by Peter Brown
Later that afternoon in the one-room flat of a friend of John’s from art college, after a meal of fish and chips eaten from a greasy newspaper, she made love with John for the first time, on a dirty mattress thrown on the floor among paint tins and drying canvases. This flat on Gambier Terrace, where John stayed on and off, became their refuge. From that day on she met him there whenever there was an opportunity. Even when the electricity was cut off for nonpayment and there was no hot water or heat, she would spend the night with him there, curled up in blankets for warmth. They would emerge at dawn in the gray morning light as dirty as two chimney sweeps. Then Cynthia would rush home to Hoylake to take a bath, explaining to her suspicious mother that she had spent the night at a girlfriend’s house, before changing her clothes and rushing off to Liverpool and John again.
She quickly learned that it was no easy chore to be in love with John Lennon. I He was an angry young man with a temperament that often bordered on the nasty. He was irrationally jealous of any man Cynthia as much as looked at but wouldn’t think twice about flirting with another girl right in front of her. Once, when he went so far as to kiss a girl in a pub, Cynthia burst into tears and stormed off. He was full of unreasonable rage, and Cynthia was never certain what would set him off. His temper often turned violent, and she got used to being belted around, but no more than a good swift punch in the arm or having her arm twisted behind her back. Her friends warned her, “You must be out of your mind; he’s a nutcase; you’ll get nothing but trouble from that one; you’re really asking for it, aren’t you?” Cynthia was told that his former girlfriend, Thelma Pickles, had been pleased to get rid of him, she was so afraid of him. But Cynthia said she saw beyond all that anger. She saw into the hurt, helpless little boy underneath the rageful pose. John needed her. He needed her more than anybody had ever needed her in her life. And if she could just make him believe that she would stick with him, through all the bad as well as the good, she could soothe his troubled spirit. So that was her promise, not to desert him as everyone else in his life had deserted him. “I wanted desperately to see him at peace with himself and the world, for his sake and mine.”
4
Liverpool in 1958 was not exactly a fairy tale setting for a romance. It was a grim, gray city with a beleaguered population. Once one of the four busiest port cities in the world with a large influx of Welsh, Irish, and Chinese immigrants, its six hundred acres of deep docks made it a major World War II supply line across the North Atlantic and thus a prime target for Hitler’s bombs. Nightly, a veritable firestorm was unleashed on the city by the Luftwaffe, turning it from a bustling, prosperous terminal into a cratered shell of sandstone from which no phoenix ever rose. The ports were so damaged it was joked that a man could walk across the river Mersey on the hulls of sunken ships. The Lancashire Cotton Mills and the Cotton Exchange, the city’s industrial lifeblood, were all but closed during the war and never revived.
The city was named after the Liver (live-ah) bird, once the symbol of King John, an eagle with a fleur-de-lis in its beak. But when the city was reconstructed by Prince Rupert in 1644, it was thought the Liver bird was a cormorant holding a piece of seaweed. Thus, the humble seagull holding a drooping shred of sea grass became the city’s emblem. A giant Liver bird sculpture sits atop the Royal Liver Insurance building, which faces the Mersey. According to legend, if the bird falls, so does Liverpool, so it is carefully guy wired to the building. Amazingly, the sculpture was one of the few things left standing after the air raids of World War II.
John Winston Lennon was born during one of those massive air raids on October 9, 1940, in a maternity home on Oxford Street. He was the issue of a long, only half-serious romance. His mother, Julia Stanley, had met his father, Fred Lennon, twelve years before in Sefton Park, one of Liverpool’s few oases of green. It was a spring day, and Fred was a dapper sixteen-year-old who had only that week been discharged from the orphanage he grew up in. He was wearing a bowler he had just purchased to impress the girls. When Julia ran into him strolling through the park, she said, “You look silly.”
“You look lovely,” Fred responded, smiling, and sailed his hat off into the lake.
