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 saddlebag. True to the spirit of their extended family, John’s cousin Liela could not be allowed to feel left out, so Mimi and George bought her a new bicycle at the same time.
John’s achievement gave him the pick of several excellent grammar schools in central and suburban Liverpool. Mimi’s choice was Quarry Bank High School in Harthill Road, an easy bicycle ride from Mendips via the path across Calderstones Park. He started there at the beginning of the 1952 autumn term, shortly before his twelfth birthday.
Quarry Bank’s designation as a ‘high school’ implied no affinity with the mixed-gender informality of American high schools but rather was a subtle hint of elevation above other boys’ grammar schools in the vicinity. Founded in 1922, it took its name from the local sandstone quarries that had begotten so many major Liverpool buildings, including the Anglican cathedral. The school itself was housed in an ornately neo-Gothic sandstone mansion, built in 1867 by a wealthy merchant named John Bland. Although part of the state system, and charging no fees, it modelled itself on a public school like Harrow or Winchester, with black-gowned masters, a house system and a general air of tradition and antiquity.
Tuition might be gratis, but each pupil’s family was expected to supply the compulsory uniform of black blazer and cap and black-and-gold striped tie. The blazer was an especially natty affair, with its breast-pocket badge of a gold stag’s head above the Latin motto Ex Hoc Metallo Virtutem—‘from this rough metal [comes forth] manhood.’ The cuffs were decorated like those of a junior naval officer, with a raised black stripe surmounted by a ring of gold stags’ heads. The blazers were costly enough when bought from the school’s official outfitter, Wareings in Smithdown Road. Mimi, however, preferred to have John’s made to measure by his Uncle George’s tailor for the whopping sum of £12 apiece, nearly as much as George had paid for the new bike. No real parents could have been more dotingly insistent that he had the best of everything.
The start of a new academic epoch scattered the Woolton Outlaws in widely different directions. Academically gifted and hardworking Ivy Vaughan had won a place at Liverpool Institute, the most renowned of the inner city’s grammar schools. Nigel Walley was bound for the Bluecoat School, near Penny Lane, the former Bluecoat Hospital where Alf Lennon had been a pupil 30 years earlier. But happily for John, his arch crony Pete Shotton also had got into Quarry Bank. ‘We went through it like Siamese twins,’ Pete would remember. ‘We started together in our first year at the top and gradually sank together into the sub-basement.’
John himself later maintained that he arrived at grammar school determined to do well and be a credit to Mimi and Uncle George. All such good resolutions melted away at his first sight of his new classmates, tearing and whooping around Quarry Bank’s playground. ‘I thought “Christ, I’ll have to fight my way through this lot,” having just made it at Dovedale. There were some real heavies there. The first fight I got in, I lost. I lost my nerve when I really got hurt. If there was a bit of blood, then you packed it in. After that, if I thought someone could punch harder than me, I said, “OK, we’ll have wrestling instead.”…I was aggressive because I wanted to be popular. I wanted to be the leader. It seemed more attractive than just being one of the toffees. I wanted everyone to do what I told them to do, to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss.’
Quarry Bank’s founding head, R F Bailey, had been an outstanding educator with a special talent for spotting the potential in offbeat or eccentric boys. He had retired five years before John’s arrival, handing over the reins to an austere ex-serviceman and Methodist lay preacher named Ernest R Taylor. Quarry Bank pupils of ‘Ernie’ Taylor’s era remember him as an unapproachable figure, striding along corridors lost in aloof, headmasterly thought, his black
