John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Introductions were made a little stiffly; this was, after all, a very youthful interloper and a particularly tight-knit group. Paul broke the ice by picking up one of the Quarrymen’s guitars—whether John’s or Eric Griffiths’s no one now remembers—and levitating straight into “Twenty Flight Rock,” as played by Eddie Cochran in The Girl Can’t Help It, which he’d learned from the record a few days earlier. The song was a tricky one to sing and strum simultaneously, not just for a left-handed guitarist on a right-handed guitar but also because, thanks to Julia, the instrument was tuned like a banjo, its two bass strings slack and useless. Even so, the combined effect of the backswept hair, the baby face, the high yet robust voice, and the white sport coat was irresistible.

  Years later, in a foreword to John’s first published book, Paul would affectionately recall what a grown-up and dissipated character the Quarrymen’s leader seemed on that day. “At Woolton church fete I met him. I was a fat schoolboy and as he leaned an arm on my shoulder, I realised he was drunk…” Hallowed myth has always stated that, in reaction to his strife with Mimi, and possibly against the oppressive sanctity of the occasion, John had laid hands on a supply of beer and, by late afternoon, was seriously under the influence. Four of the Quarrymen—Davis, Hanton, Garry, and Griffiths—have disputed the story. “Except for Colin Hanton, we none of us had any money to get tanked up on beer,” Rod Davis says. “John might have managed to sneak a half-pint of bitter, but that would have been it.”

  Paul himself is now inclined to revise the degree of John’s intoxication, which he says did not become apparent until after “Twenty Flight Rock” was over. “I also knocked around on the backstage piano and that would have been ‘A Whole Lot of Shakin’ by Jerry Lee [Lewis]. That’s when I remember John leaning over, contributing a deft right hand in the upper octaves and surprising me with his beery breath. It’s not that I was shocked, it’s just that I remember this particular detail.”

  More desultory conversation followed while church helpers completed preparations for the Grand Dance or emptied dregs from tea urns in the adjacent kitchen, unaware of an encounter that was to rank alongside Gilbert’s first with Sullivan or Rodgers’s with Hart. Paul made himself still more impressive by tuning John’s and Eric’s guitars as guitars, giving them their full six-string span for the very first time. He remembers they did all go out to a pub in Woolton village later that evening, when he and John—and all the others except pint-size Colin Hanton—had to lie about their ages before being served. The visitor felt himself even more in dangerous adult company when talk arose of an impending raid by Teds from Garston and a mass punch-up in the center of the village. “I was wondering what I’d got myself into. I’d only come over for the afternoon and now I was in Mafia-land.”

  As John remembered, he asked Paul to join the Quarrymen when they first met in St. Peter’s Church Hall, though Paul did not take it as official until Pete Shotton formally repeated the invitation a couple of weeks later. John realized at the time it was a major step, though how major he could not have dreamed. “I thought, half to myself, ‘He’s as good as me.’ I’d been kingpin up to then. Now I thought ‘If I take him on, what will happen?’…The decision was whether to keep me strong or make the group stronger…It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line if I let him join. But he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him.”

  Eleven days after the Woolton fete, John reached the end of his final term at Quarry Bank High School. He had sat the GCE Ordinary-level examination in seven subjects and failed every one—though by a margin narrow enough to indicate that he could have passed with a minimum of extra effort. Even in art, his outstanding subject, he could not be bothered to meet the unexacting O-level standard. “All they were interested in was neatness,” he would recall. “I was never neat. I used to mix all the colors together. We had one question [in the exam-paper] which said do a picture of ‘travel.’ I drew a picture of a hunchback with warts all over him.”

  Without O-levels, there was no question of entering Quarry Bank’s sixth form for the two-year A-level (Advanced) GCE course on which university and college entrance depended. Since John was not prepared to sit his O’s again, any more than the school was to let him, he had no choice but to leave.

