Читать книгу John Lennon: The Life - Philip Norman - Страница 6

I was never really wanted.

John Lennon was born with a gift for music and comedy that would carry him further from his roots than he ever dreamed possible. As a young man, he was lured away from the British Isles by the seemingly boundless glamour and opportunity to be found across the Atlantic. He achieved that rare feat for a British performer of taking American music to the Americans and playing it as convincingly as any homegrown practitioner, or even more so. For several years, his group toured the country, delighting audiences in city after city with their garish suits, funny hair and contagiously happy grins.

This, of course, was not Beatle John Lennon but his namesake paternal grandfather, more commonly known as Jack, born in 1855. Lennon is an Irish surname—from O’Leannain or O’Lonain—and Jack habitually gave his birthplace as Dublin, though there is evidence that his family had already crossed the Irish Sea to become part of Liverpool’s extensive Hibernian community some time previously. He began his working life as a clerk, but in the 1880s followed a common impulse among his compatriots and emigrated to New York. Whereas the city turned other immigrant Irishmen into labourers or police officers, Jack ended up as a member of Andrew Roberton’s Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels.

However brief or casual his involvement, this made him part of the first transatlantic popular music industry. American minstrel troupes, in which white men blackened their faces, put on outsized collars and stripey pantaloons, and sang sentimental choruses about the Swanee River, ‘coons’ and ‘darkies’, were hugely popular in the late 19th century, both as performers and creators of hit songs. When Roberton’s Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels toured Ireland in 1897, the Limerick Chronicle called them ‘the world’s acknowledged masters of refined minstrelsy’, while the Dublin Chronicle thought them the best it had ever seen. A contemporary handbook records that the troupe was about 30-strong, that it featured some genuinely black artistes among the cosmetic ones, and that it made a speciality of parading through the streets of every town where it was to appear.

For this John Lennon, unlike the grandson he would never see, music did not bring worldwide fame but was merely an exotic interlude, most details of which were never known to his descendants. Around the turn of the century he came off the road for good, returned to Liverpool and resumed his old life as a clerk, this time with the Booth shipping line. With him came his daughter, Mary, only child of a first marriage that had not survived his temporary immersion in burnt-cork makeup, banjo music and applause.

When Mary left him to work in domestic service, a solitary old age seemed in prospect for Jack. His remedy was to marry his housekeeper, a young Liverpool Irishwoman with the happily coincidental name of Mary Maguire. Although 20 years his junior, and illiterate, Mary—better known as Polly—proved an ideal Victorian wife: practical, hardworking and selfless. Their home was a tiny terrace house in Copperfield Street, Toxteth, a part of the city nicknamed ‘Dickens Land’, so numerous were the streets named after Dickens characters. Rather like Mr Micawber in David Copperfield, Jack sometimes talked about returning to his former life as a minstrel and earning fortunes enough for his young wife, as he put it, to be ‘farting against silk’. But from here on, his music-making would be confined to local pubs and his own family circle.

Jack’s marriage to Polly gave him a second family of eight children. Two died in infancy, a fact that the superstitious Polly attributed to their Catholic baptism. The next six therefore received Protestant christenings, and all survived: five boys, George, Herbert, Sydney, Alfred and Charles, and a girl, Edith. Polly did a heroic job of feeding them all on Jack’s modest wage. But their diet of mainly bread, margarine, strong tea and lobscouse—the meat-and-biscuit stew from which Liverpudlians get their nickname Scousers—was chronically lacking in essential nutrients. This had its worst effect on the fourth boy, Alfred, born in 1912, who as a toddler developed rickets that stunted the growth of his legs. The only remedy known to paediatrics in those days was to encase both legs in iron braces, hoping the ponderous extra weight would promote growth and strength. Despite years burdened by the braces, Alf’s legs remained puny and foreshortened, and he failed to grow any taller than 5′4. He was, even so, a good-looking lad, with luxuriant dark hair, merry eyes and the distinctive Lennon family nose, a thin, plunging beak with sharply defined clefts over the nostrils.

Jack’s musical talents were passed on to his children in varying measure. George, Herbert, Sydney, Charles and Edith all had passable singing voices, and the boys played mouth organ, the only instrument young people in their circumstances could afford. Alf, however, showed ability of an altogether higher order, allied to what his brother Charlie (born in 1918) called ‘that show-off spirit’. He could sing all the music-hall and light operatic songs that made up the First World War hit parade; he could recite ballads, tell jokes and do impressions. His speciality was Charlie Chaplin, the anarchic little tramp whose film comedies had created the unprecedented phenomenon of an entertainer famous all over the world. At family gatherings, Alf would sit on his father’s knee in his Tiny Tim leg irons, and the two would sing ‘Ave Maria’ together, with sentimental tears streaming down their faces.

