Читать книгу John Lennon: The Life - Philip Norman - Страница 8

I’d say I had a happy childhood…

I was always having a laugh.

Thanks in largest part to his minstrel grandfather and his would-be minstrel father, but also to numerous others on both sides of his family, John could be fairly said to have had music in his bones. Yet in his early years the odds seemed weighted against his becoming a musician at all, let alone the one he finally did.

In early-fifties Britain, music was something most people got along without. The technology for listening to it in the home consisted of gramophones with manually cranked turntables, and thick wax 78 rpm (revolutions per minute) discs the size of car hubcaps, which came in plain brown paper covers and broke when dropped. Rare was the household whose record collections numbered more than about a dozen of these sepia-wrapped, dust-attracting monsters.

Back then, one did not hear music playing incessantly in shops, office buildings, airports, station concourses, doctors’ surgeries or lifts, as a background to news bulletins or from the earpieces of telephones. Portable radios were hulking battery-powered objects designed to look like small suitcases. Tape recorders for private use were almost unknown. Sound came in mono only and did not travel. In public places like parks or beaches, the only noise would be human hubbub. Most residential areas passed their days and nights in the same unbroken silence.

Television was still a fabulously expensive novelty, enjoyed in only a few thousand homes and served by a solitary BBC channel offering a scanty Programme in the afternoon and early evening. Radio, likewise the BBC’s monopoly and better known as the wireless, broadcast music largely as a public duty, to keep the factories running and the food queues quiet. So afraid was the corporation’s Light Programme of overexciting its listeners that records with the faintest sexual frisson were banned from the airwaves, and continuity announcers forbidden to use such inflammatory terms as hot jazz. Professional musicians were a tiny faction who had mastered their complex craft only after years of study, possessed little personality outside their playing, and in general projected an aura that was at once middle-aged, irritable and foreign.

For Mimi Smith, nothing more clearly defined the Alf Lennon world from which she had rescued John than people enjoying raucous-accented singsongs in their front parlours or—worse still—in the pubs wrapped around a thousand and one inner-Liverpool street corners. The only music Mimi cared for was the classical kind, as played by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Manchester’s revered Hallé, and BBC radio’s cathedral-solemn Third Programme (whose announcers wore dinner jackets even though visible to none but their own studio staff). Between classical and popular music in this era there was no possible meeting point. Pop lovers regarded classical as impossibly difficult and highfalutin; classics lovers regarded pop as just so much horrible noise.

In John’s family as now constituted, there was only one person of any musical ability. His mother Julia, though otherwise not noted for consistency, still kept up the banjo and piano accordion she had learned as a girl. She was a natural entertainer, liable at the slightest encouragement to break into impromptu performance. ‘Judy [the children’s name for her] played the banjo and accordion really well,’ her niece Liela remembers. ‘She had a lovely singing voice that I can only compare to Vera Lynn’s. And she was a wonderfully witty and entertaining person to be with. She could keep going for hours at a time, singing, telling jokes, doing impersonations, and you’d never get tired of it.’

From John’s earliest childhood, his response to music was instant and visceral. In 1946, just before his sixth birthday, the BBC Light Programme started the nightly 15-minute adventures of Dick Barton, Special Agent, an Austerity forerunner to James Bond, introduced by a melodramatic theme tune called ‘The Devil’s Gallop’. Mimi remembered how deathly white John’s face always went each evening at 6:45 as its frantic strains echoed through the house.

Under the Stanley sisters’ mutual support system, he would spend a long holiday in Scotland each summer with his Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert. The high point of his stay was the Edinburgh Tattoo, an extravagant military band display with the city’s medieval castle as its dramatic backdrop. Among the red-coated phalanxes playing ‘Annie Laurie’ or ‘Scotland the Brave’, there would sometimes be an American Air Force band in the Glenn Miller mould that—as John later recalled—‘swung like shit’. He never forgot his emotion during the Tattoo’s closing ritual, when all the lights went out and a lone set of bagpipes wheezed and wailed its valediction for another year.

