Читать книгу John Lennon: The Life - Philip Norman - Страница 13

It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.

By his second term at Liverpool College of Art, John was known as the most problematic student in any age group or any course: a troublemaker and subversive who resisted doing serious work himself and tried his utmost to distract his fellow students from theirs. Most of his instructors quickly decided he was unteachable, demanded little or no work from him, and avoided any confrontation over his behaviour. His sculpture tutor, Philip Hartas, for one, was frankly intimidated by ‘a fellow who seemed to have been born without brakes.’

The sullen sartorial outsider of registration day had metamorphosed into something vaguely resembling an art student, though he would never completely discard his would-be tough Teddy Boy persona. ‘I became a bit artier…but I still dressed like a Ted, with tight drainies,’ he recalled. ‘One week I’d go in with my college scarf…the next week I’d go for the leather jacket and jeans.’

The young people with whom he now spent his days were a great deal less shockable than his old classmates at Quarry Bank. The word fuck and its derivatives—still absolutely taboo in polite society and all printed matter—were used throughout college with a casualness that even the doggedly foul-mouthed Woolton Outlaw at first found surprising. Many students had flats of their own, and so could have sex whenever they pleased, in privacy and comfort rather than hastily and furtively in the cold outdoors. Almost everyone, male and female, drank heavily and chain-smoked; some even took illegal drugs, mostly acquired through the neighbouring West Indian community—though John, at this stage, did not even dream such things existed.

On the outside, he might have been all swagger and defiance, but inside he was consumed with self-doubt, believing that he had got into college only by a fluke and possessed no aptitude for the work he was expected to do. ‘I should have been an illustrator or in the painting school,’ he complained years later. ‘But I found myself in Lettering. They might as well have put me in sky-diving for the use I was at lettering.’ (Once again, he sold himself short: the private sketchbooks containing his cartoons, nonsense poems and stories were always lettered immaculately.)

‘I think he felt frustrated, though he would never admit it,’ recalled one of his first tutors, Arthur Ballard. ‘There he was, surrounded by people who had some talent with art, and I think he felt in a bit over his head. He would act in a daft manner to distract people and probably take away the fact that he wasn’t as good an artist as they were. He would act the fool, but underneath all that I could see he actually was a thinker.’

John liked Arthur Ballard, a friendly, red-whiskered bear of a man who had once been the army’s middleweight boxing champion. But in Ballard’s classes, he initially shone no brighter than in any others. Every Friday the members of his 12-person Intermediate group were expected to display a painting or drawing in progress for assessment by Ballard and general discussion and criticism. John’s offerings were always far below the standard of the others’; on many occasions, he seemed too embarrassed to show anything at all.

In an attempt to stimulate John’s enthusiasm, Ballard would sometimes take him to a club called the Basement in Mount Pleasant, run as a sideline by the painter Yankel Feather. ‘Ballard used to come in with this very serious-looking young lad, and talk to him for hours at a time,’ Feather remembers. ‘Even in those days, I used to think he looked sort of half-Japanese. I remember the look he always used to give me, as if he wanted to tangle with me and see what I was made of.

‘At the back of this old wine-cellar we used to have a grand piano with half its keys missing. John would get on that sometimes, and do Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”. One time when he was bashing away, I told him “If you don’t stop that fucking noise, I’ll throw you out!” In the vestibule of the club, I’d hung this big semi-abstract painting that I’d done; and as John walked past it on this day, he got a key or something out of his pocket and ripped the canvas along its whole length. “Cheerio, boss,” was all he said.’

Ballard was beginning to despair of conjuring any worthwhile work from John when, in an empty lecture room one day, he happened on a notebook full of caricatures of college professors and students, poems and satirical commentaries, which he thought ‘the wittiest thing I’d ever seen in my life’. The book contained no clue as to its author; Ballard had to do some detective work before discovering it was John’s. He didn’t let on that he’d found it until the next time his class were pinning up their work for discussion. ‘I brought out [his] notebook and we discussed the work in it,’ Ballard remembered. ‘John had never expected anyone to look at it, let alone find it funny and brilliant. “When I talk about interpretation, boy, this is the kind of thing I mean as well,” I told him. “This is the kind of thing I want you to be doing.”’

Yet he had abilities that went far beyond cartooning, even if he chose to reveal them only in flashes, and almost never on demand. He certainly was not the poor relation in his set when they were sent out of college to sketch from life in the cathedral precincts or the Williamson Square livestock market. The accepted method was to work in small dabs and stabs, with painstaking shading and crosshatching. John, however, could capture a face or object in a single bold, unwavering line, much as one of his earliest artist heroes, Henri Matisse, was wont to do. He was also capable of impressing his painting tutor, an energetic Welshman named Charlie Burton. ‘I thought he had the potential to be very good,’ Burton says. ‘But he didn’t really have the right temperament for a painter, which means spending a lot of time on your own. John always had to have a crowd around him—and he had to be in control of them. One day, I told his group what I wanted them to do, and went out of the room for a few minutes. When I came back, John had them all rolling around in fits of laughter. Then he gave them a look as if to say “What a load of absolute idiots you lot are.” Chilled them to the bone, he did.’

Just as he and his fellow Woolton onanists had fantasised, his course did include life drawing of a nude female, to which Intermediate students eventually graduated from Grecian busts and the college skeleton. Not only that: June Furlong, the model who usually sat for John’s group, was a gorgeous 27-year-old with the kind of voluptuous severity as a rule seen in shadowy ‘art’ photographs. A forthright Scouser despite her exotic looks, she had modelled at most of London’s premier art schools and was on friendly terms with many famous painters, among them Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach.