Jack died from liver disease, probably caused by alcoholism, in 1921. Unable to survive on the state widow’s allowance of 5 shillings per child per week, Polly had no choice but to take in washing. It meant backbreaking, hand-scalding work from 4 a.m. to dusk, scrubbing other people’s soiled linen on a washboard, then squeezing out the sodden coils through a heavy iron mangle. Even so, as her granddaughter Joyce Lennon remembers, the cramped little house remained always spotless with ‘floors you could eat your dinner from’, the kitchen range cleaned with graphite religiously every Monday morning, the front step scoured almost white, then edged in red with a chip of sandstone. Polly ruled her five sons like Mrs Joe in Great Expectations, not hesitating to chastise them with a leather strap even when they were nearly grown men. Like many down-to-earth people, she had a contrasting mystical side, believing herself a psychic able to read the future in spread-out playing cards or the pattern of tea leaves in an empty cup.

As hard as Polly worked, the task of supporting her six-strong brood proved beyond her. Fortunately, a means was found to take Alf and Edith off her hands without breaking up the family or damaging her fierce self-respect. Both were offered live-in places at Liverpool’s Bluecoat Hospital (charity school) in Church Road, Wavertree, a stone’s throw from a then-obscure thoroughfare called Penny Lane. Founded in 1714, the Bluecoat still attired its male pupils in an 18thcentury costume of gold-buttoned blue tailcoat, breeches, stockings and cravat. The educational standard was high, the regime not unkindly, and any child granted admittance was considered fortunate. Alf and Edith, even so, found it traumatic to leave their cosy, soapy home in Copperfield Street and the mother they worshipped. Of the two, cheery Alf adjusted better to institution life: he did well at lessons, became mascot of the football team, and entertained his dormitory mates with the same song-and-dance and Charlie Chaplin skits he used to do for his family and neighbours.

From earliest childhood, his one wish had been to follow his father into show business. It very nearly came true one night when he was 14, and his brother Sydney took him to the Empire Theatre in Lime Street to see a troupe of singing, dancing juveniles called Will Murray’s Gang. After the show, Alf talked his way backstage and performed an impromptu audition for Will Murray, the Gang’s adult ringmaster, who there and then offered him a job. When his brothers Herbert and George, now in loco parentis, refused to entertain the idea, Alf ran away from the Bluecoat Hospital and joined up with the Gang en route to Glasgow for their next appearance. But a Bluecoat teacher came after him, led him back in disgrace and subjected him to ritual humiliation in front of his assembled schoolmates.

A year later, the Bluecoat sent him out into the world, equipped with a good education, plus two suits with long trousers to confirm his entry into manhood. He spent a few unhappy weeks as an office boy before realising that a far preferable career—one, indeed, almost comparable with going on the stage—lay right under his nose. For this was the golden age of transatlantic liner travel, when Liverpool vied with Southampton as Britain’s busiest passenger port. Huge, multi-funnelled ships daily nosed up the River Mersey to be met by emblazoned boat-trains from London, packed with rich people, their furs and cabin trunks. In Ranelagh Place, the splendiferous Adelphi Hotel had just been built to provide a painless transition from shore to ship, with its Titanic-size palm court, bedrooms like staterooms, below-waterline swimming pools, hairdressers and masseurs.

So Alf went off to sea as a bellboy on the SS Montrose. It was, as he soon discovered, a life he seemed born to lead. His friendly, cheery nature made him popular with passengers and his superior officers and kept him on the right side of the gay mafia who ran the ships’ catering departments. ‘Lennie’—his onboard nickname—rapidly won promotion to restaurant waiter on the cruise vessels plying between Liverpool and the Mediterranean. In off-duty hours, he would entertain his fellow workers with songs and impressions in their cramped, foetid communal cabins or in the crew bar, known on every ship as the Pig and Whistle. His speciality (one his father Jack would have especially appreciated) was blackening his face with shoe polish and ‘doing’ Al Jolson, the minstrel offcut whose schmaltzy anthems to ‘Mammy’ and ‘Dixie’ sold records by the million in the 1920s and early 30s.