Julia’s parents and four sisters all vehemently disapproved of Fred Lennon, but Julia thought the two of them made a good pair. The third youngest, she was a headstrong, fun-loving girl, with high cheekbones and dark devilish eyes. She loved being naughty and slightly outrageous and having a night out on the town. Fred considered himself a real smoothy and played love songs for her on his banjo at the pub. Julia thought he had the “perfect profile.” Marriage, however, was over a decade in coming, largely because of Freddie’s career as a steward on ocean liners and Julia’s family’s disapproval. One day in December of 1938, as a kind of a prank to rankle Julia’s family, they posted banns at the registry office and got married. They spent the night in a movie theater in celebration, after which Julia went home to her house and Fred to his.
Two years later when John was born, Fred was off at sea. And it was off at sea he stayed. Each month Julia’s only contact with him was a visit to the shipyard office to pick up the support payments he was sending for her and infant John. The payments stopped when John was eighteen months old. After a time Julia wrote Fred off, never expecting to hear from him again. She heard a rumor he had jumped ship; no one knew what had happened to him.
Little John was five years old before his father turned up, his pockets bulging with cash, boasting of an extraordinary adventure. Freddy claimed that he hadn’t deserted ship at all but instead had gotten drunk during a stopover in New York and hadn’t made it back to his ship in time. He was arrested and marched off to a jail cell on Ellis Island, where he was eventually remanded to a Liberty Ship heading for North Africa. His fortunes hadn’t proved much better on the Liberty Ship either, where he was accused of stealing a bottle of liquor from the hold. When the ship finally docked in Africa, Freddie was thrown in jail for three months. Finally allowed to go free, he had made his long journey home, becoming involved in various wartime rackets, mainly selling black-market stockings, and he had made a killing. He reappeared in Liverpool full of easy money for his wife and child.
Julia wasn’t impressed at all with his black-market money and she was hardly waiting for him. In fact, she wanted a divorce. For some time she had been involved with another man whom she wanted to marry. Fred, taken aback, said he would consider it but first asked to take his young son for a few days’ holiday to the seaside resort of Blackpool, so he could get to know him. Freddie said a friend of his had rented a small cottage, and they would stay there. Although Julia disapproved of the idea, she felt she couldn’t refuse Fred a visit with his own son, and she let John go off with his father.
Fred Lennon had no intention of ever returning with John. Fred’s buddy in Blackpool was already making arrangements for the three of them to emigrate to New Zealand, which Fred had been told was a postwar boom town and the right place for a smart man to start his life over again. Fred was prepared to board the next freighter with John and leave England for good. Unexpectedly, Julia appeared at the door, demanding the child back.
“I’m used to John myself now,” he told her, “and I’m going to take him with me.”
“No, you won’t,” Julia said firmly. “Where is he?”
Much to Julia’s surprise, Freddie smiled warmly and came over to where she stood. “I can tell you still really love me,” he said to her. “Why don’t you come with us? We could start again.”
Julia said the idea was preposterous. Freddie was always a dreamer, and he was dreaming now. All she wanted was her son back. Fred insisted that he had just as much right to the boy as she did, and then all hell broke loose, with Julia challenging Fred to just try and take him. In the end they decided to let little John decide whom he wanted to stay with, the way they did in the movies. Freddie called to him, and he came running into the living room. He was pleased and excited to see his mother there.
�
��Are you coming back, Mummy?” he begged. “Are you?”
“No, she’s not,” his father told him. “I’m going to New Zealand, and your momma’s going back to Liverpool. Now, who do you want to go with? Your momma or with me?”
The child’s face darkened. He looked at Julia, paused, then looked at his father and said, “You.”
Freddie beamed proudly. Julia took a step toward her son. “Are you sure, now?” she asked the little boy.
John looked up at her, then at his father, and nodded.
Julia kissed her son good-bye and went out the door as John clung to his father’s knee. She was halfway down the street before she heard the little boy’s screams. “Mummy! Mummy! I’ve changed my mind!” He came scurrying out of the house and up the street after her.
That was the last time Fred Lennon heard of or saw his son until he was told John had become something called a Beatle.
