He seems to have made no attempt to contact his son, John Winston Lennon, the abandoned boy who was now broken. He had “lost” his mother at five and now lost her again with appalling finality at 17, and so soon after establishing a profound connection. It was the most tremendous and irreconcilable heartbreak. As he would put it, with customary deafening economy, she had him but he never had her. He was scarred for life, and more embittered, more cynical, more harsh, more uncompromising, more edgy, more volatile than ever. It was also the second death of a close loved-one in three years, because that’s all it was since his dear Uncle George, his father figure, had gone at the age of 52. Life was still dealing John Lennon bad cards. As he would recall in 1980: “[It] was really a hard time for me and it just absolutely made me very, very bitter. The underlying chip on my shoulder I’d had as a youth was really big then. Being a teenager, and rock and roll and sideboards and art school and mother being killed just when I was reestablishing a relationship with her—it was very traumatic for me.”13
Accounts vary about John’s reaction in the first weeks after the accident. Some have him burying his feelings, going quiet; others have him raging and rampaging, drunk and vitriolic. The witnesses are reliable. Everyone agrees that he never talked about it. Internalize would have been the word, had it existed.
It was Mimi’s role in life to have backbone, and to show it: the eldest of the five surviving Stanley sisters, the family matriarch after their mother’s death, John’s surrogate mother from the age of five, the reliable provider for husband, nephew and lodgers. Now the sole caring adult in John’s life, she would continue to do her best and to protect him—but it was going to be a fiery old time, especially as he no longer had the Blomfield Road bolt-hole for days, evenings, weekends. Thunderous verbal exchanges were inevitable. Mimi was going to have this damaged youth undiluted, for good and for ill.
Despite John’s very mixed feelings about Twitchy, they maintained some semblance of a relationship at least a little longer. Dykins got a job in the Viscount restaurant at Liverpool Airport, and when John was looking for summer work, the chance to earn a few quid until college went back, Dykins obliged. For perhaps three or four weeks, probably in August 1958, John did some basic restaurant work here: washing up, waiting at tables, packing sandwiches. It was his first-ever job. As his later friend and assistant Derek Taylor would recall, however,14 when they were passing through the airport on a particularly momentous occasion in 1964, “John advised anyone who would listen not to eat cheese sandwiches at Speke Airport; he said he’d once been employed there as a packer and used to spit in them for spite.”*
Richy Starkey turned 18 on July 7. Free of illness for almost three years, he was in more vigorous health now than at any time. He’d stopped growing at 5ft 8in, neither giant nor shrimp, and he had a bigger-than-normal nose that people weren’t slow to tell him about; yet while his visage was naturally downcast, which meant people thought he was glum, or even miserable, he was generally contented—“I always feel I was born happy,” he would say. He was also a bolshie teenager, full of robust views loudly broadcast. At 16, he’d declared everyone should be shot at 60 to create more space on the planet; he’d since revised that figure—“When I was 18 I thought that thirty was the time to die.”15 It was all about now. Eighteen was only a birthday—not the big coming-of-age marker, which was 21—but it meant legal drinking. Richy celebrated with Roy, knocking ’em back in the city-center pubs where they’d been underage customers; when they shared their deceit with the manageress at the Lisbon, she feigned anger and then they all had a bloody good laugh about it.
It was to Richy’s credit, and his parents’, that he was always prepared to put in a good shift of work to earn his ale money, unlike so many of Dingle’s work-shy men who just lived off the dole. The fruit of his labor at H. Hunt & Son must have been a source of real pride in the family when the Sixth British Empire and Commonwealth Games opened in Cardiff on July 18: there, on television, was the diving board Richy had helped make, the springboard to an English victory, no less. Generally, however, Richy found work at Hunt’s a mixed but mostly dull bag: the bosses got on his nerves and he hated one of the foremen who lorded it over him but knew less about the work than he did. Years later, asked to describe his time here, Richy said only, “I was lugging metal about and chopping it up and things, which got me down.”16 Another thing that got him down was Hunt’s relocation from Windsor Street to Woodend Avenue, Speke. Instead of a short walk to and from the factory, he now had to get up half an hour earlier and catch the 80 bus, passing George Harrison who was heading to school by bus in the other direction. Richy did this four days a week; on the other he’d either go to his day-release class at Riversdale Tech or sag off and head into town, perhaps to take in a Cavern midday session. OK, it was jazz, but it was live music.