He could think himself always in a kind of spotlight, whether serving rich food to ‘nobs’ in his gleaming white mess jacket and gloves, or crooning Jolson’s ‘Sonny Boy’, down on one knee, with clasped hands, to the beery delight of his shipmates, or returning home to Copperfield Street laden with the contraband ship’s delicacies that are every steward’s God-given perk. Between voyages, too, in some dockside saloon-bar or other, he could always find an audience eager to be regaled with stories about the exotic places and peoples he had seen and the racy shipboard life of a single young waiter.

Despite all his lurid sailor’s yarns, there had only ever seemed to be one woman for Alf Lennon. Sometime in 1928, not long after leaving the Bluecoat Hospital, he was strolling through Sefton Park resplendent in one of his two new suits, topped off by an outsized bowler hat and smoking a cheap Wild Woodbine cigarette fixed dandyishly into a holder. Seated alone on a bench beside the ornamental lake was a girl with fluffy auburn hair and the facial bone structure of a young Marlene Dietrich. When Alf moved in to chat her up, he was met with gales of derisive laughter. Realising that his top-heavy bowler was the cause, he whipped it off his head and sent it skimming into the lake. So began his long, troubled relationship with Julia Stanley.

In Julia—variously known as Juliet, Judy, or Ju—destiny had paired Alf with a character whose craving for glamour and urge to entertain were almost the equal of his. Julia, too, had a better than average singing voice and, unlike Alf, was a practised instrumentalist. Her grandfather, yet another stagestruck Liverpool clerk, had taught her to play the banjo; she also could give a passable account of herself on the piano accordion and the ukulele.

Julia’s musical talent, personality and enchanting prettiness made her an obvious candidate for the professional stage. But the hard slog entailed by a career on the boards was not for her. When she left school, aged 15, it was merely for an dull office job in a printing firm. She quickly gave this up to become an usherette at Liverpool’s plushest cinema, the Trocadero in Camden Street. Like Alf’s role at sea, it was a life of glamour by proxy, working amid deep pile carpets and soft lights, clad in a trim Ruritanian uniform with cross-buttoning tunic and pillbox hat.

Her looks won her many admirers, and even the manager of the Trocadero, a magnificent personage who wore evening dress all day, made periodic attempts to woo his prettiest usherette by leaving gifts of stockings or chocolates in her locker. For such a siren, Alf Lennon with his Chico Marx hat and little legs seemed not much of a catch. But their happy-go-lucky natures and zany sense of humour were exactly in tune. They also shared a passion for dancing—which in those days meant the ‘strict tempo’ ballroom variety. Waltzing or quickstepping in each other’s arms, they would imagine themselves the most famous dancing couple of the cinema screen, with redheaded Julia becoming Ginger Rogers while Alf metamorphosed into Fred, as in Astaire.

To outward appearances, Alf and Julia might seem to have been from roughly similar backgrounds. Both belonged to large families—she having as many sisters as he had brothers—and both were offspring of men in shipping. Like every other stratum of British life, however, the seafaring world in those days was governed by rigid class distinction. And it happened that Julia’s father, George Stanley, known to his family as Pop, stood several notches above Alf in the rigidly defined mercantile hierarchy. He had trained as a sailmaker in the not-so-distant days when many ships putting into Liverpool still relied on canvas as a supplement to steam. After many years at sea with the White Star Line, he had joined the London, Liverpool and Glasgow Tug Salvage Company, helping to retrieve the wrecks that storms or human error frequently caused in the treacherous deeps between the Mersey estuary and the North Wales shore.

Pop Stanley therefore mingled on equal terms with ships’ captains and pilots, the bluebloods of the sea. His other four daughters, though lively and strong-willed, all comported themselves in a manner befitting this social eminence, keeping company with young men destined to be navigators or marine engineers. Only Julia had ever dragged down the family by going out with ‘a mere steward’ like Alf Lennon. In his displeasure, Pop found strongest support in his oldest daughter, Mary, known as Mimi. ‘Why she picked [Alf] I’ll never know,’ Mimi would still lament at the very end of her life. ‘I couldn’t believe she ended up with a seaman. He was a good-for-nothing…the type to have one in every port. Fly-by-night is what I called him.’

Alf himself, unfortunately, possessed the same sharp wit and withering bluntness that would be among his future son’s strongest characteristics. Mingling as he did with actual bluebloods every day of his nautical life, he found the Stanleys’ attitude ludicrous, and made no bones about saying so. Whenever Julia tried to introduce him into her tight-knit family circle, there would invariably be some upset—if not with Pop then with Mimi—that ended with his leaving the house or being ordered out of it. Had the pair been left alone, Julia probably would have tired of Alf and found someone her family considered worthier of her. But, true to her nature, the more he was snubbed and criticised, the greater became her determination to hang on to him.