June ran the life class more strictly than any tutor, quelling the smallest hint of unrest among its male members with a ferocious eye, creating the rigidly practical atmosphere of—in her own phrase—‘a clinic’. She had received advance warning of John’s fractiousness, and prepared herself for the worst when she saw him perched with dangling legs on the wooden shelf above the sink where students washed their brushes and palettes. (The shelf’s being just too high to sit on with comfort made it irresistible to John.)

‘But I never had the slightest bit of trouble with him,’ June remembers. ‘And never had a bad word from him. When he came in for a class, he’d pull his chair right up close to me and we’d talk, talk, talk for the whole time—about art, about the colleges where I’d worked in London and all the artists I’d met. And there was something about him you couldn’t help but take notice of, even though no one seemed to think his work was much good. I remember thinking “You, mate…you’ll either end up at the bottom or you’re going to the very top.”’

Clinical though June made the ambience, fascinating though her anecdotes about Augustus John and the Slade Art School, she was still the sexiest woman John had encountered outside Brigitte Bardot films or the pages of Razzle magazine. He once made an attempt to proposition her, as hundreds must have done before him, but was rebuffed without serious damage to his amour propre. ‘I said to him “How much money have you got, John? I’m not sitting over a half of bitter at Ye Cracke, you know. I go to the Adelphi.”’

He needed an accomplice at college no less than at school, and Russell Jeffrey Mohammed soon stepped into the role of Ginger to his William, Lotton to his Shennon. Jeff Mohammed lived in Didsbury, Manchester, but boasted a complex pedigree—a father who was an Indian silk merchant and an Italian mother born within the sacred precincts of Vatican City in Rome. Aged 27, ten years older than John, he epitomised the college’s open-door policy; before deciding to study art, he had experimented with a variety of jobs and done National Service as a military policeman in Malaya.

Jeff was tall and handsome, with the bearing of a prince and a voice that still bore traces of the public school to which his polyglot parents had sent him. He played jazz clarinet and was a passionate trad enthusiast who treated the latter encroachments of modern jazz as a personal insult. When the great Humphrey Lyttelton temporarily forsook the Dixieland style to make records with a more modern feel, Jeff waited until Lyttelton played a gig in Manchester, then confronted him, denounced him as a traitor, and ended by punching him in the nose.

By the time he met John, his eccentricities were already a byword among his fellow students. When he received his grant money, he would change it all into half-crown coins, turn the light off in his bedroom, then fling them far and wide, so that in later weeks when he became hard up, there was always hope of finding a stray halfcrown under his bed or on top of his wardrobe. One of his favourite tricks was to select a pub or workmen’s ‘caff’ where every face was uncompromisingly white and fling open its door with a ringingly authoritative cry of ‘Right! All foreigners out of here!’

Despite their age difference, the pairing of John and Jeff Mohammed had something inevitable about it. They belonged to different work groups and so spent most of each day apart, but wherever their paths crossed, John’s manic laughter instantly redoubled. Although Jeff’s greater worldliness and experience were part of the attraction for him, they always treated each other as equals. They had the same fondness for books, poetry and language, the same interest in mildly occult things like Ouija boards and palmistry, the same unerring eye for human oddity, the same inexhaustible compulsion to make fun. Even their mutually inimical musical tastes, trad versus rock, caused no serious disagreement. Jeff never managed to turn John on to Satchmo Armstrong or Kid Ory, just as he himself remained impervious to the magic of Elvis and Buddy Holly. However, he possessed a large collection of jazz record albums, in those days almost the only kind to feature contemporary design and typography on their covers. John grudgingly conceded there was something in the look, if not the sound.

The two were most commonly to be found at Ye Cracke, an eccentric little mock-Tudor pub in Rice Street, just a couple of blocks from college, where both students and teaching staff would democratically forgather. Its art-college clientele favoured the larger rear bar whose walls displayed two outsized etchings—one of Marshal Blucher greeting the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, the other of Horatio Nelson’s death at Trafalgar. John’s and Jeff’s favourite roost was a bench below the Nelson scene, between side panels of British sailors watching their admiral’s last moments. The horrified look on every face in the composition led John to retitle it Who Farted?

This being the north, the beer came in pints, in straight glasses rather than tankards, wherein to leave the slightest drop cast doubt on the drinker’s very manhood. Army life had made Jeff a seasoned drinker whose affability never faltered as the score of pints mounted. But John, then and always, needed little more than the proverbial ‘sniff of the barmaid’s apron’ to put him under the influence. And a drunk John, then and always, turned into an addle-brained kamikaze, ready to insult anyone and assault anyone. ‘I always got a little violent on drink,’ he would admit. ‘[Jeff] was like a bodyguard for me. So whenever I got into some controversy, he’d ease me out of it.’

Occasionally they made up a threesome with Jeff’s girlfriend, Ann Mason, whose sharp eye had noted every wrong detail of John’s Registration Day outfit and who—like other females on their course—regarded him with an uneasy mixture of distaste and awe. Ann says that while Jeff’s pranks always had an underlying kindliness, John seemed to recognise no boundaries of conscience or compassion in his urge to flout authority and do down the softies and drips. On the annual Panto Day, for instance, when the college joined with Liverpool University to raise money for charity, he would simply pocket the contents of the collection tin he had taken through the streets. He also continued his boyhood habit of shoplifting, even though the risks in central Liverpool were far greater than in rural Woolton. One of his habitual targets was an art-materials shop run by a pair of old ladies, both too shortsighted to realise how many of their brushes, pencils and sketchbooks he was filching.

