Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  * * *

  * The first of their fourteen children was another John Lennon, born 1894, who died of diarrhea in 1895. John and Polly claimed marital status right down the line, yet there appears to have been no impediment to their tying the knot before they did, beyond the usual (considerable) problem of mixing Catholic and Protestant.

  † The Stanleys had moved to Huskisson Street in recent months from 71a Berkley Street.

  ‡ Nems will play a huge part in this history. At this point, however, it was not yet owned by the Epstein family. Paul bought back his father’s piano in 1981 (it had previously been sold) and still plays it. Jim got his hearing problem when, as a child, he fell off a wall in the narrow back alley (“jigger”) behind their house at 3 Solva Street.

  § The trade magazine Kinematograph Weekly reported (May 11, 1939) that when the gas had cleared and the Trocadero resumed its program, the organist struck up “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes.”

  ‖ Maghull is pronounced “Magull” and the second syllable rhymes with “full.”

  a A girl, Victoria Elizabeth Lennon, was born in June 1945 in a Salvation Army maternity home in the Mossley Hill district, a short walk from Penny Lane. Julia then allowed that organization to arrange an adoption and the baby was assigned to a local woman and her Norwegian-born seaman husband. She spent her childhood just north of Liverpool and never met her mother, father or halfbrother John. Her identity was made public in 1998—her name had been changed from Victoria Lennon to Ingrid Pedersen, adopted daughter of Peder and Margaret. They show up in 1950s phone directories at 88 The Northern Road, Crosby, Liverpool 23.

  TWO

  1945–54

  BOYS

  Not long after war’s end, Julia Lennon found herself a new man. She’d taken a job at another big local pub, the Coffee House at Wavertree, where she met customer John Dykins. He’d been spared active war service because of a lingering childhood chest complaint, since when he’d developed a twitch and was often nervously clearing his throat. He worked as a door-to-door salesman and was also involved in the local black market. He and Julia began an affair—confusingly, she called him Bobby—and again her family frowned on it. As before, John Lennon was often looked after by Mimi, who was expressing grave concern for his welfare.

  Three miles away, in the Toxteth end of the Dingle, Johnny and Annie Starkey were helping care for their grandson Richy (or Dicky, or “that bloody Noddler,” as his grandad called him)—especially when he was ailing. Annie would make him either a bread poultice (slices of white bread soaked in boiling water, wrapped in muslin and applied to the skin) or a hot toddy (a spirit, usually whiskey, with hot water). Richy especially loved the hot toddies, not to mention all the fuss that went with being ill. Annie was shocked her little grandson was left-handed; she announced he’d been possessed by witches, or the devil, and took it upon herself to exorcise it. Over a long time, but persistently, she defeated the evil, forcing the child to ditch his natural tendency and use his right hand instead. Not for nothing, and never without love, would Richy come to describe Granny Starkey as “the voodoo queen of Liverpool.”1

  Having been conceived about four weeks after war began, Richy started school ten days after it officially ended, on August 25, 1945. He was enrolled at St. Silas, a large red-brick Victorian building annexed to the now bombed-out church where his parents had married. Elsie walked him there and said, “On your way, son.” He instantly hated it. Elsie would tell the story of how he walked home at dinnertime and announced they’d all been given the afternoon off, and how she gullibly believed him until she saw other kids walking past their window, returning to school. He had nearly conned her, and there’d be hundreds of times when he did.

  Elsie was scraping together around £3 a week through no end of toil—scrubbing steps and serving in a greengrocery, doing anything decent to bring in the pennies—and it was around this time that her estranged husband quit his parents’ house and left the area, probably moving to Crewe, about forty miles south of Liverpool. He saw very little of his Richy again, would retain few sympathetic memories, and stopped supporting his wife and child altogether. Unable to meet the rent on 9 Madryn Street, Elsie loaded their possessions onto a cart and wheeled them across High Park Street, then down the narrow “play street” that was Admiral Grove to their new home—a tiny “two-up-two-down” in a terrace that, Richy would always say, had already been condemned for ten years. He’d recall sitting on the back of the cart, his legs dangling over the side, as his earliest memory.2

  Rented at ten shillings a week, 10 Admiral Grove had a wooden V (for Victory) sign only recently affixed over the front door … but there wasn’t much in the way of celebration going on inside. Elsie was angry with her husband’s behavior and didn’t hide her opinions from their son, who’d later use the word “brainwashed” to describe his intake; he expressed pain incoherently when he expressed it at all.3 There were pubs at either end of the street and Elsie worked as a barmaid in at least one of them, needing the company and the laughs.

