to him on registration day, ‘I hear your mother got killed by a car.’ Onlookers thought it must be some kind of sick joke until he nodded and muttered, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ The only person not mortified by the faux pas seemed to be John himself. ‘He didn’t choke on it,’ a witness of the incident remembers. ‘He didn’t register anything. It was like someone had said “You had your hair cut yesterday.”’
The only person let under his guard was Arthur Ballard, the prizefighter-turned-professor in whom he seemed to find some of the reassuringness of his beloved Uncle George. Ballard was always to remember climbing the main college staircase and finding a red-eyed John sprawled miserably on the big window ledge halfway up. ‘I think he cried on Arthur’s shoulder,’ June Furlong, the life model, says.
Unable to express, let alone share, his feelings, he turned to Liverpool’s well-tried method of anaesthetising them. Most afternoons, he would stagger back to college from Ye Cracke with Jeff Mohammed, helplessly drunk and bent on ever more mindless disruption and devilment. One day, Arthur Ballard found him trying to urinate into the lift shaft. The verbal cruelty he had always used on even his best friends seemed to grow still sharper and more unpredictable as he sensed their pity and confusion. ‘He tried it on with me,’ Bill Harry says. ‘But I came from a tough background; I told him to fuck off, and never had any trouble with him again. Stu Sutcliffe was different, though. John admired his work, but he could be terrible to him on a personal level. He’d make fun of Stu for being small…go on and on about it. And Stu never seemed to answer back.’
The truth was that Stu possessed a maturity and wisdom beyond his 18 years. He recognized that the price of John’s friendship were these occasional venomous outbursts, and decided that it was a price worth paying. ‘John came to rely on that,’ says Stu’s sister Pauline. ‘He knew Stuart could be pushed, but that he’d never be pushed away.’
Almost everyone Stu met ended up being drawn or painted by him, and John was a subject he seemed to find more fascinating than most. A pencil sketch, made not long after they first met, shows John hunkered down with what looked like a skiffler’s washboard—faceless yet still unmistakable. In a Sutcliffe oil painting of the student crowd at Ye Cracke, he dominates the foreground, seated on a barstool in a tan sweater and blue (suede?) shoes, clutching his pint glass and staring off into the distance, lost in his own acrid thoughts.
The experience of knowing John also inspired Stu temporarily to forsake paint and charcoal for prose. In late 1958, he began writing a novel whose central character was named John and was very obviously drawn from life: ‘capricious, incalculable and self-centred, yet at the same time…a loyal friend.’ The novel seems never to have had a title, and it petered out after a few hundred words in Stu’s meticulous italic handwriting. The surviving fragments read less like fiction than a case study of its hero and the ‘terrible change’ that comes over him nine months after the narrator meets him. (It was about nine months after Stu first encountered the real-life John that Julia was killed.)
Even Aunt Mimi, never one given to idle praise, would later call Stu the best and truest friend John ever had.
The first steady girlfriend he had found at college was Thelma Pickles, a stunningly attractive Intermediate student whom he met through Helen Anderson. Thelma was as much of an individualist as he, and their relationship, while it lasted, was often stormy. ‘He could be very unbearable at times,’ she would remember. ‘He was never violent…but he would say things to hurt you. I think it was a defence thing, because he could be vulnerable at times [like] when you talked about his mother. He would become almost dreamy and very quiet. It was his weak spot…’ She also had a tongue every bit as sharp as John’s, and did not hesitate to use it if ever he tried to vent his anger and anguish on her. ‘Don’t blame me,’ she once lashed back at him, ‘just because your mother’s dead!’
Of all possible successors to Thelma, Cynthia Powell seemed the least likely. A year older than John, she was a mildly pretty, bespectacled girl of the hard working and conformist type he termed ’spaniels’. At college she had impinged on his notice only as an object of ridicule, thanks to her school head-prefecty Christian name and the fact that she came from Hoylake, on the Cheshire Wirral, a supposed bastion of suburban gentility and decorum. ‘No dirty jokes please, it’s Cynthia,’ he would admonish his cronies sarcastically when she approached, seldom failing to make her blush to the roots of her mousy, permed hair.
She was not in John’s workgroup but in Jeff Mohammed’s and thus shared a classroom with him only in a few general activities such as Lettering. For this detested but unavoidable weekly penance, he would slouch in late, his guitar slung troubadour-style on his back and, somehow, always take the seat immediately behind her. He never had any of the proper equipment, so would have to borrow her meticulously kept pencils and brushes, usually going off with them afterwards and not bothering to return them.
Cynthia’s future at this point seemed as neatly laid out as the materials on her desk. She had a steady boyfriend named Barry, whom she planned to marry before pursuing her chosen career of art teacher. She was not in the market for any new beau, least of all one whose ways were so turbulently and distastefully unlike the ways of Hoylake. Yet John had a powerful, half-fearful fascination for her. On a couple of occasions, she watched him perch on a desk and play his guitar, and was stirred by the very different look this brought to the usually hard, mocking face. ‘It softened…All the aggression lifted,’ she would recall. ‘At last there was something I had seen in John that I could understand.’
Her feelings clicked into focus one day in the college lecture theatre when she was seated a few places away from John, and saw the attractive Helen Anderson suddenly start to stroke his hair. There was nothing between Helen and him; she was simply bewailing his greasy Teddy Boy locks and urging him to have them shampooed and cut shorter. Nonetheless, Cynthia felt a sudden, irrational surge of jealousy.
From that moment, rather than avoiding John’s eye, she set out to catch it. She grew her hair down to her shoulders in the fashionable bohemian manner and exchanged her mumsy woollens and tweed skirt for the white duffle jacket and black velvet slacks favoured by college sirens like Thelma Pickles. She also gave up wearing the glasses, which, as she thought, most condemned her as a swot and spaniel to John. Since she was extremely shortsighted and could not afford contact lenses, then still an expensive novelty, this aspect of her makeover brought its problems. In the morning, her bus regularly carried her far beyond the art college stop when she failed to recognise it in time.
One day she and John were in a group of students who began a game of testing one another’s vision. To her amazement, Cynthia discovered that he was as myopic as she was, and equally self-conscious about wearing glasses. He in turn discovered that, only a year earlier, Cynthia’s father had died of lung cancer, leaving her as devastated as he now was himself. Better than all the clear-sighted people around, this shy, prim Hoylake girl knew just what he was feeling.
The end of the 1958 winter term was celebrated by a midday gettogether in one of the lecture rooms. A gramophone was playing, and, egged on by Jeff Mohammed, John asked Cynthia to dance. Thrown into confusion by this unexpected move, she blurted out that she was engaged to a fellow in Hoylake. ‘I didn’t ask you to fuckin’ marry me, did I?’ John snapped back. After the party came a drinking session at Ye Cracke, which John persuaded the usually abstemious Cynthia to join. They ended up spending the rest of the afternoon alone together at Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray’s flat in Percy Street.
Among their fellow students—the female ones at least—there was no doubt as to who had the better bargain. ‘Cynthia was a catch for John,’ Ann Mason says. ‘She could have had anyone she wanted. She had lovely eyes and the most beautiful pale skin. And she was the sweetest, nicest person you could ever meet.’
She was different indeed from the strong-willed, caustic females who had hitherto dominated John’s life. She was soft, gentle and tranquil (although secretly prone to bouts of paralysing nerves). She also possessed the notions of male superiority shared by many young women in the late fifties, which could have won them unconditional employment in a geisha house. She deferred to John in everything, never questioning or arguing, always complying with what she later called