Julia’s four sisters, there certainly was no weeping or wailing, only the most modest, muted signs of heartbreak. On the day after the tragedy, she had been due to go and see her sister Nanny at Rock Ferry. In anticipation of the visit, Nanny already had deck chairs set out in the back garden. She took a photograph of the unused chairs, and kept it always beside her until her own death in 1997.
Mimi herself was never seen to cry, although Nanny’s son, Michael Cadwallader, often saw silent tears well in her eyes. John would put his arms around her and say ‘Don’t worry, Mimi…I love you.’ But such moments were never shared with outsiders. Three days after Julia’s death, Michael Fishwick had had to report back to his RAF station, missing the funeral and not returning until the end of the year. Close though he was to Mimi, she never mentioned the events of 15 July to him, nor did she and John ever discuss them in his presence. In her traumatised state, the secret affair could hardly continue and, by unspoken agreement, she and Fishwick returned to being just friends. His visits became more infrequent until finally he met a young woman his own age and married her in 1960, ensuring that henceforward there would be only one man in Mimi’s life.
The boys who had known John since toddlerhood were all equally at a loss about what to say to him. Pete Shotton, to whose house a distraught Nigel Walley had run immediately after the accident, could manage only a muttered ‘Sorry about your mum, John’ when they met in Woolton the next day. As the last person to speak to Julia, Nigel himself would always harbour a lingering sense of guilt. He felt John blamed him for not saying the extra couple of words that might have stopped her crossing the road when she did.
It was, in fact, a new and still largely untried friend who most empathised with John’s situation. For barely a year had passed since Paul McCartney had lost his own mother to breast cancer. ‘We had these personal tragedies in common, which did create a bond of friendship and understanding between us,’ he says. ‘We were able to talk about it to some degree [and] share thoughts that until then had remained private…These shared confidences formed a strong basis for our continuing friendship and insight into each other’s characters…’ They could even summon up a weak smile at their common predicament after bumping into an acquaintance of Paul’s mother Mary who also knew Julia, but had no idea that either had died. Having first blunderingly enquired of Paul how his mother was, the acquaintance turned to John and asked him the same question.
Most of his fellow art students did not learn what had happened until the college reconvened for its autumn term, two months after Julia’s death. ‘Hey, John,’ a tactless girl shouted to him on registration day, ‘I hear your mother got killed by a car.’ Onlookers thought it must be some kind of sick joke until he nodded and muttered, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ The only person not mortified by the faux pas seemed to be John himself. ‘He didn’t choke on it,’ a witness of the incident remembers. ‘He didn’t register anything. It was like someone had said “You had your hair cut yesterday.”’
The only person let under his guard was Arthur Ballard, the prizefighter-turned-professor in whom he seemed to find some of the reassuringness of his beloved Uncle George. Ballard was always to remember climbing the main college staircase and finding a red-eyed John sprawled miserably on the big window ledge halfway up. ‘I think he cried on Arthur’s shoulder,’ June Furlong, the life model, says.
Unable to express, let alone share, his feelings, he turned to Liverpool’s well-tried method of anaesthetising them. Most afternoons, he would stagger back to college from Ye Cracke with Jeff Mohammed, helplessly drunk and bent on ever more mindless disruption and devilment. One day, Arthur Ballard found him trying to urinate into the lift shaft. The verbal cruelty he had always used on even his best friends seemed to grow still sharper and more unpredictable as he sensed their pity and confusion. ‘He tried it on with me,’ Bill Harry says. ‘But I came from a tough background; I told him to fuck off, and never had any trouble with him again. Stu Sutcliffe was different, though. John admired his work, but he could be terrible to him on a personal level. He’d make fun of Stu for being small…go on and on about it. And Stu never seemed to answer back.’
The truth was that Stu possessed a maturity and wisdom beyond his 18 years. He recognized that the price of John’s friendship were these occasional venomous outbursts, and decided that it was a price worth paying. ‘John came to rely on that,’ says Stu’s sister Pauline. ‘He knew Stuart could be pushed, but that he’d never be pushed away.’
Almost everyone Stu met ended up being drawn or painted by him, and John was a subject he seemed to find more fascinating than most. A pencil sketch, made not long after they first met, shows John hunkered down with what looked like a skiffler’s washboard—faceless yet still unmistakable. In a Sutcliffe oil painting of the student crowd at Ye Cracke, he dominates the foreground, seated on a barstool in a tan sweater and blue (suede?) shoes, clutching his pint glass and staring off into the distance, lost in his own acrid thoughts.
The experience of knowing John also inspired Stu temporarily to forsake paint and charcoal for prose. In late 1958, he began writing a novel whose central character was named John and was very obviously drawn from life: ‘capricious, incalculable and self-centred, yet at the same time…a loyal friend.’ The novel seems never to have had a title, and it petered out after a few hundred words in Stu’s meticulous italic handwriting. The surviving fragments read less like fiction than a case study of its hero and the ‘terrible change’ that comes over him nine months after the narrator meets him. (It was about nine months after Stu first encountered the real-life John that Julia was killed.)
Even Aunt Mimi, never one given to idle praise, would later call Stu the best and truest friend John ever had.
The first steady girlfriend he had found at college was Thelma Pickles, a stunningly attractive Intermediate student whom he met through Helen Anderson. Thelma was as much of an individualist as he, and their relationship, while it lasted, was often stormy. ‘He could be very unbearable at times,’ she would remember. ‘He was never violent…but he would say things to hurt you. I think it was a defence thing, because he could be vulnerable at times [like] when you talked about his mother. He would become almost dreamy and very quiet. It was his weak spot…’ She also had a tongue every bit as sharp as John’s, and did not hesitate to use it if ever he tried to vent his anger and anguish on her. ‘Don’t blame me,’ she once lashed back at him, ‘just because your mother’s dead!’
Of all possible successors to Thelma, Cynthia Powell seemed the least likely. A year older than John, she was a mildly pretty, bespectacled girl of the hard working and conformist type he termed ’spaniels’. At college she had impinged on his notice only as an object of ridicule, thanks to her school head-prefecty Christian name and the fact that she came from Hoylake, on the Cheshire Wirral, a supposed bastion of suburban gentility and decorum. ‘No dirty jokes please, it’s Cynthia,’ he would admonish his cronies sarcastically when she approached, seldom failing to make her blush to the roots of her mousy, permed hair.
She was not in John’s workgroup but in Jeff Mohammed’s and thus shared a classroom with him only in a few general activities such as Lettering. For this detested but unavoidable weekly penance, he would slouch in late, his guitar slung troubadour-style on his back and, somehow, always take the seat immediately behind her. He never had any of the proper equipment, so would have to borrow her meticulously kept pencils and brushes, usually going off with them afterwards and not bothering to return them.
Cynthia’s future at this point seemed as neatly laid out as the materials on her desk. She had a steady boyfriend named Barry, whom she planned to marry before pursuing her chosen career of art teacher. She was not in the market for any new beau, least of all one whose ways were so turbulently and distastefully unlike the ways of Hoylake. Yet John had a powerful, half-fearful fascination for her. On a couple of occasions, she watched him perch on a desk and play his guitar, and was stirred by the very different look this brought to the usually