Richy began his first long-term relationship about this time. Geraldine McGovern was a dark-haired girl, one year older, who lived in Kent Gardens, midway between the Dingle and town, and worked at an upholsterer’s. They met, she would recall, at a dance in the north end of Liverpool, and went out together when Richy wasn’t playing with the Eddie Clayton group or messing about with Roy. Richy called her Gerry, although his friend Marie Maguire says he introduced her as “Gelatine.” The Roy and Richy double-act frequently became a foursome with Gerry and one other. As Roy remembers, “He’d try to bung me off with one of Gerry’s mates. I’d get the ‘she’s yours’ tactic and would go along with it just to please him.”17
Richy and Gerry’s relationship became serious but has stayed private: not much is known of it. It seems clear there was a religious schism between his family and hers, Protestant versus Roman Catholic, and that this caused some friction; it’s clearer still that the couple’s harmony was undercut by percussion. Gerry had little time for her boyfriend’s interest in the drums, which was bad timing because ever since seeing Johnnie Ray throwing photos from the Adelphi Hotel, Richy had defined his destiny: “I decided, when I was 18, this is my life.”18
Pursuing this, Richy had just bought his first new drum kit, in May, replacing the secondhand set Harry Graves and his Romford relatives generously gave him at Christmas 1956. It was time to upgrade, and Richy had his eye on a £57 Ajax Edgware single-headed kit being sold at Hessy’s. Canny lad that he was, he went to his beloved Grandad Starkey for the loan of a good deposit, £46. Elsie would remember, “If his grandad even refused him a shilling he’d do a war dance. This time his grandad came to see me. ‘Hey, do you know what that bloody Noddler of yours wants?’ ”19
The bloody Noddler knew exactly how to pull his grandad’s strings, and he knew where the old man kept his gambling winnings (when he had any)—in a sock in the wardrobe upstairs at 59 Madryn Street. Richy pledged to pay him back at the rate of £1 a week from his wages. It seemed worth the outlay: Eddie “Clayton” Myles ran a really good group and continued to get the best bookings around. They even played the main dance at the annual Liverpool Show, at Wavertree on July 18, an especially prestigious booking. For Richy Starkey, this was one date where only the full kit would do.
For Paul McCartney and George Harrison, the school year ended seven days later. Boys could bring musical instruments into Liverpool Institute classrooms on the last day of term, and even more so than in 1957 it was guitars, guitars, guitars and a few more guitars besides. Paul and George performed together, plugged into the Elpico.
Asked some years later to describe how he’d been able to help John cope with the loss of Julia, Paul could remember nothing of the period at all. It could be they didn’t see much of each other in the summer of 1958. John was working at the airport, and Paul and George went on holiday together—adventurous for boys of 16 and 15. But Louise Harrison would recall how she encouraged George to visit John at Mendips, “so he wouldn’t be alone with his thoughts.” The awful fact that both his mates had lost their mothers terrified George: the penny dropped that his might die any moment too. “He’d watch
me carefully all the time. I told him not to be so silly, I wasn’t going to die.”20
Paul and John shared tragedies of sudden severity—Paul lost his mother at 14 in 1956 with literally no warning, John lost his at 17 in 1958, the same way. Not that they spoke of it, as Paul says:
We had a bond there that we never talked about—but each of us knew that had happened to the other … I know he was shattered, but at that age you’re not allowed to be devastated, and particularly as young boys, teenage boys, you just shrug it off. That’s a lot of what we did—we had private tears. It’s not that either of us was remotely hardhearted about it, it shattered us, but we knew you had to get on with your life. I’m sure I formed shells and barriers in that period that I’ve got to this day. John certainly did.21
Paul’s hope that Mike Robbins might swing them summer jobs at Butlin’s came to nothing; the plan would anyway have been wrecked by Julia’s death. But Paul and George did have that holiday, their first together, away from their parents. Some of the details are sketchy, but they ended up in a farmhouse bungalow in Harlech, just around the west Wales coast from Pwllheli.† John Brierley, the then 16-year-old son of the farm owners, remembers Paul and George “wandering around”:
They didn’t know us. It was just “Can we stop in your field?” We had quite a bit of land at the back. Mum said that was fine, so they put up this crappy little tent and started camping. It poured with rain during the night, and because their tent was useless they were wet through. So Mum said, “You can’t stop out there, come in.” They stayed in the bungalow, both of them sharing a double bed, and Mum fed and watered them for the duration of their stay.
