Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Mimi was one of two adult anchors in John’s new life, because Uncle George was also important. Only three years older than his wife—43 to her 40—he seems somehow ancient in the photos, elderly before his time. He was tall, with a good head of silver hair, a kindly chap who, having served in the army, had seen a bit of the world; he could talk about things, sitting back to light his pipe and consider his view; he enjoyed salty jokes with his beer, and made Mimi’s budgeting all the harder because he liked a “flutter” on the horses. He and John formed a close bond and shared unimportant little secrets. He taught the boy to ride a bike and tried to demonstrate the finer techniques of cricket and football, though John had little aptitude for ball games. He also allowed affection: John insisted on giving him “squeakers”—his word for kisses—before George put him to bed.

  That Christmas of 1946, Mimi, George and John took the bus to Lewis’ department store in the city and each sat for a series of Polyfotos. There’s a physical ease about John Lennon here that is extraordinary considering his stormy life. Comfortable in front of the camera, in a school blazer and cap, he smiles naturally and appears happy.*

  John’s network of Woolton comforts also included family and friends. Running behind Mendips was Vale Road, where he found Pete, Nige and Ivan, his closest childhood pals—Masters Shotton, Walley and Vaughan. He formed them into a gang, four junior reprobates who persistently and sometimes dangerously terrorized the community for years to come. John was leader, because he just was. It was a position divined through natural unspoken process, by force of personality and, where necessary, by scrapping. Pete Shotton, a blond curly-haired lad, had the brazen guts to constantly challenge this and so became John’s best mate. John Lennon liked to be confronted; by his code, if he found you were a pushover he’d push you over.

  All three boys were younger than John, which was another reason he was the leader, but this demonstrated a further aspect of his unusual character: if you were different—an original thinker, in some way unconventional—age wasn’t a particular problem. John’s chosen friends were also intelligent—Ivan exceptionally so—and eager to follow their leader wherever he took them.

  In early summer 1947, Richy Starkey fell dangerously ill. He’d never been the most robust infant, now he was sick beyond even the efficacy of Annie’s medicinal compounds. An ambulance blue-lit him to Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital and appendicitis was diagnosed, but when they opened him up the picture was far worse: the appendix had burst and caused infected peritonitis. Barely conscious as he was wheeled into the operating room, Richy asked the nurse for a cup of tea. “We’ll give you one when you come round,” she answered—by which time ten weeks had passed.

  Three times, doctors told Elsie he’d not survive the night. Still working all hours in all jobs, she was on the bus to the hospital every day, sometimes only allowed to see him through a pane of glass. One of the three desperate nights was July 6, the eve of Richy’s seventh birthday. But the boy was a born fighter, and would not surrender. When finally he stirred from his coma, he spent possibly another sixteen weeks slipping in and out of consciousness, and once this passed, at the start of 1948, he finally began a protracted and painful period of convalescence.

  He was restricted to a cot with high sides, to allow his surgical scars to heal, so it was a time of utter, numbing boredom; there was simply nothing to do. Despite having been at school almost two years his progress had been unstartling, and at seven he’d not yet learned to read or write, so he couldn’t even lose himself in a book. The nurses’ instruction—don’t move—held good until the day Richy wanted to show a boy in the next bed a toy bus he’d been given. As he leaned to pick it up, he overbalanced, fell out of the cot and ripped his stitches open, setting back his recovery another few months. “Always remember, the sooner you’re better, the sooner you’re out” were the words he heard over and over, more times than he could count.12

  In August 1947, a year after John Lennon had been relocated deeper into south Liverpool, Paul McCartney arrived there. The switch—seemingly the first time any of the McCartneys lived outside the north end—came through Mary’s work. Her employers, Liverpool Corporation’s Municipal Midwifery Service, needed a midwife resident on a new housing estate, and a rent-free house came with the job.