5
It wasn’t really Julia who wanted John back; it was her older sister Mimi Smith. It was Mimi who insisted she take the trip to Blackpool to get the little boy, and Mimi who would take him in and raise him as her own. Married but childless, Mimi fell in love with the baby from the moment she saw him in the maternity home on Oxford Street. She oohed and aahed over him so much that it even made Julia jealous. “Fine thing,” she harrumphed. “All I’ve done is have him.” But motherhood had not dulled Julia’s appetite for the nightlife, and soon after Fred first disappeared, Mimi started caring for the little boy, feeding him, burping him, and diapering him like he was her own.
Mary Elizabeth Smith and her husband George, who owned a local dairy, would become as close to a real mother and father as John would ever know. They lived in a small, spotlessly clean, semidetached house at 251 Menlove Avenue. It was not a poor suburb, as it was often portrayed, but a rather nice, middle-class area called Woolton. “Mendips,” as they grandly nicknamed the plain house, had bay windows, a pretty garden with carefully kept flower beds, and several bedrooms, which were at times rented out to students for extra income. Mimi was a thin but strong woman with dark hair and a warm, rarely seen smile that showed her perfect white teeth. She loved John dearly, but she also believed that sparing the rod spoiled the child and was as tough with him as she tried to be fair. She allowed him to attend the picture show at the cinema only twice a year, and John’s weekly allowance was a frugal five shillings a week until he was fourteen. On Sundays Mimi saw to it that he went to church school for Bible lessons and to sing in the choir. He was confirmed when he was fifteen. If John was ever indulged as a child it was by his kindly Uncle George, whom John turned to for an extra shilling or permission to see the latest Walt Disney movie at the downtown cinema. His favorite treat, however, was going to the carnival held each summer at the Strawberry Fields Salvation Army’s girls’ hostel, which was just around the corner from Mendips.
The golden-haired little boy looked like Julia’s side of the family, and many people mistook John for Mimi’s own son. They were never corrected. Mimi found such great shame in Julia and Fred’s circumstance that she never could bring herself to discuss it with the little boy. When John asked about his real parents, Mimi would tell him that they had fallen out of love and that his father was too heartbroken to face coming back. John soon forgot about Fred. “It was like he was dead,” he said. But not Julia. Julia remained a living specter in John’s life. She would unexpectedly appear at Mendips, demanding warmth and affection from him. Then she would just as suddenly disappear, not to be heard from for months. These visits were like a tornado descending into John’s life, and he was caught in an emotional maelstrom. Finding it impossible to turn his emotions on and off, he soon cut off all feelings for her. During the longer periods of Julia’s absence, John would lull himself into a feeling of security with Mimi and George, only to have Julia appear out of the blue to haunt him again.
Once she arrived at the house on Menlove Avenue in a black coat with the collar turned up around her face, which was bruised and bleeding. She pretended to the little boy that she had been in an accident on the way over to Mendips, but John knew it wasn’t true. He guessed that she had been beaten up, and he hid in the garden so he wouldn’t have to look at her. By the time he was old enough to be immersed in school and friends, Julia stopped coming by altogether. He once asked Mimi where she went, where she lived, but Mimi would only say, “A long, long way away.”
At the Dovedale Primary School he proved himself a precocious student, a quick study, easily bored. He also had a most peculiar, almost mean, sense of humor. While he was never interested in schoolwork, he spent hours at his desk drawing satirical cartoons about his teachers and classmates, along with poems and short stories filled with puns. Mimi encouraged him to read and supplied him with an assortment of books from the local library, including Wind in the Willows, which he relived many times in his head after he read it. He especially loved to read poetry and Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem, “Jabberwocky,” from Through the Looking Glass became his favorite. The rascally twelve-year-old protagonist of the Just William children’s books became his hero.