  Had he been born a few months earlier than he was, the period after school-leaving would have been amply occupied. Since 1939, all young British males had been subject to compulsory military service, a two-year term that, in the mid-fifties, might find them facing Soviet Russia in the West German nuclear front line, fighting terrorists in Malaya, Kenya, or Cyprus, or merely drilling pointlessly on some home base like Catterick or Aldershot. But in 1957, National Service was abolished, saving John in the nick of time from “square-bashing” and sergeant majors. The only time he would ever don a khaki uniform or pick up a gun would be when acting in a film.

  He himself had given no thought to his career, other than inwardly vowing never to become the doctor or pharmacist or veterinarian that Aunt Mimi hoped he would. “I was always thinking I was going to be a famous artist and possibly I’d have to marry a very rich old lady, or man, to look after me while I did my art…I didn’t really know what I wanted to be, apart from ending up as an eccentric millionaire. I had to be a millionaire. If I couldn’t do it without being crooked, then I’d have to be crooked. I was quite prepared to do that—nobody obviously was going to give me money for my paintings—but I was too much of a coward.”

  With seafaring men on both sides of his family, it was natural for his thoughts to turn to the docks that still flourished along the Mersey, and the exotic worlds to which they led. One day, he brought home a slightly older boy who had followed Alf Lennon’s calling of ship’s steward and—so it seemed to John—led a life of dazzling glamour and affluence. “His hair [was] in a Tony Curtis, they called it, all smoothed down with grease at the sides,” Mimi remembered. “‘Mimi,’ John whispered to me in the kitchen, ‘this boy’s got pots of money. He goes away to sea.’ I said, ‘Well, he’s no captain and he’s no engineer—what is he?’ ‘He waits at table, John said. ‘Ha!’ I said. ‘A fine ambition!’”

  Shortly afterward she stumbled on a pact between John and Nigel Walley to enroll together in the training course that would have turned them into junior stewards. We just thought we’d like to see the world while we were still young,” Walley remembers now. However, when John tried to sign up for the course, he was told that at his age he needed consent of a parent or guardian. “I was rung up by this place at the Pier Head—some sort of seamen’s employment office,” Mimi remembered. “‘We’ve got a young boy named John Lennon here,’ they said. ‘He’s asking to sign up….’ ‘Don’t you even dream of it,’ I told them.”

  The main enticement of going to sea for young men those days was the unlimited sex it promised. But that, at least, formed no part of John’s motivation. Alone of his circle, he was known to have lost his virginity with his curvaceous strawberry-blonde steady, Barbara Baker, and since then had racked up a mounting score with several of the Quarrymen’s more brazen camp followers. “Going all the way,” it used to be called, though the term is hardly accurate. In those days, the predominant form of contraception was the sheath, not yet known as the condom but as the French letter or rubber Johnny, and sold only by pharmacists and barbers amid fandangos of furtiveness and embarrassment that few teenage boys were willing to brave. With the girls who would let him, John therefore used the risky method of coitus interruptus. In Liverpool it was known as “getting off at Edge Hill,” that being the last station on the northbound railway line where one could alight before the climactic downhill run into the Lime Street terminus.

  Since neither he nor Barbara had a place of their own, there was nowhere to do it but al fresco in the woods or on the grounds of some neighborhood stately home, or even in a churchyard whose monuments at least provided a relief from damp grass. Years later, he would ungallantly remember “a night,
or should I say a day…when I was fucking my girlfriend on a gravestone and my arse got covered in greenfly [aphids]. Where are you now, Barbara? That was a good lesson in karma and/or gardening….”

  In 1957, Barbara became pregnant. Despite their long physical relationship and his dangerous habit of getting off at Edge Hill, John was not responsible. Tired of sharing him with the Quarrymen’s embryo groupies, she had chucked him some time before and taken up with one of his friends just to spite him. To avoid the inevitable stigma on her family, she was sent away from Liverpool to have the baby, which was then immediately put out for adoption. John, she says, was almost as mortified as if he’d been the father. “He was beside himself…. He came round to our house and he went crazy…kicking a panel of the fence in and shouting…. He was saying ‘It should have been mine! It should have been mine!’ He said he would marry me. It was typical of John, that. He came to see me and said it would be the best thing if we got married. He would stand by me.” When Barbara returned home, they began going out again, but things were never the same, and the relationship faded away.