One day, when John and Ann sat near each other in a lecture, she began idly sketching him. Later, in one of the painting rooms, she developed her sketch into the first full-length portrait she had ever done—and the only one she ever would. John sat for her for a couple of hours with surprising patience, though, as she recalls, ‘I had to pretend I wasn’t painting him and he pretended he wasn’t posing.’ The portrait shows him seated on a turned-round wooden chair with his arms folded tightly over its back and his knees thrust out on either side; he is wearing a dark jacket and olive suede shoes (bought on a grant-spending spree with Jeff) and his usually hidden Buddy Holly glasses. The effect is of barely contained energy: a figure coiled to spring, or maybe run for cover.

John may have learned next to nothing from his college teachers. But that does not mean he learned nothing at college. His friendship with Stuart Sutcliffe amounted to a one-man degree course, even if largely conducted in student flats and smoky bar-parlours. And here, no scholarship boy with a virtuous cargo of O-level passes could have been more attentive, receptive or enthralled.

Stu was the same age as John but had arrived at college from Prescot Grammar School a year earlier. He was far and away the most talented student in the place, gifted with a seemingly effortless mastery of every medium he touched, drawing, painting or sculpture. He was also phenomenally energetic, filling canvases and sketchbooks with work of a maturity that dazzled his instructors, then hurtling on to the next thing almost before they had time to articulate their praise. Small and feminine featured, with luxuriant backswept hair, he was often likened to the short-lived screen idol James Dean—a comparison that would prove all too sadly appropriate. In fact, the dark glasses he often wore denoted a more obscure role-model, Zbigniew Cybulski, protégé of the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda and sometimes called ‘the James Dean of Poland’.

Stu functioned on an altogether more grown-up level than John. Though his Scottish middle-class parents lived in Liverpool, he had a flat in Percy Street, which he shared with his close friend Rod Murray. Recognising him to be in a class of his own, the college let him do much of his work there also. His main tutor, the tolerant Arthur Ballard, would drop by regularly to see him, bringing half a bottle of whisky for refreshment, but seldom made any effort to control the roaring flood of his creativity.

John met Stu through Bill Harry, another fellow student destined to play a significant role in his later life. Bill, in fact, was the archetypal working-class hero, having fought his way to college from an impoverished childhood in Parliament Street, near the docks, where wartime bomb rubble remained still uncleared and terrifying mobs with names like the Chain Gang and the Peanut Gang ruled the neighbourhood. A compulsive reader, writer, cartoonist, organiser and entrepreneur, he found few kindred spirits apart from Stu and Rod Murray in a student body he considered largely time-wasting ‘dilettanti’.

Bill discovered that John shared his own interest in writing and, at Ye Cracke one lunchtime, asked to read some of his work. Diffidently murmuring something about ‘a poem’, John pulled two bedraggled sheets of paper from his jeans pocket and handed them over. Bill expected the standard teenage knock-off of Byron or the American Beats; instead, he found himself reading a Goonish pastiche of The Archers, BBC radio’s agricultural drama, that made him guffaw out loud.

John, as it happened, already knew about Stu Sutcliffe, and was more than happy for Bill Harry to introduce them formally at Ye Cracke, under the distracted gaze of the dying Lord Nelson. ‘If John ever thought anything or anyone was really good,’ Rod Murray remembers, ‘he turned into a completely different person. Much quieter, more thoughtful…ready to talk seriously about serious things. And he thought Stu was really good.’

The admiration was by no means all on one side. Along with other diverse subject matter, Stu also enjoyed cartooning, as did Bill Harry. To John’s amazement, both of them heaped praise on his drawings for technique as well as wit, comparing him with Saul Steinberg, whose whimsical, perspectiveless covers for The New Yorker magazine they had found in the college library. Suddenly, John was being taken seriously by the most talented artist on his horizon.

Stu’s sister Pauline—in later life a respected therapist—thinks it hard to overrate the redemptive effect of this. ‘John had a desperate quest for a certain kind of nurturing. Stuart’s nurturing was unconditional…He loved him. And John recognised that Stuart believed in him…that he believed he wasn’t just a mad, destructive anarchist, but was somebody of worth. Stuart freed John’s own creative spirit.’

John in effect led a double life at college, reflecting the two utterly different sides of his personality. For every drunken foray with Jeff Mohammed there would be a long, serious talk with Stu Sutcliffe, together with Bill Harry and Rod Murray or tête-à-tête. In common with only a few visual artists, Stu could verbalise his aims and intentions, and possessed intellectual curiosity outside his own field. At the time he met John, his personal reading list included Turgenev, Benvenuto Cellini, Herbert Read, Osbert Sitwell and James Joyce. He was also heavily into Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher who first said that in an irrational world, truth can only be subjective and individual. ‘We’d sit around for hours, asking, “Who are we? Why are we here? What are we for?”’ Bill remembers. It was from Stu that John first heard about Dadaism, the principle—to be so spectacularly demonstrated by his future second wife—that no subject matter is too shocking or absurd to deserve the name of art. ‘Without Stu Sutcliffe,’ Arthur Ballard said, ‘John wouldn’t have known Dada from a donkey.’

