death, Cynthia answered his deepest unspoken needs. ‘I think [she] offered him a kind of mother thing,’ the former Thelma Pickles says. ‘She was so warm and gentle. She was the kind of person anyone would have been proud to have as a mother.’
The two began dating in a manner reflecting their suburban backgrounds as much as their bohemian student life. Since both of them still lived at home, they had nowhere to be together in private, unless Stu and Rod Murray both tactfully absented themselves from the Percy Street flat. Their trysts therefore consisted mainly of cinema-going or sitting for hour after hour in a coffee bar, holding hands over their foam-flecked glass cups. At John’s insistence, Cynthia stayed in town until the latest possible moment each night, catching the last train from Lime Street to Hoylake amid home-going drunks and hooligans ‘[for] the longest 20 minutes of my life,’ then walking unaccompanied through the dark streets to her home.
Everything he asked, she gave unstintingly. Her eight-shilling (40p) daily subsistence allowance kept him in coffees, fish-and-chips, Capstan Full-Strength cigarettes and replacement guitar strings. She did his college work for him when he could not be bothered to finish—or begin—it and neglected her own whenever he demanded attention. To please him, she changed her whole appearance into one hopefully resembling his ultimate fantasy woman, Brigitte Bardot, dyeing her hair blonde and wearing tight skirts and fishnet stockings with garter belts. Waiting for John in such attire at their usual rendezvous, outside Lewis’s department store, she would dread being mistaken for a tart.
On bus journeys he would choose a seat behind some balding elderly passenger and softly tickle the fluff on the man’s cranium, withdrawing his hand and assuming an expression of blank innocence each time his victim turned around. Then the laughter would fade in Cynthia’s throat as he sighted some human infirmity more pitiable than baldness—a blind beggar or mentally handicapped child—and instantly went into his own pitiless-seeming over-parody, crooking his back, freezing his face into an idiot stare, inverting his hands into claws. ‘John had a great need to shock and disgust people, and certainly shocked me on these occasions,’ she would remember. ‘Of course when his mates were around, he was the star turn.’
The real terror of illness and suffering that underlay this apparent callousness showed itself one afternoon when the two were alone together in Stu Sutcliffe’s bedroom-studio at Percy Street and Cynthia suddenly collapsed with excruciating stomach pains. John’s idea of tender loving care was to rush her to Lime Street and put her on a train to travel back to Hoylake on her own. When a grumbling appendix was diagnosed, he could not bring himself to visit her in hospital without bringing George Harrison along for support. Having pined for days to spend time alone with him, Cynthia produced a rare show of temperament by bursting into tears. Love was still new enough for John to bundle the bewildered George out of the ward and spend the rest of his visit assiduously making amends to her.
As ‘going out with’ moved into its next phrase, ‘going steady’, the time came for John to introduce Cynthia to Mimi. Woolton and Hoylake being spiritually so close, and Cyn being of so obviously superior a class to other art-school girls, he expected only wholehearted approval. And certainly, the welcome at Mendips seemed warm—expressed in the usual Mimi fashion of an enormous egg-and-chips high tea with mounds of bread and butter, served on the morning room’s gateleg table. Unfortunately, the hand that hospitably poured the tea had also marked Cyn’s card in terms that nothing she could say or do hereafter would alter. In her, Mimi saw a rival for John’s affections who, even at this early stage, was unscrupulously dedicated to taking him away for ever.
Cynthia’s widowed mother, Lilian, was the opposite of Mimi: a small, hyperactive woman who cleaned their Hoylake home only at long intervals and spent much of her time buying secondhand furniture and knick-knacks at local auction sales. With her two sons now grown up and living away from home, she focused her whole attention on Cyn, much as Mimi did on John, and had definite ideas about which young men were and were not good enough for her. When Cyn first brought John home to tea, she dreaded the sharp maternal comparisons that were likely to be made with his predecessor, the so-eligible, so-Hoylake Barry. However, John was polite and respectful, as he could be when he liked, and the occasion went better than Cyn had dared to hope.