So their courtship meandered on through the 1930s, kept fresh when it might otherwise have staled by Alf’s periodic long absences at sea. He grew reasonably friendly with Julia’s sisters Elizabeth, Anne and Harriet, and liked her mother Annie (née Millward), a woman so sweet-natured and kind that she would sometimes buy shoes for children she saw running barefoot in the street. But Pop (whom even Mimi described as ‘a bully’) always remained bristlingly hostile. Like most young courting couples of that time, with nowhere to meet but pubs, family front parlors and park benches, Alf and Julia reached their early twenties without having experienced any physical intimacy beyond kissing and petting. In spite of Mimi’s dark suspicions about ‘one in every port’, Alf always swore he remained faithful to Julia on his travels, and wrote to her at every opportunity. The Stanleys accused Alf of being work shy—‘swallowing the anchor’ in nautical slang. However, he seems to have remained employed more successfully than a great many others in Liverpool during that era of grinding economic depression. His official Board of Trade seaman’s employment record gives the standard of his work and personal conduct for voyage after voyage as a consistent VG. At one point, Julia’s family made a highly disingenuous move to ‘help’ him by finding him a place aboard a whaling ship, which would have had the blessed result of taking him away for about two years. When Alf refused to consider the idea, Pop Stanley ordered him out of the house once again.

Alf and Julia finally married in December 1938, when he was 26 and she 24. A few weeks earlier, then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from Munich waving the piece of paper that ‘guaranteed’ peace with Hitler’s Germany in return for abandoning Czechoslovakia to invasion and genocide. The mood of national euphoria, while it lasted, produced a sharp surge in the marriage rate as many young people felt their future to be more secure. But Alf and Julia took their belated plunge with no more thoughts of the future than they ever had. According to Alf, she dared him to do it one night at the pub, and he was never one to refuse a dare.

Neither of their families was told in advance what they had decided. On 3 December, Julia left home as if it were just another working day and at noon met with Alf at the register office in Bolton Street, behind the Adelphi Hotel. The only witnesses to the ceremony were Alf’s brother Sydney, whom he’d let into the secret at the last moment, and one of Julia’s usherette colleagues. Afterwards, Sydney stood the new Mr and Mrs Lennon drinks and a meal of roast chicken at a pub over the road called the Big House; they spent the evening at the cinema, watching a Mickey Rooney film (which happened to be about an orphanage), then separated to spend their wedding night at their respective homes. Mimi was never to forget the heart-sinking moment when Julia walked in, threw her wedding certificate onto the table and said, ‘There, I’ve done it! I’ve married him.’

Pop Stanley’s initial reaction was also one of explosive horror and disgust. But, under the gentler influence of his wife, Annie, he accepted that there was nothing that could be done—indeed, that as a conscientious father he must try his best to give the newlyweds a proper start in life. Swallowing his feelings, Pop volunteered to leave the family flat in Berkeley Street and rent more spacious accommodation so that Julia and Alf could move in with Annie and him. The chosen property was number 9 Newcastle Road, a bay-windowed terrace house a few minutes’ walk from Penny Lane and Alf’s alma mater, the Bluecoat Hospital.

The four coexisted in relative harmony throughout 1939, as war with Germany drew nearer and Britain succumbed to a fever of gasmask issuing, child evacuation and air-raid precautions. For Pop Stanley in particular, it was an eventful time. In June, a brand-new Royal Navy submarine, the Thetis, sank during her trials in Liverpool Bay. Pop joined the massive operation to recover the vessel, whose stern was initially visible rising vertically from the water. The crew considered themselves in no great peril, tapping out cheerful Morse messages to their rescuers on the steel hull as cables were passed underneath to drag it to the surface. But at the crucial moment, the cables snapped and the submarine disappeared for good, taking 71 men with her.

Alf had gone to sea again, on the SS Duchess of York, but returned home in time for the first Christmas of the Second World War. His only child with Julia was conceived at 9 Newcastle Road one day in January 1940. Finding themselves, unusually, alone in the house for a couple of hours, they made love on the kitchen floor. They had not been trying for a baby, and Julia’s immediate pregnancy was equally dismaying to them both. ‘Ninety per cent of people [of my generation] were born out of a bottle of whisky on a Saturday night, and there was no intention to have children,’ the baby would one day observe bitterly. ‘I was never really wanted.’

