Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  Aboard the Berengaria, Alf’s singing made him the star attraction at the Pig and Whistle, the crew’s bar, where even passengers sought entrance to watch the crewmen perform. Merchant shipping at the time supported a healthy show-business subculture, complete with elaborate variety shows and drag queens. Belowdecks was one place in British culture where gay men openly expressed themselves, even inventing a pidgin language called “Parole,” a witty offshoot of Scouser slang.

  Alf often played master of ceremonies, recruiting the talent and hosting the show and singing his own numbers between sketches. When four-year-old John began asking whether his father would come home for Christmas, Judy gave him a program that Alf had enclosed in his last letter to her, with Alf listed singing “Begin the Beguine.” John was tantalized, but Judy hid an unspoken worry: the letters—and checks—had stopped coming. During the war, most merchant ships carried supplies and munitions for the military effort. Targeted by Nazi U-boats and submarines, the merchant ships were shepherded from port to port in large convoys, and one in twenty such “commercial” ships were sunk during the war.27 Alf was as much a target as any military sailor.

  Luckily, it was carousing that got Alf into trouble, not Nazi torpedoes. In New York, having been dropped by the Berengaria, Alf was scheduled to ship out on a trawler called the Middle East, but he missed the ship’s departure after a long night of singing at a dockside bar. (In Daddy Come Home, Alf claims it was all an elaborate scam, in which ship owners persuaded workers to take reduced pay with promises of promotion and then conned them out of work once they reached New York.) With no visa and no job, Alf was interned at Ellis Island by the U.S. Immigration Service, and from there he was unable to get word to his wife. Judy went down to collect her monthly check only to be told that her husband had “jumped ship.” Strapped for cash, she assumed the worst about Alf: that he had jumped the marriage or was lost at sea—or dead. The Stanleys, including Mimi, shook their heads knowingly. Even if he was alive, wasn’t Alf just the sort to skip out on his responsibilities? Without Alf’s checks, Judy had little means of support, especially since her father was no longer living with her on Newcastle Road. Unsubstantiated rumors, strongly denied years later by her daughter, swirled around her that she started sleeping with men for money during this time.28 Whether or not this is true, concern for her son’s welfare does not seem to have rated high on Judy’s list of priorities.

  Meanwhile, in New York, the British consulate found Alf a job on a steamer called the Sammex, which kept him from being charged with desertion by the U.S. authorities. But he had to take a demotion, and the Sammex was loaded with “hot” cargo—booze and cigarettes. When police boarded the boat in North Africa, the loot was confiscated and Alf was taken into custody for “stealing and finding,” and thrown into prison for three months, unable to send money to Judy. He finally found his way home to Liverpool on a ship called the Monarch of Bermuda, which docked as the war was winding down in mid-1945.

  If Alf envisioned a happy homecoming, he was disappointed. At Newcastle Road, Judy was nowhere to be found, and neighbors were watching his son. When Judy returned home around midnight, quite pregnant with another baby, she informed a stupefied Alf that she’d been raped by a soldier. Initially, she refused to give up his name, but Alf pressed her. Once Judy relented, Alf headed straight off to the Cheshire barracks and dragged the man, one “Taffy” Williams, back to Liverpool to “sort things out.” Williams denied raping Judy and pledged his undying love. The rape story quickly unraveled: apparently the two had been seeing each other for well over nine months. But when Alf brought them face-to-face, Judy laughed and threw Williams out of the house.

  This second baby realigned family politics. Alf, ever forgiving, offered to stick by Judy and help raise the new child, but Judy refused. Mysteriously, Pop Stanley supported her in this. Ignoring Alf’s, Mimi’s, and even Williams’s offers to bring up the child, and unhappy at the prospect of two fatherless children being raised by an absent, careless mother, Pop insisted that Judy put the new baby up for adoption. Mimi arranged for Judy to stay at Elmswood, a Salvation Army hostel in North Mossley Hill Road. She gave birth to a little girl on June 19, 1944, less than two weeks after D-Day, named her Victoria Elizabeth (did such respectable, patriotic names help Judy legitimize her offspring?), and turned her over for adoption by a Norwegian sailor. (In 1998, a Norwegian woman named Ingrid Pedersen made plausible claims that she was John Lennon’s half sister.)29 Judy forbade Alf ever to mention the baby again. Alf, in his memoirs, describes her personality as forever changed by the giving up of this child; and his emphasis on this moment suggests that he saw it as central to her turning away from the marriage.From most other accounts, though, it appears that Judy remained the same old Judy—a woman who had begun moving on from Alf long before.