My abiding memory is Paul playing my crummy acoustic guitar upside down for the left-hander. George also played it, and we had a piano in what we called “the bottom room.” Buddy Holly’s “Think It Over” had just come out and I remember Paul working on it and working on it until he’d completely figured out the piano solo in the middle. My younger brother Bernard loved the way Paul pounded away at the Little Richard songs and kept bothering him to play them again, over and over, and Paul was always happy to oblige.22
Paul remembers a week of playing snooker (there was a half-size table in the same room as the piano) and repeated spins of Elvis’s first LP, Rock ’n’ Roll, which John Brierley owned—those fabulous early Sun recordings burning deeper and deeper into their psyche. George noticed how one of the farm’s Alsatian dogs had an arthritic hind leg, and told it as a joke for years: “Heard the one about the woman who had a dog with no legs? Every morning she’d take it out for a slide.”23
The week’s high point, perhaps, was when Paul and George sat in for a few minutes with Harlech skifflers the Vikings in a performance at the Queens Hotel pub. John Brierley was one of their singer/guitarists, and a couple of the lads stepped down to allow Paul and George use of their guitars. Beyond this, nothing at all is remembered of the occasion, except Paul says he was drunk.24
The GCE O-Level results were good enough for Paul. He failed History, Geography, Scripture and German but passed four: English Language, English Literature, Art and Maths. With the Spanish obtained a year earlier he now had five passes, enough to leave the Removes and progress into the sixth-form (class 6BM2), where he decided to study for two A-Levels, English Literature and Art, to be taken in summer 1960. With George automatically moving from the E stream into the Removes (form RC), the clear school year gap between them was restored.
Paul’s two-year English Lit A-Level course delivered him into the hands of one of the most inspirational figures of his life, the English master Alan Durband. Known to one and all as “Dusty,” he had that innate ability to inspire a classroom collectively and connect with students individually. His age was a strong advantage: he was just 31, only fifteen years older than Paul. He was also a “Lioban” (Liverpool Institute old boy) of humble origins who’d dragged himself up, worked hard and done well, studying under F. R. Leavis at Cambridge. Paul was particularly impressed that Durband had written a story broadcast by the BBC.
Another key was his understanding of what would drive the boys’ interest. To get them stoked up about Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, for instance, he disclosed its many rude bits (“he kissed her naked arse full savorly” and more). In an instant, Paul was “totally turned on to Chaucer.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet followed, and suddenly a little-evident literary interest was awakened in Paul McCartney. He started reading plays—Salome by Oscar Wilde, Camino Real by Tennessee Williams, and works by Shaw, Sheridan and Hardy. Just as he liked to see himself as a songwriter, so now Paul saw himself, in his imagination, as a stage director.25
George, meanwhile, hated the Removes as Paul had done twelve months before. It was demeaning to be lumped in with boys a year younger. As he put it, with characteristic brevity, “I did one day in Mike McCartney’s class and then I thought fuck this and went over the railings.”26 More than ever now, it was fun or nothing. Arthur Kelly recalls a moment in Art class when Stan Reed, for them the only good master, momentarily sat in George’s seat to demonstrate a particular technique. Reed had black sideburns, and George, standing behind him, stage-whispered, “Sing us a song, Sideburns!”—a line from the Elvis film Loving You.