Julia’s pregnancy coincided with the bleakest months in Europe’s history, as Hitler’s mechanized armies swept across Belgium and France, the battered remains of the British Expeditionary Force were evacuated from Dunkirk, and RAF fighters whirled like fiery gnats around the Luftwaffe’s incoming swarms of heavy bombers. Alone and braced for invasion, the country often seemed to have nothing to sustain it but the voice of Winston Churchill, whose bulldog-like mien and gift for blood-igniting oratory made the most desperate moments seem somehow glorious.

In August, Alf sailed away again on the SS Empress of Canada. With London under nightly bombing and Britain seemingly defenceless, the RAF made a surprise hit-and-run raid on Berlin—an event that the Luftwaffe’s commander, Hermann Goering, had boasted could never happen. A furious Hitler promised to retaliate by razing all Britain’s other major cities. As a key port for the nation’s vital Atlantic food convoys, Liverpool prepared for the worst.

Julia’s sister, Mimi, would often relate how the baby’s arrival on 9 October was marked by an especially ferocious German night attack. According to Mimi, when news came that Julia had been delivered of a 71/2-pound boy, the air-raid sirens were wailing and all public transport, as usual, had ground to a standstill. Such was her excitement that she ran the 2 miles from her parents’ home to the Oxford Street maternity hospital, oblivious of bombers and their parachute-borne land mines. The worst that Hitler could do seemed trivial by comparison with this marvellous event.

The week in question was certainly a bad one for Liverpool. The records of its Watch Committee show that on the night of 7-8 October, high-explosive bombs fell on Stanley Road and Great Mersey Street in the city centre, and on Lichfield Road and Grantley Road, Wavertree, causing damage to houses and demolishing the Welsh Chapel. The next night came two separate raids, hitting Everton Valley, Knotty Ash, Mossley Hill and Mill Street in the first, and the Anfield area in the second. On the night of 11-12 October, two more raids dropped tons of high explosive on the City and North Docks first, then on Alexandra and Langton Dock, causing serious damage to the Harbourmaster’s House, sheds, railway tracks, Admiralty stores and four ships.

But on the night of 9-10 October, the Luftwaffe unaccountably stayed away. As Mimi hurried towards Oxford Street, she would undoubtedly have seen the results of previous bombing, in rubble, shattered glass and white-helmeted ARP wardens. On later visits to Julia, the situation could have been as she remembered that first night, with a land mine falling next to the hospital and the new baby being wrapped in a rough blanket and put under his mother’s bed for safety. Uppermost in Mimi’s thoughts on 9 October was concern for her sister, mingled with delight that a boy had entered the overwhelmingly female Stanley family. Possibly it was the strength of her own emotion when she first held her nephew in her arms that helped give the scene its apocalyptic quality in her memory.

E M Forster once wrote that ‘there is a battle fought over every baby.’ The battle over this particular Liverpool baby was to be fiercer than most—revealing not that he ‘wasn’t wanted’, as he came to believe, but that too many people wanted him too much. Nor would it become clear for some little time who had won him.

About his name, at least, there was no conflict. Julia decided to call him John, which pleased Alf as a tribute to his paternal grandfather, the sometime Kentucky minstrel, but was also classically middleclass, suggesting every quality the Stanleys most admired—plain, upright, steady, predictable, uncomplicated. And, with fierce wartime patriotism in common, neither side of the family could object to his mother’s giving him the middle name Winston, in honour of the Prime Minister.

Alf’s long absences from home would later brand him in his son’s eyes as feckless, selfish and unloving, but it should be remembered that as a merchant sailor he was doing one of the most vital and dangerous jobs in Britain’s war effort. Thousands of other Liverpool men were in his situation, facing the same dangers from German U-boats—drowning in icy seas or turning into oil-soaked human torches—while, back at home, children they barely knew were raised by committees of women. Undoubtedly, for all its hazards, the sea provided an escape from dull routine and responsibility, where Alf could turn into ‘Lennie’ and live out his fantasies as an entertainer (now adding a skit on Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers to his repertoire of Jolson and Eddie Cantor). Another deterrent to seeking a safer shore job was that he was climbing the ladder of his profession. In September 1942, he gained promotion to saloon steward, the shipboard equivalent of headwaiter.

At the time, it appears, the most hostile of his in-laws no longer found anything to criticise about his nautical station, especially as he always returned home laden with booty from the ships’ pantries, meat and butter and fresh fruit otherwise impossible to obtain under wartime rationing, which he would share out liberally among them. While at sea, he would send programmes of ships’ concerts featuring himself for Julia to show to John, who for years afterwards would associate his father’s name with a mysterious number called ‘Begin the Beguine’.

