The Harrisons, Harry and Louise, had married in 1929 when she worked in a greengrocer’s shop and he was a seaman on ships of the White Star line. The thin, dapper, thoughtful young shipboard waiter proved a perfect match with the jolly, warm-hearted young woman whose mother had been a lamplighter during the Great War. In 1931, a daughter, Louise, was born to them and, in 1934, their first son, Harold Junior. Harry quit the sea soon afterward, braving the worst of the Depression to be nearer his wife and children. After fifteen months on the dole he managed to get a job with the corporation, initially as a bus conductor. A third child, Peter, was born in 1940, at the height of the Liverpool Blitz.
The family lived then at Wavertree, in the tiny row house in Arnold Grove that Harry and Louise had occupied since their marriage. It was here, on February 25, 1943, that Louise gave birth to her fourth child and third son, George. When Harry came upstairs to see the new baby, he was amazed at its likeness to himself. Louise, too, noticed the dark eyes that, even then, cautiously appraised the world.
Though Harry earned little on the buses, he made sure his large family lacked for nothing. Louise was a capable and also a happy mother, whose laughter rang constantly through the house. George, as the baby of the family, was petted by everyone, from his big sister Lou downward. Accustomed to being the center of attention, he was, at the same time, independent, solitary, and thoughtful. Even as a toddler he forbade Louise to go with him to school, for fear she would get mixed up with “all those nosy mothers.” It horrified him to think they might ask her what he did and said at home.
The wartime baby “bulge” had brought in its wake an acute shortage of space at primary schools. George—like his mother—had been baptized a Catholic, but could be fitted in only at an Anglican nursery school, Dovedale Primary, near Penny Lane. He was there at the same time as John Lennon. Though the age-gap was too great for them ever to become friendly.
In 1954, George went on to Liverpool Institute, where he was put into the form below Paul McCartney. Unlike Paul, however, he soon began to do extremely badly. Alert and perceptive, with an unusually good memory, he developed a hatred of all lessons and school routine. Detentions, even beatings, could not lift the firmly shut barriers of his indifference, and soon his teachers found it less fatiguing to leave him alone.
He acquired further disreputability by coming to school in clothes that did not conform to the Institute’s regulation gray and black. Already, in admiration of the dockland Teds, his hair was piled so high that a school cap could only cling on precariously at the back. He would sit in class, his blazer buttoned over a canary yellow waistcoat borrowed from his brother Harry, his desk-top hiding trousers secretly tapered on his mother’s sewing machine. His shirt collar, socks, and shoes growing pointed all uttered the defiance still hidden in his gaunt face while some master or other, like “Cissy” Smith, was sarcastically making fun of him.
In 1956, his mother noticed him drawing pictures of guitars on every scrap of paper he could find. He had heard Lonnie Donegan, and seen Donegan’s guitar. Soon afterward, he came to Louise and asked her to give him three pounds to buy a guitar from a boy at school. She did so, but when George brought it home, he accidentally unscrewed the neck from the body, then found he couldn’t put them back together. The guitar lay in a cupboard for weeks until his brother Peter took it out and mended it.
Learning to play even the first simple chords in the tuition book was an agonizing process for George. Unlike Paul, he had no inherited musical ability; nor was he, like John, a born adventurer. All he had was his indomitable will to learn. His mother encouraged him, sitting up late with him as he tried and tried. Sometimes he would be near to tears with frustration and the pain of his split and dusty fingertips.
His brother Peter had taken up the guitar at about the same time, and together they formed a skiffle group, the Rebels. Their first and only engagement was for ten shillings each at the Speke British Legion Club. At George’s insistence, they left the house one at a time, ducking along under the garden hedge so that “nosy neighbors” wouldn’t see.
The family had moved by now to a new council house, in Upton Green, Speke. It was on his bus journey into Liverpool each morning that George met Paul McCartney. Though Paul was a year older and in a higher grade at school, their passion for guitars drew them together. Paul would come across from Allerton to practice in George’s bedroom, bringing with him his ’cello guitar with the upside-down scratch plate. George now had a guitar that his mother had helped him buy for thirty pounds—a far better one than Paul’s, with white piping and a cutaway for reaching the narrow frets at the bottom of the neck.
