John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

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

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

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

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

  All this was mere marginalia, however, in comparison with The Goon Show, which had begun its first series on BBC radio in 1951 but hit full stride in 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Scripted almost single-handedly by a sometime jazz musician named Spike Milligan, it superficially harked back to the Second World War (Goons had been Allied prisoners’ nickname for their German guards) and to a Conan Doyle-esque world of spies, intrigue, and derring-do. But in content, it was mold-breakingly anarchic, a mélange of demented voices and lunatic situations such as had never before been offered to a British audience, least of all on the sanctified airwaves of the BBC.

  Together with a little-known variety comedian named Peter Sellers, Milligan created a gallery of characters who often seemed to have only the most nodding acquaintance with the human race—the decrepit Colonel Bloodnok, the quavery duo of Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister, the moronic Eccles, the supersmooth Grytpype-Thynne, the whining hermaphrodite Bluebottle. Embedded in the madness like hooks in blubber were jibes against previously inviolable national institutions such as the army, the church, the Foreign Office, and even the BBC itself (which the corporation, amazingly, never noticed).

  The Goons’ most besotted fans were middle-class preadolescent schoolboys, those overserious war babies who had hitherto believed the oppressive sanity of life to be everlasting. For John, between 1953 and 1955, they were the brightest spot in his whole existence. Nothing could unstick him from the wireless on evenings when the cut-glass voice of announcer Wallace Greenslade presaged another Milligan free-form fantasy such as “Her” (a parody of H. Rider Haggard’s She) or “The Sinking of Westminster Pier,” featuring Minnie and Henry as oyster-sexers, with frantic musical interludes by Dutch harmonica player Max Geldray. John could do the voices and catchphrases of every character, from Minnie’s senile gurgle to Bluebottle’s scandalized shrieks of “I do not like dis game,” “Dirty, rotten swine!,” and “You deaded me!”

  As the terms passed, “Cutting class and going AWOL” became an ever more frequent charge against Shennon and Lotton in Quarry Bank’s punishment book. The bicycles that had been a reward for scholastic excellence allowed them to escape far from the school precincts and any likelihood of detection. By their third year, they had discovered smoking, a habit then practiced almost universally by adults and attended by no health warnings. The usual routine was to filch a packet of Wild Woodbines or Players Weights from some unsuspecting tobacconist, then repair to Reynolds or Calderstones Park, rest their bikes on the grass, and smoke all ten “ciggies” at one go, while John blew salvoes on his mouth organ or shouted in Bloodnok or Bluebottle voices at passers-by or the ducks on the lake.

  He was not irrevocably twinned with Pete Shotton. Sometimes on weekends or in the school holidays, he would forsake Pete and his Raleigh Lenton and go for a long bus ride by himself, past the Penny Lane roundabout and through the descending suburbs into central Liverpool. His usual destination was the Kardomah coffeehouse in Whitechapel, where he had a favorite stool at the ledge along the street window. He would sit there for so many hours, sketching in his book and on the steamed-up window or, as he put it, “just watching the world go by,” that Mimi nicknamed him the Kardomah Kid.

  To Mimi, his drawings and poems were no more than time-wasting distractions from schoolwork. Often he would come home and find she had conducted a guerrilla raid on his bedroom and thrown every piece of paper she could find into the kitchen wastebin. There would a furious argument in which even his usual ally, Uncle George, dared not take his side. “I used to say [to Mimi] ‘You’ve thrown my fuckin’ poetry out and you’ll regret it when I’m famous,’” John remembered. “I never forgave her for not treating me like a fuckin’ genius.”

  Prior to John’s fifteenth year, the British had regarded the process of growing up as perfectly straightforward. The system was that children went on being children until puberty was well advanced; then, virtually overnight, they turned into grown-ups, wearing the same kind of clothes as their parents, aspiring to the same values, and seeking the same amusements. The effect of rioting hormones on immature and impressionable minds had yet to be studied in any depth by scientists or sociologists. The continuance of wartime’s mass conscription claimed all able-bodied males at age eighteen and put them through two years of military discipline that, in most cases, left a permanent mark. Only university students, then accounting for just 2 percent of young people, were permitted an interlude of free will and indulgence—even some public unruliness—before assuming the burdens of adulthood.

  American films made John and his friends enviously familiar with a society that, on the contrary, recognized the years between thirteen and twenty as a distinct season of life and catered to it with superabundant lavishness. A blissful interlude it seemed, with its open-to-all college campuses, its high schools so very d
ifferent from Quarry Bank, its giant-lettered boys’ jerseys, its girls’ ponytails, its hamburgers, Coca-Cola, cheerleaders, and hops. Long before it had any personal relevance for him, John had picked up on the fundamental cultural difference: “America had teenagers…. Everywhere else just had people.”

