Authors: Philip Norman
Mimi, aware that she was being exploited, sometimes took dramatic
measures to call John’s bluff. “They used to keep a little dog called Sally,” Pete Shotton says. “John really thought the world of her. One time, when he’d walked out and gone off to Julia’s, Mimi got rid of Sally, saying there’d be no one left in the house to take her for walks. That was the only time I ever saw John really heartbroken and showing it—when he came home to Menlove Avenue and didn’t find Sally there.”
On the evening of July 15, 1958, Nigel Walley left his house on Vale Road and took the short cut over the stile into Menlove Avenue to call for John. At Mendips, he found Mimi and Julia talking together by the front garden gate. John was not there, they said—he had gone to Julia’s for the whole weekend. Julia, having paid her daily visit to Mimi, was just leaving to catch her bus.
“We’d had a cup of tea together,” Mimi said. “I said, ‘I won’t walk to the bus stop with you tonight.’ ‘All right,’ Julia said, ‘don’t worry. I’ll see you tomorrow.’”
Instead, it was Nigel Walley who walked with John’s mother through the warm twilight down Menlove Avenue toward the big road junction. “Julia was telling me some jokes as we went,” Nigel remembers. “Every time you saw her, she’d have a new one she’d been saving up to tell you.” About two hundred yards from Mimi’s house, they parted. Nigel continued down Menlove Avenue and Julia began to cross the road to her bus stop.
Old tram tracks, concealed by a thin hedgerow, ran down the middle of the busy divided highway. As Julia stepped through the hedge into the southbound lane, a car came suddenly out of the twilight, swerving inward on the steep camber. Nigel Walley, across the road, turned at the scream of brakes to see Julia’s body tossed into the air.
“I can picture it to this day. I always think to myself, ‘If only I’d said just one more sentence to her, just a few words more, it might have saved her.’”
There was first the moment, parodying every film melodrama John had ever seen, when a policeman came to the back door at Springwood and asked if he was Julia’s son. The feeling of farce persisted in the taxi ride with Twitchy to Sefton General Hospital; in the sight of the faces waiting to meet them there. For Julia had died the instant the car had struck her. The shock was too much for Twitchy, who broke down with grief and dread of what would now become of him and his children by Julia.
Even in the moment of her death it must have seemed to John that his mother was someone else’s property.
The anguish was drawn out over several weeks. The car that killed Julia had been driven by an off-duty policeman. Pete Shotton was working on attachment from police college in the local CID department that investigated the case. The inquest exonerated the driver of any blame. “I went as a witness,” Nigel Walley says, “but me being only a boy, they didn’t give much weight to what I’d seen. Mimi took it very hard—shouting at the fellow who’d driven the car; she even threatened him with a walking stick.”
John, in the weeks after Julia’s death, reminded Pete Shotton of the times they would be caned at Quarry Bank, when John used to fight with all his strength not to let out a single sound of pain. Few people knew the extent of his grief since few understood his feeling for the happy, careless woman who had let her life become separate from his. At college, he would sit for hours alone in the big window at the top of the main staircase. Arthur Ballard saw him there once, and noticed that he was crying.
Elsewhere, if his desolation showed, it would be in manic horseplay with his crony Jeff Mohamed, both in college and at the student pub, Ye Cracke, where John was increasingly to be found. “They’d come back to college pissed in the afternoon,” Arthur Ballard says. “I caught John trying to piss into the lift shaft.” Ballard was human enough to understand the reason for such behavior. But even Pete Shotton was shocked to see how much of the time John now spent anesthetized by drink. “I remember getting on a bus once and finding John on the top deck, lying across the backseat, pissed out of his mind. He’d been up there for hours with no idea where he was.”
He had never been short of girlfriends, though few were willing to put up for long with the treatment that was John Lennon’s idea of romance. His drinking, his sarcasm, his unpunctuality at trysts, his callous humor, and most of all, his erratic temper drove each of them to chuck him, not infrequently with the devastating rejoinder that is the speciality of Liverpool girls. “Don’t take it out on me,” one of them screamed back at him, “just because your mother’s dead.”