Yet for all the good Christian upbringing and love and warmth he got at Mendips, John had an angry and rebellious streak. Perhaps it was something he inherited from his mother and father, who were in their own ways very much the same, or perhaps it was just the buried hurt of being abandoned by them. He developed a quick and corrosive wit and would take on any challenger, either verbally or physically. He loved, in particular, to verbally lacerate a helpless victim, the more helpless the better. With his neighborhood chums Ivan Vaughan, Nigel Whalley, and Pete Shotton, John indulged in increasingly dangerous schoolboy pranks. With John as their ringleader, he and the other boys pilfered candy and toys from local shops. As he got older he stole to order and began a brisk business in black-market cigarettes. A favorite feat of daring was to climb a tree and dangle a foot in the path of an oncoming bus and snatch it away just in the nick of time.
By the ripe old age of twelve, when he started at Quarry Bank School, a small, strict grammar school not far from Mendips, he was already a well-known neighborhood ringleader and street terrorist. His mischief ran from simple insubordination to getting caught with an obscene poem, “the sort you read to give yourself a hard-on,” he explained. As he got into his teens he went from bad to worse. A new trick was to torture luckless neighborhood girls by grabbing their panties and pulling them down around their ankles. Once, when John and Pete Shotton were called into the office of the deputy head of the school to be disciplined over one of their many transgressions, John urinated down his pants leg so that it ran all over the office floor. The deputy head was quite astonished to find a yellow puddle on the other side of the desk when the boys left. John went home to Mendips with a wet inseam that day, but the joke was well worth it for the notoriety it gave him with his classmates. By his third year at Quarry Bank, he had been demoted to the bottom of his stream. A teacher wrote on his report, “He’s just wasting other pupils’ time.”
Mimi couldn’t understand it. Although she ruled Mendips with an iron hand, she couldn’t get a grip on John. She ranted and railed at him and threatened him with all sorts of punishments, but it did not seem to have any effect on the boy. What disturbed her the most was his petty pilfering, and when he stole so much money from her purse that she was finally forced to take notice that he was stealing from her on a regular basis, she beat him. Yet nothing seemed to make him stop.
One Monday in June of 1953, John returned to Mendips from a vacation at an aunt’s house to find Mimi sobbing at the kitchen table as she diced carrots. “Mimi, what’s the matter?” John asked, wide-eyed.
“Your Uncle George died,” she told him. George had been taken to the hospital the day before for what they suspected was cirrhosis of the liver and had died unexpectedly of a brain hemorrhage. John was dazed; another parent gone in a flash. As the house quickly began to fill with Mimi and George’s relatives, the impact of it hit him. Emba
rrassed to show public grief, John hid upstairs in his bedroom, where he was shortly joined by his cousin Leila. The two of them sat on the bed and began to laugh. They went on like that, laughing for hours and hours, stifling the noise when any adult came to the door. John felt horribly guilty about the laughter, but he didn’t seem to be able to cry. He was only thirteen and he was getting used to losing people.
Or so he thought.
6
A few months after Uncle George’s death, Julia suddenly reappeared at Mendips. But this time she wasn’t the woman in the black coat with the bleeding face he remembered at all. This was a young, attractive, spirited woman with a sense of humor astonishingly like his. Indeed, Julia was practically as naughty as John. It turned out that she hadn’t been living far, far away at all, as Mimi said, but only a few miles away at Spring Wood. She was living with a waiter John nicknamed “Twitchy” because of a facial tic. Julia had had two daughters with Twitchy, but she was still legally married to Fred.
The more John got to know Julia, the better he liked her. In fact, it would not be inaccurate to say that John fell in love with Julia. She turned out to be much more of a chum than a mother. He raved about her to all his friends and couldn’t wait for her to turn up at Mendips. Together they inspired each other to new heights of mischief. Julia would do anything to impress John and his pals, it seemed. Once, to give the boys a laugh, she walked down the street with her panties tied around her head like a scarf. Another time she had John and Pete Shotton in hysterics by wearing a pair of eyeglass frames without any lenses in them. She would stop to ask the time from a stranger on the street and nonchalantly scratch her eyebrow through the frame, convulsing the boys. When the fashion rage was brightly colored shirts for men—and Mimi had forbidden John to wear one—Julia bought one for him.