  Speke† was Liverpool’s southernmost point and already the location of a small airport and industrial area; now it was to accommodate a vast new public housing project, effectively a whole new town. When the McCartneys moved into 72 Western Avenue they were among the earliest families to arrive: the road was still being constructed, grass verges were being sown and trees being planted … but none of its much-vaunted British Utopian brightness would ever transfer from the architect’s drawing board. It was, instantly, an estate—nothing to do, nowhere to go, troubled.

  Mrs. M. P. McCartney SRN [State Registered Nurse], SCM [State Certified Midwife], her name etched on a brass plate on the gate, was a valued member of Speke’s growing community. Paul had just turned five, and his earliest memory is of someone bringing her a plaster dog: she was brought gifts by many of the mothers she helped. Mary worked all hours (babies being no respecters of the clock), and, though the job was not well paid, she was dedicated and professional. Her attitude, Jim said, was never less than overly conscientious.13

  The move more or less coincided with a welcome lift in Jim Mac’s life: a return to cotton. He got a job at the reopened (though much-neutered) Cotton Exchange, and was even more fortunate to find himself back at Hannay’s. It really wasn’t like the old days though, and he had to accept what was called “half-money,” earning only about £10 a week before deductions. He felt acutely the “shame” of not being a better provider for his family (a feeling imposed by no one but himself), but he was, nonetheless, back in his chosen career, a suited and courteous gent among friends in the business district.

  Mary timed the move to coincide with the beginning of Paul’s schooling. Jim didn’t want him to go to a Catholic school, feeling they dispensed too much religion and not enough education.14 Speke had a new Church of England school, Stockton Wood Road infants, and it was just behind the McCartneys’ house; Paul began here as soon as they were in.

  Things came more or less easily to him. He was naturally one of the brightest children—alert, upbeat, smart, gifted, funny. At the same time, since Speke was already a haven for young toughs, he could take care of himself, fighting to maintain position. Paul’s only real difficulty was when anyone told him what to do. He was always one of the friendliest and keenest contributors, but the moment anyone—teacher, parent, friend—used the word “should” or “ought” to direct his actions, there’d usually be only one result: he would do the opposite, never doubting his right or ability to do so. As Paul says, “I’ve never liked ‘ought.’ The minute I hear someone say you ought to do this I want to go the other way.”15

  Sundays were the best days, at home, when Mary would whistle her way through making the best roast lunch rations could provide, and Jim would sit at his Nems upright piano, pipe in mouth, and allow his hands to find the melodies of old—some from those Roaring Twenties days of Jim Mac’s Band, others more recent. The effect on his young sons, on Paul especially, was electrifying and permanent. “I’d lie on the carpet and listen to him playing things like ‘Stairway to Paradise’ or one I loved called ‘Lullaby of the Leaves,’ and a couple he made up himself. He’d just noodle around and it was lovely to listen to. He had a mate at the Cotton Exchange, another salesman called Freddie Rimmer, who’d come around and play as well, so there was always a musical atmosphere in the house.”16

  Jim was reluctant to teach Paul the piano, so as not to pass on untutored bad habits, but it didn’t matter because Paul listened and watched and imbibed, and his fingers did the rest. “I started off with three fingers in the chord of C—C and E and G—and then I realized that if you moved the whole thing up a tone you got D minor, and if you moved it all up again you got E minor, and
if you moved it all up again you got F, with the same shape.”17

  John Lennon played his first instrument about the same time. The unsupported cost of raising him caused Mimi to take in lodgers at Mendips. Beginning autumn 1947, she had an ongoing arrangement with Liverpool University to accommodate students. They came usually in pairs, slept in the spare bedroom and used the ground-floor dining room for meals and quiet study. Because of this, John’s youthful years were witnessed firsthand by a succession of bright young adults. They paid £3 a week for breakfast and evening meals, and Mimi asked for veterinary students because she had a dog and two cats (pets John adored) and they treated them free, needing the practice.

