Like all eleven-year-old boys on their first day at senior school, he was intimidated. It was 4 September 1952 and the sheer muscularity of over six hundred youths converging on the imposing, Edwardian-style Quarry Bank High School in leafy Harthill Road to begin the new term was daunting. The presence of little girls had softened the atmosphere at his primary school, but a single-sex institution of hormonal teenage boys was going to be something different. ‘I thought, Christ, I’ll have to fight my way through all this lot . . .’ he would often remember. It was reassuring then that Pete was alongside him and that they were even put together in the same class. Rod Davis, the boy he’d met in the choir at St Peter’s, was also there. There was security in numbers.
School, however, would be different from now on. Grammar schools took their ambitions seriously. Quarry Bank might only have been built in 1922, but, with an Old Etonian for a headmaster and a Latin inscription on the school crest, Ex Hoc Metallo Virtutem, which translated as ‘Out of this quarry cometh forth manhood’, its ethos was firmly that of the traditional British public school. Socially structured around the house system, which dated back to when boys actually boarded in different houses on the school premises (no one boarded at Quarry Bank), the curriculum included Latin and French, and the teachers wore gowns to indicate their academic status. Founded as a fee-paying school for Liverpool’s better-off sons, its remit was now to take some of the brightest boys from all backgrounds and to educate as many as possible towards careers in the professions.
Seeing John off on his new bicycle, wearing his new school uniform of black blazer and grey flannels, school cap on his head, with Pete on his bike alongside him, must have pleased Mimi. All her plans were coming to fruition. John was a creative, artistic boy, maybe not so good at maths, but good enough, and he was brilliant at English. He could do anything he wanted if he put his mind to it, she had been told by his previous headmaster. Surely the discipline of a grammar school, where, in those days, most headmasters still believed in the maxim ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’, would dampen his mischievous spirit and he would make the most of this golden opportunity.
She could hardly have been more wrong. Quarry Bank’s traditionalism didn’t suit every boy. And it didn’t fit John Lennon. While his behaviour in his first year was unremarkable, and he still spent most of his free time in his bedroom reading, by his second year, as he moved into his teens and he and Pete became ever more disruptive in class, his concentration began to fail him. ‘For some reason he just hated authority . . . hated being told what to do,’ his friend Rod remembers. Increasingly school became one long joke for him – and, therefore, for Pete, too. Because, whatever John did, Pete always followed.
At around this time the radio comedy programme The Goon Show, which was mainly written by Spike Milligan and starred Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine, Peter Sellers (before he became famous in films) and Milligan himself, had become compulsive listening for young people, and John rarely missed an episode. Having begun in 1951, it was already turning into the most original comedy radio show the BBC ever produced, sowing the seeds that would one day bring forth Monty Python’s Flying Circus. And, with its constant mockery of authority, it was unlike anything ever heard before on the radio.
John loved its absurdist situations and eccentric characters, all of which soon began to influence his own cartoons and jokes. He had already begun to draw in the style of the New Yorker cartoonist James Thurber, whom Mimi much admired, but now a darker side to his humour began to emerge, as he would create grotesque, wart-covered, misshapen creatures, and draw cruel, though recognisable, cartoons of his teachers.
With The Goon Show’s surrealism and catch phrases in his head, and always encouraged by Pete, his antics in class quickly graduated to the downright rebellious. Not surprisingly, he and Pete eventually found themselves summoned to the headmaster’s study for punishment. Even here John couldn’t resist being the comedian. Going in first for a caning, he came out crawling on his knees in what, to the waiting Pete, looked like agony. Only as Pete opened the door to what he thought was the headmaster’s office did he realise that there was a short corridor before a further door led to the headmaster. John had only dropped to his knees after he’d had his punishment. Amused by this, Pete went into the headmaster’s office still smiling at John’s joke, only to get an additional whacking for having the cheek to look amused.
More canings would follow for both of them, but to no avail. The dye was now cast, and for the rest of John’s school life there would be more jokes than application. The contradictions in his personality were plain to see. He knew, as did all the teaching staff, that he was intelligent. His masters mentioned it in his end-of-term reports – when they weren’t criticising his attitude. John, who never lacked for a high opinion of himself, would later tell me: ‘I used to think I must be a genius, but nobody had noticed. So I thought, I’m either a genius or I’m mad. But then I thought, I can’t be mad because nobody has put me away. Therefore, I must be a genius.’