For John, the most surprising and winning aspect of this pintsized powerhouse was that he had nothing to do with the college’s dominant trad jazz crowd but, on the contrary, had adored rock ‘n’ roll from its beginning. And already its unhinged sounds and tawdry glitter were firing his imagination as potently as anything from the Renaissance or the French Impressionists. Among his early paintings was an abstract entitled ‘Elvis Presley’, clearly influenced by Picasso’s Guitar Player, executed in garish jukebox colours and spotted with names of Presley songs, ‘Blue Moon [of Kentucky]’, ‘Hound Dog’, and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.

Another prescient belief shared by Stu, Bill, Rod and now John, was that the city to which they belonged was unique in Britain—in the whole world—and deserved to be celebrated in art and culture just as American Beat poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso had enshrined San Francisco. As regular attendees of poetry readings at Liverpool University, they disliked the way that almost all young contemporary British poets seemed to have fallen under the Beats’ spell. They agreed to form a four-man society called the Dissenters (an echo of William Brown’s many secret societies) to uphold Liverpool’s own native idiom against these outside invaders: Stu and Rod would do it through art, Bill through writing, and John through music.

Now more than a year old, the Quarrymen still idled along under their obsolete name, mixing the death rattles of skiffle with already dated rock-’n’-roll classics and the latest easy-to-follow blueprint helpfully lobbed across the Atlantic by Buddy Holly.

The first months of 1958 brought further personnel changes. Once Paul was sure of his own position, he had begun enthusing to John about the guitar-mad Liverpool Institute boy with whom he used to travel to school by bus each day when the McCartneys still lived in Speke. The crucial defining mark of a rock combo was a lead guitarist playing instrumental breaks aside from the collective strum. Paul suggested that his schoolmate George Harrison might suit this role.

In contrast with the class ambiguities surrounding John (and, to a lesser degree, Paul), there was never any doubt about George’s place in the social scale. His father, Harry, was a Liverpool Corporation bus driver, hardworking, respectable and entirely comfortable with his station. Born in February 1943, George had spent infant years in the Liverpool from which Mimi had so thankfully rescued John, where homes stood claustrophobically side-to-side and back-to-back, linked by cobbled lanes known as jiggers; where the toilet was an outdoor shed and the only way to have a bath was in a zinc tub before the kitchen fire.

George was an unlikely convert to rock ‘n’ roll—a serious, taciturn boy who hated many of the enforced intimacies of his workingclass background and had an almost phobic abhorrence of ‘nosey neighbours’. With this earnest nature went an acute sense of style and a refusal to conform that, in its quiet way, was almost the equal of John’s. While other boy skifflers were content merely to strum in A or E, George applied himself to mastering the single-string solos that more experienced players automatically assumed to be far out of reach. He also owned a spectacular guitar: a cello-style Hofner President with what the catalogue termed a ‘brunette sunburst finish’ and a cutaway shoulder, for reaching the high notes at the base of the fretboard.

Paul’s selling of George to John was a more protracted affair than Paul’s own by Ivan Vaughan had been. For some time he was merely another Quarrymen follower, one of a not overlarge constituency, whose pale, unsmiling face could often be seen near the stage-front at Wilson Hall before all chance of serious musical appreciation was terminated by belt-lashing Teds. Formal introductions were finally made—so drummer Colin Hanton remembers—at an illegal club called the Morgue in the basement of an old house in Oakhill Park. By way of audition, George played ‘Raunchy’, a bass-string instrumental that was currently a hit for Sun Records’ producer Bill Justis. On the evidence of that and other bass-note workouts like ‘Guitar Boogie Shuffle’, not to mention his splendiferous Hofner President, there seemed every reason for the Quarrymen to haul him on board before some other group did.

The objection was that George was still not quite 15 and, despite his carefully poised coiffure and ultrasharp clothes, looked barely old enough to be out alone at night. The nine-month age difference between Paul and him was just about tolerable, as was the 18-month one between Paul and John. But John was George’s senior by almost two-and-a-half years. To the worldly art student, the intense little Ted with his big cutaway guitar and protruding ears was inevitably ‘just a kid’.

John’s answer was to accept George as a guitarist but not as an equal and still less, to begin with, as a friend. ‘[George] was just too young. I didn’t want to know him at first. He came round [to Mendips] once and asked me to go to the pictures with him, but I pretended I was too busy.’ Nor was it from John alone that snubs and belittlement had to be endured. On the occasion of George’s first visit to Mendips, Aunt Mimi also happened to be there. Mimi had considered Paul Mc-Cartney a sufficiently unwelcome visitant from the Scouse-accented netherworld. Unassuming little George, with his bus-driving dad, his Speke council house, his Saturday job as a butcher’s errand boy—above all, his unusually deep, adenoidal Liverpudlian voice—could hardly have dismayed her more if he’d marched into the front hall and begun laying about its Royal Worcester and Coalport china with a hatchet. ‘He’s a real wacker, isn’t he?’ she commented witheringly after he’d gone. ‘You always seem to like the low-class types, don’t you, John?’

George swallowed all such slights—though he did not forget them—and by March 1958, having by now turned 15, was a full-fledged Quarryman. That month Paul wrote to a man named Mike Robbins, the husband of his cousin Bett, who was entertainments manager at Butlins Holiday Camp in Filey. With true McCartney hubris but, alas, unsuccessfully, he offered the Quarrymen as resident performers during the next summer holiday.

George brought the number of guitarists in the Quarrymen to four, a not unusual complement for strum-happy skiffle groups but too many for the cooler, more calculated image of rock ‘n’ roll. Balance could be restored only by dropping Eric Griffiths, the last of John’s original sidemen from Quarry Bank school. He was not an especially accomplished player and had never enjoyed the friendship with John that would have protected his back.

