Bank’s syllabus, and Mimi could not be interrogated on such matters in other than the most general and theoretical terms. Like most of his generation, John had to piece together the facts of life from dirty jokes and diagrams on the walls of public urinals.
It was still almost universally believed that masturbation called down the same heavenly wrath as the Old Testament’s Onan suffered for ’letting his seed fall on the ground’. Boys who wanked, tossed off, beat their meat, pulled their wire or gave themselves a hand-shandy did so at the supposed risk of going blind, growing hair on their palms or being permanently shut away in psychiatric institutions. As a Boy Scout, John had been bombarded with such warnings via Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys manual, with its puzzling metaphors about rutting stags and its advocacy of fresh air and exercise to stave off any inclination to ‘beastliness’.
He became a dedicated wanker, undeterred by any fear of heavenly retribution and, as always, in company with his arch-crony, Pete Shotton. It was a further symbol of their closeness, without any suggestion of the homoerotic; they wanked together as an act of Shennon-Lotton rebellion, defiance and mutual showing off. John proved to have a particular aptitude and near-inexhaustible stamina. Once, he accepted Pete’s challenge to do it ten times in a single day, the prize being unlimited access to the Shotton family’s television set. He failed to reach this target, but only by one go.
The wider circle of Lennon followers would also sociably wank all together, stimulating themselves and their neighbours by shouting out the names of sex goddesses like Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida. Sometimes at the critical moment, John would call out ‘Winston Churchill’ or ‘Frank Sinatra,’ and the onanists would collapse into giggles.
As if there were not enough going on in 1955 already, the nation’s wankers were presented with a riveting alternative to ‘tit’ magazines like Spick and Razzle. Twenty-one-year-old Brigitte Bardot, already well known to French cinemagoers, made her first English-language film, Doctor at Sea, and changed every preconception of sexuality on the big screen. Whereas conventional Hollywood sirens like Ava Gardner or Lana Turner were remote, untouchable and curiously ageless, Bardot seemed hardly more than a schoolgirl with her startled-doe eyes and dimpled chin, as dewily innocent as she was knowingly voluptuous. Her very nickname, ‘the sex kitten’, was almost enough to bring her overheated young admirers to spontaneous orgasm. John became obsessed by her, cutting her picture from a magazine and pasting it to the ceiling above his bed.
He was by now intensely aware of the strong sexual atmosphere between his mother and ‘Twitchy’ Dykins at 1 Blomfield Road. Once, as he would always remember, he accidentally walked into their bedroom while Julia was fellating Dykins, half-covered by a sheet. As his hormones began to run riot, he also became increasingly conscious of Julia’s physical allure, the more so as she had always treated him in a jokey, flirtatious manner, more like a sportive young aunt. One afternoon when he was playing truant from Quarry Bank as usual, he lay on her bed next to her as she took an afternoon rest. He never forgot what she was wearing: ‘a black Angora short-sleeved round-necked sweater, not too fluffy, maybe it was that other stuff, Cashmere, soft wool anyway, and, I believe, that tight dark green and yellow mottled skirt’. As they lay there, he accidentally touched Julia’s breast, ‘and I was wondering if I should do anything else. It was a strange moment because at the time I had the hots, as they say, for a rather lower-class female who lived on the opposite side of the road. I always think I should have done it. Presumably she would have allowed it.’
Early that summer, Ivy Vaughan asked one of his classmates at Liverpool Institute, a lanky, humorous boy named Len Garry, to come and meet John and the Woolton gang. Len agreed but did not rush to take up the invitation: he had several more-pressing social commitments, among them cinema-going with another Institute classmate, Paul McCartney.
Finally Len made the trip from his Wavertree home on the bicycle he’d been given for passing his Eleven Plus. He met Ivy walking along Vale Road toward Menlove Avenue in a little group that also included John. He recalls: ‘John had a piece of paper in his hand that he was showing to the others. When Ivan introduced us, he didn’t say much, just gave me a look. I got the feeling I was being weighed up.’
The newcomer quickly proved himself made of the right stuff. He was an aficionado of William books and the Goons, he knew the words to Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine songs and, as a bonus, could reproduce the hideously drawn-out jungle cry of Tarzan the Ape Man as portrayed in films by Johnny Weissmuller. It wasn’t long before John felt sufficiently at ease with Len to show him the piece of paper that the others had been passing around and chortling over. This was not just a drawing but a miniature newspaper singlehandedly written and illustrated by John. Entitled ‘The Daily Howl’, it consisted of gossip-style paragraphs, single cartoons and comic strips, hand-lettered, ruled and coloured with all their creator’s usual extra-curricular care. There were running jokes about celebrities like Fred Emney, Stanley Unwin and the bald TV magician David Nixon; about John’s own middle name of Winston; and, inevitably, about black people and ‘cripples’, some phrases being phoneticised (‘Thik ik unk’, for instance, meaning ‘This is a’) to signify a speech impediment. Despite all the work that went into each edition, their author kept ‘Daily Howls’ coming at the rate of several per week.
Len Garry joined the group of bike riders that John led like a squadron of cavalry around the quiet Woolton lanes, looking for girls to chat up. Almost invariably, this feminine quarry would also be out with bikes and also dressed in school uniforms but, by the game’s unwritten rules, walking and pushing rather than riding. Between cavalry and giggling infantry, sooner or later, the right signal would be sent and answered, and the varicoloured school blazers and bikes would come together.
John was not good-looking in any conventional sense, with his slanted eyes and plunging beak of a nose. Yet he invariably proved the most successful, both in the chatting-up ritual and the encounters that followed. When the riders compared notes later, it would be John who described feeling right inside a heavily engineered brassiere, or sniffed ostentatiously at the lingering aroma of what Liverpudlians call finger pie. Part of every almost adolescent boy’s experience is to see small girls he has hitherto ignored or taken for granted suddenly grow into desirable young women. For John this happened spectacularly with Barbara Baker, whom he had known since they were toddlers together, seated on the floor at Mrs Clark’s Sunday school. For years, he had regarded Barbara with the contempt that William Brown always showed to little girls, but at the age of 15, she’d suddenly metamorphosed into a curvaceous strawberry blonde who deliberately modelled her hair and clothes on cinema sex sirens—and even had the mystic initials BB. In Reynolds Park one day, she and a girlfriend found themselves being followed in a meaning way by John and Len Garry. On this occasion, it was Len who first made the running. ‘Len asked me to join him on a walk a few nights later, and I said “Yes,”‘ she remembers. ‘But I could see John watching me.’
She soon dropped Len and became John’s first ‘steady’ girlfriend, as the sedate fifties phrase had it. In many ways, theirs was a relationship straight out of Enid Blyton: they would go for bike rides together or ice-skating at the Silver Blades rink in central Liverpool. Barbara got to know John’s mother and Aunt Mimi, and was often taken home to tea at Mendips, joining Michael Fishwick, and any aunts and cousins who were visiting, around the lavishly spread gateleg table. She remembers John as a romantic, naturally chivalrous boy, who bombarded her with love notes and drawings, was definitely not a Teddy Boy, and, thanks to Mimi’s hard verbal schooling, still did not speak with a Scouse accent.
As a rule, the courtship rituals went on without adult interference. A line was crossed one day, however, when a group including John, Barbara and David Ashton went for a petting session into the field owned by St Peter’s Church—i.e., virtually hallowed ground. Because John and Ashton were still members of the 3rd Allerton Scout Troop, both were summoned to explain their sacrilege before an official Scouts board of inquiry. ‘My Dad had been a scoutmaster, so the court was held at my house,’ Ashton remembers. ‘As I was coming home
