anyone’s shoe actually touched the bus roof, that counted as bonus points.
Lennon’s gang, as people soon took to calling them, became the curse of a district otherwise blessedly free from persecution or disturbance. They trespassed on Allerton Golf Course, annoying the grave businessmen at play there and conducting riotous games of their own. They crept in through the back entrances of cinemas without paying and disrupted performances until ejected by furious usherettes. Their ‘scrumping’ of apples from other people’s gardens became so pestilential that one enraged grower appeared with a shotgun and fired both barrels at John’s fleeing form.
Like William, he became a Boy Scout, joining the 3rd Allerton troop, but also like William, he had little time for the Scout code of duty and respectfulness. David Ashton, his companion in the troop’s ‘Badgers’ section, recalls the alternative marching chorus he encouraged the others to sing as they tramped along in their shorts, bush hats, and neckerchiefs: ‘We are the Third! The mad Third! We come from ALLeerTON and we are MAD! MAD!’
A frequent background for William’s and the Outlaws’ adventures are summer fêtes and garden parties. Their Woolton disciples, too, were invariably to be found when some local church or institution set out its innocent fund-raising paraphernalia of raffia stalls, lucky dips and kiddies’ fancy-dress parades. They would sneak into the tents where home-made cakes and pies or lovingly nurtured raspberries awaited the judges’ inspection, and make off with whatever they fancied. Once stuffed to the gills, they would entertain themselves by mocking the well-meaning people who were attempting to raise money for good causes, and the families innocently enjoying themselves. Nigel Walley has a mirthful recollection of one garden fête ‘run by the nuns’ where they spotted a group of monks seated together on a bench. ‘Somehow John got hold of this robe and dressed himself up as a monk. He was sitting with the other monks, talking to them in all these funny words while we were rolling about under the tent, in tucks.’
The portrayal, however, contained one major departure from character. Whereas William, for all his lawlessness, never stoops to intentional larceny, John—egged on, as always, by Pete—became a habitual and dedicated shoplifter. Confectioners in those days would often trustingly display sweets and chocolate on their counters in open boxes or arranged in glass dishes with paper doilies. ‘We’d go into this certain place that was run by a little old lady,’ Nigel Walley remembers. ‘John’d point to things he said he wanted on the top shelf, and all the time he’d be filling his pockets from the counter. He did the same at a shop that sold Dinky Toys in Woolton, opposite the Baths. He’d put a tractor or a little car in his pocket while the bloke was looking the other way. We went back to that same shop later, but this time John hadn’t got his glasses on. He couldn’t understand why his fingers couldn’t get at the Dinky cars. He couldn’t see that the bloke had covered them with a sheet of glass.’
Mimi was generous with pocket money, giving John a weekly allowance of five shillings (the same amount received by William’s pampered arch-foe, Hubert Lane), on condition that he did certain household jobs, such as mowing the lawn. Like William, he shared whatever he had with his ‘boon companions’. He found it impossible to hang on to money, just as he would all his life; nor was he willing to earn a bonus by legitimate means. The one time he ever received physical chastisement from Mimi was when she found he’d stolen some cash from her handbag. ‘I was always taking a little, for soft things like Dinkies,’ he would recall. ‘This day I must have taken too much.’
In contrast with his kind heart and impulsive generosity, he could show a lack of sensitivity and compassion that even roistering Liverpool boys sometimes felt to be going too far. This was not an era of verbal tact toward the physically and mentally handicapped, but John seemed to find all forms of affliction hilarious. His drawings teemed with hideously misshapen, obese or skeletal figures, endowed with too few or too many limbs and covered with warts or sores. A blind person tapping along with a white stick, or a child-on-crutches collection box would reduce him to giggles—a device with which many people try to disguise fear or repugnance. He often entertained his followers with what they called his ‘cripple act’ when he would shamble and cavort like Quasimodo, grinning with the blank-eyed oblivion of a simpleton and holding one hand crookedly 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