Mendips, of course, boasted nothing so newfangled and showy as a television set. The only wireless stood on the morning-room sideboard: an imposing artefact with a lacquered wood cabinet, gold knobs and a dial that could theoretically find European stations like Limoges and Hilversum. Kindly Uncle George wired it to an extension speaker in John’s room so he could listen while lying in bed. But that was mainly to the comedy shows that came after his 7.30 lightsout—Take It from Here, Variety Bandbox, Much-Binding in the Marsh, or Stand Easy. His favourite was Life with the Lyons, a sitcom about an American family in London, featuring the thirties’ screen stars Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon with their real-life children Barbara and Richard.

Aged seven or eight, he took up the mouth organ, just as both his parents—not to mention several of his uncles—had done at roughly similar ages. The epiphany occurred when a medical student who was boarding at Mendips casually took one of the little silver oblongs from his pocket and blew a few notes on it, to John’s huge fascination. The student offered to buy him a mouth organ of his own, provided he learned to play a tune on this one by the next morning. John disappeared with it and in no time had learned to play two.

The mouth organ revealed that he had a natural musical ear just like his mother’s, his father’s and most of those unknown Lennon uncles. He soon outgrew his first cheap little instrument, graduating to a chromatic model—with a sliding bar for changing key—and buying a teach-yourself manual, The Right Way to Play Chromatic Harmonica by Captain James Reilly. With Captain Reilly’s help, he mastered dozens of tunes, from old English airs like ‘Greensleeves’ to film music like the theme from Moulin Rouge. Travelling by Ribble Company bus from Liverpool up to Mater’s in Edinburgh, he sometimes would hardly stop playing for the whole six-hour ride. On one of these journeys, the driver offered to give him a mouth organ that had been left behind by a previous passenger if he would come to the Edinburgh bus depot next day to collect it. John kept the appointment, chaperoned by his cousin Stanley, and duly received a magnificent top-of-the-line chromatic Hohner. ‘I believe it was the same mouth organ he played on his records,’ Stanley says.

He quickly progressed to tinkering on any piano he encountered, at school or in friends’ houses, discovering the same instant facility in his fingers as on his lips. But Mimi, so indulgent in every other way, refused his plea to have his own piano at Mendips. ‘I wouldn’t have it,’ she remembered. ‘ “We’re not going down that road, John,” I told him. “None of that common sing-song stuff in here.”’

In the house overlooking Mendips’ back garden lived Ivan Vaughan, a Dovedale Primary classmate whom John had instantly dubbed Ivy. The two would communicate with whistles or on scraps of paper stuffed into tin cans and swung back and forth by the rope that hung from John’s tree house. A few doors along from Ivan in Vale Road lived Nigel Walley, a cheerful, enthusiastic boy John had met while briefly attending Mosspits Lane school. Nigel, too, became his eager follower, receiving the nickname Walloggs.

The favourite meeting place for local children was a dirt field known as the Tip, in prewar years the site of an artificial lake. It was here that John first encountered a fellow seven-year-old whose rubicund face was topped by a mat of curly hair so sandy pale as to be almost albino. His name was Pete Shotton.

Pete had previously regarded Ivan and Nigel as his gang, and felt some hostility to the kid from Menlove Avenue who seemed to be taking them over. Discovering that John’s middle name was Winston, he began taunting him as ‘Winnie, Winnie, Winnie!’ The resultant scuffle ended with Pete on the ground on his back and John kneeling on his shoulders, pinning down his arms. There he was willing to let matters rest so long as Pete promised never again to call him Winnie. Pete gave his promise and was released—but, once at a safe distance, broke out again with ‘Winnie, Winnie, Winnie!’ John was at first so angry that he couldn’t speak. Then, at the sheer effrontery of it, his face broke into a grin. He had found his first soul mate.