Alf was at sea as saloon steward on the SS Moreton Bay from 26 September 1942 to 2 February 1943. Though air attacks on Liverpool had diminished since the horrendous ‘May blitz’ of 1941, the city centre was still considered a danger area. To make a safer as well as cleaner environment for John, Mimi persuaded Julia to move from 9 Newcastle Road out to suburban Woolton, where she herself had recently settled with her husband, George Smith. For several months, mother and son occupied a small house named the Cottage in Allerton Road, a short walk from Mimi’s home. It was here that John formed the first definite impressions of Julia as she sang him to sleep at night. ‘She used to do this little tune…from the Disney movie,’ he would remember. ‘ “Want to know a secret? Promise not to tell. You are standing by a wishing-well…” ’

The move was to put the first serious stress on a marriage that had never exactly been founded on maturity or trust. After being paid off by the Moreton Bay, Alf drew a stretch of shore leave long enough for him to register for fire-watching duties at Liverpool docks. Expecting Woolton to be a quiet retreat for Julia, he discovered that, on the contrary, she had acquired the habit of visiting local pubs, getting tipsy and flirting with unattached men while Mimi or a neighbour named Dolly Hipshaw looked after John. One day, Alf answered the door to a noisy group of Julia’s new friends, who plainly had no idea she was even married. A furious argument followed, in which Julia poured a cup of hot tea over Alf’s head. He lashed out and caught her across the face, making her nose bleed.

John’s maternal grandmother, the sweet-natured Annie Stanley, had died earlier in 1943, before she could imprint any but the vaguest picture of herself on his mind. Reluctant to stay on alone at 9 Newcastle Road, Pop Stanley decided to turn the house over to Julia and Alf while he moved in with relatives. For a time, at least, the rent was paid by Alf’s older brother, Sydney. The anonymous little bay-fronted house, duplicated a thousand times in neighbouring streets, became for John ‘the first place I remember…red brick…front room never used, always curtains drawn…picture of a horse and carriage on the wall. There were only three bedrooms upstairs, one on the front of the street, one in the back and one teeny little room in the middle…’ He was already sharply observant, as Alf had realised the previous Christmas, when every department store in central Liverpool advertised its own Santa Claus grotto. ‘How many Father Christmases are there?’ John had asked.

In July 1943, Alf travelled to New York to work on Liberty Ships, the prefabricated merchantmen that America was mass-producing to replenish Britain’s battered Atlantic convoys. He would be absent for 16 months on a bizarre journey that took him halfway around the world, showed him the inside of two prisons, saw an ominous amendment on his employment card from VG to D (Declined comment) and put the collapse of his marriage into overdrive. No ‘lost weekend’ his son would experience in future years even came close to this.

Alf later portrayed himself as the innocent victim of circumstance, bad advice from superiors and his own trusting nature—and, to be sure, the hysteria and malign happenstance of the war itself seems to have been as much blameworthy as any misdeed or mistake of his. In New York, he was kept waiting so long to be assigned a berth that he found a temporary job at Macy’s department store, acquired a Social Security card, and drank and sang his way through most of the better-known Broadway bars. Finally ordered to report to a Liberty Ship in Baltimore, he discovered he had been demoted to assistant steward. His only hope of keeping his proper ‘rate’, so a colleague advised, was to stay with the vessel until her first port of call, New York, then jump ship and take his problem to the British consul. Alf naïvely adopted this strategy and was promptly arrested for desertion and locked up for two weeks on Ellis Island.

On his release, he was ordered to accept a berth as assistant steward on a ship named the Sammex, bound for the Far East. When the Sammex docked in Bône, Algeria, Alf was arrested for the ‘theft by finding’ of a bottle of whisky and, by his own account, chose to take the rap rather than betray the friend who actually had committed the offence. He spent nine days in a horrific military prison, where he was forced to scrub latrines and was threatened with death should he ever speak about the conditions he had witnessed. Turned loose into the city’s dangerous casbah district, he met a mysterious Dutchman, known only as Hans, who not only saved him from being robbed and possibly murdered but also helped him rough up the British official he held partly responsible for his incarceration.