When he wasn’t drawing caricatures, there were some elaborate pranks. On one occasion he persuaded the rest of the class to put white strips of cardboard around their necks, like the dog collars that vicars wore, for the moment the teacher of religious knowledge entered the classroom. The poor man had to be amused, as were the class when, having being asked to write an essay about St Paul’s epiphany on the road to Damascus, John is said to have written: ‘On the road to Damascus a burning pie flew out of the window and hit St Paul between the eyes. When he came to, he was blind forever.’
All this made John the popular boy he wanted to be (and a flaming pie would be an image he would use later in a jokey reference to the origins of the Beatles), but therein lay the problem. As he moved through the school and his confidence and notoriety grew, he was falling increasingly behind with his work.
By the fourth year, when he was fourteen, he and Pete had been moved down to the C stream, the lowest level. This embarrassed him, because he was now with boys whom he considered to be less intelligent than himself. Not that that made him work any harder. Deadpan gags came more easily. When he’d first begun living with Mimi the worst punishment she could inflict on him had been to ignore him. ‘Don’t ’nore me, Mimi,’ he would beg. ‘Don’t ’nore me.’ Now his overactive desire for attention and constant clowning made some teachers’ lives a misery. Not all of them put up with it. One was so angry at the pupil’s insolence that, Rod Davis says, he physically lifted John off the ground by the lapels of his blazer. Others, while secretly amused by his cartoons, despaired of the way this bright boy was wasting his time, their time and his classmates’ time. Perhaps his headmaster summed him up best when he wrote: ‘He has too many of the wrong ambitions and his energy is too often mis-applied.’
Looking back on his schooldays, John would be unrepentant: ‘I was never miserable. I was always having a laugh.’ As to why he was so disruptive, he never offered a serious explanation, other than to blame the school for not recognising his talent. ‘I’ve been proved right. They were wrong and I was right,’ he would say, before admitting, ‘although I think I went a bit wild when I was fourteen.’
It has to be possible that his later reflections were post-rationalisations to cover up his embarrassment at his school failures. It wouldn’t be the only time he would reinterpret events to suit his view of his own history.
Like many boys who become difficult during their teenage years, John was bored with school and hated science and maths – in which in one exam he got just 17 per cent. But there was no questioning his ability in other subjects. He was so good at art he would sometimes do Pete’s art homework as well as his own.
He made, however, no effort to fit into the school regime. ‘He would get what we used to call “black marks” all the time,’ Rod Davis remembers, ‘which would lead to detentions. And then sometimes while he was doing a detention, he’d get another black mark, therefore a double detention, for having given cheek or some such offence. He just didn’t care.’ A school punishment ledger shows that John Lennon was punished for ‘making silly noises during an exam’, on one date, and for ‘bad behaviour’ on the same day. While the following day he got another black mark for ‘sabotage’ (of what it doesn’t say), and yet another for ‘fighting in class’ a little later.
‘He’d realised early on there was nothing anyone could do to him, so he was just going to enjoy himself and make everyone laugh,’ Rod Davis says. ‘He and Pete were once suspended for a week. John loved it. Quite simply, no one could make him do anything he didn’t want to do.’
He was perfectly capable of doing his homework, but only if it interested him. He always enjoyed English. ‘When I was about fourteen they gave us this book in English Literature,’ he liked to recall. ‘It was Chaucer or some guy like him . . . and we all thought it was a gas. . . After that I started to write something on the same lines myself. Just private stuff for friends to laugh at.’
That something turned into ‘The Daily Howl’, his own newspaper which appeared in a series of exercise books, and which he would spend his evenings creating when he should have been doing his schoolwork. Carefully laid out and very neatly written, his newspaper would be filled with little nonsense stories, jokes and poems, all illustrated with cartoons – many depicting several of his teachers in unflattering poses, and even some of those he quite liked.
Where did the obsession with drawing ugly people come from? He never explained. Probably he never knew, though he would continue drawing them into adulthood. For a fourteen-year-old, the skill and observation in the cartoons was clear. At that stage, allied with his mordant sense of humour and interest in current affairs, a career as a cartoonist might not have seemed unlikely.
