But another argument, equally strong, can be made in favour of Aunt Mimi. After all, she lies in the grand tradition of Great British Aunts: bossy, demanding and fearsome, unabashed upholders of the social fabric, capable of reducing even the most recalcitrant nephews to jelly. ‘It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At core, they are all alike,’ observes Bertie Wooster. ‘Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.’
Pete Shotton recalled John’s childhood obsession with Richmal Crompton’s Just William books, which are choc-a-bloc with aunts, most of them forbidding, in both senses of the word. They range from Aunt Jane, ‘tall and prim and what she called “house proud”’, to Great-Aunt Augusta, who lives by the adage ‘There’s no joy like the joy of duty done.’ With his pals Ivan Vaughan and Nigel Whalley in tow, John led a gang called the Outlaws, just like William’s. ‘I used to live Alice and Just William,’ he recalled. ‘I wrote my own William stories, with me doing all the things … After I’d read a book, I’d relive it all again. That was one reason why I wanted to be the gang leader at school. I’d want them all to play the games that I wanted them to play, the ones I’d just been reading.’
His Outlaws would get up to all sorts of pranks and japes, some playful, others verging on the delinquent. They would pinch apples, ride up Penny Lane on the bumpers of the tram cars, spend money intended for the church collection on bubblegum, smash street lamps with stones, shoplift cigarettes, and pull girls’ knickers down. At the school fête, John and Pete set up a dartboard decorated with their teachers’ faces. On another occasion, they made dog collars out of old cereal packets and dressed up their classmates as vicars. To make money, they stole school-dinner tickets and sold them around school.
The influence of William is tangible, and may well have infected the Beatles. ‘The Beatles made me laugh immoderately, the way I used to laugh as a child at the Just William books,’ recalled Maureen Cleave, the journalist who knew them best in their early days of fame. ‘Their wit was just so keen and sharp – John Lennon’s especially. They all had this wonderful quality – it wasn’t innocence, but everything was new to them. They were like William, finding out about the world and trying to make sense of it.’ William’s Outlaws, like John’s, were always on the lookout for fishy ways to make their fortunes. In William’s Double Life (1929), when the Outlaws try to raise money, they are disappointed by the poor response from their various aunts and uncles:
‘I went round to them ALL,’ said Ginger mournfully, ‘an’ my Aunt Emma she said, “Certainly not, after your ball comin’ in through my landin’ window like it did last week,” an’ my Uncle John said, “Cert’nly not after you goin’ over my lawn with your scooter the way you did yesterday,” an’ my Aunt Jane said, “Cert’nly not after you chasin’ my dear Pussy as I saw you last week,” an’ my Uncle George said, “‘Cert’nly not after you throwin’ stones up at my walnut tree like I saw you doin’ yesterday,” an’ my Uncle John said, “Cert’nly not after you climbin’ my rose pole an’ breakin’ it” …’
In Just William (1922), William puts one of his scariest aunts to good use. He arrives in her room to find his imposing Aunt Emily has fallen asleep, and that ‘She lay in her immense stature in a blouse and striped petticoat, while from her open mouth issued the fascinating sounds.’ Seizing an opportunity for commerce, William then places a sign on her door saying:
FAT WILD WOMAN
TORKIN NATIF
LANGWIDGE
and charges the neighbouring children tuppence to see her. ‘They stood in a hushed, delighted group around her bed. The sounds never ceased, never abated. William allowed them two minutes in the room. They came out reluctantly, paid more money, joined the end of the queue and re-entered.’
William extends the exhibit to incorporate Aunt Emily’s dressing table, posting notices such as ‘FAT WILD WOMAN’S TEETH’ and ‘FAT WILD WOMAN’S HARE’. But suddenly Aunt Emily comes to life.
She sprang up and, seizing him by the shoulders, shook him till his teeth chattered, the tinsel crown fell down, encircling ears and nose, and one of his moustaches fell limply at his feet.
‘You wicked boy!’ she said as she shook him. ‘You WICKED, WICKED, WICKED BOY!’
John and his gang once constructed a makeshift raft from old planks, but it tipped over, casting them into a murky pond teeming with frogs. In an attempt to dry his clothes so Aunt Mimi wouldn’t know what they had been up to, John built a bonfire, but it got out of hand and the fire brigade arrived with sirens blaring. It could just as well have happened to William.