Finally, in October 1944, exhausted and half starved, with only a couple of dollars and his US Social Security card in his pocket, he managed to scrounge passage back to Britain as a DBS (Distressed British Seaman) on the troopship Monarch of Bermuda. In Liverpool, meanwhile, the shipping company had ceased paying his wages to Julia, who had no idea whether he was alive or dead. When he reached home, she informed him she was pregnant by another man. She had not been deliberately unfaithful, she said, but had been raped. She even gave Alf the name of the man she held responsible, a soldier stationed out on the Wirral Peninsula. Today the police would instantly be called in; back then, the proper course was for Alf to confront the alleged rapist and demand what he had to say for himself.

Fortunately, Alf’s brother Charlie, by now serving with the Royal Artillery, was on hand to lend moral support. Charlie would later recall the episode in terms rather like a deposition to a court-martial: ‘[Alf] told me he had come home and found [Julia] six weeks gone, but not showing. She claimed she’d been raped by a soldier. She gave a name. We went over to the Wirral where the soldier was stationed…Alfred wasn’t a violent man. Hasty-tempered but not violent. He said to him “I believe you’ve been having affairs with my wife and she accuses you of raping her.” No such thing, says the soldier. It wasn’t rape—it was consent.’

The upshot was that soft-hearted Alf took a shine to the soldier, a young Welshman named Taffy Williams, listening sympathetically to his protestation that he loved Julia and wanted to marry her and bring up the baby on his family’s farm (though John seemed to feature nowhere in this plan). Alf decided he had no option but to step aside—a decision that possibly did not come too hard after Julia’s recent behaviour. He persuaded Williams to accompany him back to 9 Newcastle Road, where, over a conciliatory pot of tea, he told Julia he was willing to let her go. No more inaccurate reading of the situation could have been possible. ‘I don’t want you, you fool,’ she told her erstwhile lover disdainfully, recommending him to finish his tea and then ‘get lost’.

To Alf’s credit, he expressed himself willing to take Julia back and bring up the baby as his own. But Pop Stanley, fearing the inevitable public disgrace, insisted it must be put up for adoption. On 19 June, 1945, five weeks after the war’s end, a girl was born to Julia at Elmswood, a Salvation Army maternity home in North Mossley Hill Road. Victoria Elizabeth, as Julia had named her, was adopted by a Norwegian couple named Pederson, who renamed her Ingrid Maria and took her off to Norway, out of her real mother’s life for ever.

This period of crisis and upheaval in the Stanley family saw four-year-old John, for the one and only time, handed over to the care of his Lennon relatives. During Julia’s pregnancy and confinement, he was sent to live with Alf’s brother Sydney, a man whose respectability and drive to better himself even Mimi had come to acknowledge. Sydney, his wife Madge and their eight-year-old daughter Joyce welcomed John to their home in Maghull, a village between Liverpool and Southport. He was left with Sydney and Madge for something like eight months. The life they provided for him was stable and loving and, as time passed, they assumed that they’d be allowed to adopt him officially. So confident were they of this outcome that they put his name down to start at the local primary school the following autumn. Then Alf turned up one night without warning and announced he was taking John away. Despite Sydney’s protests about the lateness of the hour, he insisted they had to leave immediately. All the family were distraught at losing John, Madge in particular. Soon afterward she adopted a six-week-old baby boy to fill the void he had left.

If Alf had hoped his display of magnanimity over Victoria Elizabeth would save his marriage, he was to be disappointed. In 1946, he returned from another cruise to find Julia openly involved with a sleek-haired hotel waiter named John—aka Bobby—Dykins. This time, however, the cuckolded husband wasn’t prepared to take it lying down. A furious night altercation took place at 9 Newcastle Road between Alf, Julia, her new man friend and Pop Stanley after Julia announced she was setting up home with Dykins and taking John with her. Awoken by the angry voices, John came to the stair head in time to see his mother screaming hysterically as Alf manhandled Dykins out the front door. When Alf himself awoke the next morning, John had been spirited away by Pop Stanley, and Julia was moving out her furniture, helped by a female neighbour. Alf pitched in to help them, telling Julia with the ostentatious self-pity of a country-and-western ballad to leave him only ‘a broken chair’ to sit on.

The sea, his old comforter, beckoned as alluringly as ever, and in April 1946 he found a berth as night steward aboard the Cunard company’s flagship, the Queen Mary, plying between Southampton and New York. The ship was within an hour of sailing when he received a telephone call from his sister-in-law, Mimi Smith, urging him to return to Liverpool immediately.