  American young people as Hollywood projected them—which, of course, meant young white people—had always been gee-whiz happy and healthy-minded and, if possible, even more respectful and conformist than their British counterparts. But since the war, ominous cracks had begun to appear in this cornerstone of the American Dream. Nineteen fifty-one saw publication of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, a novel written in the voice of a seventeen-year-old boy, Holden Caulfield, alternately mocking and reviling the Utopia into which he had been born. In 1953 came The Wild One, a film about the terrorizing of a small town by a group of leather-clad teenage motorcyclists (collectively known as the Beetles). “What are you rebelling against?” a woman character demands of the young Marlon Brando as the pack’s leader. “Whaddaya got?” he replies.

  All these vague, discontented mutters and hormonal stirrings first took definite shape in James Dean, a young stage actor from the Midwest, schooled with Brando in the Method technique and then picked up by Hollywood. Gaunt and melancholic, Dean was the first star with specific appeal to teenagers of the new troubled and troublesome variety. He wore their to-hell-with-it uniform of T-shirts and shabby jeans, suffered their same agonies of uncertainty and hypersensitivity, spoke in their same surly or shy mumble. Their feeling of alienation from a seemingly bountiful and indulgent world was perfectly expressed in Rebel Without a Cause, the 1955 film that was both Dean’s apotheosis and farewell. That same year, he died in an auto accident in his Porsche sports car, thereby achieving immortality.

  In Britain also, the postwar years had seen rising concern over what was still patronizingly termed “the younger generation.” Juvenile crime increasingly dominated newspaper headlines, from the Craig-Bentley murder case (in which a London policeman’s sixteen-year-old killer was judged too young to face otherwise automatic capital punishment) to the rise of so-called coshboys (young men who carried blackjacks almost like a fashion accessory) as a threat to formerly safe urban streets.

  But the first generalized outbreak of deviancy among the younger generation occurred in no place more sinister than tailors’ fitting rooms. During 1955, a proportion of British youths rejected the tweed jackets and baggy gray flannels prescribed for them almost by statute, and took to going about in knee-length coats with black velvet collars, frilled shirts, leopardskin waistcoats, bootlace ties, ankle-hugging “drainpipe” trousers, fluorescent orange or lime green socks, and chukka boots raised on two inches of spongy rubber. The style being reminiscent of Edwardian dress, its adherents were dubbed Teddy Boys, though dandified Wild West heroes like Wyatt Earp or Wild Bill Hickok also represented a strong influence. Their most radical departure from convention was their hair—no longer planed into an army-style short back and sides and flattened with Brylcreem, but blow-dried into a flossy forelock, backswept over long sideburns, and interleaved at the rear into a D.A., or duck’s arse.

  Teddy Boys were exclusively working-class young men who by rights should have been welcomed as symbols of growing national affluence. Since no men’s outfitters stocked such outlandish garments, they had to be expensively tailor-made, often to the client’s own design. Unfortunately, some (though by no means all) of these style pioneers were also apt to get into street brawls, using weapons like coshes, brass knuckles, and bicycle chains. As a result, for a decade to come, unusual suits and long hair would be synonymous in the British mind with proletarian criminality and riot.

  In Woolton, John and his circle were too young—albeit by just a whisker—to be swept up in James Dean mania or join the first blow wave of Teddy Boys. For John, the latter were no more than comic curiosities to be recorded in his sketchbook (like a Scotsman with a “drainpipe kilt”). Liverpool “Teds” took their reputation as hard men with special seriousness, none more so than John’s old Dovedale Primary schoolfellow Jimmy Tarbuck, now very big and tough and disinclined to any humor where his wardrobe was concerned. “We were all dead scared of Tarbuck,” Len Garry remembers. He’d only got to say ‘Are you looking at me?’ and we’d run…John the fastest of all.”

  Woolton did not offer much encouragement to would-be Teddy Boys. The village’s two barber’s shops, Ashcroft’s and Dicky Jones’s, both treated their teenage clientele merely as so many sheep to be sheared. John and his friends preferred to have their hair cut at Bioletti, in the little parade of shops off the Penny Lane roundabout. The proprietor and sole operator was an elderly Italian who had also cut John’s father’s hair—though John had no idea of this—when Alf Lennon was at the Bluecoat Hospital, thirty years earlier. Signor Bioletti’s hands were famously shaky, but his trembling scissors would make at least a stab at more modish styles. And in his shop window—as a song would one day commemorate—were head shots of satisfied customers triumphantly coiffured like James Dean, Tony Curtis, or Jeff Chandler.