  There is disagreement among family histories about whether John, almost five, knew that his mother was pregnant and understood what had happened to the baby she bore. Most five-year-olds today know what it means when a woman is pregnant and recognize a pregnant woman when they see one. Many people have described Lennon as an alert, bright, and curious child; it seems unlikely that he would have been oblivious to such a big event. Although Mimi Smith insists that the truth was kept from him, this may have been what Mimi needed to believe. If John did understand what was happening, it can only have increased his feeling that his place in the world was uncertain, even perilous. His mother had given away another child; mightn’t she one day give him away, too?

  Just before John turned five in autumn 1945, Mimi, stepping into the mother’s role, enrolled him in the Mosspits Lane Infant School, the neighborhood kindergarten. That following spring, however, the school dismissed him for severe behavioral problems, which suggests that he was already confused and angry, even before he watched his mother carry another baby and give her away. Nigel Walley, a childhood schoolmate, remembers a scuffle: “John was expelled for being disruptive. . . . I remember he bullied a girl called Polly Hipshaw.”30

  After the birth of Victoria, Alf returned to sea, assuming that his on-again, off-again marriage was back on. But he was gone a long time, and when he returned to Newcastle Road in March 1946 the situation had changed again: Pop Stanley was back in the apartment and had had Alf’s name removed from the lease. Someone else was living in the apartment, too: Judy’s new boyfriend, a waiter named Bobby Dykins, who worked at the same hotel, the Adelphi, where Alf once had been a bellhop. Why Pop Stanley would tolerate living in the same apartment with his married daughter’s lover remains a mystery, unless his distaste for Alf outweighed his disapproval of Dykins.

  Coming back to this new arrangement, Alf responded by throwing Dykins out and telling Pops to move out the next day. He was still sending home money to support Judy and John and figured that gave him certain rights. But this time Judy rebelled, announcing that she was moving out, too. Alf didn’t take her seriously until he woke up the next morning to find half the furniture on its way out the door. He pleaded with his wife to stay for John’s sake, if not for his own. In his memoirs—which offer the only version we have of this conversation—Alf described Judy’s response: “What difference will it make to him?” John rarely saw his father anyway, she pointed out. “The sea has always been more important to you than we have.” She blamed the rift that had opened between them on his misadventures in New York and Morocco. “You can’t just disappear for eighteen months and expect things to be the same.”31

  Taking John with her, Judy went to live with Dykins in a tiny one-bedroom flat across town in Gateacre. Convinced that the marriage was truly over and enraged by his wife’s behavior, Alf followed his brother Sydney’s advice and hired a lawyer to place notices in the local papers declaring that Alfred Lennon was no longer responsible for his wife’s debts.32 But the Gateacre arrangement was short-lived: within months, Judy, John, and Bobby Dykins had moved back into 9 Newcastle Road.

  The drama didn’t end there. In May of 1946, hours befo
re Alf was due to sail for two weeks on the Queen Mary out of Southampton as a night steward, he received a long-distance call from Mimi Smith. Mimi told Alf that John had just walked two miles from Newcastle Road to Mendips because he didn’t like living with Judy and Dykins. Mimi put John on the phone to plead with his father not to leave, but Alf said he’d lose his job if he didn’t sail—he was still earning back the good faith of his employers after his jail time in New York and Africa. Alf told John to stay with his aunt Mimi and promised he’d be back soon.33