Not long after Julia’s death his eye fell on Cynthia Powell, an intermediate student in a group slightly ahead of his. Cynthia was a timid, bespectacled girl with flawless white skin. Hitherto, if John had noticed her at all, it was merely to taunt her for living in Hoylake, on the
Cheshire Wirral, where primness and superiority are thought to reign. “No dirty jokes please—it’s Cynthia,” he would say while she blushed, knowing full well that dirty jokes would inevitably follow.
This was the girl who, nevertheless, found herself drawn to John Lennon with a fascination entirely against her neat and cautious nature. She dreaded, yet longed for, the days when John would sit behind her in the lettering class and would pillage the orderly pattern of brushes and rulers she had laid out for the work. She remembers, too, a moment in the lecture hall when she saw another girl stroking John’s hair, and felt within herself a confusion that she afterward realized was jealousy.
They first got talking one day between classes, after some of the students had been testing one another’s eyesight and Cynthia discovered John’s vision to be as poor as hers, despite his refusal to be seen in glasses. Encouraged by this, she took to loitering about the passages in the hope of meeting him. She grew her perm out, dyed her mousy hair blonde, exchanged her usual modest outfit for a white duffel coat and black velvet trousers, and left off her own spectacles, with frequently catastrophic results. The bus she caught each day from Central Station regularly carried her past Hope Street and the college stop and on into Liverpool 8.
John approached her formally at an end-of-term dance at lunchtime in one of the college lecture rooms. Egged on by Jeff Mohamed, he asked her to dance. When he asked her for a date Cynthia blurted out that she was engaged—as was true—to a boy back home in Hoylake. “I didn’t ask you to marry me, did I?” John retorted bitterly.
In the autumn term of 1958, amid much local astonishment, they began going steady. Cynthia’s friends—especially those who had already passed through the John Lennon experience—warned her strongly against it. Equally, in John’s crowd no one could understand his interest in a girl who, although nowadays had somewhat improved in looks, still had nothing in common with John’s ideal woman, Brigitte Bardot. Even George Harrison forgot his usual shyness in John’s company to declare that Cynthia had teeth “like a horse.”
Against these defects there was about her a gentleness, a malleability that John, brought up among frolicsome and strong-willed aunts, had not met in a female before. To please him, she began to dress in short skirts, fishnet stockings, and garter belts that shocked her to her suburban soul as well as giving her much anxiety while she waited for him
outside Lewis’s department store, terrified of being mistaken for a “totty,” or Liverpool tart. For him, each night, she braved the last train out to Hoylake, and its cargo of hooligans and drunks.
She was, even then, terrified of John—of his reckless humor no less than the moods and sudden rages and the ferocity with which he demanded her total obedience. He was so jealous, Cynthia says, he would try to beat up anyone at a party who so much as asked her to dance. He would sit for hours with her in a pub or coffee bar, never letting go her hand. It was as if something stored up in him since Julia’s death could be exorcised, or at least quieted, through her.
Elvis was tamed. The gold-suited figure whose lip had curled on behalf of all British adolescence, whose defiant slouch had altered the posture of a generation, could now be seen meekly seated in a barber’s chair preparatory to serving two years in the United States Army. No one yet quite comprehended how much this repentance was a stroke of incomparable showmanship by his manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, a one-time huckster at fairs and carnivals. It mattered less to America than to Britain, which Elvis had not yet visited, although rumors of his coming were continually rife. As the colonel beamed fatly and Elvis shouldered arms, showing what a decent kid he had been all along, England’s rockers vowed that, in their eyes at least, “the King” would never abdicate.
There was some consolation in an upsurge of British rock ’n’ roll, and a television show capable of reflecting it.
Oh Boy!
every Saturday night, on the solitary commercial channel, filled a dark stage, as in some Miracle play, with major American performers like Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, and their British counterparts, Marty Wilde, Dickie Pride, Duffy Power, Vince Eager, and Tony Sheridan. There was also a new young Elvis copy, Cliff Richard, whose lip unfurled at the corner like a faulty window blind, and whose backing group, the Shadows, featured in equal prominence around him, stepping to and fro with their guitars in unison. Their first single, “Move It,” was the first successful British version of American rock ’n’ roll, with its junglelike bass rhythm and clangorous lead guitar.