  One sunny evening during that June of 1955, Mendips’s most regular boarder, Michael Fishwick, was finishing supper in the morning room, and Uncle George was due to take his place at the table before starting night-watchman duty at the Bear Brand factory. Suddenly, as Fishwick recalls, there was “a terrible bang on the stairs.” On his way down, George had collapsed from what the biochemistry student recognized as massive internal bleeding. He was rushed to Smithdown Road Hospital but died soon after admission; the cause was given as a hemorrhage of the liver.

  John was away in Scotland with Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert, and knew nothing of what had happened until his return home a couple of days later. As Mimi would remember, “He came bouncing in, his usual excitable self, and asked where George was. When I told him he was dead [John] just went very quiet. He didn’t cry or anything like that. He just went up to his room. If there was any crying to do, he would do it on his own. He wouldn’t want anyone else to see him like that.”

  The family member thought best suited to keep John company at such a devastating moment was his Aunt Harrie’s daughter, Liela. She remembers arriving at Mendips to find Mimi “sitting outside on the coal-bunker, looking lost.” Alone in his bedroom with this trusted childhood ally, John could at last give vent to his emotions, which he did not do by crying but by cackling with uncontrollable laughter. “We both had hysterics,” he later remembered (though Liela has no recollection of joining in). “We laughed and laughed. I felt very guilty afterwards.”

  George’s death had a devastating effect on Mimi, made worse, perhaps, by recollecting how little overt affection she had shown him in return for his generosity, good nature, and ever-dependable kindness. “Our world was never the same,” she would remember. “John took it on the chin…but never the same. The place seemed empty, but we muddled on. I mean, you don’t give up, do you?”

  George had never been much of a businessman and—so the family always maintained—had been denied his fair share of the Smith dairy farm when his brother Frank sold it for development in the latter war years. Mimi thus found herself left with little in the way of capital to continue educating and providing for John and maintaining the comfortable home to which he was accustomed. She did not discuss these financial anxieties with him, and he never dreamed that at least once a year she discreetly visited a pledge shop in Smithdown Road and pawned her diamond engagement ring.

  In the northern England of that era, a woman widowed in her early fifties was expected to regard her life as over. Although Mimi was only just over forty, the thought of remarriage—or any other relationship with a man—never crossed her mind. From here on, so she thought, her only raison d’être would be the care and protection of John.

  Her main support were the four sisters whose lives and families remained as closely meshed as ever. And ironically, the one she turned to most frequently for consolation was Julia, t
he “baby sister” whose unreliability she had so often deplored. Though Mimi still could not bring herself to accept Bobby Dykins, she formed a closer bond with Julia than had existed since their childhood; henceforth a day seldom passed when Julia did not drop in at Mendips for a cup of tea and a chat.

  Coping single-handedly with fourteen-year-old John was a task that required all Mimi’s old hospital-bred toughness as well as her bottomless reserves of diligence and self-sacrifice. He was always to remain in awe of her flights of temper, when she would pick up anything at hand and fling it at him, regardless of consequences. Rather than provoke her ire over neglected homework or unsuitable friends, he often preferred to tiptoe noiselessly out of the house on stocking feet; for the rest of his life, he would retain this habit of padding around as noiselessly as a cat. But more often than not, just as he reached the back door and liberty, a stern voice from above would call, “Is that you, John?”

  The lack of a man about the house was accentuated by John’s inability to perform even the simplest domestic tasks. When his two small cousins, Michael and David, arrived for a visit, Mimi would give them the many overdue little jobs that were beyond him. “I remember often changing the light-bulb in John’s bedroom,” Michael Cadwallader says. “He’d never even learned to do that.”

  Mimi’s straitened finances increased her reliance on her student boarders. Fortunately, Michael Fishwick was now preparing for a biochemistry PhD and so needed accommodation for most of the year rather than just a regular student’s three college terms. He was allotted the back bedroom Mimi had formerly shared with George, while she moved into the larger bay-windowed one adjoining John’s. Considering Fishwick an old friend, as well as a link with George, she took to confiding in him as she seldom had in anyone outside the immediate family. When she visited a solicitor to probate George’s will, she asked Fishwick to accompany her, and also recounted the circumstances that had brought John into her care. Once she even showed him a letter from John’s father, Alf, sent from prison, which all these years later still “made steam come out of her ears.”