like a claw.
Even then, when nothing in his daily life even hinted at it, he seems to have had premonitions of his strange destiny, almost as if his grandmother Polly’s reputed psychic powers were reaching out to him, too. So vivid and exciting were his dreams that he looked forward to going to sleep in his blue-quilted bed almost as much as to a theatrical performance or movie. As he later remembered, he always dreamed in brilliant colour and weird shapes that gave his subsequent first encounters with painters like Salvador Dalí and Hieronymus Bosch the shock of déjà vu.
The most prophetic of his dreams recurred time and again. In one, he was circling in an airplane above Liverpool, looking down at the Mersey, the docks and the twin Liver Birds on their towers, climbing higher and higher with each circuit until the city disappeared from view. In another, he was engulfed by seas of half crowns, the big old predecimal silver coins with milled edges that used to be worth 12.5p but had purchasing power equal to £5 today. In yet another, he recalled ‘finding lots of money in old houses—as much of the stuff as I could carry. I used to put it in my pockets and in my hands and in sacks, and I could still never carry as much as I wanted.’
In 1951, two new Liverpool University students arrived at Mendips to share the bay-windowed room next to John’s. One of them was a 19-year-old biochemistry student from Leeds named Michael Fishwick, the other a medical student named John Ellison. Fishwick was to become Mimi’s favourite paying guest—though as yet neither of them dreamed what that would ultimately entail—and, from his privileged insider’s position, was to share in both the great tragedies of John’s childhood.
The boarders paid £3 5s—which, as Fishwick remembers, was ’slightly above the odds’—for their accommodation and (very good) meals on the gateleg table in the morning room, which Mimi always served in a sitting apart from George and John. He recalls John as a friendly, ‘malleable’ boy, whose behaviour at home gave little hint of the tearaway he was outside, and who spent most of his time reading or drawing pictures of ‘wart-infested trolls’ or caricatures of the new lodgers. Both students at this point seemed to be equally in Mimi’s favour for their good manners, their upmarket love of rugby football, and their willingness to help out with the gardening, sometimes aided by a reluctant John. The pair would sometimes take him out for the day, their usual destination Hoylake on the Cheshire Wirral, where the shipping consisted of graceful white-sailed yachts rather than the Mersey’s dredgers and tugs.
Even the family circumstances that singled him out from other boys seemed in those days more a bonus than a deprivation. With Mimi taking care of him, his mother close at hand, his three other aunts in ever-dependable backup, John lived in an atmosphere of feminine admiration and solicitude, petted and lionised even more than the youngest of his cousins. He had somehow realised that Mimi’s title to him was only of the most tenuous, unofficial kind; as time passed, he became adept at exploiting her constant fear of losing him. If aunt and nephew had a particularly explosive argument, over the state of John’s room, for instance, he would stomp off to Julia’s in Allerton for the night, sometimes the whole weekend, throwing dark hints over his shoulder that he might never come back again.
The little council ‘semi’ at 1 Blomfield Road where Julia lived with Bobby Dykins could not have been more a contrast to Mendips. For Julia shared none of her eldest sister’s devotion to tidiness, routine and domestic protocol. At Julia’s one did not have to wipe one’s feet or hang up one’s coat in the proper place; meals kept no fixed schedule, but might appear on the table at any time. ‘That’s not to say she wasn’t a good housekeeper,’ her niece, Liela, remembers. ‘There was always a stew or a casserole on the stove. And if anyone came to the door when we were about to sit down, an extra place would automatically be laid.’
John seemed to feel no jealousy of the two half-sisters, Julia and Jackie, who enjoyed his mother’s attention seven days a week; they in turn regarded him as a big brother, nicknamed him Stinker, bounced up and down on him in the morning as he lay in bed, and loved the tales of monsters and Mersey mermaids he told them, and the dancing skeletons he would cut out of paper. ‘Julia always made it clear how much she adored him,’ Liela says. ‘She had photographs of him all over the house.’ Just the same, he would have been conscious at every minute that she was no longer really his.
Julia was one of the first in John’s circle to have television, another powerful reason to visit her. In those times, anyone so blessed was under obligation to invite friends and neighbours to ‘look in’, as the phrase went, filling their living rooms with extra seats, extinguishing lights and drawing blinds to create a cinema-like darkness. Early television variety shows sometimes featured elderly survivors of the music hall and even the minstrel eras—Hetty King, singing ‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor’; Leslie Hutchinson, aka Hutch, who had first popularised Alf Lennon’s beloved ‘Begin the Beguine’; and Robb Wilton, the Liverpool-born ‘confidential comic’ whose quavery monologues always began ‘The day war broke out…’ Julia’s favourite was George Formby, the chipper Lancastrian with outsized grin who strummed a banjolele while singing songs of innocent double entendre about Chinese laundries and window cleaners. ‘Judy adored Formby, and John caught it from her,’ Liela says. ‘I remember one day when he was on TV, and the money in the electric meter suddenly ran out, Judy almost went mad.’
At Julia’s, the wireless was always on, tuned to the Light Programme and blaring out the dance music that Mimi could not abide. She also had a gramophone and came home almost every week with a brand-new 78 rpm single in its dull brown wrapper. Thanks to her, John knew everything that was happening on Britain’s early pop music chart—called the Top 12 before it became the Top 20—in particular, whenever the effortless dominance of American performers like Guy Mitchell and Nat King Cole was briefly broken by some homegrown upstart like Ruby Murray or Dickie Valentine.
In the very early fifties, the blood of a British boy was most likely to be stirred by Frankie Laine, who sang sub-operatic arias with cowboy themes, like ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ and ‘Gunfight at OK Corral’. John relished the over-the-top showmanship of Laine and also of Johnnie Ray, who wore a hearing aid and ostentatiously burst into tears during his big hit, ‘Cry’. Surprisingly, though, the hardcase Woolton Outlaw also liked sentimental ballads, even when sung by the ‘old groaner’, Bing Crosby. One Crosby song included a play on words that instantly stuck to the flypaper of his mind: ‘Please…lend your little ears to my pleas…Please hold me tight in your arms…’
During John’s visits, Julia was always the bright, carefree, funloving person he looked on more as an elder sister than a mother. But after he had gone, her daughter Julia remembers, she would sit down in the suddenly quiet living room, open up the gramophone, and put on the record that, for obvious reasons, was her favourite one of all: ‘My Son John’, by the British tenor David Whitfield. During the climactic closing verse, with its eerily accurate prophecies—‘My son John…who will fly someday…have a wife someday…and a son someday…’ her eyes would fill with tears, as though, somehow or other, she guessed she would never see it.
4 SHORTSIGHTED JOHN WIMPLE LENNON
I thought, ‘I’m a genius or I’m mad. Which is it?’
These were days when the Eleven Plus examination regulated every child’s progress through the state educational system like traffic lights, sending those who passed the exam to grammar schools and rest to either secondary modern or technical schools. Throughout John’s latter years at Dovedale Primary, as he would recall, the idea had been ceaselessly drummed into him that ‘if you don’t pass the Eleven Plus you’re finished in life…So that was the only exam I ever passed, because I was terrified.’
For boys who brought such distinction on themselves and their families, the traditional reward was a brand-new bicycle. Uncle George, in no doubt that John would sail through, had picked out a bike for him long before the joyous news reached Mendips. It was an emerald green Raleigh Lenton—almost his own surname—fitted with luxurious extras like a Sturmey-Archer three-speed gear, a dynamo-operated front lamp and a matching green leather