In those days, children roamed freely out of doors for hours on end without their families feeling the least anxiety. And Woolton and its environs offered many inviting places for John and his friends to explore. Across from the Tip was a rugged open space called Foster’s Field, with thickets of blackberry bushes and a pond where they caught tadpoles, newts and frogs and paddled a homemade raft. There were meadows that frothed creamily with cow parsley in summer, and tracts of dense woodland haunted by cuckoos and corncrakes. Calderstones Park and Reynolds Park lay within easy walking distance, as did the grounds of Strawberry Field and of a vanished stately home named Allerton Towers. On the opposite side of Menlove Avenue from Mendips stretched the greens and bunkers of Allerton Golf Course.

Their games were fuelled by make-believe, demanding vigorous activity rather than the modern child’s sedentary trance. The favourite of all was cowboys and Indians, with the participants shooting each other and falling down ‘dead’ with no conception of pain, and Native Americans cast as villains in obedience to Hollywood mythology. But John’s version was different. ‘He always wanted to be the Indian,’ Mimi recalled. ‘That was typical John, to support the underdog. And because he was leader of his little group, the Indians always won.’ Rather than white Western icons like Buffalo Bill or Wild Bill Hickok, his hero was Sioux Chief Sitting Bull. Mimi would stain his face with gravy browning and daub it with lipstick for war paint. From their local butcher’s shop she begged cock-pheasant feathers to make him a chief’s headdress. ‘He loved it,…he never took it off. I can see him in it now, dancing around Pete Shotton, tied to a tree in our garden.’

The centre of Woolton village, socially as well as spiritually, was its Anglican church, St Peter’s, a sandstone edifice with a square Norman-style clock tower. John attended Sunday school in its church hall, as did Pete, Ivy and Walloggs, plus a boy named Rod Davis from King’s Drive and a precociously pretty little girl named Barbara Baker. On leaving home after Sunday lunch, they would each be given a few pennies to put into the collection plate or the cottageshaped money box for Dr Barnardo’s homes. At John’s instigation, they spent the money on chewing gum instead, masticating it showily through their couple of hours’ Bible study.

His pure treble singing voice quickly won him a place in the church choir, to which Nigel Walley also belonged. At first, he seemed to enjoy the ritual of dressing up in a white surplice and turning out for services twice every Sunday as well as Saturday weddings, which meant a half crown (12.5p) payment for each chorister. He was also mysteriously drawn to St Peter’s little churchyard (or the bone orchard, as he called it) where mossy, weather-beaten tombstones traced Woolton families back two centuries and more. He would read and reread the etched inscriptions with their familiar local names, their forgotten tragedies between the lines and their soft euphemisms for death:

Also ELEANOR RIGBY

THE BELOVED WIFE OF THOMAS WOODS

AND GRANDDAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE

DIED 10TH OCTOBER 1939, AGED 44 YEARS

ASLEEP

Mimi would later remember how comforted John seemed by the notion in Eleanor Rigby’s epitaph that ‘it wasn’t gone for ever…just asleep.’

The rector of St Peter’s was a middle-aged Welsh bachelor named Morris Pryce-Jones, known to his younger parishioners as Pricey. Far from the grim stereotype of his race, Pricey was a kindly and tolerant man, prepared for boys to be boys up to a point. But he was utterly unprepared for boys to be anything like John Lennon. One Sunday during a particularly arduous sermon, John’s fellow chorister David Ashton began surreptitiously reading a Boy Scouts’ Pocket Diary, which included the maxim ‘A Boy Scout is Thrifty.’ John produced a pen and altered it to ‘A Boy Scout is Fifty,’ sending everyone around them ‘into tucks’—the Liverpool term for laughter so uncontrollable that it puckers up the entire body as if by some invisible drawstring. Both boys were docked their next wedding payment.

One Sunday school teacher, ‘Ma’ Davies, had an altercation with John during a lesson about Jesus’s encounter with the Scribes and Pharisees. So incensed was he by the story that he announced that Christ’s persecutors ‘must have been Fascists’. Ma Davies told him that Fascists were far worse than Scribes or Pharisees, but John refused to be convinced. The teacher might have given him some credit for such strong emotions on behalf of the Redeemer; instead, she excoriated him for ‘making trouble’ and ordered both him and David Ashton, who had supported him, to report to Pricey for punishment.