  Home life was much steadier for Paul McCartney, now aged three, and also a natural left-hander (left unchallenged). Jim and Mary seem to have quickly established the kind of balanced domesticity experienced by only some families: Jim was mild-mannered, softly spoken, even-tempered and attentive; if he was cross, he kept it inside. Mary—quiet, firm, presentable, respectable—was more serious but also more demonstrably affectionate, though not overly so. She’d smack Paul or Mike if the need arose, but her biggest threat would be verbal: “You’ll get a smacked bottom from your father.”4

  George Harrison was also being nurtured within a strong family, led by the indomitable Louise and steadfast Harry, Liverpool-sharp with decency. Harry had become an official with the local Transport & General Workers Union (TGWU), active at his bus depot. Though people considered him a quiet man, every so often he’d be up on a soapbox telling his worker brothers his thoughts and beliefs, and how he felt their lives could be improved.5

  Still waiting for the Corporation to give them somewhere bigger to live, the Harrisons spent much of their time in Arnold Grove’s cramped kitchen. There was usually a fire in the grate, with its adjacent oven where Louise baked bread; mantel-lights were lit by gas fed through a shilling meter; and the cooker was a two-ring burner on top of an upside-down tea-chest—from which lucky equipment, and using the government’s scanty rations, Louise somehow made three meals a day for six. Once a week here (as in Madryn Street, Newcastle Road and some of the places the McCartneys lived), a zinc tub would be brought into the kitchen and everyone—adults and children in turn—would bathe or be bathed with hot water poured from a jug into their “bungalow bath.” Photos of George at this age show a blond-haired boy, podgy-cheeked and with his father’s lopsided smile, and every story of his childhood paints a picture of a lad single-mindedly self-reliant. “George was always a very independent child,” Louise would explain. “He liked to do things by himself, no one to help him. He was also very intelligent and fun-loving, and helped a lot around the house.”6

  John Lennon started school on November 12, 1945, at Mosspits Lane Primary, a suburban establishment typical of its kind. It was a short distance from Newcastle Road and Julia walked him there in the morning and collected him in the afternoon, working the Coffee House lunchtime session in between, and sometimes singing from its stage. Like Richy Starkey at St. Silas, John began in the nursery class; unlike Richy, John saw clearly how he stood out from the crowd. He was exceptional, being advanced at reading, writing, drawing and painting, as well as at thinking creatively and communicating. But this gifted and lively mind was set in perpetual whirl by the adults around him. Problems beyond John’s ken and control had been hurtling at him since the womb—and now came the decisive episode.

  At the end of March 1946, Julia moved in with Bobby Dykins, and took John with her. It wasn’t only a one-bedroom flat in Gateacre Village (close to Woolton), it was a one-bed flat—one double-bed in which Julia an
d her man were sleeping with her five-year-old son.7 Considering with what fervor and frequency newly cohabiting couples usually enjoy sex, John’s intimate exposure to such a situation was truly shocking, no matter how discreetly the adults may have been behaving. Mimi went straight over to express her view, Dykins ordered her out, and she returned with a senior official from the Public Assistance Committee. This department of Liverpool City Council—the Social Services of its day—played everything straight. It wasn’t in the business of separating a mother from her child unless there was good reason, but an unmarried couple sharing a bed with a young infant was one such. As a consequence, for the time being at least, Mimi found herself John’s primary carer. He moved in with her and his Uncle George at their house on Menlove Avenue.