To pay back his mother George did a Saturday morning delivery round for a local butcher, E. R. Hughes. One of the houses on his round belonged to a family named Bramwell, whose son Tony had met Buddy Holly during the star’s recent British tour. Tony Bramwell would lend George his Buddy Holly records to listen to and copy. Confidence came from the songs built of easy chords, like E and B7; the changes he could do now from one chord to the other; the solo bass runs that, painfully, unsmilingly, he was learning to pick out for himself.
Paul introduced him to the other Quarry Men one night late in 1957, in the suburb of Liverpool called Old Roan. “It was at a club we used to go to, called the Morgue,” Colin Hanton says. “It was in the cellar of this big old derelict house. No bar or coffee or anything, just a cellar with dark rooms off it, and one big blue lightbulb sticking out of the wall.”
The others crowded round George, interested in what they could see of his guitar with its cutaway body. They listened while George played all he had been carefully rehearsing. He played them “Raunchy,” an eight-note tune on the bass strings; then he played the faster and more tricky “Guitar Boogie Shuffle.”
George was not asked to join the Quarry Men that night. Indeed, they never asked him formally to join. He would follow them with his guitar around the halls where they played, and in the interval stand and wait for his chance to come across and see Paul. Generally, he would have some newly mastered chord to show them, or yet another solemn-faced bass string tune. If another guitarist had failed to arrive, George would be allowed to sit in.
No one other than Paul took him very seriously. John Lennon in particular, from the pinnacle of seventeen years, considered him just a funny little eager white-faced lad who delivered the weekend meat. Even George’s ability as a guitarist became a reason for John to tease him. “Come on, George,” he would say. “Give us ‘Raunchy.’” George played “Raunchy” whenever John asked him to, even sitting on the top deck of the number 500 bus to Speke.
The great benefit of letting George tag along was that it brought the Quarry Men another safe house in which to practice. At weekends or on truant days they could always find refuge at George’s. Mr. Harrison would be out on the buses, but Louise always welcomed them, never minding the noise. She developed a soft spot for John Lennon, in whom she recognized much of her own scatty humor. She used to say that John and she were just a pair of fools.
Aunt Mimi, by contrast, did not like John to associate with someone who was, after all, a butcher’s errand boy, and whose accent was so thickly Liverpudlian. George called at Mendips one day to ask John to go to the cinema, but John, still thinking him just a “bloody kid,” pretended to be too busy. “He’s a real whacker, isn’t he?” Mimi said bitterly when George had gone. “You always go for the low types, don’t you, John?”
To Mimi, in her innocence, George—and even Paul—were the bad influences: If John had not met them he would still be happy in ordinary clothes. “Paul used to wear these great long winklepicker things, with buckles on the sides. And as for George! Well, of course you couldn’t wish for a quieter lad. But one day when I came into the house, there was George with his hair in a crew cut, and wearing this bright pink shirt. I told him, ‘Never come into this house with a shirt like that on again.’”
With George sitting in more and more, the Quarry Men no
w found themselves with a glut of guitarists. For, as well as John and Paul, there was still Eric Griffiths, the chubby-faced boy who had been a founder member, and who did not realize his growing superfluousness. At length, the others decided that Eric must be frozen out. Colin Hanton, his best friend in the group, was visited by Nigel Walley and asked to go along with the plan. They still needed Colin or, rather, his drum set that cost thirty-eight pounds.
“We didn’t tell Eric we were going to Paul’s house to practice,” Colin says. “He rang up while we were there. The others got me to talk to him and explain how things stood. Eric was pretty upset. He couldn’t understand why they’d suddenly decided to get rid of him. I told him there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. I could tell that if they wanted somebody out, he was out.”
Between John and Aunt Mimi, the atmosphere had grown increasingly turbulent. Mimi had to support him at art college for a full year until he qualified for a local authority grant; she therefore felt doubly entitled to pronounce adversely on his clothes, his silly music, and the friends who were, in Mimi’s opinion, so very ill-attired and unsuitable. Pete Shotton was only one of John’s friends who witnessed memorable fights between him and the aunt who so resembled him in strength of will and volatile spirits. “One minute,” Pete says, “they’d be yelling and screaming at each other; the next they’d have their arms round each other, laughing.”
