Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Julia Lennon, Bobby Dykins and the child they’d had together—Julia Lennon, aka Julia Dykins, born March 1947—had long since left the one-bed flat in Gateacre and been living back at Newcastle Road. Then George Stanley (John’s grandad) died and they had to move. They applied to Liverpool Corporation for a council house, and as Julia was pregnant again at the time were given priority and assigned a pleasant three-bedroom semidetached house on the Springwood estate, near Garston, at 1 Blomfield Road. It was under two miles from Mendips, though it’s said Mimi kept this from John. To get the house, Julia and Bobby had to pretend they were married, and there was little chance of this becoming anything other than a deception because Alf Lennon wasn’t of a mind to grant her a divorce, and wasn’t around to discuss it. They show on the electoral roll as John Dykins and Julia Dykins, and no neighbor thought them otherwise. Also, while Julia’s real husband was a waiter, on board ships, her “husband” had chucked in door-to-door selling and become a waiter in a Liverpool hotel.

  Julia was now settled for the first time in years. Giving birth to John hadn’t stopped her leading a merry life, and her second baby had long gone for adoption, but at the third stroke she gave up work precisely to become a housewife and full-time mother. Her character remained unquenchable, of course: she still made people scream with her repartee and singing, and she went out shopping in six-inch stiletto heels, walking down the street like a petite doll. When, inevitably, a man gave her a wolf-whistle, she’d wolf-whistle back or shout “Not bad yourself!”—although, with her poor eyesight, she’d no real idea what her admirer looked like.28

  Julia had a bedroom to spare at Blomfield Road but John stayed at Mendips. He did see her though—there are photos of a summer 1949 family gathering at his Aunt Anne’s house in Rock Ferry, “over the water” (across the Mersey) from Liverpool: two shots of John with his cousins and half sister, and one of him with Julia. It’s the only known photo of John and Mummy. He’s in short trousers, laughing as she tickles him under both arms, and she’s wearing a baggy dress under which she’s four or five months pregnant. That October, she gave birth to her and Bobby’s second baby—Jacqueline Gertrude Lennon, aka Jacqueline Gertrude Dykins—so John now had two infant half sisters, actually three.

  It could have been because of Julia’s past predicament that Mimi supported the Salvation Army’s residence for the children of broken homes. Strawberry Field—Strawberry Fields most called it—was a Gothic mansion with turrets and towers, a rambling great edifice of Woolton sandstone, set in substantial private grounds.29 Fun was had, and funds were raised, at its annual garden fete, an archetype of British summer life. Girls from the home—known as “Strawbs”—went around the district in their summer striped-blue dresses, selling tickets door-to-door. Come the day, a brass band played, the children staged dancing and gymnastic displays, and there were stalls with little games, secondhand “jumble” and homemade refreshments subject to rationing: tea, lemonade and cakes. Mimi always took John, until he went independently.

  He knew the place well. To John, Pete, Nige and Ivan, Strawberry Fields meant the private grounds, not the big house. It was one of their prime hangouts: they’d scamper over the wall in Vale Road and disappear into the trees, with infinite opportunities for trouble, adventure, danger. One known peril was the groundsman—John called him “the Cocky Watchman,” or “Cocky Watchtower”—a sour and sometimes vicious individual who hated all young trespassers, that Lennon gang in particular. He wouldn’t think twice about giving them a good hiding, but had to catch them first. “I suppose you realize this is private property!” he’d shout as they hightailed it into the wind …

  • • •

  The Liverpool of all these childhoods was in a sorry state as the 1940s turned into the 1950s. Little had gone right here in decades, just depression layered on downturn. Viewing it as would a stranger, a Liverpolitan magazine writer noted, “What I saw made me almost ashamed of my hometown. Once progressive and proud, the city is now dilapidated and dirty; shabby and down-and-out.”30 True, the sounds of the place hadn’t altered—the reinstated “one o’clock gun” that reported every lunchtime, the seagulls, the foghorns, the laughter pouring from pub doorways—but its look had: the landscape was full of still-unrepaired bombsites, open lesions that had become children’s playgrounds (“bommies”) or eternal temporary car parks. The old place had plenty of fine public buildings, but everything was black with encrusted soot; ruined shops were riddled with police-dodging barrow boys; and people queued for almost everything, standing in long lines. The air was damp even when it wasn’t raining—and instead of it being healthy air, fresh from the Irish Sea, it was (as the Liverpool novelist John Brophy noted in 1946) “laden with smoke and soot and grease, and with smells from tanneries, breweries, oil-cake factories, margarine factories, smells from the engine-rooms of ships, from dockyards, from thousands of warehouses where every sort of cargo is stored.”31