It was not an easy call for Mimi to make, and it doubtless caused even the unvengeful Alf a measure of quiet satisfaction. For the Stanley family’s hostility towards Julia’s new man friend Bobby Dykins was more virulent than anything he himself had ever suffered at their hands. According to Mimi, Julia and John had moved back into 9 Newcastle Road, and Dykins was also now in residence there, confronting John with the daily spectacle of his mother—in the accepted phrase—‘living in sin’. Of most immediate concern was that John seemed not to like his ‘new daddy’ and had turned up on Mimi’s doorstep in Woolton, having walked the 2 miles from Newcastle Road on his own. Despite all her hostility to Alf, she had been forced to concede that he missed and needed his real father. Alf then spoke to John, who asked him excitedly when he was coming home. He replied that he couldn’t ‘break Articles’ by deserting his ship, but promised to come as soon as the Queen Mary returned to Southampton, two weeks later.

He duly made his way back up north, arriving at Mimi’s late one night after John was in bed and asleep. The homecoming mariner was not offered a meal, only a cup of tea, which Mimi served to him accompanied by a further angry recital of Julia’s misconduct with Bobby Dykins. She also presented Alf with a bill for various necessities which she said she’d had to buy for John since his arrival. Fortunately, thanks to profitable black-market dealings in nylon stockings and other contraband, Alf had plenty of cash with him. He gave Mimi £20, and in that moment—so he would afterwards claim— decided he had no alternative but to abduct his son the following day. As he would later write, ‘I finally made up my mind that I would take [John] to Blackpool with me, making some excuse that I was taking him shopping or to see his granny.’

Alf stayed overnight at Mimi’s and the next morning was awoken by an exuberant John bouncing up and down on his chest. His suggestion that the two of them should go out together for the day was greeted with wild excitement. Mimi offered no opposition, believing the purpose of the outing was to buy some new clothes for John. Father and son then caught a tram into Liverpool, where Alf took his older brother Sydney into his confidence, swearing him to secrecy. Sydney reiterated his own willingness to adopt John, though Alf later claimed never to have seriously considered this option.

Blackpool was Alf’s chosen destination not only as a northwestern seaside resort of fabled child appeal but also as the hometown of his shipmate and fellow black-marketeer Billy Hall. For something like three weeks, he hid out there with John, staying with Billy’s parents and spending his abundant spare cash on every carnival ride and sticky treat the little boy could desire. The kindly Halls also found themselves added to the waiting list of John’s would-be guardians. Alf’s initial idea was that, when his money ran out and he returned to sea, John should stay on with the Halls in Blackpool. When it transpired that they were about to sell their home and emigrate to New Zealand, a more complex scheme took shape. Mr and Mrs Hall would take John with them, posing as his grandparents; a little later, Alf, Billy Hall, and Billy’s brother would obtain their own passage to New Zealand free of charge by signing on to some Australasianbound liner, then jumping ship when it reached Wellington.

The plan had no chance to mature any further. Julia had by now picked up Alf’s trail and, one sunny June day, turned up at the Halls’ house, accompanied by Bobby Dykins, to take John back. Initially her demand was not backed up by any real force. When Alf outlined the New Zealand scheme, she agreed it could be the start of a wonderful new life for John and indicated her willingness to let him go, merely asking to see him one last time. When John was brought into the room, his first reaction, after their days of fun and intimacy, was to climb into Alf’s lap. But when Julia admitted defeat and turned to leave, he jumped down and ran after her, burying his face in her skirt, sobbing and begging her not to go. To break the impasse, Alf pleaded with her to give their marriage another chance, but Julia would have none of it.

Alf then told John he must choose between going with Mummy or staying with Daddy. If you want to tear a small child in two, there is no better way. John went to Alf and took his hand; then, as Julia turned away again, he panicked and ran after her, shouting to her to wait and to his father to come, too. But, paralysed once more by fatalistic self-pity, Alf remained rooted in his chair. Julia and John left the house and disappeared into the holiday crowds.

That evening, good-hearted Mr and Mrs Hall sought to cheer Alf up by taking him to a pub called the Cherry Tree and persuading him to do his Al Jolson routine for its assembled customers. His all-too-appropriate song choice was Jolson’s ‘Little Pal’, a eulogy to some angelic Sonny Boy tucked in a soft, safe nursery as his faithful dad watches adoringly over him. Instead of ‘Little Pal’ in each verse, Alf sang ‘Little John’. It made tears stream down his cheeks, although—ever the pro—he sang the song to its end, amid a storm of clapping and whistling. Unlike the little pal he had given up, Alf Lennon would never find crowds oppressive nor applause wearisome.