Deciding that a mere telling-off would have no effect, the rector decided to take the rare step of caning them. Unfortunately, the nearest to a cane he could find was an umbrella belonging to a female chorister named Bertha Radley, a relative of the Eleanor Rigby memorialized in the churchyard. Her umbrella was an ornate one, covered in crocodile skin, with a handle shaped like a crocodile’s head. ‘John got it first, one on each hand,’ Ashton remembers. ‘Then when Pricey hit me, the handle broke off. I remember to this day Bertha saying “Oh, my poor crocodile!”’

The choicest of this rich crop of misbehaviour and insubordination occurred, suitably enough, at Harvest Festival time. Woolton still remained agricultural enough for harvesting to have real significance, and St Peter’s always rose to the occasion, decorating its altar lavishly with grain sheaves and offerings of vegetables and fruit from local greenhouses and garden plots. When Pricey emerged from the vestry to lead the singing of harvest hymns like ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’, he found the altar fruit depleted as if by a flock of predatory crows. A glance along the giggling choir stalls was sufficient to identify the pilferer. John was expelled from the choir, and he and Pete Shotton were banned from the church altogether.

Mimi urged him to beg reinstatement, but in vain. ‘I told him “It’s all part of your education, John.” But he just shouted back “kayshuedshun, kayshuedshun!” He was always inventing daft words. And he used to make me laugh by taking off the choirmaster—he’d pull a funny face and conduct the cats.’

His bedroom, situated directly above the front porch, was a tiny elongated space, almost filled by a single bed with a blue-green canopy, pushed against the right-hand wall. A diminutive clothes cupboard and a table and chair by the window were its only other furniture. John would always classify himself as ‘a homebody’, and this was where he spent as many contented boyhood hours by himself as he did in the open air with his friends. At such times, the house would fall so utterly silent that Mimi presumed he was out. Then she’d push open his bedroom door and find him on his bed with a book, in a position of seeming perverse discomfort. He would lie flat with his body twisted round and his legs resting up the wall. All his life, he could never fully savour print without first folding himself into that awkward hairpin shape.

He had caught Mimi’s love of reading—though with John it was always to be more like an insatiable physical hunger. Years later, his aunt would mimic the half-truculent way he used to scoop a volume from a shelf and turn away, his eyes already devouring the print like twin piranhas. Children’s literature in the early fifties offered a limited choice compared with what would come later—A A Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, Hugh Lofting’s adventures of Doctor Dolittle. The genre was dominated by Enid Blyton, with her prolific adventures of the Famous Five and the Secret Seven and her chronicles of the girls’ boarding schools Mallory Towers and St Clare’s. Lying on his red quilt, with his feet higher than his head, John read them all.

The two outstanding favourites of his youngest years were Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. He loved the pure anarchy that lay behind their prim Victorian façade, the incessant punning and spoonerising, the lunatic logic, always spelled out in flawless syntax and perfect scansion; the songs whose hypnotically simple refrains (‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?…’) needed no setting to music. In Carroll’s fabulous bestiary, if he had known it, lay several future incarnations of himself—the hyperactive Mad Hatter, the sleepy Dormouse, the Caterpillar puffing smugly on its hookah, the derisively grinning Cheshire Cat, Alice herself, as she experiments with life-transforming pills and potions, and the Walrus on that nightmare beach where the sun never goes down, sweet-talking a school of baby oysters into becoming hors d’oeuvres. Most influential of all was the mock-epic poem entitled ‘Jabberwocky’—to the boy with his legs up the wall, nothing less than a tutorial in how nonsense can be made infinitely more descriptive than sense:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe…

Through the Looking-Glass ends with a coda, which runs:

A boat beneath a sunny sky

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July…

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

Twenty-five years in the future there would be a song about that same phantom girl, that same ‘boat on the river’, and ‘marmalade skies’ recalling the Orange Marmalade jar Alice sees during her fall into the White Rabbit’s burrow.