The group had also, coincidentally, lost Len Garry, the only other one who might perhaps have accompanied John, Paul and George to their eventual destiny. In July 1958, Len collapsed at home and was rushed to Sefton General Hospital in a coma. He was found to be suffering from meningitis, an illness triggered, among other things, by breathing foetid air in subterranean dives like the Cavern. Once off the danger list, he was moved to the convalescent hospital at Fazakerley, where he remained until January 1959.

Eric Griffiths said later that John offered him a chance to stay on in the Quarrymen if he would replace Len on bass, but using one of the new electric bass guitars rather than an outmoded tea chest. When he replied that such a technological marvel was far beyond his means, the plot against him moved swiftly. His best friend in the group, Colin Hanton, was visited by Nigel Walley, informed of the collective will, and persuaded not to walk out in sympathy—for Colin’s drum kit, if not Colin’s drumming, remained a vital collective asset. The next time a group rehearsal was scheduled, Griffiths was simply not told about it. Colin then delivered formal notification that he was out.

Ironically, the change of image that was meant to improve the Quarrymen’s fortunes seemed to have a quite opposite effect. After the departure of Garry and Griffiths, the supply of paid gigs dwindled almost to nothing. For the next year, as graver matters overshadowed John’s life, his group would teeter constantly on the edge of extinction yet somehow never quite topple over it.

During this extended drought, most of the occasions when he shared a stage with his two young Liverpool Institute sidekicks had nothing to do with performing. Although the Institute and the Art College occupied the same building complex, they did not interact in any way, and all interior connecting corridors had been sealed since their hiving-off from the old Mechanics Institute in the 1890s. However, there was an exterior side passage from the Institute to a section of the college yard close to a door that led to its cafêteria. Several times a week in their lunch break, Paul and George would do their best to obliterate their school uniform by buttoning their black raincoats to the neck over their ties. Then they would slip along the passage into the college precincts to meet up with John in the cafeteria.

It was strictly against the rules of both college and school: had the two intruders been recognised by anyone in authority, they would have been ejected and reported to their headmaster. As Paul remembers, the thrill of danger always suffused this lunchtime habitat of John’s, where egg and chips were served instead of dreary school meat and veg, where fascinating females engaged in racy banter with arty young men, and where everyone could smoke as they pleased. ‘You’d see Paul and George sneak in,’ Ann Mason remembers. ‘Then John would join them, looking quite nervous. The cafeteria had a stage, which we used for our college plays and shows. They usually sat up there together, because it was near the door, I suppose in case Paul and George needed to make a quick exit.’

John and Paul meanwhile continued writing songs together, seated in their facing chairs in the McCartney living room. After something like six months of these mostly illicit afternoon sessions, they had around 20 compositions they thought worth preserving—though for what, they still had no idea. Paul kept them in a school exercise book, their lyrics and chord sequences set out in his neat hand, each page headed ‘A Lennon-McCartney Original’ or ‘Another Lennon-McCartney Original’.

In every songwriting partnership they had ever heard of, one partner produced the melody, the other the lyrics. John and Paul made no such division of labour; both did words and music. Each song on which they collaborated was not only an expression of their mirrorimage affinity but also an exercise in one-upmanship. From opposite sides of the fireplace, they would bat new ideas and chord changes back and forth like a table tennis match, each half-hoping the rally would continue for ever and half that his opponent might miss and the ball go bouncing out of control among the coal scuttle and the fire tongs.

To begin with, they used the traditional Tin Pan Alley lexicon of moon, June, true and you, from which rock ‘n’ roll, for all its seeming iconoclasm, had not significantly departed. ‘There’s no blue moon that I can see/There’s never been in history,’ ran one lyric destined to go nowhere. Now and then, the composers would subconsciously reveal their common grounding in English literature. A casual pingpong exchange around G major, for instance, produced the phrase ‘love, love me do,’ a locution straight from the Lewis Carroll era (‘Alice, Stop daydreaming, do!…’). Tape recorders at this date were still cumbersome reel-to-reel machines, costing far more than the pair could hope to scrape up between them. Consequently, they had no idea how their voices sounded together, nor any means of preserving rough versions of songs that might deserve to be polished later. Instead, a simple rule of thumb was adopted: if they came up with a new number on one day and could both still remember it on the day after, it worked.

So the titles kept accumulating in Paul’s exercise book, some predictable and derivative, others already giving off an unmistakable tang of originality and humour: ‘Keep Looking That Way’, ‘Years Roll By’, ‘Thinking of Linking’, ‘Looking Glass’, ‘Winston’s Walk’. In relation to their present life as musicians, the exercise was completely pointless. The audiences for whom the Quarrymen played, when they did manage to play, wanted nothing but skiffle chestnuts or American rock-’n’-roll covers. Those Lennon-McCartney Originals seemed destined not even to enjoy the limited exposure of John’s ‘Daily Howl’.

The old skiffle scene was growing more sophisticated in every way. Whereas once groups would audition for gigs in person, many of them now preferred to put songs on tape to circulate among promoters and club managements. Since the Quarrymen had no tape recorder, nor access to one, there was only one way so to advertise themselves. In the Kensington area of Liverpool was a small studio where, for not too high a price, amateur performers could have their efforts enshrined on an actual gramophone record. Somewhat as a last resort in their hunt for work, the Quarrymen found the requisite cash between them and booked an appointment.