Behind Mimi’s briskness and sarcasm lay the real dread of losing John. She was only a substitute, as she well knew, for his real mother, her sister Julia. And John, in his teenage years, had grown adept at playing on that fear. After a row at Mendips, he would storm out and go straight to Julia’s house, remaining there for days, sometimes weeks on end. With Julia, life was always pleasant and carefree. Having made no sacrifice for him, she bore no grudge against his indolence: she pampered him, bought him unsuitable clothes, and made him laugh. Her man friend, John Dykins, would frequently press on him a handful of the evening’s restaurant tips.
Mimi, aware that she was being exploited, sometimes took dramatic measures to call John’s bluff. “They used to keep a little dog called Sally,” Pete Shotton says. “John really thought the world of her. One time, when he’d walked out and gone off to Julia’s, Mimi got rid of Sally, saying there’d be no one left in the house to take her for walks. That was the only time I ever saw John really heartbroken and showing it—when he came home to Menlove Avenue and didn’t find Sally there.”
On the evening of July 15, 1958, Nigel Walley left his house on Vale Road and took the short cut over the stile into Menlove Avenue to call for John. At Mendips, he found Mimi and Julia talking together by the front garden gate. John was not there, they said—he had gone to Julia’s for the whole weekend. Julia, having paid her daily visit to Mimi, was just leaving to catch her bus.
“We’d had a cup of tea together,” Mimi said. “I said, ‘I won’t walk to the bus stop with you tonight.’ ‘All right,’ Julia said, ‘don’t worry. I’ll see you tomorrow.’”
Instead, it was Nigel Walley who walked with John’s mother through the warm twilight down Menlove Avenue toward the big road junction. “Julia was telling me some jokes as we went,” Nigel remembers. “Every time you saw her, she’d have a new one she’d been saving up to tell you.” About two hundred yards from Mimi’s house, they parted. Nigel continued down Menlove Avenue and Julia began to cross the road to her bus stop.
Old tram tracks, concealed by a thin hedgerow, ran down the middle of the busy divided highway. As Julia stepped through the hedge into the southbound lane, a car came suddenly out of the twilight, swerving inward on the steep camber. Nigel Walley, across the road, turned at the scream of brakes to see Julia’s body tossed into the air.
“I can picture it to this day. I always think to myself, ‘If only I’d said just one more sentence to her, just a few words more, it might have saved her.’”
There was first the moment, parodying every film melodrama John had ever seen, when a policeman came to the back door at Springwood and asked if he was Julia’s son. The feeling of farce persisted in the taxi ride with Twitchy to Sefton General Hospital; in the sight of the faces waiting to meet them there. For Julia had died the instant the car had struck her. The shock was too much for Twitchy, who broke down with grief and dread of what would now become of him and his children by Julia. Even in the moment of her death it must have seemed to John that his mother was someone else’s property.
The anguish was drawn out over several weeks. The car that killed Julia had been driven by an off-duty policeman. Pete Shotton was working on attachment from police college in the local CID department that investigated the case. The inquest exonerated the driver of any blame. “I went as a witness,” Nigel Walley says, “but me being only a boy, they didn’t give much weight to what I’d seen. Mimi took it very hard—shouting at the fellow who’d driven the car; she even threatened him with a walking stick.”
John, in the weeks after Julia’s death, reminded Pete Shotton of the times they would be caned at Quarry Bank, when John used to fight with all his strength not to let out a single sound of pain. Few people knew the extent of his grief since few understood his feeling for the happy, careless woman who had let her life become separate from his. At college, he would sit for hours alone in the big window at the top of the main staircase. Arthur Ballard saw him there once, and noticed that he was crying.
Elsewhere, if his desolation showed, it would be in manic horseplay with his crony Jeff Mohamed, both in college and at the student pub, Ye Cracke, where John was increasingly to be found. “They’d come back to college pissed in the afternoon,” Arthur Ballard says. “I caught John trying to piss into the lift shaft.” Ballard was human enough to understand the reason for such behavior. But even Pete Shotton was shocked to see how much of the time John now spent anesthetized by drink. “I remember getting on a bus once and finding John on the top deck, lying across the backseat, pissed out of his mind. He’d been up there for hours with no idea where he was.”