At the opposite end of the scale, he devoured the weekly boys’ comics that existed in huge quantity in the early fifties, from the Rover, Wizard and Hotspur, which contained serial stories (usually about wartime Nazis going ‘Himmel!’ and ‘Donner und Blitzen!’) to the all-cartoon periodicals the Beano, the Dandy, Radio Fun, Film Fun and Knockout. Along with sweets and picturedromes, Mimi had forbidden him comics, except perhaps the high-minded Eagle (edited by a clergyman), but his Uncle George would defy the Look by smuggling Beanos or Dandys up to him—and in any case they were freely available at the homes of his friends.

He would write his own adventure stories, like the ones in Wizard and Hotspur, but with himself as their hero, and invent his own cartoon strips like the ones in the Beano and Knockout. At the age of seven he handwrote and drew a whole magazine entitled ‘Speed and Sport Illustrated’ by J W Lennon, with portraits of football players in action, cartoon strips, and the beginning of an adventure serial. ‘If you liked this,’ the first instalment ended, ‘Come again next week. It’ll be even better.’ But of all the diverse high and low cultural sources that fed his imagination—and shaped his character for ever—none could compare with William Brown.

William was the creation of Richmal Crompton Lamburn (1890-1969), a Lancashire classics teacher who switched to writing under the name Richmal Crompton after being stricken by polio. Her 11-year-old hero had originally been intended for an adult readership, but children quickly latched on to him, ensuring his continuance through 37 story collections. William was the archetypal naughty small boy in the innocent decades before vandalism, mugging, joyriding and alcopops changed the agenda. Incorrigibly noisy and untidy, his pockets bulging with catapults, marbles and live frogs, he is the bane of his conventional parents, his uptight older brother and sister, and every schoolteacher, clergyman and nervous elderly spinster in his orbit. He has three companions, Ginger, Douglas and Henry, with whom, in a gang known as the Outlaws, he roams the countryside, trespassing, bird’s-nesting, playing Red Indians, waging guerrilla war against his sworn enemy, Hubert Lane, and dodging his besotted follower, a prototype groupie named Violet Elizabeth Bott. The Outlaws form an unbreakable blood-brotherhood against repressive and pompous adults: they have their own private language, secret signs and sacred rituals, and their own cavernous hideout-cum-auditorium, the Old Barn.

William is a many-sided character: a leader whose authority over his followers is absolute; a daydreamer who imagines exotic careers as a big-game hunter, secret agent or circus clown; a virtuoso of scorn and sarcasm and an inventive liar; an exhibitionist, given to singing at the top of his voice, playing mouth organs and trumpets at high volume, dressing up in exotic clothes and wearing elaborate false beards and mustaches; a hustler, forever trying to raise money for new water pistols or cricket bats; a tender-hearted animal lover; a tireless novelty-seeker and observer of new trends and fashions; an indefatigable writer of lurid stories, dramas and poems in his own individual spelling; and organizer of plays, shows and exhibitions in his bedroom or the Old Barn. His greatest joy is to escape from his own genteel environment and run around with ’vulgar’ workingclass children, swapping his nice clothes for their scruffy ones and trying to imitate the fascinating crudeness of their speech. His spirits are never lower than when he is discovered among these unsuitable companions and restored to the outraged bosom of his family.

Having gobbled up the few red clothbound William books on Mimi’s bookshelf, John began to collect them, following their hero through the twenties, thirties and Second World War to the threshold of the space age. He loved the caustic prose style, which made no concession to young readers, freely using words such as inamorata and rhododendron, yet always sided with William against a largely risible grown-up community of choleric retired colonels, ditzy vicars’ wives, dimwitted policemen and sandal-wearing vegetarians. William’s world, moreover, was uncannily like the one that John himself inhabited—same ‘village’ surrounded by countryside, same genteel home with servants’ bells. He identified totally with William’s rebelliousness, his audacity, his humour, his flights of fantasy, his need always to be the kingpin yet always to have companions, his share-and-share-alike generosity, his proneness to hilarious misspellings and mispronunciations, even his preference for Red Indians over cowboys and addiction to playing the mouth organ. And it was William who inspired him to create his first gang of four, united against the world.

