unexacting O-level standard. ‘All they were interested in was neatness,’ he would recall. ‘I was never neat. I used to mix all the colours together. We had one question [in the exampaper] which said do a picture of “travel”. I drew a picture of a hunchback with warts all over him.’
Without O-levels, there was no question of entering Quarry Bank’s sixth form. Since John was not prepared to sit his O-levels again, any more than the school was to let him, he had no choice but to leave.
Had he been born a few months earlier than he was, the period after school-leaving would have been amply occupied. Since 1939, all young males had been subject to compulsory military service, a two-year term that, in the mid-fifties, might find them facing Soviet Russia in the West German nuclear front line, fighting terrorists in Malaya, Kenya or Cyprus, or merely drilling pointlessly on some home base like Catterick or Aldershot. But in 1957, National Service was abolished, saving John in the nick of time from ‘square-bashing’ and sergeant majors. The only time he would ever don a khaki uniform or pick up a gun would be when acting in a film.
He himself had given no thought to his career, other than inwardly vowing never to become the doctor or pharmacist or veterinarian that Aunt Mimi hoped he would. ‘I was always thinking I was going to be a famous artist and possibly I’d have to marry a very rich old lady, or man, to look after me while I did my art…I didn’t really know what I wanted to be, apart from ending up as an eccentric millionaire. I had to be a millionaire. If I couldn’t do it without being crooked, then I’d have to be crooked. I was quite prepared to do that—nobody obviously was going to give me money for my paintings—but I was too much of a coward.’
With seafaring men on both sides of his family, it was natural for his thoughts to turn to the docks that still flourished along the Mersey, and the exotic worlds to which they led. One day, he brought home a slightly older boy who had followed Alf Lennon’s calling of ship’s steward and—so it seemed to John—led a life of dazzling glamour and affluence. ‘His hair [was] in a Tony Curtis, they called it, all smoothed down with grease at the sides,’ Mimi remembered. ‘ “Mimi,” John whispered to me in the kitchen, “this boy’s got pots of money. He goes away to sea.” I said, “Well, he’s no captain and he’s no engineer—what is he?” “He waits at table,” John said. “Ha!” I said. “A fine ambition!”’
Shortly afterward she stumbled on a pact between John and Nigel Walley to enrol together in the training course that would have turned them into junior stewards. ‘We just thought we’d like to see the world while we were still young,’ Walley remembers now. However, when John tried to sign up for the course, he was told that at his age he needed consent of a parent or guardian. ‘I was rung up by this place at the Pier Head—some sort of seamen’s employment office,’ Mimi remembered. ‘“We’ve got a young boy named John Lennon here,” they said. “He’s asking to sign up…” “Don’t you even dream of it,” I told them.’
The main enticement of going to sea for young men those days was the unlimited sex it promised. But that, at least, formed no part of John’s motivation. Alone of his circle, he was known to have lost his virginity (with his curvaceous strawberry-blonde steady, Barbara Baker), and since then had racked up a mounting score with several of the Quarrymen’s followers. ‘Going all the way’, it used to be called, though the term is hardly accurate. In those days, the predominant form of contraception was the sheath, not yet known as the condom but as the ‘French letter’ or ‘rubber Johnny’, and sold only at chemists’ and barber shops amid fandangos of furtiveness and embarrassment that few teenage boys were willing to brave. With the girls who would let him, John therefore used the risky method of coitus interruptus. In Liverpool it was known as ‘getting off at Edge Hill’, that being the last station on the northbound railway line where one could alight before the climactic downhill run into the Lime Street terminus.
Since neither he nor Barbara had a place of their own, there was nowhere to do it but al fresco in the woods or on the grounds of some neighbourhood stately home, or even in a churchyard whose monuments at least provided a relief from damp grass. Years later, he would ungallantly remember ‘a night, or should I say a day…when I was fucking my girlfriend on a gravestone and my arse got covered in greenfly. Where are you now, Barbara? That was a good lesson in karma and/or gardening…’
In 1957, Barbara became pregnant. Despite their long physical relationship and his dangerous habit of getting off at Edge Hill, John was not responsible. Tired of sharing him with the Quarrymen’s embryo groupies, she had chucked him some time before and taken up with one of his friends just to spite him. To avoid the inevitable stigma on her family, she was sent away from Liverpool to have the baby, which was then immediately put up for adoption. John, she says, was almost as mortified as if he’d been the father. ‘He was beside himself…He came round to our house and he went crazy…kicking a panel of the fence in and shouting…He was saying “It should have been mine! It should have been mine!” He said he would marry me. It was typical of John, that. He came to see me and said it would be the best thing if we got married. He would stand by me.’ When Barbara returned home, they began going out again, but things were never the same, and the relationship faded away.
As his final term at Quarry Bank drew to a close, John was the only one among his cronies still to have no idea what came next. Rod Davis was to go into the sixth form to do A-level French, Spanish, history and Latin—and ultimately become head boy. Eric Griffiths was to train as a ship’s navigation officer. Even John’s closest partner in crime, Pete Shotton, had astonished his teachers—not to mention his erstwhile fellow shoplifter and dinner-ticket racketeer—by winning a cadetship at the Police Training College in Mather Avenue.
Since John seemed incapable of formulating any ideas, his future had to be discussed over his head by Mimi and the Quarry Bank headmaster, Mr Pobjoy. ‘Pobjoy asked me what I was going to do with him.’ Mimi recalled. ‘I said, “What are you going to do with him. You’ve had him for five years.”’ The only faint ray of hope his headmaster could see was his unquestioned talent for drawing. If his aunt consented, Mr Pobjoy would put John’s name forward to the Liverpool College of Art, with a special letter pleading for his failed O-level in that subject not to count against him. To Mimi, ‘It was better than nothing; at least he was going to college. Then I found out I would have to go on supporting him for the first year, so I thought if I am paying for his education, then he’s going to go there and learn something.’
Mr Pobjoy made it a condition of recommending John to the art college that his behaviour must be impeccable for the rest of that final term. Not until Quarry Bank actually let out and his teachers all corroborated his good conduct would the letter to the college be sent. John duly sat out his remaining classes with an expression of choirboy innocence, and took pains to avoid overt trouble. However, there was one final act of subversion on his conscience that could have ruined everything.
Summer term’s most sacred ritual was the school photograph, a black-and-white portrait of all 200-odd pupils and staff assembled on the lawn outside the main building. Such wide-angle shots required a tripod-mounted camera with a special panoramic lens that took several seconds to make its exposure, panning from one end of the group to the other. According to school folklore, it was possible for a boy on one side to be snapped by the lens, then run to the opposite side and be snapped again as it completed its arc, so appearing in the picture twice. When Quarry Bank mustered in eight ascending black-blazered rows for the 1957 photograph, John decided to put this theory to the test.
Rather than conduct the experiment in person, he nominated his classmate Harry ‘Goosey’ Gooseman. ‘John had heard it was possible, but rather than do it himself, he got me all fired up and raring to go,’ Gooseman remembers. ‘Anyway, you can see what happened when you look at the photograph…When the camera began its slow move, I ducked down and ran along behind the line and popped up in another place. Sadly for me,…I moved too soon, and so you see this empty space where I should have been standing,