The studio was owned by an elderly man named Percy Phillips, who operated it single-handedly in a back room of his Victorian terrace house. Here, one afternoon in mid-1958, John, Paul, George and drummer Colin Hanton assembled, plus a schoolfriend of Paul’s named Duff Lowe, who was blessed with the gift of playing Jerry Lee Lewis-style arpeggios on the piano.

Even at this important moment, Lennon-McCartney Originals were left in the background. For their A-side, they chose ‘That’ll Be the Day’, Buddy Holly’s breakthrough hit with the Crickets, released in September of the previous year. They had been trying for months to work out Holly’s back-somersaulting guitar intro and, thanks mainly to John, had just succeeded in getting it note-perfect. The B-side was ‘In Spite of All the Danger’, a country-and-western pastiche—and a rather good one—written by Paul with help from George, which explained Duff Lowe’s presence on piano. John took the lead vocal on both tracks, with Paul and George singing backup harmonies.

The experience of ‘making a record’, about which they had been boasting to their friends and families, proved rather lacking in glamour. They were allowed only a single take for each song, then had to sit and wait while Mr Phillips cut the disc on a machine somewhat like an industrial lathe. The price was £5, but for an extra £1, he told them, he could first transfer their recording to tape and help them edit it before putting it on wax. ‘We’d only just managed to raise the five quid between us,’ Colin Hanton remembers. ‘John said there was no way we were paying another £1.’

Their money bought them just the one shellac disc in the new, shrunken 45 rpm size, with a yellow label saying ‘Kensington’ and the song titles and composer credits handwritten by Percy Phillips. Nigel Walley duly hawked it around the clubs and dance halls, but without notable success. Merseyside as yet had no local radio that might have picked it up, nor discotheques that might have introduced it to live audiences. The most effective plugger turned out to be Colin’s printer friend, Charles Roberts, who worked for the Littlewoods mail-order organisation. Roberts managed to get John’s rendition of ‘That’ll Be the Day’ played over the public-address system to Littlewoods’ largely female employees.

The disc became the common property of its makers, each enjoying custody of it in turn, one week at a time. John had it for a week then passed it to Paul, who had it for a week then passed it to George, who had it for a week then passed it to Colin, who had it for a week, then passed it to Duff Lowe who had it for the next two decades, until it was worth a fortune.

All these new people and preoccupations in his life had helped blind and deafen John to an unbelievable thing going on under his very nose. Aunt Mimi was having a clandestine affair with her lodger, the biochemistry student Michael Fishwick. Yes, Mimi, that brisk suburban Betsey Trotwood, who seemed so scornful of normal feminine susceptibilities—scornful of the entire male species—had a lover half her age and only eight years older than the nephew in her care.

She had taken to Fishwick from the moment he arrived at Mendips as a 19-year-old undergraduate in 1951. It was not just that the Yorkshire teenager was studious and serious beyond his years and able to provide the intellectual stimulation Mimi had craved in her mundane marriage to George Smith. Something about him recalled the only real love of her life, the young doctor from Warrington who had died from a virus in 1932 before they could marry. She would later give Fishwick the gold cuff links she had bought her doomed fiancé as an engagement present and secretly had cherished ever since.

After George’s death, Mimi had leaned heavily on Michael Fishwick, making him almost a surrogate head of the household and increasingly turning to him for advice in coping with John. A few months later—to their mutual astonishment—friendship turned into something more. He was 24 and she was 50, though she said she was 46. The affair was consummated, revealing the exact nature of poor Uncle George’s fabled ‘kindness’. Mimi was still a virgin.

Their relationship, Fishwick now recalls, was punctuated by his absence during university holiday periods, and was carried on almost entirely at Mendips. Occasionally they would go together to an art exhibition—like the big Van Gogh show in Liverpool—or stroll around one of the National Trust stately homes in the neighbourhood, always taking care to do nothing that might set Woolton’s tongues wagging and front-room curtains twitching. Once, when Mimi was with John at her sister Mater’s in Edinburgh, she left him there and returned home so that she and Fishwick could have the house to themselves for a few days.

John never once suspected what was going on, often beyond a flimsy plaster wall in the bedroom next to his. Nor did Mimi confide in her three sisters, despite their unspoken vow to share everything. Julia, the one with the most highly tuned sexual antennae, had recently noticed a change in her—an indefinable blooming—and told the others she thought Mimi might have a ‘fancy man’, but never guessed his identity.

In July 1958, Fishwick returned to Mendips for another extended stay. Three months earlier he had been drafted into one of the last batches of young men compelled to do National Service. He was now an RAF officer trainee on the Isle of Man but applied for leave to return to Liverpool, as he said, to check over the PhD thesis he was having typed at the university.

Mimi was deeply worried about John’s lack of progress at art college, and more than that: when taking his coat to be dry-cleaned, she had found a packet of Durex ‘rubber Johnnies’ in one of the pockets, a precaution doubtless inspired by what had happened to Barbara Baker. Fishwick was the only person to whom she showed the packet, opening a tightly clenched hand to reveal it and asking, ‘What do I do about this?’ His advice was not to make too big a thing of it—which she evidently took, for on this occasion, at least, he recalls, there was no fiery argument between aunt and nephew, no door-slamming exit by John to seek sanctuary at Julia’s.

Sunday, 15 July, brought Merseyside warm, sunny weather that showed the woods, golf greens and trim hedges of Woolton at their lushest. John, on holiday from college, was around the house in the morning but, as Fishwick remembers, ‘drifted off later with some friends’. Mimi’s only visitor was Julia, who dropped in that afternoon for a cup of tea and a chat as she invariably did. It wasn’t until late evening—past 9.30—that she left to catch her bus back to Allerton. The longest day of the year had been only three weeks earlier. Dusk was only just starting to fall.