The Outlaws have an unchanging hierarchy, with William at the top, supported by his ‘boon companion’ Ginger, and Henry and Douglas forming a less essential second division. In John’s Vale Road following, Ivy Vaughan and Nigel ‘Walloggs’ Walley corresponded to Henry and Douglas, while albino-blond Pete Shotton, his prime accomplice and audience, was a natural Ginger.

With John as their leader, they devoted after-school hours, weekends and holidays to reincarnating William and the Outlaws in Woolton. Many of their escapades were dastardly only in their own eyes—walking on grass in defiance of KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs, entering and exiting wherever NO ENTRY or NO EXIT was proclaimed, drinking from taps marked NOT DRINKING WATER, and—in the words of their Sunday school classmate Rod Davis—‘running into Marks and Spencer’s and shouting “Woolworths!”’ At other times, they flouted authority and risked life and limb in ways that would have caused apoplexy in their respective homes. One of their favourite games was to hang on behind the trams that clanked up and down Menlove Avenue. Another was to climb a tree over a busy main road and play a version of Chicken with the double-decker buses passing beneath. When a bus approached, one of them would poke a leg into its path and dangle it there until the last possible moment before impact. Whoever kept his nerve for longest was the winner. If anyone’s shoe actually touched the bus roof, that counted as bonus points.

Lennon’s gang, as people soon took to calling them, became the curse of a district otherwise blessedly free from persecution or disturbance. They trespassed on Allerton Golf Course, annoying the grave businessmen at play there and conducting riotous games of their own. They crept in through the back entrances of cinemas without paying and disrupted performances until ejected by furious usherettes. Their ‘scrumping’ of apples from other people’s gardens became so pestilential that one enraged grower appeared with a shotgun and fired both barrels at John’s fleeing form.

Like William, he became a Boy Scout, joining the 3rd Allerton troop, but also like William, he had little time for the Scout code of duty and respectfulness. David Ashton, his companion in the troop’s ‘Badgers’ section, recalls the alternative marching chorus he encouraged the others to sing as they tramped along in their shorts, bush hats, and neckerchiefs: ‘We are the Third! The mad Third! We come from ALLeerTON and we are MAD! MAD!’

A frequent background for William’s and the Outlaws’ adventures are summer fêtes and garden parties. Their Woolton disciples, too, were invariably to be found when some local church or institution set out its innocent fund-raising paraphernalia of raffia stalls, lucky dips and kiddies’ fancy-dress parades. They would sneak into the tents where home-made cakes and pies or lovingly nurtured raspberries awaited the judges’ inspection, and make off with whatever they fancied. Once stuffed to the gills, they would entertain themselves by mocking the well-meaning people who were attempting to raise money for good causes, and the families innocently enjoying themselves. Nigel Walley has a mirthful recollection of one garden fête ‘run by the nuns’ where they spotted a group of monks seated together on a bench. ‘Somehow John got hold of this robe and dressed himself up as a monk. He was sitting with the other monks, talking to them in all these funny words while we were rolling about under the tent, in tucks.’

The portrayal, however, contained one major departure from character. Whereas William, for all his lawlessness, never stoops to intentional larceny, John—egged on, as always, by Pete—became a habitual and dedicated shoplifter. Confectioners in those days would often trustingly display sweets and chocolate on their counters in open boxes or arranged in glass dishes with paper doilies. ‘We’d go into this certain place that was run by a little old lady,’ Nigel Walley remembers. ‘John’d point to things he said he wanted on the top shelf, and all the time he’d be filling his pockets from the counter. He did the same at a shop that sold Dinky Toys in Woolton, opposite the Baths. He’d put a tractor or a little car in his pocket while the bloke was looking the other way. We went back to that same shop later, but this time John hadn’t got his glasses on. He couldn’t understand why his fingers couldn’t get at the Dinky cars. He couldn’t see that the bloke had covered them with a sheet of glass.’