  It was one of the first pair of houseguests, Harold Phillips—ex–Royal Navy, back in college as an English Lit student—who ignited in John the musical spark. He had a harmonica that John would not leave alone; one day Phillips held out the instrument and said John could keep it if he could play a tune by the following morning. The odds were narrow, but this boy had musical talent in his blood. Did he even know his dad and all his Lennon uncles played harmonica—or “gob iron” to use Liverpool slang? John learned two tunes by the next day, and Phillips was as good as his word.18 The instrument was now the boy’s, although Mimi made him wait for it until Christmas. John could always tap into the excitement of waking up that Christmas morning in 1947: “I felt the stocking and there was a mouth organ in it. A harmonica. That was one of the great moments of life, when I got my first harmonica.”19

  A year after almost dying three times, by the summer of 1948 Richy Starkey was ready to convalesce at home. Elsie was thrilled to have him back and naturally more possessive. To Grandad Starkey, he was no longer just “that bloody Noddler,” he was Lazarus, the boy who’d cheated death. When finally Richy went back to school, however, he was hopelessly behind all the other children, and there wasn’t much accommodation of the fact. Left to sink or swim, he sank.‡ It was much easier to “sag off” than turn up: Richy and some pals would drift into nearby Prince’s Park, or scamper down “the Cazzy” (the Cast Iron Shore) and be deserters.20

  Richy’s decisive education in English came not from teachers but from a friend, Marie Maguire, four years his elder. Her mum Annie, newly a widow, had been Elsie’s best buddy for years; the Maguires lived at 10 Madryn Street, opposite Elsie and Richy’s former house at 9, and Marie always helped take care of the boy. Painstakingly, over a period of time at the kitchen tables of 10 Madryn Street and 10 Admiral Grove, even when Richy would not pay attention and threw things at her, Marie went over and over the Dobbin horse storybooks with him, pointing out each word and explaining how the letters formed sounds. Though he’d missed out on his education, Richy certainly wasn’t stupid, and he also spoke better than many in the locality, not dropping letters from words and not adopting the Liverpool “Scouse” accent; he just needed this extra tuition to get off the ground. His reading ambition would remain limited—he didn’t progress much beyond comics for years to come, and his spelling was never good: he tended to write words phonetically, confusing “wood” and “would,” and “stake” and “steak”—but, through dedication and perspiration, and thanks to Marie, he’d made a vital breakthrough.

  Like the generations before him, Richy’s life was bound up in the Dingle: home, family, friends, school, church, recreation. When he grew too big for a “bungalow bath” in front of the fire, he’d scoot around to Steble Street baths and pay a few pennies for a hot tub. Music didn’t yet feature much. A photo shows him holding a small accordion, but he didn’t play it. His Starkey grandparents played mandolin and banjo (or ukulele) at family sing-songs and gave him the instruments, but he’d no interest. At seven, he got a harmonica—same result. There was even, says Richy, “a piano at home which I walked on.” The trigger came at the pictures, when he watched Gene Autry, on his horse Champion, singing “South of the Border,” his three Mexican compadres adding the ay-ay-ay-ays as he rode along in a white cowboy hat, big wide-open prairie spaces all around. This eureka moment in Richy Starkey’s life came together as sound and vision. He’d never forget it, and would call Autry “the most significant musical force in my life.”21

  From Autry onward, Richy was and stayed a big fan of cowboys, of America and Americana, of country music, and of maudlin or melodic songs that tell the story of love lost and found. He harbored the dream of so many Liverpool sons: to become a merchant seaman and sail away to the USA, the promised land.