  While all this was going on, Alf finally accepted he’d been taken for a mug. His next engagement was on the RMS Queen Mary, the great Cunard White Star flagship sailing from Southampton to New York—another 1,600 GI brides exchanging ration books for endless bounty. But this was in stark contrast to his own predicament. Before leaving, he placed an advertisement in the Liverpool Echo—“I, Alfred Lennon, recently of 9 Newcastle Road, Wavertree, Liverpool, will NOT be RESPONSIBLE for any DEBTS unless personally contracted”8—which as good as announced that the extraordinary seven-year marriage of Alfred Lennon and Julia Stanley was over. Not a single photograph of them together is known to have been taken.

  One of Mimi’s first actions was to remove John from Mosspits Lane and enroll him instead at Dovedale Road infants school—records show that he began here on May 6, 1946. The Queen Mary was back in England three weeks later; learning that his son was living with Mimi, Alf paid a visit to Menlove Avenue, one that seems to have been reasonably cordial. The next day, he said he was taking John out to the shops, but he didn’t: they took the train to Blackpool and stayed there. The school “withdrawal book” at Dovedale Road records the fact: “Left district 31/5/46.”

  Alf went to Blackpool because this was where his merchant navy friend Billy Hall lived, with his parents (the house is still there, 37 Ivy Avenue). Born in 1923, ten years younger than the man he knew as “Lennie,” Hall has for a long time been the only living witness to what transpired here, and the only person to relate the events impartially. (He calls John “Johnny” because this was how Alf introduced him.)

  Every account of Alf and John’s time in Blackpool has turned on the vital fact that Alf brought his boy here prior to emigrating with him to New Zealand—the plan being that Billy’s parents would emigrate and take John with them, to be joined later by Alf who’d work a passage there. This, insists Billy Hall, is fantasy.

  There’s no truth at all in that. I said I would go to New Zealand, and Lennie said he might too, and also another mate of ours, and at some point it was mentioned that it would be a great place to raise Johnny—but no plans were ever made. Not only were my parents not planning to go, they didn’t even know I was.

  The only actual plan that involved Johnny was that maybe he’d stay with my parents for two or three months until Lennie got something sorted out. But my mother was born in 1894—she was already fifty-two. Though she looked after Johnny for the short time we were there, she didn’t want to be responsible for a young kid at her age, and Lennie had to go back to sea. He had to go back. We were only on leave.

  The final scene—probably June 22, 1946—is painted vividly in John Lennon docudramas as the ultimate heartbreak moment for the youngster, the blameless participant in a devastating tug-of-love, forced to choose between his mother, who’d come up from Liverpool to fetch him back, and his father, who was about to sweep him off to New Zealand. Legend has the tear-stained infant first choosing Alf and then changing his mind, running in cinematic slow-motion down a Blackpool street as Julia walks dejectedly into a sepia sunset. Billy Hall recalls what actually happened.

  Lennie’s wife came up with her boyfriend. I’ll always remember him: he looked like a spiv, a wide-boy, with a trilby hat at a forty-five-degree angle, and a very thin moustache, like a smaller version of Terry-Thomas. He was probably there in case of trouble.

  They needed privacy, so we let them go in the front room—which normally no one went into, and which my mother kept spotless. They talked maybe half an hour and then Lennie came out and said, “I’m letting Johnny go back with his mother—she’s going to look after him properly.” I remember him saying “properly” because Lennie felt pleased that he’d fixed it. There were no raised voices—had there been, I would have rushed in because I didn’t know this Terry-Thomas character and my pal Lennie was only small. I really can’t remember if Johnny was in there too, maybe he only went in later, but there was definitely no tug-of-love scene. Lennie’s wife didn’t leave the house until Lennie came and told us what they’d decided.9

  John’s “choice” was not between his mother and father, it was between his mostly absent dad’s friend’s parents—in whose lives he had no place—and home and school back in Liverpool. There was no choice at all. But there was a good-bye, John parting decisively from his dad. From opening time that afternoon until closing time that night, Alf got hammered. Then, on June 29, he sailed out of England on the Almanzora and continued life’s riotous adventure … while Julia and Bobby went back to Liverpool, and Julia (who was pregnant again) handed John over to Mimi and there was no further question, ever, about who would raise him.

  John Lennon was now a child of Woolton, this self-sufficient village that was the least Irish, and so most English, suburb of Liverpool. Along with many other local children, he was enrolled in Sunday School at the handsome church on the hill, St. Peter’s; the sandstone that made it came from Woolton Quarry, from where excavating explosions regularly shook the area.