Mimi was generous with pocket money, giving John a weekly allowance of five shillings (the same amount received by William’s pampered arch-foe, Hubert Lane), on condition that he did certain household jobs, such as mowing the lawn. Like William, he shared whatever he had with his ‘boon companions’. He found it impossible to hang on to money, just as he would all his life; nor was he willing to earn a bonus by legitimate means. The one time he ever received physical chastisement from Mimi was when she found he’d stolen some cash from her handbag. ‘I was always taking a little, for soft things like Dinkies,’ he would recall. ‘This day I must have taken too much.’

In contrast with his kind heart and impulsive generosity, he could show a lack of sensitivity and compassion that even roistering Liverpool boys sometimes felt to be going too far. This was not an era of verbal tact toward the physically and mentally handicapped, but John seemed to find all forms of affliction hilarious. His drawings teemed with hideously misshapen, obese or skeletal figures, endowed with too few or too many limbs and covered with warts or sores. A blind person tapping along with a white stick, or a child-on-crutches collection box would reduce him to giggles—a device with which many people try to disguise fear or repugnance. He often entertained his followers with what they called his ‘cripple act’ when he would shamble and cavort like Quasimodo, grinning with the blank-eyed oblivion of a simpleton and holding one hand crookedly like a claw.

Even then, when nothing in his daily life even hinted at it, he seems to have had premonitions of his strange destiny, almost as if his grandmother Polly’s reputed psychic powers were reaching out to him, too. So vivid and exciting were his dreams that he looked forward to going to sleep in his blue-quilted bed almost as much as to a theatrical performance or movie. As he later remembered, he always dreamed in brilliant colour and weird shapes that gave his subsequent first encounters with painters like Salvador Dalí and Hieronymus Bosch the shock of déjà vu.

The most prophetic of his dreams recurred time and again. In one, he was circling in an airplane above Liverpool, looking down at the Mersey, the docks and the twin Liver Birds on their towers, climbing higher and higher with each circuit until the city disappeared from view. In another, he was engulfed by seas of half crowns, the big old predecimal silver coins with milled edges that used to be worth 12.5p but had purchasing power equal to £5 today. In yet another, he recalled ‘finding lots of money in old houses—as much of the stuff as I could carry. I used to put it in my pockets and in my hands and in sacks, and I could still never carry as much as I wanted.’

In 1951, two new Liverpool University students arrived at Mendips to share the bay-windowed room next to John’s. One of them was a 19-year-old biochemistry student from Leeds named Michael Fishwick, the other a medical student named John Ellison. Fishwick was to become Mimi’s favourite paying guest—though as yet neither of them dreamed what that would ultimately entail—and, from his privileged insider’s position, was to share in both the great tragedies of John’s childhood.

The boarders paid £3 5s—which, as Fishwick remembers, was ’slightly above the odds’—for their accommodation and (very good) meals on the gateleg table in the morning room, which Mimi always served in a sitting apart from George and John. He recalls John as a friendly, ‘malleable’ boy, whose behaviour at home gave little hint of the tearaway he was outside, and who spent most of his time reading or drawing pictures of ‘wart-infested trolls’ or caricatures of the new lodgers. Both students at this point seemed to be equally in Mimi’s favour for their good manners, their upmarket love of rugby football, and their willingness to help out with the gardening, sometimes aided by a reluctant John. The pair would sometimes take him out for the day, their usual destination Hoylake on the Cheshire Wirral, where the shipping consisted of graceful white-sailed yachts rather than the Mersey’s dredgers and tugs.

Even the family circumstances that singled him out from other boys seemed in those days more a bonus than a deprivation. With Mimi taking care of him, his mother close at hand, his three other aunts in ever-dependable backup, John lived in an atmosphere of feminine admiration and solicitude, petted and lionised even more than the youngest of his cousins. He had somehow realised that Mimi’s title to him was only of the most tenuous, unofficial kind; as time passed, he became adept at exploiting her constant fear of losing him. If aunt and nephew had a particularly explosive argument, over the state of John’s room, for instance, he would stomp off to Julia’s in Allerton for the night, sometimes the whole weekend, throwing dark hints over his shoulder that he might never come back again.