  For a British boy intrigued by American country music, Liverpool certainly was the place to be. Merchant seamen (some known as “Cunard Yanks”) were bringing back goods unobtainable in British shops—cowboy boots, hats, jeans and records not issued by the companies in London—and that led to a small but vocal following of country and western (C&W) on Merseyside. The first guitar John Lennon ever saw was in the hands of “a fully dressed cowboy in the middle of Liverpool, with his Hawaiian guitar … He had the full gear on.”22

  Country music was also a great influence on George Harrison—the first guitar recordings he heard were “Waiting for a Train” and “Blue Yodel No. 4” (“California Blues”) by Jimmie Rodgers, America’s original country star, a yodeler popularly known as the Singing Brakeman. The wind-up gramophone and records Harry brought back from New York in his “merch” days bridged an ocean of magical discovery for his children. George’s impressionable mind was spinning at 78 with Hank Williams, Stéphane Grappelli, the Ink Spots, Cab Calloway, Hoagy Carmichael and Josh White, and all the Harrisons loved the records they bought in Liverpool shops by George Formby, the toothy, north of England, banjulele-plucking star of music-hall and film comedies. These were real English songs of rhythm and sauce, and George was hooked. “Those George Formby songs were always in the back of me life,” he’d explain fifty years later. “They were either being played in the background or my mother was singing them when I was three or four.”23

  John Lennon also loved Formby, and saw him on stage at Liverpool Empire in the 1948–9 pantomime season. An annual trip to the Empire panto was one of the two big treats he was allowed each year by Mimi and George, the other being a summer visit to the pictures to see Walt Disney’s latest. Mostly, though, John read. In 1965, he was invited to list the books that had made a forceful impression on him, and for the period “up to the age of eleven” he specified Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.24 John was given the Alice books as birthday presents and reread them once a year—though he never bothered to find out if Carroll wrote anything else. He was also in love with Richmal Crompton’s Just William books, identifying himself with William Brown, the scruffy, rascally gang-leader.

  On the art front, John’s favorite was Ronald Searle, creator of the St. Trinian’s School books. Searle’s characterful cartoons catapulted John deeper into drawing, which took up great chunks of his time from about the age of eight. Though difficult to categorize, his work fell into two broad areas. The first was to draw, in careful detail, and then color in, good copies of established art, like all the Alice characters and other fictional and historical personae; he used these to illustrate poems he was writing in the style of Carroll’s Jabberwocky.25 Another category was the Searle-like cartoons that gave a rough but dead-eye impression. In these, John hardly ever went into detail but would deliver the decisive feature—and most especially the humor—in a few speedy fountain-pen flourishes that cut to the core, saying everything in a few lines. He drew them fast and then moved on to the next.

  Mendips’ student lodgers would get used to the sight of John and Mimi quietly together in either the front room or “the morning room,” she reading, he reading or creating. John had to wear glasses, having become shortsighted by about the age of seven (just like Julia). Mimi took him into town and had him tested for a pair of “goggles” issued free by the new National Health Service, round and wire-framed, with a curly circle of flex to run behind the ears (and abrad
e the skin). Julia’s nearsightedness had been unaided for twenty or so years now and John started out in much the same direction: his glasses were for inside use only, as his friend Nigel Walley remembers. “He didn’t want to be seen out in them, and kept them in an inside pocket along with his mouth organ. He might slip them on to see something, but he’d whip them off again very quickly.”26

  In August 1948, John went up into the junior section at Dovedale Road school. The infants had been mixed gender but now it was boys only and John wasn’t slow or shy in ensuring a necessary dominance, fighting whoever wouldn’t listen to reason. He also told Mimi she couldn’t take him there anymore, that he’d go alone … and virtually these same words were also being said, at the same place and time, by George Harrison to his mum. Louise had sent her first two children to Catholic schools but let her third and fourth go Church of England. Peter was switched to Dovedale Road in April 1948 and George went there too, to start his schooling—though because of the age gap (and juniors used a different playground to the infants) he and John didn’t know each other. Later, though, they’d have the same teachers and similar experiences to remember.

  In Peter, George already had someone to take him to school and fetch him home again in the afternoons, and he didn’t want his mum doing it. She took him the first day but then he put his five-year-old foot down: the scene at the gate was not for her. As Louise would recall, “George was always against nosy mothers, and he used to hate all the neighbors who stood around gossiping.”27