Just as Pete Shotton’s Quarry Bank descent had matched John Lennon’s, so Arthur Kelly was set on the same path as George. This was O-Level year for them both and neither gave a fig about it. Many days they didn’t go in at all, just sagged off. When they did deign to attend, at least one teacher struck an arrangement with them: if they promised not to disrupt the lesson, he’d let them sleep at the back of the class. George’s school uniform became even more outlandish, so extreme even by his own standards that he knew it was “very risky—it felt like all day, every day, I was going to get busted.” One of its many pieces was Twitchy Dykins’ black double-breasted waiter’s waistcoat that John had given him. (How John got it, he didn’t necessarily make clear.) John also gave him powder-blue drainies with turn-ups, which George then dyed black for school. (John and George were already this close.)
And what of John? To everyone, his behavior now seemed worse by degrees. He was the definitively gifted yet troubled young man, the mix that defined him: artistic and sarcastic, literate and cruel, brutal and tender, swift and funny, contemptuous of all pretense. His obsession with deformities, race and religion seemed to have gone up a few notches and absolutely everything was done for laughs, to amuse the audience he always needed. Jeff Mahomed exposed this one day when he jumped on a passing bus while John was pointing at something in a shop window. Jon Hague witnessed it and says, “He was furious at being left alone like that.”
John told none of his college friends straightforwardly about Julia’s death and the news spread sporadically, some learning it right away, others not for ages. Tony Carricker discovered it only when John was skint (his regular state) and looking to cadge money (his regular solution). Tony said to him one day, “Can’t you borrow some money off your mother?” The reply and the succinctness of its delivery shook him rigid. “He just said, ‘Me mother’s dead.’ And I said, ‘Jesus! When did that happen?’ It turned out she’d already been dead a few months. John said, ‘What could I have said to people—“Oh, by the way, me mother’s died”?’ It did explain to me why he was being a lot more cruel than he had been before.“27
The full-color spectrum of John’s personality could usually be witnessed in the pub. The students’ main hangout was Ye Cracke—“the Cracke”—a small and basic bar on Rice Street with a quaint little nook called the War Office where older men sat and drank. Art school student Rod Murray had many a session in the Cracke with John and mostly enjoyed them. “Provided he wasn’t picking on you for something, John was very amusing company. He was an endless source of amusement in the pub—largely at somebody else’s expense, that is, which was only fine so long as it was somebody else.”28
It was in the Cracke that John developed the beginnings of a strong friendship wit
h Stuart Sutcliffe. Four months older than John, Stuart had entered art school a year earlier and was in every respect a different kind of student. He had an outstanding talent, and his strong sole focus was on learning and developing as an artist. Where John was brash, Stuart was meek; where John seemed tough, Stuart was delicate to the point of being weedy. Where John only rarely wore his glasses, Stuart kept them on. They appeared to have nothing in common at all, but then found out, steadily through the 1958–9 academic year, that there was a good friendship. Bill Harry, who introduced them, says, “Stuart was very much the introvert and John was the extrovert, but the two of them became so very, very close—they each had something the other found quite valuable.”29 Pat Jourdan insists John was closer to Jeff Mahomed than to Stuart, but an abiding kinship evolved along similar lines. John was impressed with Stuart’s talent and dedication; also, Stuart had grown up: he’d left home at 16, in 1956, and taken a flat near the college with Rod Murray, his best friend—the first in a series of scarcely furnished or unfurnished rooms they rented in the grand but deteriorating houses by the college, where Liverpool 1 meets Liverpool 8, the haunt of bohemians, great empty rooms with bare floors, high ceilings and no heating. They presently had first-floor rooms at 9 Percy Street, one block behind Hope Street. Rod watched Stuart and John’s friendship develop: “Even though Stuart was physically more slight, I think John looked up to him as a mentor in art, and also in general knowledge about things. And he admired Stuart’s talent as an artist. You couldn’t dislike Stuart—I can’t remember Stuart saying anything nasty about anybody or being malicious, he was a really nice guy. John could be very abrasive and mean, but not Stuart.”
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