Up in Liverpool, the three guitarists in a group still called the Quarry Men watched
Oh Boy!
every Saturday night, crawling close to the television screen when the Shadows came on, to try to see how they did that
stupendous “Move It” intro. Paul worked it out first and at once jumped onto his bike with his guitar to hurry over to John’s.
Of all the original, top-heavy skiffle group, apart from John himself, only one member remained. They still had Colin Hanton, the little upholsterer, and the drum set he was paying thirty-eight-pounds for in installments. They only kept him on, as Colin well knew, for the sake of those drums. Having a drummer, however unsatisfactory, made the difference between a
real
group and three lads just messing around with guitars.
Without Nigel Walley to manage them, their playing was on a haphazard basis, at birthday parties, youth club dances, or social clubs, where they would perform for a pie and a pint of ale. To Colin, the ale was consolation for knowing they only wanted him for his drums, and for the increasingly acid remarks made by Paul about his playing.
Both John and George now owned electric guitars. John’s was a fawn-colored Hofner “Club 40,” semisolid, with two knobs on it, while George had persuaded his mother to help him raise thirty pounds for a Hofner “Futurama,” a cheap version of Buddy Holly’s two-horned Fender Stratocaster. But neither could yet afford to buy an amplifier. Better-equipped groups would usually lend them an amp for their orphan guitar leads. Failing that, George the trainee electrician would wire both his and John’s instruments to the club or dance hall’s public address system.
In mid-1958, they scraped up £5 between them to make a demonstration record that, they hoped, might act as a more impressive calling card than the printed ones in Nigel’s wallet. The “studio” they chose was in the back room of a private house in Kensington, Liverpool, owned by an elderly man named Percy Phillips. The group that day comprised John, Paul, George, Colin Hanton, and a temporary recruit named John Lowe. Their money bought them a two-sided shellac disk, its A-side a cover version of the Crickets’ “That’ll Be the Day” with John singing lead and George rather tinnily reconstructing Buddy Holly’s guitar licks. Of far more individuality was John’s B-side vocal, a country-ish ballad called “In Spite of All the Danger,” written by Paul with help from George. However, the first duty of all amateur groups in 1958 was to mimic hot sounds in the charts. Their Crickets cover was what they played and replayed, to themselves and anyone else who would listen.
Colin Hanton was still with them when a second chance arrived to become Carroll Levis “Discoveries.” Again, with every other local group, they presented themselves at the Empire theater to be auditioned by the great man—this time for his Granada Television talent show. They got through the Liverpool heats, and were booked to appear in the semifinals at the Hippodrome Theater studios in Manchester. Before they left they changed their name to Johnny and the Moondogs.
The journey to Manchester was overshadowed by their general poverty. “We hadn’t worked out in advance how much it would cost us to get there by train and by bus,” Colin Hanton says. “When we got on the bus in Manchester Paul discovered he hadn’t got enough money to get home again. He was panicking all over the place. ‘What am I going to
do
? This is
serious
.’ A bloke stood up at the front to get off and, as he passed Paul, he stuck a two-shilling piece (10p) into his hand. Paul got up and yelled down the bus stairs after him, ‘I love you.’”
Poverty robbed them of their opportunity to appear on television with Carroll Levis’ infant ballerinas and players of musical saws. The final judging, on the strength of the audience applause for each act, did not take place until late evening, after the last bus and train back to Liverpool had gone. Johnny and the Moondogs, with no money to spend on an overnight hotel stay, had to leave before the finale.
Colin Hanton appeared with them as drummer for the last time one Saturday night at the Picton Lane busmen’s social club. They had got the engagement through George Harrison’s father, who acted as MC there and, with Mrs. Harrison, ran a learners’ ballroom dancing class. From George’s dad had come the important news that a local cinema manager would be dropping in to see whether Johnny and the Moondogs were suitable to put on in the interval between his Sunday picture shows.
“At the beginning, that night went really well,” Colin Hanton says. “We were all in a good mood—pulling George’s leg and saying, ‘There’s George’s dad; where’s his bus?’ It was a real stage they’d put us on, with a curtain that came up and down. The curtain got stuck, so we played six numbers, not five, in our first spot. The busmen and clippies were all cheering, they really dug us.