would give the general impression that all was fine with his childhood. Occasionally, though, he would provide insights into a somewhat different opinion of his time at Mendips. His comments of a happy childhood and his own inner turmoil could be compared to a duck sailing along a pond – all peace and calm while underneath the paddling feet creating turbulence and purpose invisible to those above. While at Rishikesh in a search for inner peace John reflected:

When you’re born, you’re in the pram and you smile when you feel like smiling. But the first game that you learn is to smile before you get touched. Most mothers actually torture the kid in the pram – make it smile when it doesn’t want to: smile and you get fed.¹³

The important term of reference here from John is ‘most mothers’. This could be a subconscious term intended to deflect directly from Mimi and couch the cry for help and understanding by denial of the emotional distress he was going through.

Child psychologist Alice Miller’s research showed that

repressed pain blocks emotional life and leads to physical symptoms. And the worst thing is that, although the feelings of the abused child have been at the point of origin, that is, in the presence of those who caused the pain, they find their voice when the battered child has children of his own.¹⁴

John’s confused childhood entered a new phase when, at the age of 10, he had to live with total strangers. These strangers were Mimi’s lodgers – local university students who rented out the spare rooms at Mendips. Mimi moved her and George’s bedroom into the downstairs living room, which left John upstairs in his box room flanked by a yearly change of students. An interview for the Liverpool Echo by one of Mimi’s old lodgers revealed that she ‘targeted’ male students from the Veterinary Department of the university. This particular department was chosen so that free, professional pet care could be doled out to her three cats and John’s dog, Sally. Not only were the students expected to provide free pet care but they had to endure ‘greasy breakfasts, sometimes with cat hairs floating in them’.¹⁵ Julia Baird remembers the young John being taught ‘The Dirty Alphabet’ by one of these student lodgers which entailed ‘A is for Arse, B is for …’ Well, you get the idea. What other introductions made towards the adult world of sex by this conveyor belt of students is anyone’s guess. In Hunter Davies’ authorised biography, The Beatles, he reveals nothing at all of John having an annual round of new faces to share his home with. There was certainly no mention of one of the very early students from Yorkshire, Michael Fishwick, a student of biochemistry who would later return to Mendips while completing his PhD.

The introduction of these lodgers may have served Mimi well, providing additional monies and free pet care, but for John, beside the issues of his privacy and sheer uneasiness of the situation, he was constantly reminded by these young men of the educational path he was expected to take: O Levels, A Levels and then university, like many other pupils at Quarry Bank. The pressure of a grammar school education was compounded by the constant reminder at Mendips to apply and adapt to the homilies of ‘getting on’ in life by ‘building character’ and ‘a need to learn right from wrong’. Mimi never missed an opportunity to self-publicise herself as a caring mother substitute – ‘firm but fair’.

Mimi’s explanation for taking John with the aid of social workers from Julia centred on the ‘love’ she had for him the instant she saw him. This follows Mimi’s fairytale ‘mad dash through German bombs’. In her mind she had no competition in writing the history of John and Mendips. In all the interviews she gave, she never once mentions at any point spending time with John as a baby or toddler, not one word to the effect of buying baby John clothes, a pushchair or toys. Not one word of going on days out with toddler John or trips to the park or cinema, nothing.

These omissions are strange when one considers the complete ‘accuracy’ Mimi gave to every little detail she had in John’s upbringing from birth to adulthood. Only when John was taken to Mendips was there any recollection of her involvement with the child. The story of Mimi being besotted with John as a newborn baby appears to have been essentially a smokescreen for what she would carry out with the aid of Liverpool Corporation Welfare Department five years later. Mimi took Julia’s child not for any altruistic means, but because she wanted to and she could. The manipulation, threats and total insensitivity to the needs of young John would ultimately leave him psychologically scarred. Later, John would recall that he had a ‘subconscious urge to get above people or out of a rut’¹⁶ and in terms of his childhood, ‘nothing would drive me through all that if I was normal’.¹⁷ John’s reflection of his childhood was honest and heart-rending:

The worse pain is that of not being wanted of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them … When I was a child I had experience of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my mind and into my eyes.¹⁸

John was plainly aware of how the perceived absence of love in his life tainted his perception of the world. A double blow for John was that he was conditioned to judge and dislike his parents and hence be dependent on Mimi, who in turn left him in emotional turmoil. John’s feelings for Julia and Freddie became increasingly complex and confused. Cynthia Lennon, a first-hand observer of Mimi and John’s relationship, commented:

She loved to fuel the image of the stern but loving aunt who provided the secure backdrop to John’s success. But that wasn’t the Mimi I knew. She battered away at John’s self-confidence and left him angry and hurt.¹⁹

Hunter Davies explains what happened when Mimi insisted he sent her a draft copy of The Beatles:

… she had hysterics. The manuscript came back with almost every paragraph which concerned John’s childhood heavily crossed out or amended. In the margins she had written beside John’s own quotes such things as ‘Rubbish’, ‘Never!’. She denied so many of John’s own memories of his childhood, especially if they contradicted her memories of the same people or events.²⁰

As John slowly developed a capacity for self-reliance, his arguments with Mimi grew. There were painful consequences. John’s emerging self-assurance was closely matched to his confidence in his writing, but this would often be frustrated and criticised by Mimi:

I used to say, ‘Don’t you destroy my papers.’ I’d come home when I was 14 and she’d rooted through all my things and threw all my poetry out. I was saying, ‘One day I’ll be famous and you’re going to regret it’.²¹

Mimi went to even greater lengths to curb this sense of independence. At a time when John was forming a stronger relationship with his mother, his visits to Blomfield Road having significantly increased, Mimi stepped up her opposition. Continuous quarrels developed over these visits, which Mimi venomously opposed. One weekend visit turned into a particularly hurtful episode after John threatened to stay with his mother. When John returned to Mendips a couple of days later, he found that Mimi had had his dog Sally, who he had owned since Junior School, destroyed. Mimi’s excuse was that 14-year-old John had threatened not to return and she wasn’t going to walk his dog. So, in the space of a weekend, she had no choice but to have the dog put down. John’s life-long friend Pete Shotton recalls that it was ‘one of the few times [he] ever saw John cry, after he returned home from Julia’s house and found Sally missing’.²² John’s ‘big brother’, cousin Stanley, believed that the fate of the dog, ‘which he adored’, dramatically affected him. His feeling towards Mimi changed, hardened and ‘he never forgave her for that’.

The story of John’s childhood has largely been told through the narratives of Mimi. Major ‘players’ such as Julia, Freddie and the Stanleys have been silenced, discredited or been persuaded to accept Mimi’s version of events. John’s sister, Julia Baird, has stood out amongst those writers on John’s history in her attempt to bear witness for their mother, and has sought to reveal a more accurate picture of John’s life. She argues:

Mimi lived for 11 years after John and she continued to rewrite her story. She said, ‘I knew I wanted John from the moment I first saw him.’ We all like our sister’s children, but she made all that up. Give her another 50 years and she’d have claimed she had John herself.²³

John used his creativity to help stem the tides of such unhappiness. ‘It was all imagining I was Just William, really.’²⁴ John’s life, though, wasn’t like his hero’s childhood, with William getting up to comic scrapes along with his gang the Outlaws in a mythical corner of England. In fact, the adult John recalls how ‘the first thing I remember is a nightmare’.²⁵