  When Alf returned to England in June, he docked at Southampton and traveled straight to Mendips to find John. Mimi had already put John down for bed, so she invited Alf back to her kitchen for tea and began itemizing her expenses for taking care of the little boy. Alf gave Mimi a twenty-pound note and accepted her invitation to spend the night. After retiring, he made a momentous decision: he would take John with him. The following morning, he told Mimi he was going to take John for a short holiday at Blackpool, a resort town about thirty miles up the northwest coast from Liverpool. Mimi hesitated. Judy was out of town on “a short trip”—there’s no record of where she went or with whom. In Alf’s memoirs, Mimi revealed that John had been living with her on and off for about nine months. She may have begun to feel as though she could finally keep him. With Judy out of town, Mimi had misgivings about letting the boy go. But Alf was his father, and perhaps, after taking his money, she didn’t feel she could refuse.

  When John woke up the next morning, Mimi told him that Alf had come to see his boy and had spent the night. John raced upstairs and jumped on his father in bed. John knew his father, of course, but until that day Alf’s visits had always devolved into arguments with Judy, disruption of John’s routine, and often a move. With Alf’s infrequent time ashore during John’s first five years, John had had no chance to form an attachment. Judy had told John stories of their ten-year courtship, “always larking around and laughing.” And Alf’s letters and postcards had filled John’s head with images of his exotic travels. Now his father was finally there, and he told John that they were going on a fabulous holiday.

  Did any five-year-old ever get a more irresistible invitation? John begged his aunt to let him go. Mimi packed a small bag for him, and the little boy followed Alf into what must have seemed like a waking dream.

  Blackpool had long been the preferred seaside resort for workers, sailors, and their families in the region’s industrial towns, an Atlantic City on Britain’s western shore, complete with a promenade, rides, games, and vendors. Its 1894 Tower replicated the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and three piers were lined with concessions. Holiday goers liked to promenade on its boardwalk, romp in the waves, and visit its amusement park built in an American Style.34 Although past its prime in 1946, Blackpool still had carnival rides, games to play, donkeys to ride, and prizes to win. Playwright John Osborne set his 1957 play The Entertainer in an unnamed Blackpool to symbolize the end of empire during the Suez crisis of 1956. In one of his great, self-lacerating roles (immortalized in Tony Richardson’s 1960 film), Laurence Olivier portrayed the repulsive, over-the-hill music-hall comic Archie Rice, and there was a lot of Archie Rice in Alf—a ham past his prime, working his racket in a town sinking from its own faded glory.

  To a five-year-old boy accustomed to wartime rationing, however, Blackpool must have seemed like paradise. Alf had abruptly removed John from the physical and emotional rubble of his life in Liverpool to a sunny seaside where he could eat treats and play all day. Now that the war was over, a father finally had time for his boy.

  Alf had misrepresented his intentions to Mimi, however. One of his shipmates, a man named Billy Hall, was planning to relocate to New Zealand, and this became Alf’s plan, too: he would take his son to New Zealand and start a new life. Having finished two stints in prison and given up on reconciling with Judy, Alf was ready for a big change. Judy wasn’t taking proper care of the boy, anyway. In his memoir he wrote, “I set off with John for Blackpool—intending never to come back.”

  Alf took John with him to Billy Hall’s parents’ place in Blackpool and set about getting ready for the big move. To fund the trip, though, he and Billy needed to unload some swag. “You couldn’t go wrong in those days, just after the war,” Alf wrote later. “I was on lots of rackets, mainly bringing back black market stockings. They’re probably still selling the stuff in Blackpool I brought over.”35 At some point, Alf needed to leave town for several days, and he took John to stay with his brother Sydney, who had a summer house nearby—a familiar experience for John, whom Judy had handed off several times to Sydney’s home in Liverpool. When Alf returned, he was full of talk about their new life abroad.

  Alf’s point of view has been given little credence in most Lennon histories; he didn’t get his say until his second wife published his memoirs in 1990, almost fourteen years after his own death and ten years after John’s. For years, Mimi Smith’s version of events stood unchallenged. In her version, Alf was a low-class lout who impregnated Judy and then lived the life he’d always lived: as a drifter with no real prospects. He went to Blackpool to run an undergarment black market with his no-good buddy Hall and left John with his brother. In Mimi’s view, far from rescuing John, Alf was dumping him with family the same way Judy had. And if John was going to be dumped with a relative, Mimi wanted it to be her.