He had never been short of girlfriends, though few were willing to put up for long with the treatment that was John Lennon’s idea of romance. His drinking, his sarcasm, his unpunctuality at trysts, his callous humor, and most of all, his erratic temper drove each of them to chuck him, not infrequently with the devastating rejoinder that is the speciality of Liverpool girls. “Don’t take it out on me,” one of them screamed back at him, “just because your mother’s dead.”
Not long after Julia’s death his eye fell on Cynthia Powell, an intermediate student in a group slightly ahead of his. Cynthia was a timid, bespectacled girl with flawless white skin. Hitherto, if John had noticed her at all, it was merely to taunt her for living in Hoylake, on the Cheshire Wirral, where primness and superiority are thought to reign. “No dirty jokes please—it’s Cynthia,” he would say while she blushed, knowing full well that dirty jokes would inevitably follow.
This was the girl who, nevertheless, found herself drawn to John Lennon with a fascination entirely against her neat and cautious nature. She dreaded, yet longed for, the days when John would sit behind her in the lettering class and would pillage the orderly pattern of brushes and rulers she had laid out for the work. She remembers, too, a moment in the lecture hall when she saw another girl stroking John’s hair, and felt within herself a confusion that she afterward realized was jealousy.
They first got talking one day between classes, after some of the students had been testing one another’s eyesight and Cynthia discovered John’s vision to be as poor as hers, despite his refusal to be seen in glasses. Encouraged by this, she took to loitering about the passages in the hope of meeting him. She grew her perm out, dyed her mousy hair blonde, exchanged her usual modest outfit for a white duffel coat and black velvet trousers, and left off her own spectacles, with frequently catastrophic results. The bus she caught each day from Central Station regularly carried her past Hope Street and the college stop and on into Liverpool 8.
John approached her formally at an end-of-term dance at lunchtime in one of the college lecture rooms. Egged on by Jeff Mohamed, he asked her to dance. When he asked her for a date Cynthia blurted out that she was engaged—as was true—to a boy back home in Hoylake. “I didn’t ask you to marry me, did I?” John retorted bitterly.
In the autumn term of 1958, amid much local astonishment, they began going steady. Cynthia’s friends—especially those who had already passed through the John Lennon experience—warned her strongly against it. Equally, in John’s crowd no one could understand his interest in a girl who, although nowadays had somewhat improved in looks, still had nothing in common with John’s ideal woman, Brigitte Bardot. Even George Harrison forgot his usual shyness in John’s company to declare that Cynthia had teeth “like a horse.”
Against these defects there was about her a gentleness, a malleability that John, brought up among frolicsome and strong-willed aunts, had not met in a female before. To please him, she began to dress in short skirts, fishnet stockings, and garter belts that shocked her to her suburban soul as well as giving her much anxiety while she waited for him outside Lewis’s department store, terrified of being mistaken for a “totty,” or Liverpool tart. For him, each night, she braved the last train out to Hoylake, and its cargo of hooligans and drunks.
She was, even then, terrified of John—of his reckless humor no less than the moods and sudden rages and the ferocity with which he demanded her total obedience. He was so jealous, Cynthia says, he would try to beat up anyone at a party who so much as asked her to dance. He would sit for hours with her in a pub or coffee bar, never letting go her hand. It was as if something stored up in him since Julia’s death could be exorcised, or at least quieted, through her.
Elvis was tamed. The gold-suited figure whose lip had curled on behalf of all British adolescence, whose defiant slouch had altered the posture of a generation, could now be seen meekly seated in a barber’s chair preparatory to serving two years in the United States Army. No one yet quite comprehended how much this repentance was a stroke of incomparable showmanship by his manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, a one-time huckster at fairs and carnivals. It mattered less to America than to Britain, which Elvis had not yet visited, although rumors of his coming were continually rife. As the colonel beamed fatly and Elvis shouldered arms, showing what a decent kid he had been all along, England’s rockers vowed that, in their eyes at least, “the King” would never abdicate.
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