around competing would-be parents like a parcel. Mimi volunteered little information, replying to his questions in only the briefest anodyne fashion. ‘[She] told me my parents had fallen out of love,’ he would recall. ‘She never said anything directly against my mother and father. I soon forgot my father. It was like he was dead.’ But Alf was very much alive and, to begin with at least, still a very real threat to Mimi’s guardianship. She had not officially adopted John, nor would she ever do so; Alf remained married to Julia and in a position of moral ascendancy as far as the law was concerned. At any moment, he could have walked through the front door and demanded that his son be returned to him.
This danger was soon neutralised, in large part thanks to the hapless Alf himself. After parting from John in Blackpool, he had drowned his sorrows at sea again, signing aboard the Royal Mail steamer Andes on her maiden voyage to Argentina. Buenos Aires had produced another of those apocalyptic misadventures that only seemed to happen to him. Picked up with some other British mariners in a routine police sweep, he found himself held in solitary confinement for two days. The explanation was that his captors had misread the page in his passport where his signature, ‘ALennon’ was immediately preceded by the name of his next of kin, given simply as ‘John’. He was therefore assumed to be ‘John Alennon’. A notorious murderer in Argentina at the time also bore that name, and the police had mistaken Alf for him. On regaining his freedom and returning to Britain, he resumed service, on the Dominion Monarch, but in posts of declining importance, first as Assistant Boots (shoe cleaner), then as Silverman (custodian of restaurant silverware).
By his own later account, he still cherished hopes of winning John back and carrying out their Blackpool scheme of emigrating to New Zealand. When the Dominion Monarch returned to Tilbury in December 1949, he resolved to catch a train from London to Liverpool and have it out with Julia again. On his way to Euston Station, however, he was diverted by some shipmates into a Soho pub crawl. This ended in the early hours of the following morning with a riotously drunken Alf smashing the display window of a West End shop and attempting to waltz with the mannikin inside. Hauled before an unsympathetic magistrate, he was sentenced to six months in Wormwood Scrubs.
Alf’s plight could not better have suited the purposes of his unofficial judges in Liverpool. According to his brother Charlie, Mimi wrote to him while he was in prison, threatening to tell John his father was a ‘jailbird’ if ever he tried to contact him again. The possession of a criminal record also effectively ended Alf’s career at sea. Defeated and dejected, he took a menial job as a dishwasher in a hotel kitchen and seemed to give up all thought of ever contacting John again.
Not only his father but the whole Lennon side of his family was now firmly airbrushed from John’s consciousness. For the rest of his life, he would have no idea what decent, brave and loyal people also bore his surname. His grandmother, the redoubtable Polly, had refused to leave her house throughout the war, even though Toxteth was in one of the worst-blitzed quarters of Liverpool. John had been wont to visit Copperfield Street only with his father or during his stay with his Uncle Sydney and Aunt Madge. After the parting from Alf, his visits there ceased. When Polly died in 1949, of stomach cancer, she had not seen him for something like three years. ‘That side of John’s family was never mentioned,’ his cousin Liela remembers. ‘As children, we didn’t even know it existed.’
Even when no aunts and cousins happened to be visiting, Mendips was always a lively and crowded place. To supplement George’s small income, Mimi took in a succession of boarders—‘paying guests’, as they were known in the 1950s—whom she provided with meals as well as bed-sitter accommodation in the bay-windowed front bedroom. These lodgers, exclusively male, were usually students at Liverpool University and tended to become part of the family, helping out in the garden, keeping George company at his local pub and joining in John’s games. The household also included three animals: a large black-and-white cat named Samuel Pepys, which always sat on George’s lap, a Persian cross named Titch, and an adoring mongrel bitch named Sally.
John adored cats as much as did Mimi and George. One snowy night when he was no more than seven or eight, he returned home carrying a bedraggled brown-and-white Persian kitten, which he said he had been unable to dissuade from following him. He begged to be allowed to keep the kitten, but Mimi said that, since it was obviously valuable, they must first advertise for its owner in the Liverpool Echo. No owner came forward, so the kitten stayed and was given the name Tim. ‘We had Tim for 20 years,’ Mimi recalled. ‘Wherever he was in the world, John was always wanting to know what Tim was up to.’
As well as its country cottages and Art Deco villas, Woolton had many curious old houses, nestling in woodland or behind forbidding stone walls, carved from Liverpool’s native sandstone and embellished with the turrets and gargoyles of fairy-tale castles. The most familiar to John, being only a short walk from Mendips, was a gloomy Gothic mansion bearing the anomalous name of Strawberry Field. No strawberries grew in its extensive grounds, and few were ever tasted in its interior, now a refuge for orphan girls run by the Salvation Army. The inmates attended various schools in the locality but wore their own distinctive uniform of blue-and-white striped dresses and summertime straw hats trimmed with red.
On walks with Mimi or Uncle George, John would always linger outside Strawberry Field, peering through its heavy iron gates and up at its windows as if he felt some affinity with the less fortunate children who lived there. He never missed the chance to visit the home each summer when it held a fund-raising garden fête with homemade cake stalls and games offering prizes of plaster Scottie dogs, peppermint rock candy or lone goldfish suspended dejectedly in water-filled jam jars.
‘I’d give him sixpence to spend on the stalls,’ Mimi remembered. ‘He’d hear the Salvation Army band and he’d pull me along, saying, “Hurry up, Mimi! We’re going to be late!”’
I’d say I had a happy childhood…
I was always having a laugh.
Thanks in largest part to his minstrel grandfather and his would-be minstrel father, but also to numerous others on both sides of his family, John could be fairly said to have had music in his bones. Yet in his early years the odds seemed weighted against his becoming a musician at all, let alone the one he finally did.
In early-fifties Britain, music was something most people got along without. The technology for listening to it in the home consisted of gramophones with manually cranked turntables, and thick wax 78 rpm (revolutions per minute) discs the size of car hubcaps, which came in plain brown paper covers and broke when dropped. Rare was the household whose record collections numbered more than about a dozen of these sepia-wrapped, dust-attracting monsters.
Back then, one did not hear music playing incessantly in shops, office buildings, airports, station concourses, doctors’ surgeries or lifts, as a background to news bulletins or from the earpieces of telephones. Portable radios were hulking battery-powered objects designed to look like small suitcases. Tape recorders for private use were almost unknown. Sound came in mono only and did not travel. In public places like parks or beaches, the only noise would be human hubbub. Most residential areas passed their days and nights in the same unbroken silence.
Television was still a fabulously expensive novelty, enjoyed in only a few thousand homes and served by a solitary BBC channel offering a scanty Programme in the afternoon and early evening. Radio, likewise the BBC’s monopoly and better known as the wireless, broadcast music largely as a public duty, to keep the factories running and the food queues quiet. So afraid was the corporation’s Light Programme of overexciting its listeners that records with the faintest sexual frisson were banned from the airwaves, and continuity announcers forbidden to use such inflammatory terms as hot jazz. Professional musicians were a tiny faction who had mastered their complex craft only after years of study, possessed little personality outside their playing, and in general projected an aura that was at once middle-aged, irritable and foreign.
For Mimi Smith, nothing more clearly defined the Alf Lennon world from which she had rescued John than people enjoying