Called to see the deputy head, Mr Gallaway, on charges of misbehaviour, John and Pete were told to stand behind him while he got out the Headmaster’s Punishment Book. To amuse Pete, John put out a hand and tickled Mr Gallaway’s bald pate. Thinking it was a fly, Mr Gallaway kept swatting his head. ‘This subtle play of hands continued for several minutes,’ Pete recalled, ‘until both of us were doubled up with suppressed laughter – to the point that John (as was his wont in such desperate situations) literally pissed himself.’ When Mr Gallaway asked what the puddle was, John replied, ‘I think the roof’s leaking, sir.’ Pete exploded with laughter, but once again John saved the day. ‘Bless you, Pete!’ he exclaimed, adding, for Mr Gallaway’s benefit, ‘He’s been sneezing all day, sir. He has a dreadful cold.’
Mimi was strict with John. Whenever word got back to her about his bad behaviour, she would send him to his bedroom without any supper. Only once did she beat him, having caught him stealing money from her handbag. But these punishments had little effect. ‘I was coming down Penny Lane one day and I saw this crowd of boys in a ring, watching two boys fighting,’ Aunt Mimi recalled. ‘“Just like those common Rose Lane scruffs,” I said … Then they parted and out came this awful boy with his coat hanging off. To my horror it was John. John always liked me telling him that story. “Just like you, Mimi. Everybody else is always common.”’
To the end of his life, John stayed in constant touch with Aunt Mimi, perhaps because she was the only person on the planet who could see through his nonsense. In 1968 Hunter Davies observed that of all the Beatle parents, ‘Mimi is probably the only one whose relationship has not really changed. She still in many ways treats John as she’s always done, whereas with the others there is a hint of hero worship, almost reverence. Mimi still criticizes John’s clothes and how he looks, as she did when he was a teenager. She tells him when he’s looking fat and not to spend too much. Mimi even doesn’t care for the way John speaks. She says he won’t speak properly, never finishing sentences. “John’s always been a bad speaker. And he’s getting worse all the time. I often can’t understand what he’s talking about. His mind’s jumping all over the place.”’
In turn, John’s devotion to Aunt Mimi transcended all his fads and his failings, and all her rantings against them, justified and unjustified. As a child he could bear her reprimands, and even her occasional praise, but he hated it when she ignored him. ‘Don’t ’nore me, Mimi,’ he would say. When he grew up, and all the rest of the world started paying him attention, he still needed to be sure that Mimi wasn’t ignoring him. To the end of her days, Mimi kept a plaque in pride of place on her mantelpiece, given to her by John, and engraved with one of her grumbles from his adolescence: ‘The guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it.’ For both of them, her admonishment had become a source of pride. To the end of his days, John wrote a long letter to her once a week, signed ‘Himself’. In their monthly phone conversations he liked to tease her into a furious response by exaggerating his Scouse accent. In New York he developed a craving for items that reminded him of his childhood with his Aunt Mimi. She dutifully posted him her Royal Worcester tea service, along with his Quarry Bank school blazer and stripy school tie: ‘I sent him parcel after parcel of stuff.’
John kept urging Aunt Mimi to abandon Dorset for an apartment in the Dakota. The uncompromising tone of her reply must surely have pleased him, as it was so entirely in character: ‘You’ll never catch me over there. I have never liked Americans. And you shouldn’t be there either, it’s no good for you.’
‘He comes to see me as often as he can,’ she told Davies in 1968. ‘He sat up on the roof for four days in the summer. I ran up and down getting drinks for him. He never shows much emotion. He finds it hard to say sorry. But one night he said that even if he didn’t come down to see me every day, or every month, he always thought about me at some time every day, wherever he was. That meant a great deal to me.’
In 1979 John wrote a long, nostalgic letter to his cousin Leila – ‘I thought of you a lot this Xmas – the shadows on the ceiling as the cars went by at night – putting up the paper chains …’ He ended it with a reference to Aunt Mimi: ‘I’m almost scared to go to England, ’coz I know it would be the last time I saw Mimi – I’m a coward about Goodbyes.’ For her part, Yoko thought that when John sat down with a cup of tea in their apartment at the Dakota, stroking a cat, ‘he always looked just like Mimi’.
Every Christmas when John was little, Mimi would take him to Puss in Boots at the Liverpool Empire. One year it was snowing, and John went in his Wellington boots. When Puss first came onstage, John stood and piped up, ‘Mimi, he’s got his Wellington boots on! So have I!’ Everyone in the audience turned to him and smiled.
In December 1963, after a year in which the Beatles had, in the words of the TV host Alexander Kendrick, transformed the country into ‘Beatleland, formerly known as Britain’, they brought their Christmas show to the Liverpool Empire. Aunt Mimi stood at the back, having turned down John’s offer of a seat in the front row.
‘I was very proud of course to see him playing on the stage at the Empire. It was the first time I realised what an effect they had. They had mounted police to keep the crowds back … It was very exciting. But I couldn’t help thinking all the time: “No, he’s not really a Beatle. He’s the little fellow who once sat upstairs with me and shouted, ‘Mimi, he’s got his Wellington boots on!’”’