  Outsiders who had dealings with Liverpool were losing patience. A travelers’ journal published by the great Thomas Cook & Son tried hard to apply gloss but it really wasn’t easy. “Let it be allowed that Liverpool took a tremendous pounding in her blitz week. Other cities took a hammering also, but somehow Liverpool never seems to have risen from the count.” In the London newspapers, Liverpool had become a word as dirty as its blackened buildings, and even Liverpolitan had to admit that the many charges against it were accurate—“slovenly city, filthy tram cars, dilapidated buildings and dingy streets,” the people “ill-mannered savages,” its women “dowdy, shabbily dressed and carelessly groomed.”32 But then, let them say what they like: Liverpudlians didn’t like or trust Londoners anyway—they were “soft” and “bloody southerners.” Two fingers to the lot of ’em.

  Liverpool’s brain-drain, running since the 1930s or before, was accelerating now. Plenty with talent and ambition got out and made their lives elsewhere, while those who couldn’t or wouldn’t retreated further into the Liverpudlians’ protective shell to keep them in and the rest out, Liverpool an enclave unto itself, nowhere else like it, its backside to the rest of the country, its people tightly together and, though sharply self-deprecating, acutely sensitive to an outsider’s criticism. Deep down, pretty much everyone knew why people left, but those who stayed would disparage and hold a grudge against those who did.

  Even its dream new housing estates, like the one at Speke, were soon plummeting in ambition; and it was here on New Year’s Day 1950 that the Harrisons became the first residents at 25 Upton Green. It was eighteen years since Harry and Louise, then with one child, applied for a council house—so long ago that the child had grown up and gone. All the participants in the move—Harry (40), Louise (38), Harry (15), Peter (9) and George (6)—had lived their entire lives in Wavertree, compact but cozy. Quickly, having so long hankered for someplace else, they wanted to move back.

  The novelty of being in a new house held good for a while—25 Upton Green had no heating but it did have electricity, plumbing (an indoor bathroom at last, and even a bath), front and back gardens and, though the place was small, what seemed to George like space. He’d recall, “After [living in] a two-up-two-down terrace house, you could go from the hall to the sitting room then into the kitchen then into the hall again and back into the sitting room. I just ran round and round it all that first day.”33

  The main problem in Speke—as the McCartneys were also finding out less than a mile away in Western Avenue—was the undesirability of some of the neighbors. Upton Green was a close, a large oval bordered by identical estate houses; young kids played on the grass in the middle, older kids hung round the garden gates. When Louise tried to grow things, delinquents wrecked them—plants murdered in their beds. That got to George. As he’d later explain, “As soon as we got to Speke we realized we had to get out of there, fast. The place was full of fear and people smashing things up. We got on another list.”34 As for school, Louise decided against having George transferred to Speke, so he stay
ed at Dovedale Road, necessitating a long bus journey every morning and afternoon.

  Alf Lennon didn’t begin the new decade very well either. The Dominion Monarch docked at Tilbury before Christmas, after which he tomfooled around London with a few shipmates, waiting for it to sail again in mid-January. Alcohol was surely a fixture, opening time to closing with bottles between sessions, and late on Sunday, January 8, they were laughing and shouting their way along Oxford Street when they stopped in front of a ladies’ gown shop. A moment or two later the window was smashed and Alf and another Liverpool sailor, John Murphy, were dancing down Oxford Street with beautiful expensive dresses … and waltzed right into the arms of the scuffers. The next morning, after sleeping off their drunkenness in the cells—Alf had probably cut himself too, because records show he needed a doctor—the Marlborough Street magistrate looked sternly upon Lennon and Murphy, both of “no fixed abode.” Pleading guilty to a charge of breaking and entering, and stealing two gowns to the value of £42 8s 6d, they were each sentenced to six months. The ledger at the west London prison Wormwood Scrubs details Alf’s incarceration: he arrived there from court on January 9 and was transferred to Brixton, south London, on February 13, where he lived until gaining early release in the second week of May.35