  Like Mary McCartney and many others, Mimi Smith was trying to climb away from unvarnished working-class roots. George was now employed menially and on low pay, as a cleaner of trams and buses on the night-shift at Woolton depot, but they’d got a house that bordered on the affluent lower middle class—a semidetached with a bathroom and indoor toilet, a telephone, picture rails, a couple of leaded-glass windows, and front and back gardens with lawns, trees and a shed. The previous occupants had pretensions of grandeur: not only did they give the house its name, Mendips, they called the middle downstairs room “the morning room” and installed servants’ bells—electrical fixtures that remained on the wall, but out of use, in the years John lived here. The Smiths had taken out a mortgage, and finding the monthly repayment was a stretch, achieved partly with rental income (from letting out a cottage George had inherited—it was now home to Mimi’s sister Harriet and family) but mostly through prudent budgeting. Adding a child to the household was something Mimi had to manage with resourceful pragmatism. Though she gained John’s ration book, she was never given the means to support him: there’s no known indication that Alf or Julia helped foot the ongoing costs of their son’s upbringing.

  From June 1946, then, Mimi was the principal parental influence on John Lennon. Her character, which helped shape his, was later assessed by Mike Hennessey, a journalist who knew her:

  Aunt Mimi is a remarkable woman. Slender, dressed with severe simplicity and regarding the world with warm, brown, inquisitive eyes, she somehow communicates great inner strength and resolution and an independence of spirit, all mellowed by an irresistible sense of fun. She comes, she says, from a family of incessant talkers and certainly [she holds] free-flowing and intelligent conversation … She is extremely well-read, utterly self-sufficient, defiantly unsentimental and is sometimes mischievously irreverent. Her bookshelves are thick with biographies. She has a special regard for Osbert Sitwell but no time at all for slushy love stories. “I couldn’t possibly read that rubbish,” she says. “If I read a book I want to be wiser afterward.” Books are her only indulgence. She eats one simple meal a day, has never been to the hairdresser in her life and never wears make-up or jewelry. “But if I go into Smith’s, that’s the end. I just can’t resist boo
ks.”10

  Already a keen reader, John became a bookworm at Mendips, digesting all the best juvenile literature and, while still a child, progressing to classic fiction, biographies, memoirs and histories—plus two daily papers, generally the Daily Express and Liverpool Echo, delivered and devoured. (John’s reading skills were initially sharpened by Uncle George sitting him on his knee and poring over the Echo.) John and Mimi often read the same books and discussed-argued their content. Mimi was fierce, stubborn, openly snobbish, pointed, bluntly uncompromising, nobody’s fool—and John was never not aware of it and always “gave back.” Though she might suddenly break into a Charleston dance to make him laugh (which he often copied), she was never demonstrative in her love, concealing it behind a coded series of verbal scoldings. She never hit him: her worst punishment was to ignore him, because he always had so much to say that needed to be heard. When she did, he’d plead, “Don’t ’nore me, Mimi!”11

  She was never “mum” to John, just Mimi or (when needling her deeper) Mary—and he stayed Lennon, never becoming John Smith. But he knew where he stood. He benefited enormously from her determination to provide what he’d never had in his tempestuous life to date: stability, assurance, certainty. She said she’d always be at home, that he’d never return to an empty house; she said she’d never go out in the evenings and subject him to the care of a child-sitter; and she got him put back into Dovedale Road school, where he shone, taking and fetching him every day. Her aim was to raise him as an individual. Both were as sharp as tacks, he exasperated her and she infuriated him, but theirs was always an earthy two-way relationship in which both could grow.

  For a while, Julia came to the house and saw John, but then the visits stopped and Mimi encouraged distance to develop between the child and the woman he’d always call Mummy. Whether her judgment was right or wrong is subjective, but her motives were beyond question. If she was going to be the rock in John’s life, she could not, at the same time, subject him to more of the emotional earthquakes he’d already suffered. This must have been traumatic for Julia at times (and Mimi too), but she never made any legal move to take him back, and none of their three voluble sisters made any noise about it either.