The little council ‘semi’ at 1 Blomfield Road where Julia lived with Bobby Dykins could not have been more a contrast to Mendips. For Julia shared none of her eldest sister’s devotion to tidiness, routine and domestic protocol. At Julia’s one did not have to wipe one’s feet or hang up one’s coat in the proper place; meals kept no fixed schedule, but might appear on the table at any time. ‘That’s not to say she wasn’t a good housekeeper,’ her niece, Liela, remembers. ‘There was always a stew or a casserole on the stove. And if anyone came to the door when we were about to sit down, an extra place would automatically be laid.’

John seemed to feel no jealousy of the two half-sisters, Julia and Jackie, who enjoyed his mother’s attention seven days a week; they in turn regarded him as a big brother, nicknamed him Stinker, bounced up and down on him in the morning as he lay in bed, and loved the tales of monsters and Mersey mermaids he told them, and the dancing skeletons he would cut out of paper. ‘Julia always made it clear how much she adored him,’ Liela says. ‘She had photographs of him all over the house.’ Just the same, he would have been conscious at every minute that she was no longer really his.

Julia was one of the first in John’s circle to have television, another powerful reason to visit her. In those times, anyone so blessed was under obligation to invite friends and neighbours to ‘look in’, as the phrase went, filling their living rooms with extra seats, extinguishing lights and drawing blinds to create a cinema-like darkness. Early television variety shows sometimes featured elderly survivors of the music hall and even the minstrel eras—Hetty King, singing ‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor’; Leslie Hutchinson, aka Hutch, who had first popularised Alf Lennon’s beloved ‘Begin the Beguine’; and Robb Wilton, the Liverpool-born ‘confidential comic’ whose quavery monologues always began ‘The day war broke out…’ Julia’s favourite was George Formby, the chipper Lancastrian with outsized grin who strummed a banjolele while singing songs of innocent double entendre about Chinese laundries and window cleaners. ‘Judy adored Formby, and John caught it from her,’ Liela says. ‘I remember one day when he was on TV, and the money in the electric meter suddenly ran out, Judy almost went mad.’

At Julia’s, the wireless was always on, tuned to the Light Programme and blaring out the dance music that Mimi could not abide. She also had a gramophone and came home almost every week with a brand-new 78 rpm single in its dull brown wrapper. Thanks to her, John knew everything that was happening on Britain’s early pop music chart—called the Top 12 before it became the Top 20—in particular, whenever the effortless dominance of American performers like Guy Mitchell and Nat King Cole was briefly broken by some homegrown upstart like Ruby Murray or Dickie Valentine.

In the very early fifties, the blood of a British boy was most likely to be stirred by Frankie Laine, who sang sub-operatic arias with cowboy themes, like ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ and ‘Gunfight at OK Corral’. John relished the over-the-top showmanship of Laine and also of Johnnie Ray, who wore a hearing aid and ostentatiously burst into tears during his big hit, ‘Cry’. Surprisingly, though, the hardcase Woolton Outlaw also liked sentimental ballads, even when sung by the ‘old groaner’, Bing Crosby. One Crosby song included a play on words that instantly stuck to the flypaper of his mind: ‘Please…lend your little ears to my pleas…Please hold me tight in your arms…’

During John’s visits, Julia was always the bright, carefree, funloving person he looked on more as an elder sister than a mother. But after he had gone, her daughter Julia remembers, she would sit down in the suddenly quiet living room, open up the gramophone, and put on the record that, for obvious reasons, was her favourite one of all: ‘My Son John’, by the British tenor David Whitfield. During the climactic closing verse, with its eerily accurate prophecies—‘My son John…who will fly someday…have a wife someday…and a son someday…’ her eyes would fill with tears, as though, somehow or other, she guessed she would never see it.