of his favourite tricks was to select a pub or workmen’s ‘caff’ where every face was uncompromisingly white and fling open its door with a ringingly authoritative cry of ‘Right! All foreigners out of here!’
Despite their age difference, the pairing of John and Jeff Mohammed had something inevitable about it. They belonged to different work groups and so spent most of each day apart, but wherever their paths crossed, John’s manic laughter instantly redoubled. Although Jeff’s greater worldliness and experience were part of the attraction for him, they always treated each other as equals. They had the same fondness for books, poetry and language, the same interest in mildly occult things like Ouija boards and palmistry, the same unerring eye for human oddity, the same inexhaustible compulsion to make fun. Even their mutually inimical musical tastes, trad versus rock, caused no serious disagreement. Jeff never managed to turn John on to Satchmo Armstrong or Kid Ory, just as he himself remained impervious to the magic of Elvis and Buddy Holly. However, he possessed a large collection of jazz record albums, in those days almost the only kind to feature contemporary design and typography on their covers. John grudgingly conceded there was something in the look, if not the sound.
The two were most commonly to be found at Ye Cracke, an eccentric little mock-Tudor pub in Rice Street, just a couple of blocks from college, where both students and teaching staff would democratically forgather. Its art-college clientele favoured the larger rear bar whose walls displayed two outsized etchings—one of Marshal Blucher greeting the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, the other of Horatio Nelson’s death at Trafalgar. John’s and Jeff’s favourite roost was a bench below the Nelson scene, between side panels of British sailors watching their admiral’s last moments. The horrified look on every face in the composition led John to retitle it Who Farted?
This being the north, the beer came in pints, in straight glasses rather than tankards, wherein to leave the slightest drop cast doubt on the drinker’s very manhood. Army life had made Jeff a seasoned drinker whose affability never faltered as the score of pints mounted. But John, then and always, needed little more than the proverbial ‘sniff of the barmaid’s apron’ to put him under the influence. And a drunk John, then and always, turned into an addle-brained kamikaze, ready to insult anyone and assault anyone. ‘I always got a little violent on drink,’ he would admit. ‘[Jeff] was like a bodyguard for me. So whenever I got into some controversy, he’d ease me out of it.’
Occasionally they made up a threesome with Jeff’s girlfriend, Ann Mason, whose sharp eye had noted every wrong detail of John’s Registration Day outfit and who—like other females on their course—regarded him with an uneasy mixture of distaste and awe. Ann says that while Jeff’s pranks always had an underlying kindliness, John seemed to recognise no boundaries of conscience or compassion in his urge to flout authority and do down the softies and drips. On the annual Panto Day, for instance, when the college joined with Liverpool University to raise money for charity, he would simply pocket the contents of the collection tin he had taken through the streets. He also continued his boyhood habit of shoplifting, even though the risks in central Liverpool were far greater than in rural Woolton. One of his habitual targets was an art-materials shop run by a pair of old ladies, both too shortsighted to realise how many of their brushes, pencils and sketchbooks he was filching.
One day, when John and Ann sat near each other in a lecture, she began idly sketching him. Later, in one of the painting rooms, she developed her sketch into the first full-length portrait she had ever done—and the only one she ever would. John sat for her for a couple of hours with surprising patience, though, as she recalls, ‘I had to pretend I wasn’t painting him and he pretended he wasn’t posing.’ The portrait shows him seated on a turned-round wooden chair with his arms folded tightly over its back and his knees thrust out on either side; he is wearing a dark jacket and olive suede shoes (bought on a grant-spending spree with Jeff) and his usually hidden Buddy Holly glasses. The effect is of barely contained energy: a figure coiled to spring, or maybe run for cover.
John may have learned next to nothing from his college teachers. But that does not mean he learned nothing at college. His friendship with Stuart Sutcliffe amounted to a one-man degree course, even if largely conducted in student flats and smoky bar-parlours. And here, no scholarship boy with a virtuous cargo of O-level passes could have been more attentive, receptive or enthralled.
Stu was the same age as John but had arrived at college from Prescot Grammar School a year earlier. He was far and away the most talented student in the place, gifted with a seemingly effortless mastery of every medium he touched, drawing, painting or sculpture. He was also phenomenally energetic, filling canvases and sketchbooks with work of a maturity that dazzled his instructors, then hurtling on to the next thing almost before they had time to articulate their praise. Small and feminine featured, with luxuriant backswept hair, he was often likened to the short-lived screen idol James Dean—a comparison that would prove all too sadly appropriate. In fact, the dark glasses he often wore denoted a more obscure role-model, Zbigniew Cybulski, protégé of the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda and sometimes called ‘the James Dean of Poland’.
Stu functioned on an altogether more grown-up level than John. Though his Scottish middle-class parents lived in Liverpool, he had a flat in Percy Street, which he shared with his close friend Rod Murray. Recognising him to be in a class of his own, the college let him do much of his work there also. His main tutor, the tolerant Arthur Ballard, would drop by regularly to see him, bringing half a bottle of whisky for refreshment, but seldom made any effort to control the roaring flood of his creativity.
John met Stu through Bill Harry, another fellow student destined to play a significant role in his later life. Bill, in fact, was the archetypal working-class hero, having fought his way to college from an impoverished childhood in Parliament Street, near the docks, where wartime bomb rubble remained still uncleared and terrifying mobs with names like the Chain Gang and the Peanut Gang ruled the neighbourhood. A compulsive reader, writer, cartoonist, organiser and entrepreneur, he found few kindred spirits apart from Stu and Rod Murray in a student body he considered largely time-wasting ‘dilettanti’.
Bill discovered that John shared his own interest in writing and, at Ye Cracke one lunchtime, asked to read some of his work. Diffidently murmuring something about ‘a poem’, John pulled two bedraggled sheets of paper from his jeans pocket and handed them over. Bill expected the standard teenage knock-off of Byron or the American Beats; instead, he found himself reading a Goonish pastiche of The Archers, BBC radio’s agricultural drama, that made him guffaw out loud.
John, as it happened, already knew about Stu Sutcliffe, and was more than happy for Bill Harry to introduce them formally at Ye Cracke, under the distracted gaze of the dying Lord Nelson. ‘If John ever thought anything or anyone was really good,’ Rod Murray remembers, ‘he turned into a completely different person. Much quieter, more thoughtful…ready to talk seriously about serious things. And he thought Stu was really good.’
The admiration was by no means all on one side. Along with other diverse subject matter, Stu also enjoyed cartooning, as did Bill Harry. To John’s amazement, both of them heaped praise on his drawings for technique as well as wit, comparing him with Saul Steinberg, whose whimsical, perspectiveless covers for The New Yorker magazine they had found in the college library. Suddenly, John was being taken seriously by the most talented artist on his horizon.
Stu’s sister Pauline—in later life a respected therapist—thinks it hard to overrate the redemptive effect of this. ‘John had a desperate quest for a certain kind of nurturing. Stuart’s nurturing was unconditional…He loved him. And John recognised that Stuart believed in him…that he believed he wasn’t just a mad, destructive anarchist, but was somebody of worth. Stuart freed John’s own creative spirit.’
John in effect led a double life at college, reflecting the two utterly different sides of his personality. For every drunken foray with Jeff Mohammed there would be a long, serious talk with Stu Sutcliffe,