  As his final term at Quarry Bank drew to a close, John was the only one among his cronies still to have no idea what came next. Rod Davis was to go into the sixth form to do A-level French, Spanish, history, and Latin—and ultimately become head boy. Eric Griffiths was to train as a ship’s navigation officer. Even John’s closest partner in crime, Pete Shotton, had astonished his teachers—not to mention his erstwhile fellow shoplifter and dinner-ticket racketeer—by winning a cadetship at the Police Training College in Mather Avenue.

  Since John seemed incapable of formulating any ideas, his future had to be discussed over his head by Mimi and the Quarry Bank principal, Mr. Pobjoy. “Pobjoy asked me what I was going to do with him.” Mimi recalled. “I said, ‘What are you going to do with him. You’ve had him for five years.’” The only faint ray of hope his headmaster could see was his unquestioned talent for drawing. If his aunt consented, Mr. Pobjoy would put John’s name forward to the Liverpool College of Art, with a special letter pleading for his failed O-level in that subject not to count against him. To Mimi, “It was better than nothing; at least he was going to college. Then I found out I would have to go on supporting him for the first year, so I thought if I am paying for his education, then he’s going to go there and learn something.”

  Mr. Pobjoy made it a condition of recommending John to the art college that his behavior must be impeccable for the rest of that final term. Not until Quarry Bank actually let out and his teachers all corroborated his good conduct would the letter to the college be sent. John duly sat out his remaining classes with an expression of choirboy innocence and took pains to avoid overt trouble. However, there was one final act of subversion on his conscience that could have ruined everything.

  Summer term’s most sacred ritual was the school photograph, a black-and-white portrait of all two hundred–odd pupils and staff assembled on the lawn outside the main building. Such wide-angle shots required a tripod-mounted camera with a special panoramic lens that took several seconds to make its exposure, panning from one end of the group to the other. According to school folklore, it was possible for a boy on one side to be snapped by the lens, then run to the opposite side and be snapped again as it completed its arc, so appearing in the picture twice. When Quarry Bank mustered in eight ascending black-blazered rows for the 1957 photograph, John decided to put this theory to the test.

  Rather than conduct the experiment in person, he nominated his classmate Harry “Goosey” Gooseman. “John had heard it was possible, but rather than do it himself, he got me all fired up and raring to go,” Gooseman remembers. “Anyway, you can see what happened when you look at the photograph…. When the camera began its slow move, I ducked down and ran along behind the line and popped up in another place. Sadly for me,…I moved too soon, and so you see this empty space where I should have been standing, right behind John. And then when I tried to race the camera and to get onto a chair or bench further along, there was no way in for me, so you can just see a bit of my head peeping through. Some of the lads didn’t know what was happening, but John did. You have only to look at his face…and the smirks of his gang. I remember him laughing out loud when we were finally presented with the photograph, and he saw the empty space behind him where I should have been.”

  Fortunately, Mr. Pobjoy never noticed the gap at one end of the school group or the blur of an intruding head at the other. On the last day of term, July 17, the letter went to Liverpool College of Art, recommending John for entry. The head also supplied a personal reference that generously accentuated the positive: “He has been a trouble spot for many years in discipline, but has somewhat mended his ways. Requires the sanction of ‘losing a job’ to keep him on the rails. But I believe he is not beyond redemption and he could really turn out a fairly responsible adult who might go far.”

  It was not such a tremendous coup that had been accomplished on John’s behalf. Under the easygoing educational system of late-fifties Britain, virtually anyone showing the faintest glimmer of creative ability could get a place at art college and be assured a generous local authority grant to support them. From this large intake, it was accepted that only a tiny minority would turn into actual artists. Some would become teachers, and a few would gravitate into the undeveloped sphere of design and graphics still mundanely known as commercial art. For the rest, studying art was merely an exotic interlude when they could put on airs and acquire calligraphic handwriting before yielding to the banalities of a business career or marriage.