  This wasn’t unknown behavior for Alf—it was at least his third time in the clink. Always one for a laugh, the ale led him a merry life over which he exercised no apparent control. Friend Billy Hall remembers being with him in New Zealand in 1944 or ’45 when they’d been drinking and Alf was shouting about smashing a jeweler’s shop window. They didn’t, but they did nick a bicycle and were making whoopee around the streets of Wellington until police stepped in and let them off with a warning.36

  When the Dominion Monarch put to sea, Alf was marked down as AWOL. He was unable to explain himself until after release from Brixton, when the Merchant Service—taking a bleak view of events—dismissed him from duty. After twenty eventful years at sea, Alf Lennon was a sailor no more, beached at the age of 37, high but rarely dry.

  His brothers despaired for him, but Alf received understanding and support from an unlikely source: Mimi. Using his best Blue Coat–educated grammar and script, and calling himself “Alfred,” he wrote to her (quite properly calling her “Mary”) and confessed to his situation. He corresponded first from prison and then from Copperfield Street, and Mimi—despite her consistent and now reinforced opinion of “that Alf Lennon”—not only replied in kind but enclosed the first of at least two letters from John, friendly and chatty words from a nine-year-old lad to a dad he’d not seen in four years. She also enclosed some recent photos, so Alf could see his boy again. What Alf called “white lies” were necessary between the adults, to prevent John discovering a certain embarrassing predicament, but it’s clear from the letters that Mimi was trying to bring father and son closer. They were, at this moment, four miles apart, Toxteth to Woolton, but it was a wish that prompted Alf’s retreat. Soon afterward, he heard there might be a job going at Middleton Tower—a summer holiday camp in Morecambe, just up the coast from Liverpool—and went after it. He was on “KP duty” (kitchen porter), up to his elbows in sudding dishes. And when the season ended, in September 1950, Alf hit the road and became an itinerant, going where the brew blew him.

  The boy Lennon who had this sudden, unexpected contact with his dad had two still-evolving characters now, one for inside the house—reading, writing, drawing—the other for outside, a boy Mimi scarcely saw or would have recognized. This was the John Lennon of larks and dares, scraps and scrapes, games and guffaws, everything for laughs. There was plenty of boyish cruelty, verbal more than physical (though John was never shy to use his fists), and it was great to be in his gang even when he forced you to steal. John was now petty-thieving whenever and wherever he could. He called it “slap leather,” and all the gang had to do it. Shops were fair game, toy cars or sweets slipped into pockets with shopkeepers none the wiser. If there was trouble, though, if a Lennon plan went awry, he had the knack of disappearing. The gang members would turn around and their leader would be gone.

  John’s “outside” vocabulary was now awash with swearwords, instantly learned and put to inventive use, and he also adopted the lexicon of many a Liverpool kid, the local argot that Mimi Smith (and Mary McCartney and others) frowned upon but which Lennon, Starkey, McCartney and Harrison all used—where something good or great was “gear,” and stupid was “soft,” and out of fashion was “down the nick”; and when taunting or teasing someone you’d shout “Chickaferdy!”; and if someone was spineless they were “nesh”; and you said “Come ’ead!” (“come ahead,” for “come on”); and “Eh oop!” had many uses, from “hello” to “let’s go,” and “lad” was “la”; and an interesting person was a “skin”—so “Eh la!” and “Eh oop, la!” and “ ’E’s a good skin”; and where (though swearing was muted on the street because people got upset if they overheard it) “stupid get” (“stupid git”) or “yer daft get” were OK … and then you said good-bye to your mates with a wacker’s “Tarrah well!”

