On 6 December 1969 my father was about to enter the Bull Hotel in Long Melford, Suffolk, when he found his way blocked by John and Yoko, who were trying to exit.
To a child – I was twelve at the time – the difference in age between my father and John Lennon was a century or more. It’s odd to think that in reality only twenty years separated them: my father (b.1920) was then forty-nine, and John (b.1940) was twenty-nine. Oddly enough, my mother (b.1930) was, and remains, only three years older than Yoko Ono (b.1933).
My father had come to Suffolk to shoot pigeons. John and Yoko had come to Suffolk to shoot a film, Apotheosis no. 2. It involved a hot-air balloon rising from the square of the pretty medieval village of Lavenham. As often happened in those days when they were the centre of attention, John and Yoko were also being filmed while filming, on this occasion for a BBC documentary called 24 Hours: The World of John and Yoko.
You can still see them on YouTube, checking into the Bull Hotel (as ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’), then having tea in bed, before being driven through the snow from Long Melford to Lavenham in their white Rolls-Royce. Eerily, at the beginning of the film, lying in another hotel bed, John reads out a letter to Yoko:
Dear Mr Lennon,
From information I received while using a Ouiji [sic] Board, I believe that there will be an attempt to assassinate you. The spirit that gave me this information was Brian Epstein.
John and Yoko both laugh.
In Lavenham, they sit on a bench in the snow, staring into space, shrouded in black, with only their eyes and noses visible. A vast orange hot-air balloon floats up into the air as they look on. I remember seeing a video of them and their balloon on the BBC’s Top of the Pops, as a backdrop to their single ‘Instant Karma’.
The doorway of the Bull Hotel was broad enough to allow my father to enter, or John and Yoko to exit, but not all three at the same time. ‘I stood my ground,’ my father told me when he got home. In the end, John and Yoko had moved to one side – but, his triumphant tone implied, not without a struggle.
In those days the generation gap was often an issue, especially when the talk turned to John and Yoko. The older generation knew they were up to no good: they were getting away with something, though no one knew quite what. In the Daily Telegraph, my future father-in-law, Colin Welch (b.1924), attempted to articulate these suspicions. ‘It was as if the Beatles and the young had in common a secret language, incomprehensible to others, yet full of dark meaning to them,’ he wrote years later. For him, by the end of the sixties the Beatles had turned into ‘not just entertainers but avatars and prophets, heroes and philosophers of a whole generation, exemplary in their meretricious triumphs, political posturings, shallow “thinking” and sentimental feeling’. They were, he said, Pied Pipers leading children away from their parents. ‘From this world, certain boring virtues are completely missing. All the military and marital virtues, all fidelity, restraint, thrift, sobriety, taste and discipline, all the virtues associated with work, with the painful acquisition of knowledge, skill and qualifications. All these give place to a decadent self-expression, in which nothing is expressed because nothing has been cultivated to be expressed.’
The great divide was, of course, the Second World War. At the age of nineteen, John was having fun playing skiffle with the Quarrymen in the Casbah. At the same age, my father had enlisted in the Cameron Highlanders. For the next six years he had been off at war, wounded at Normandy, losing his only brother at Salerno. Aged twenty, Colin was also fighting in Normandy: his battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment lost a staggering 170 per cent of its original complement in the ten months after D-Day. ‘The smell of Normandy was death … a gigantic abattoir, bodies everywhere, human, animal, theirs, ours, French, no chance to bury them, all stiff and hideously swollen, covered with white dust or mud, faces blown away or dreadfully distorted, crawling with flies, rotting, giving off that terrible sweet-sour stench which, once smelt, is not forgotten.’
The war affected both men deeply; how could it not? ‘The fragility and preciousness of civil society, as also the dire consequences of its collapse, were indelibly impressed on us,’ wrote Colin. ‘In a way, we all became profoundly conservative, keenly aware of what had been lost, desperately anxious to preserve what remained.’
Aged twenty, John was playing the Cavern, set to embark on a life of phenomenal freedom, singing and playing to adoring audiences all over the world, rewarded with every luxury and indulgence life can offer. Small wonder, then, that so many of those of the war generation viewed his life with a mixture of bemusement, frustration and – who knows? – perhaps a little envy.