  Becoming an art student introduced John to a part of inner Liverpool that was almost unknown to him. Around the college’s gray Victorian facade in Hope Street lay a raffish area of coffee bars, bric-a-brac shops, and student lodgings catacombed among elegant Georgian streets and curving terraces originally built for the city’s shipping aristocracy. On St. James’s Mount towered the sandstone bulk of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican cathedral, begun in 1904—and destined not to be fully inaugurated until 1978. Close at hand lay Britain’s oldest West Indian and Chinese communities, the former bubbly with calypso and steel-band music, the latter so well assimilated that some pubs announced closing time in Cantonese as well as English. The mix of period grandeur and bohemian informality reached its apogee in the Philharmonic Dining Rooms—adjacent to the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s recital hall—which boasted wood paneling to rival any first-class saloon on the great transatlantic ships, and men’s urinal stalls carved from rose-colored marble.

  John was to study for a National Diploma in Art and Design, a course intended to occupy him full-time for the next four years. During the first two, he would take a range of subjects, including graphics, art history, architecture, ceramics, lettering, even basic woodworking. A college exam would then decide if he had reached a sufficient standard to continue in some specialist field like painting or sculpture. Since he did not qualify for a grant until age eighteen, he remained dependent on Mimi, who, as well as providing free board and lodging at Mendips, gave him a weekly allowance of 30 shillings for his bus fares and meals.

  For his first day as an art student, he wore his best gray-blue Teddy boy suit, set off by a Slim Jim tie and Elvis-inspired blue suede shoes with fancily stitched uppers. He was a defiant daub of rock-’n’-roll proletarianism set down among middle-class-aspiring jazzers of the very same type who’d stopped the Quarrymen’s show at the Cavern club. An observant girl named Ann Mason, who also started the Intermediate course that day, remembers how painfully he stood out among the Shetland knits and duffle coats, and his dogged air of determination not to care.

  He had little idea of what studying art would entail, beyond an ardent hope, fostered by the comembers of his wankers’ circle, that sketching nude women came into it somewhere. In fact, his daily timetable as an Intermediate student proved dispiritingly similar to life at the school from which he thought he had escaped. As at Quarry Bank, an attendance roll was c
alled each morning, then came lessons in classrooms or the steep-tiered lecture theater, when oldish men in tweed suits, with a war-veteran air, spouted facts about Renaissance painters and pediments that he hadn’t the smallest interest in studying. Before being allowed to draw a real person from life, he had to do hours of tedious groundwork in human anatomy, consisting largely of copying outsize plaster ears or arms or parts of the articulated human skeleton that the college numbered among its teaching aids.

  Among the earliest kindred spirits he discovered was Helen Anderson, a beautiful sixteen-year-old from Fazakerley who had previously attended the college’s junior art school. A precociously talented painter, Helen had been featured in the national press a few months earlier when Lonnie Donegan, the King of Skiffle himself, commissioned her to do his portrait and invited her to stay with him and his family during the sittings. John had read about this at the time, and, as soon as he arrived at college, made a point of seeking her out and demanding to hear the story firsthand. “He explained that Lonnie was a bit of a hero to him,” Helen remembers. “He wanted to hear everything that had happened. And I had to tell him again and again.”

  Mimi’s hope was that, if nothing else, art college might lessen the influence of Donegan and Elvis over John, and stimulate him to pursuits more elevated than traveling around by bus with a wallpaper-covered tea chest. There certainly was reason enough for the Quarrymen to have disintegrated that summer. Rod Davis, their banjo player, had unrancorously drifted away, feeling of no further use amid the increasingly rock-’n’-roll repertoire—which meant none of their personnel now had any connection with Quarry Bank High School. However, John was determined to keep the group going, however awkwardly it sat with his new student persona, and for the present did not bestir himself to think up an alternative name.