It wasn’t perhaps surprising that he would be the first of his gang to take up smoking and become interested in sex. Both occurred when he was thirteen, by which time, incidentally, ‘fucking’ had become his most used adjective when among friends. When Mimi discovered an obscene poem that he’d hidden under his pillow, she demanded an explanation. His excuse was that another boy had asked him to write it on his behalf. ‘I’d written it myself, of course,’ he would later admit. ‘I’d seen those poems around, the sort you read to give you a hard on. I wondered who wrote them and thought I’d try one myself.’ Uncle George would have been amused. He knew about boys and wasn’t beyond telling John and Pete the odd mildly dirty joke. But Mimi, brought up solely among girls, would have disapproved. Even if, secretly, she didn’t, she would have pretended she did, because that was the role she’d chosen to play with John.
Had she known about the erotic cartoon that he drew at school and that got passed around the class before it was confiscated, she would have been mortified. It might not matter to John what people thought of him, but it would always matter to Mimi.
So, sex and girls were much on his mind from a very early age. But soon something else of importance happened. From about the age of fourteen he began to see more of his mother. Julia had regularly visited Mendips, but now, accompanied by his older cousin, Stanley, who was down from Scotland, he went to visit her for the first time at her home in Blomfield Road in Garston. Stanley gave him the address.
He was surprised when they got there. He’d had it in his head that Julia lived some distance away, maybe on the other side of Liverpool completely. But her house was in fact only a couple of miles from Mendips, a fifteen-minute walk across Allerton Golf Course. He’d had no idea that she was so close. Did he wonder why she hadn’t invited him to go there earlier? Or why she’d kept the proximity of her home a secret from him? He must have done. It had to have hurt, to see her in her three-bedroomed home with his two half-sisters.
He didn’t tell Mimi where he’d been or who he’d seen on that occasion. It would, he knew, have upset, and possibly worried, his aunt. At first, his further visits to his mother were occasional, but gradually over the next couple of years they would become increasingly frequent.
Visiting Julia wasn’t, however, like going to see a mother, so much as calling in on a big sister. That was how Julia behaved towards him, and he loved it. Although she was now forty, she was still an attractive, young-at-heart, amusing woman, and she made him and his friends welcome – especially when Bobby Dykins, whom John would unkindly refer to as Twitchy because of a nervous tic, was absent. The day she wore a pair of knickers on her head for fun amused all of John’s friends. Mums didn’t do that sort of thing. Like her son, Julia was an attention seeker.
The difference between Mimi and Julia was still as marked as ever. While Mimi was unbending in her determination that John would make something of himself by hard work, Julia remained easy-going. The ‘Julia’ of whom John would later sing on the Beatles’ White Album was a dreamy idealised version of her. She was probably more dizzy than romantic. But he enjoyed being at her house where the rules of Mendips didn’t apply. One school report when he was fifteen shows that he was absent for almost all of the end-of-term exams. ‘He would probably have been sagging off school [playing truant] going round to Julia’s,’ Rod Davis believes.
In effect, John was receiving conflicting messages. It was natural that an adolescent boy would be drawn to the zany, more permissive world of his carefree, modern-thinking mother who had been the first member of his family to get a television. To John she represented the exciting new world he was growing up in. Mimi, who had taken on the serious job of caring for him, was traditional and unbending. His loyalties must have been strained.
But there was something else about Julia that chimed with him, something that Mimi couldn’t offer. While the only music Mimi wanted played in her house belonged in the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Julia liked pop songs. She still liked to sing, too, and even had a record player. When John once suggested to Mimi that perhaps they should get a piano, her reply, knowing the kind of music he would want to play, was instantly discouraging. ‘Oh no, we’re not going down that road, John,’ she said. ‘None of that common sing-song stuff in here.’
As usual John went up to Scotland during the summer of 1955 and was therefore away when Uncle George suddenly collapsed on the stairs. A long-time lodger at Mendips called Michael Fishwick was downstairs with Mimi at the time and immediately called for an ambulance. George died the following day in Sefton General Hospital of a non-alcoholic liver disease. He was fifty-two. John only found out when he got back from Edinburgh.
‘I think John was very shocked by George’s death, but he never showed it,’ Mimi would later say. He may not have shown it to her. Instead he and his cousin Liela went up into his bedroom and giggled hysterically, neither understanding why, but both feeling guilty afterwards. John was hiding his true feelings. The shell that he’d built around his emotions saw to that. He would never let the cracks show in public. Fifteen years later he would remember George to me fondly as ‘a kind man’, before bleakly adding: ‘I’ve had a lot of death in my life.’