  From Alf’s vantage point, Judy gave few signs that she cared much for their son. Alf seems to have truly loved her, however, and even took some responsibility for her behavior. At each juncture, he was willing to carry on with her in spite of a sequence of betrayals. Once she’d decided firmly against him, Alf concluded that he had just as much right to raise their son—he couldn’t do any worse than she had. Since he never had the chance to try, we can’t say for certain whether he would have made a go of it, but he had no personal experience of a stable home himself. At one point during the Blackpool holiday, he stopped to light a cigarette and John, running ahead, fell into a deep gully in the sand and couldn’t climb out. Alf was sufficiently far behind not to have seen where he fell, and he ran up and down the beach for five minutes before discovering the boy at the bottom of the hole, frightened but unhurt.36 Although this incident reflects badly on Alf, his reporting of it gives the rest of his story added credibility.

  The length of the Blackpool holiday is in dispute, but it appears to have lasted three weeks at most. It came to an abrupt end on June 26, when Judy knocked on Billy Hall’s door. She’d tracked down her husband through the local “pools”—the dockworkers’ work log—and she’d come to retrieve her son. Alf was stunned: he was days away from setting off for New Zealand, and the last person he expected to get in his way was his carefree wife.

  Dykins had accompanied Judy to the house, and waited nervously by the gate as she went in. In Alf’s recollection, Judy didn’t seem quite herself; she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Her manner was uncharacteristically meek; her spirited and challenging personality seemed muted. She always dressed with panache, but on that day she wore an “ill-shaped” getup that made her look positively matronly—and was definitely out of character for the girl Alf knew and the “wickedly” irresponsible mother Mimi had described to him.37 Did Judy dress more conservatively to impress Alf with her new commitment to family? Were her awkwardness and subdued manner products of her ambivalence about making the trip—about insisting that Alf give John back? Did she bring Dykins along for moral support, to keep her from being swayed by Alf’s charm, or to remind herself that she had another life she wanted to go back to, one that had nothing to do with this man and his child?

  Alf sent John into the kitchen to wait with Hall’s parents while he and Judy talked in the front room. He begged Judy to get back together with him, told her that he still loved her, and said making up would be good for the boy. The three of them could get a fresh start in New Zealand together. “I could tell she still loved me,” he wrote in his memoir. But Judy refused. A reconciliation with Alf was out of the question
. She presented herself as newly stable, anxious to finally prove herself and give John the home he deserved. She had set herself up with a new man and planned to make her own fresh start, including having more children, with Dykins.

  After they reached this stalemate, the two adults who should have taken the most care to protect their son and choose the best life for him instead did something shockingly cruel. Alf called John in, and the boy ran out from the kitchen and jumped onto his father’s lap. John asked if his mother was going to stay with them, if they’d all be going away together. Alf said no. John would have to decide which parent he wanted to go with. Whom did he prefer, his father or his mother? Would he rather stay with his father and travel abroad and have a wonderful adventure in New Zealand, or go back home with his mother (to gray Liverpool) and the life he knew (of not belonging)?

  As these two adults sat there, expecting their five-year-old to make his choice, perfectly willing to accept whatever he decided, the ground must have opened up beneath the child. If you’ve never had a real father and your mother is fun and tenderhearted but unreliable and self-absorbed; if your father is a glamorous adventurer but never around; if you love your mother because she’s your mother, but she’s distracted (though compellingly mysterious); if you know that choosing your mother doesn’t really mean having your mother, and choosing your father means . . . what?; if you’ve watched your mother give away another child; if you’ve been having a great holiday with the first and only man who has belonged specially to you—whom do you choose? At some level John, consistently described as a sensitive child, may have intuited that either option was essentially tragic: that either choice was simply more abandonment in different clothes.