  John was the first of his pals to pick up some “facts of life,” information he readily passed on, and such was the way he conducted his life, adults swiftly singled him out as an undesirable. Each of his gang, and plenty of other boys in the district, heard the same words: “Keep away from that John Lennon, he’ll get you into trouble,” or “he’s a bad influence,” or “he’s a wrong ’un.” Many did, but some simply couldn’t. As Nigel Walley says, “He was a good buddy to have beside you: he wasn’t a loner, he liked company, he was funny, he was generous, and he always supported his mates.”37

  Three miles south, in Speke, Paul McCartney was now well established at Stockton Wood school, if not top of the class then certainly capable of it. Home life was settled, and he had a devoted playmate in his younger brother Mike. Paul led, egging “our kid” into situations in which there could only ever be one casualty. In September 1950, Mary brought her midwifery career to an end, wanting a job where she was home nights and weekends. Paul and Mike were growing up fast and needed the benefit of closer attention. This meant relinquishing 72 Western Avenue, the house that had come with the job.

  She was instantly appointed Speke’s health visitor, administering advice and care around the district. Another Corporation house was found for them, deeper into the estate at 12 Ardwick Road—at least the seventh place Paul had lived in his eight years; it was rented, not free, but the McCartneys had two working adults. The worst thing about moving was that Paul and Mike had a longer walk to school. As they made their way back to Stockton Wood each day they’d pass close to Upton Green, which George Harrison was leaving to catch the bus up to Dovedale Road, he in his school cap, blazer and short trousers, they in theirs, passing as strangers. The best thing about Ardwick Road was that they were just half a mile from the eastern edge of the estate, beyond which it wasn’t Liverpool anymore but real Lancashire: different accents, woods, fields, farms and cliffs down to a more rural River Mersey. Years of happy adventuring lay ahead.

  George rose from the infants to the juniors at Dovedale Road in August 1950 and would always remember being happy here. He reckoned himself a swift runner and liked playing football and cricket. He was comfortably bright, and he could take care of himself. Like a certain Dovedale boy two years his senior, George wasn’t shy to use his fists. In the lingo of the day, he was “handy.” The school’s Punishment Book records the date he was caned for “Disorderly behaviour in lines, despite repeated warnings.” It was May 8, 1951, when he was eight. A new teacher, Mr. H. Lyon, administered a single stroke on George’s hand. To what would be Lyon’s regret, his aim was slightly askew; the cane thwacked across George’s wrist and brought up a weal. As George would recall, “When I got home my dad saw it, and the next day he came down to the school, got Mr. Lyon out of the class and stuck one on him.”38 Harry Harrison, the quiet man bestirred when he saw a wrong, was a hero to every child, but it wasn’t the punish
ment he objected to, only Lyon’s aim.

  Richy Starkey was also fighting—he had to, where he lived. He won only rarely, and even then might have to face the retribution of his victim’s big brother. Richy longed for a big brother who’d take care of the ruffians who picked on him, though Elsie certainly never fought shy of taking it to the opposition: “My mother had many a fight for me. If anybody bigger picked on me, she’d be down knocking on the door and would deal with them.”39

  Richy could have taken the Eleven-Plus exam in spring 1951 but St. Silas didn’t enter him. There was a Review, a filtering process, and it proved that the boy, so far behind in his education, had no chance of succeeding in such a test. Like most local kids, at 11 he ended up at Dingle Vale, a secondary modern school for the academically unexceptional, where boys and girls were segregated and streamed into A, B, C and D levels depending on ability. Richy was put in C, pretty much a no-hoper. His curriculum included gardening. The cane and slipper were liberally applied, and no GCE O-Level exams were taken: any child considered capable of sitting them was transferred to a technical or grammar school; all the others would leave empty-handed (some empty-headed) at 15, fit only for manual labor. Even the headmaster had to admit that the process had “a deadening effect.”40

  Richy’s most-told memory of his years here is of going out onto Dingle Lane with mates Davy Patterson and Brian Briscoe and spending Elsie’s “dinner money” not on the school-provided meal but on a small loaf of Hovis bread, four penn’orth of chips and five Woodbines (“Woodies”)—the cheapest brand of cigarette, the working man’s fag. Like generations before and after, he’d scoop out the dough from the loaf, stuff it with chips (so making “a chip butty,” only without the butter), then return to school to eat, smoke and talk shit while lolling on the swings. Richy was a smoker from about 11.