Julia’s bus stop was in Menlove Avenue, about 200 yards from Mendips’ front gate, on the other side of the busy two-lane road, with no pedestrian crossing anywhere near—though a 30-mph speed limit was in force. Usually Mimi walked to the stop with her, but this evening she said she wouldn’t if Julia didn’t mind. ‘That’s all right, don’t worry,’ was the cheerful reply. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ Just then, Nigel Walley turned up at the front gate, looking for John. But John had not returned home all afternoon—and, in fact, was now over at Blomfield Road, waiting for his mother’s return. Julia explained this to Walloggs, adding in her flirtatious way, ‘Never mind. You can walk me to the bus-stop.’

Mimi watched from the front door as they strolled off together, Nigel chuckling at some remark of Julia’s. They parted at the junction with Vale Road; Nigel turned right towards his home while Julia crossed Menlove Avenue’s southbound lane to the central reservation. This marked the route of the old tramway, where John and his Outlaws used to play their urchin games, and was now grassedover and planted with a hedge. Julia stepped through the hedge and was halfway across the northbound lane when a bulky Standard Vanguard sedan, registration number LKF 630, loomed out of the twilight. Nigel heard a screech of brakes and a thud, and turned to see Julia’s body thrown high into the air.

The noise was loud enough to reach Mimi and Michael Fishwick in the kitchen at Mendips. ‘We looked at each other and didn’t say a word,’ Fishwick remembers. ‘We both just ran like hell.’ They found Julia lying in the road, with a stunned Nigel Walley kneeling beside her. Nigel would always be haunted by the memory of how strangely peaceful she looked, with a stray lock of her auburn hair fluttering in the summer breeze. The impact seemed to have left no mark, though Fishwick could see blood seeping through the reddish curls; she was still just barely alive. ‘[But] when I ran across the road and saw her,’ Mimi remembered, ‘I knew there was no hope.’

An ambulance arrived within minutes to take Julia to Sefton General Hospital. Mimi got into the ambulance, still wearing the slippers in which she’d rushed out of doors. Fishwick joined her at the hospital later, bringing her some shoes and her handbag. Her immediate concern was that he should telephone other family members with the news, so that one of them could break it to John. ‘She didn’t want John to find out just from a policeman turning up at the door.’

Unfortunately, that was exactly how it happened: a constable in a Praetorian-crested helmet, knocking on the front door of 1 Blomfield Road and asking John in embarrassed officialese if he was Julia’s son. At this unspeakable moment, the only person with him was the member of his extended family he least cared about: Bobby ‘Twitchy’ Dykins. ‘Twitchy took it worse than me,’ John would recall. ‘Then he said “Who’s going to look after the kids?” And I hated him. Bloody selfishness. We got a taxi over to Sefton General, where she was lying dead…I talked hysterically to the taxi-driver all the way, ranted on and on, the way you do. The taxidriver just grunted now and again. I refused to go in and see her. But Twitchy did. He broke down.

‘It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. We’d caught up so much, me and Julia, in just a few years. We could communicate. We got on. She was great. I thought “Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. That’s really fucked everything. I’ve no responsibilities to anyone now.”’

Michael Fishwick met Mimi at the hospital, then took her to Blomfield Road, where John’s aunts Nanny and Harrie and their husbands had now arrived. Mimi collapsed into her sisters’ arms while Fishwick was given a large whisky by one of the eversubordinate menfolk. When John finally left the house, it was not to return home but to seek out his old girlfriend, Barbara Baker, and tell her the news. As Barbara would recall, the two of them went into Reynolds Park and ‘stood there with our arms around each other, crying our eyes out.’ Late that night, Mimi’s next-door neighbour, a Mrs Bushnell, saw John playing his guitar in his usual place out on Mendips’ front porch—the only real form of comfort or healing he could find.

Julia’s death was recorded by a brief announcement in the Liverpool Echo, which allowed Bobby Dykins to claim her as the spouse she’d never officially become:

Dykins—July 15th—Julia, died as result of car accident, beloved wife of John Dykins, and dearly beloved mother of John Winston Lennon, Julia and Jacqueline Dykins, 1 Blomfield Road, Liver pool 19.

Julia’s funeral took place at Allerton Cemetery on the following Friday, 20 July. There was a bitter argument between Twitchy and her sisters when it emerged that he had intended her to be buried in a pauper’s grave, subsidised by the city corporation. Instead, the four women clubbed together to pay the funerary expenses. Among the mourners were John’s cousin Liela, his childhood playmate and secret teenage crush. Now a medical student at Edinburgh University, she had been summoned by telegram from the Butlins Holiday Camp where she had a holiday job as a chalet maid. Liela remembered John lying with his head in her lap for most of that day, too numbed to speak or even move.

The car that struck Julia had been driven by an off-duty policeman, 24-year-old Eric Clague of 43 Ramillies Road, Liverpool 18. The matter therefore became the subject of an internal police inquiry by a team that included John’s friend Pete Shotton, currently on attachment to the CID from training college. The officer was only a learner driver and so should not have been out in a car by himself. Since the police of those days were rigorous in prosecuting their own, an accusation of causing death by dangerous driving seemed likely. But no criminal charge of any kind resulted. The whole matter was dealt with by the inquest, four weeks later—though, unusually, this was conducted before a jury, and its proceedings were closed to the press.

