I had seen in John that I could understand.’
Her feelings clicked into focus one day in the college lecture theatre when she was seated a few places away from John, and saw the attractive Helen Anderson suddenly start to stroke his hair. There was nothing between Helen and him; she was simply bewailing his greasy Teddy Boy locks and urging him to have them shampooed and cut shorter. Nonetheless, Cynthia felt a sudden, irrational surge of jealousy.
From that moment, rather than avoiding John’s eye, she set out to catch it. She grew her hair down to her shoulders in the fashionable bohemian manner and exchanged her mumsy woollens and tweed skirt for the white duffle jacket and black velvet slacks favoured by college sirens like Thelma Pickles. She also gave up wearing the glasses, which, as she thought, most condemned her as a swot and spaniel to John. Since she was extremely shortsighted and could not afford contact lenses, then still an expensive novelty, this aspect of her makeover brought its problems. In the morning, her bus regularly carried her far beyond the art college stop when she failed to recognise it in time.
One day she and John were in a group of students who began a game of testing one another’s vision. To her amazement, Cynthia discovered that he was as myopic as she was, and equally self-conscious about wearing glasses. He in turn discovered that, only a year earlier, Cynthia’s father had died of lung cancer, leaving her as devastated as he now was himself. Better than all the clear-sighted people around, this shy, prim Hoylake girl knew just what he was feeling.
The end of the 1958 winter term was celebrated by a midday gettogether in one of the lecture rooms. A gramophone was playing, and, egged on by Jeff Mohammed, John asked Cynthia to dance. Thrown into confusion by this unexpected move, she blurted out that she was engaged to a fellow in Hoylake. ‘I didn’t ask you to fuckin’ marry me, did I?’ John snapped back. After the party came a drinking session at Ye Cracke, which John persuaded the usually abstemious Cynthia to join. They ended up spending the rest of the afternoon alone together at Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray’s flat in Percy Street.
Among their fellow students—the female ones at least—there was no doubt as to who had the better bargain. ‘Cynthia was a catch for John,’ Ann Mason says. ‘She could have had anyone she wanted. She had lovely eyes and the most beautiful pale skin. And she was the sweetest, nicest person you could ever meet.’
She was different indeed from the strong-willed, caustic females who had hitherto dominated John’s life. She was soft, gentle and tranquil (although secretly prone to bouts of paralysing nerves). She also possessed the notions of male superiority shared by many young women in the late fifties, which could have won them unconditional employment in a geisha house. She deferred to John in everything, never questioning or arguing, always complying with what she later called his ‘rampant’ demand for sex. Normally he might quickly have tired of such a companion, but in the desolation of Julia’s death, Cynthia answered his deepest unspoken needs. ‘I think [she] offered him a kind of mother thing,’ the former Thelma Pickles says. ‘She was so warm and gentle. She was the kind of person anyone would have been proud to have as a mother.’
The two began dating in a manner reflecting their suburban backgrounds as much as their bohemian student life. Since both of them still lived at home, they had nowhere to be together in private, unless Stu and Rod Murray both tactfully absented themselves from the Percy Street flat. Their trysts therefore consisted mainly of cinema-going or sitting for hour after hour in a coffee bar, holding hands over their foam-flecked glass cups. At John’s insistence, Cynthia stayed in town until the latest possible moment each night, catching the last train from Lime Street to Hoylake amid home-going drunks and hooligans ‘[for] the longest 20 minutes of my life,’ then walking unaccompanied through the dark streets to her home.
Everything he asked, she gave unstintingly. Her eight-shilling (40p) daily subsistence allowance kept him in coffees, fish-and-chips, Capstan Full-Strength cigarettes and replacement guitar strings. She did his college work for him when he could not be bothered to finish—or begin—it and neglected her own whenever he demanded attention. To please him, she changed her whole appearance into one hopefully resembling his ultimate fantasy woman, Brigitte Bardot, dyeing her hair blonde and wearing tight skirts and fishnet stockings with garter belts. Waiting for John in such attire at their usual rendezvous, outside Lewis’s department store, she would dread being mistaken for a tart.
On bus journeys he would choose a seat behind some balding elderly passenger and softly tickle the fluff on the man’s cranium, withdrawing his hand and assuming an expression of blank innocence each time his victim turned around. Then the laughter would fade in Cynthia’s throat as he sighted some human infirmity more pitiable than baldness—a blind beggar or mentally handicapped child—and instantly went into his own pitiless-seeming over-parody, crooking his back, freezing his face into an idiot stare, inverting his hands into claws. ‘John had a great need to shock and disgust people, and certainly shocked me on these occasions,’ she would remember. ‘Of course when his mates were around, he was the star turn.’
The real terror of illness and suffering that underlay this apparent callousness showed itself one afternoon when the two were alone together in Stu Sutcliffe’s bedroom-studio at Percy Street and Cynthia suddenly collapsed with excruciating stomach pains. John’s idea of tender loving care was to rush her to Lime Street and put her on a train to travel back to Hoylake on her own. When a grumbling appendix was diagnosed, he could not bring himself to visit her in hospital without bringing George Harrison along for support. Having pined for days to spend time alone with him, Cynthia produced a rare show of temperament by bursting into tears. Love was still new enough for John to bundle the bewildered George out of the ward and spend the rest of his visit assiduously making amends to her.
As ‘going out with’ moved into its next phrase, ‘going steady’, the time came for John to introduce Cynthia to Mimi. Woolton and Hoylake being spiritually so close, and Cyn being of so obviously superior a class to other art-school girls, he expected only wholehearted approval. And certainly, the welcome at Mendips seemed warm—expressed in the usual Mimi fashion of an enormous egg-and-chips high tea with mounds of bread and butter, served on the morning room’s gateleg table. Unfortunately, the hand that hospitably poured the tea had also marked Cyn’s card in terms that nothing she could say or do hereafter would alter. In her, Mimi saw a rival for John’s affections who, even at this early stage, was unscrupulously dedicated to taking him away for ever.
Cynthia’s widowed mother, Lilian, was the opposite of Mimi: a small, hyperactive woman who cleaned their Hoylake home only at long intervals and spent much of her time buying secondhand furniture and knick-knacks at local auction sales. With her two sons now grown up and living away from home, she focused her whole attention on Cyn, much as Mimi did on John, and had definite ideas about which young men were and were not good enough for her. When Cyn first brought John home to tea, she dreaded the sharp maternal comparisons that were likely to be made with his predecessor, the so-eligible, so-Hoylake Barry. However, John was polite and respectful, as he could be when he liked, and the occasion went better than Cyn had dared to hope.
Under the rules of going steady, the next step was for Lilian and Mimi to meet. Mimi accepted an invitation to tea at the Powell home, turning up in her usual immaculate coat, hat and gloves, and, for a time, all went well. Then, in her abrupt fashion, she began complaining to Lilian that Cyn was distracting John from his college work. Lilian naturally defended Cyn, and in no time a furious argument was raging between the two women. John, who had a horror of domestic confrontation—no doubt implanted by all he had seen as a small boy—simply jumped up and bolted from the house. Cyn found him cowering at the end of the street, so she later said, ‘in tears’.
This whiff of adversity took the relationship to a level for which Cyn had been totally unprepared. John became obsessed with her, sometimes filling an entire letter with declarations of his love, bewailing their midnight farewells at Lime Street station until she agreed to throw away her last Hoylake scruples and spend whole nights