Under the rules of going steady, the next step was for Lilian and Mimi to meet. Mimi accepted an invitation to tea at the Powell home, turning up in her usual immaculate coat, hat and gloves, and, for a time, all went well. Then, in her abrupt fashion, she began complaining to Lilian that Cyn was distracting John from his college work. Lilian naturally defended Cyn, and in no time a furious argument was raging between the two women. John, who had a horror of domestic confrontation—no doubt implanted by all he had seen as a small boy—simply jumped up and bolted from the house. Cyn found him cowering at the end of the street, so she later said, ‘in tears’.
This whiff of adversity took the relationship to a level for which Cyn had been totally unprepared. John became obsessed with her, sometimes filling an entire letter with declarations of his love, bewailing their midnight farewells at Lime Street station until she agreed to throw away her last Hoylake scruples and spend whole nights with him in town. Fortuitously, Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray’s landlady at 9 Percy Street had rented the whole ground floor to a new tenant who in turn sublet its large back room to Rod. This made Rod and Stu’s first-floor studio-cum-bedsit more regularly available as a refuge for John and Cynthia. She would tell her mother she was staying with her college friend, Phyllis McKenzie; he would tell Mimi he was sleeping over with one of the Quarrymen after a late gig.
Although Cynthia showed John nothing but devotion, he became increasingly possessive and insecure. She had only to smile at another boy in the most casual, friendly way to throw him into anguished fantasies that it might be some kind of secret code for an affair in progress or about to begin. At one college hop, he punched a fellow student who’d merely asked her to dance. As they sat together, he would hold on tightly to her hand, as if afraid she might fly away at any moment. Cynthia later said that he often showed symptoms of a nervous breakdown—a diagnosis with which John himself later concurred. ‘I demanded absolute trust[worthiness] from her because I wasn’t trustworthy myself. I was neurotic, taking out all my frustrations on her.’
In these days, it was still considered quite normal for men of every stamp—and northern ones above all—to keep ‘their’ women in line by physical chastisement if and when they saw fit. ‘As a teenager all I saw were films where men beat up women,’ John would recall. ‘That was tough, that was the thing to do, slap them in the face, treat them rough, Humphrey Bogart and all that jazz…’ Cynthia’s autobiography, A Twist of Lennon, published in 1977, made no mention of having suffered physical abuse from him. Some 20 years later in a BBC documentary, she recounted how, one night when she was not seeing John, she and Phyllis McKenzie had gone to an out-of-town club and afterwards been given a lift home by two boys they had met. Next day at college, she mentioned the innocent episode to John. Phyllis then described finding her in tears after he’d ‘slapped her face’.
Cynthia’s second autobiography, published in 2005, had a harsher story to relate. One evening at a party, John ‘went mad’ after someone told him she was dancing with Stu Sutcliffe. They stopped as soon as they saw the look on his face, and Cyn hastened to mollify him. The next day, however, he followed her down to the ladies’ toilets in the college basement. When she came out, he hit her across the face so hard that her head struck a heating pipe on the wall; John then walked off without a word. As a result, she chucked him, and they stayed apart for three months until John persuaded her to take him back. Even according to this score-settling account, he was never again physically violent to her.
Summer of 1959 brought the multi-part exam that Intermediate students had to pass before moving on to their chosen speciality. Despite his dismal past performance in almost all the areas covered by the exam, John managed to scrape through. Well-wishers and not-so-well-wishers alike rallied round to help him make up the deficiencies of the past five terms. Stu Sutcliffe gave him a crash course in basic painting skills, devoting night after night to the task in an empty lecture room, while Cynthia waited patiently at an adjacent desk.
As well as taking the exam, he was required to submit course work in the form of paintings or drawings. ‘The trouble was, he hadn’t