Clague attested that he had not been driving carelessly and had been doing no more than 28-mph in the 30-mph zone. Nigel Walley, the only eyewitness, testified that Clague’s car seemed to have been travelling at abnormal speed and to have swerved out of control on the steep camber of the road as Julia suddenly stepped through the hedge. Though himself the son of a police superintendent, he sensed that the court regarded him as too young to be taken seriously. ‘The Coroner seemed to be bending over backwards to help this man who’d killed Julia,’ Mimi remembered. ‘It emerged that he was driving too fast, but you could see it was a bit of a men’s club really.’ When the young policeman was exonerated of blame, Mimi exploded in fury and threatened him with a walking stick. ‘I got so mad…That swine…If I could have got my hands on him, I would have killed him.’

The findings were reported in a further brief Echo news item:

DASHED INTO CAR

Misadventure Verdict on Liverpool Woman

A verdict of misadventure was returned by the jury at the Liverpool inquest today into Mrs Julia Lennon, aged 44, of 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, who died after being struck by a motor car while she was crossing Menlove Avenue on July 15.

A witness, the Coroner (Mr J.A. Blackwood) told the jury, had said that Mrs Lennon had not appeared to look either way before she walked into the roadway. Then she saw the approaching car, made a dash to avoid it, but dashed into the car.

Julia’s death left Bobby Dykins a broken man, ridden with guilt over his past drunken misuse of her and vowing tearfully never to touch alcohol again. Even after all these years, her sisters had never brought themselves to like or accept Dykins; their opinion of him now sank to rock bottom when—echoing his first panic-stricken cry to John—he announced he couldn’t cope with raising his two young daughters by Julia. The sisters’ mutual support group then swung into action to look after 11-year-old Julia and 9-year-old Jackie, much as it had for John 12 years earlier. Since Mimi had more than enough on her plate this time around, it was decided that the girls should live with their Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert in Edinburgh.

In an attempt to soften the blow, Julia and Jackie were told that their mother was merely ill in hospital, and then packed off to Edinburgh on a supposed holiday with Mater and Bert. Within a short time, however, Mater decided she had bitten off more than she could chew, and Julia and Jackie were brought back to Woolton to live with Harrie at the Cottage, having still not been told that Julia was dead. The deception somehow struggled on for weeks more, until Harrie’s husband, Norman, could bear it no longer and blurted out, ‘Your Mummy’s in Heaven.’

Unable to stay on at 1 Blomfield Road without Julia, Dykins moved to a smaller house on the outskirts of Woolton, eventually acquiring a new woman friend and a dog. But he maintained contact with his daughters and kept Harrie well supplied with money for their keep. He also continued to feel a stepfatherly obligation towards John, giving him a key to the new house and encouraging him to use it whenever he pleased. When Dykins subsequently became relief manager at the Bear’s Paw restaurant, he got John a summer job there and ensured that a large share of the tips always went his way.

However deficient the Echo’s inquest report, it at least gave Julia her proper surname. For her marriage to Alf Lennon had never been officially dissolved, any more than Mimi’s custody of John had been officially ratified. Her death in such shocking circumstances might have been expected to reconnect John with the long-absent father who nonetheless was still his legal guardian. But the family could not have got in touch with Alf even if it had wanted to.

Since leaving the merchant navy, Alf had, in his own romantic parlance, become ‘a gentleman of the road’, the once-immaculate saloon steward now a semi-vagrant whose only employment was occasional menial jobs in hotel and restaurant kitchens. He was washing dishes at a restaurant called the Barn in Solihull when his brother Sydney sent him the Liverpool Echo cutting about Julia’s death. He did not return to Liverpool until just after the following Christmas, having spent the preceding weeks in a London Salvation Army hostel recovering from a broken leg. It was at the hostel that a Liverpool solicitor finally contacted him and told him that, as Julia’s legal next of kin, he was heir to the whole of her small estate. Alf duly returned north and presented himself at the solicitor’s office, but only to give up his right to Julia’s few possessions in favour of John. He made no attempt to see or communicate with John, however, and after a few days disappeared on his travels again. His reasoning was that, thanks to Mimi’s years of propaganda, John would regard him as nothing but ‘a jailbird’.

For Mimi herself, the blow went beyond losing her sister and seeing John lose his mother. Now that John was approaching manhood, she had realised she must prepare for a time when he would longer need her. For the first time in her dutiful, self-sacrificing life, she could think of herself—and bring her relationship with Michael Fishwick into the open. Fishwick had been offered a three-year research post in New Zealand, where, as it happened, several of Mimi’s mother’s family had emigrated. Not long after George’s death, an uncle out there had died and left her a property worth £10,000. Mimi’s plan, confided to no one, had been to follow Fishwick and live with him in the house she had inherited. ‘If it hadn’t been for Julia’s death,’ Fishwick says, ‘she’d have been gone by the end of ‘58.’

Now there was nothing in the world that could have made her leave John. ‘I worried myself sick about [him] then,’ she remembered. ‘What he would turn out to be…what would happen if it was me next.’

Despite Mimi’s suspicions, police constable Eric Clague did not get off scot-free. He underwent a period of suspension from duty and, soon afterwards, resigned from Liverpool Constabulary to begin a new career as a postman. By a horrible coincidence, one of the delivery routes he was later assigned included Forthlin Road, Allerton. Many times as John sat in the McCartneys’ living room, he would have heard their afternoon mail drop onto the front doormat, little suspecting that ‘Mister Postman’ was his mother’s killer.