The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realizing your parents do not need you in the way you need them. When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness. . . . This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind.
—JOHN LENNON, 19711
Liverpool was a desperate place on October 9, 1940, when Julia Stanley Lennon gave birth to her first and only son, at the Oxford Maternity Home. For the third month in a row, the Nazis were raining bombs on the city, trying to disrupt supply lines through Liverpool’s sprawling port system, with its direct access to the Irish Sea. Built up around the River Mersey’s deep estuary, thirty miles across at its widest point and navigable by oceangoing vessels, the Port of Liverpool was a critical point of entry for the beleaguered nation’s food and fuel; the Allies called it their “Atlantic approach.” In targeting Liverpool, Hitler hoped to starve Britain into submission and yoke the island into his European conquests.
The first bombs fell on Liverpool in August, a mere two months before Julia gave birth. Hitler dropped 454 tons of high explosives and 1,029 tons of incendiaries on the town, more than the Luftwaffe dropped on any other British city that month, including London. Throughout the following weeks, in a relentless barrage, the German bombs savaged dockyards, factories, and airfields, destroyed both a children’s convalescent home and a jail. The wreckage left thousands of Julia Stanley Lennon’s neighbors homeless, more than half of them from “the Bootle,” the hardest-hit neighborhood and home of most of the docks’ workforce. Many of these workers relocated to outlying towns, and ten thousand commuted back to the wharves daily to keep the docks running for the rest of the war.2
The terrified population buckled down to maintain some semblance of normal life, tending their shops and gardens, unsure how long the bombing would last. Remarkably, most historians report high morale throughout that fall.3 But underneath, Liverpool, not to mention the rest of England, was panicked by what the war might bring: whether Britain would still be Britain or, like most of Europe and much of North Africa, a Vichy-like satellite or appendage to the Third Reich.
On October 8, 1940, the day before John Lennon was born, the BBC radio broadcast Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s address to the House of Commons. Churchill promised that the cities devastated by German bombs would “rise from their ruins, more healthy, and, I hope, more beautiful.”4 In Liverpool and cities like it, where the bombing seemed endless, Churchill’s words injected the careworn citizenry with a newly found courage. “So hypnotic was the force of his words,” Isaiah Berlin later wrote, “so strong his faith, that by the sheer intensity of his eloquence he bound his spell upon them until it seemed to them he was indeed speaking what was in their hearts and minds. If it was there, it was largely dormant until he had awoken it within them.”5
Julia Stanley Lennon—called Judy by her four sisters—was raised in a stable middle-class family. Her paternal grandfather, William Henry Stanley, had been a solicitor’s clerk and an amateur musician, who taught his musical granddaughter Judy how to play the banjo. William Henry had moved his family out of the dockyard slums by the time his son George married Annie Jane Milward. George and Annie moved one step farther out, to Toxteth, then a neighborhood of row houses, semidetached “cottages,” and tidy parks south of the city center. The family lived within walking distance of the Queen and Albert docks, where George worked at the Liverpool and Glasgow Salvage Association, initially as a diver and then as the leader of a salvage crew, raising sunken vessels from the ocean floor. Judy, the fourth daughter of five girls, arrived in 1914, after Mimi, Elizabeth, and Anne but ahead of Harriet. George’s work, however, was so arduous and required such long, relentless hours that his daughters regarded him as another man at sea. Like so many Liverpool families in similar situations, the Stanleys functioned as a typical dockside matriarchy.
George never owned property, which made the Stanleys’ respectability tenuous and that much more precious. In England’s tenaciously class-conscious society, in which one’s “place” was finely parsed and underlined by every interaction with one’s “betters,” the worst thing you could be was “common.” Having escaped that fate, the Stanleys were determined never to slip back. John Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia, recalled that his aunt Mimi’s harshest reproof was to not be common.6
The Stanleys’ status anxiety reflected Liverpool’s own social insecurity. A grimy city filled with transients and immigrants, descendants of slave traders, Americans from the nearby Burtonwood Air Force Base, and the occupants of some disreputable rooming houses, Liverpool was perceived by England’s ruling elite as a sorry by-product of the Industrial Revolution. The city was useful because of its bustling port but, even compared with nearby Manchester, Liverpool was short on cultural prestige and beneath the notice of the country’s aristocracy. “It was in England but not exactly of it,” observes Jan Morris, “being a boisterous and sometimes explosive mix of nationalities—Irish, Welsh, Chinese, African and many more—and it had been built upon the most ruthless kind of capitalist enterprise.”7 As the hub of the North American slave trade, Liverpool nursed long-standing moral and class resentments.
Long before the city was ravaged by the war, the prevailing Liverpool character carried a chip on its shoulder, conveyed in an embittered, comic language studded with class antipathy—the perfect incubator for John’s personality. Dockers spoke a thickly accented brogue called Scouse, immediately recognizable as a working-class tongue, rich with suggestive street slang, its own obscenities and many colorful non sequiturs. Often mistaken for London Cockney, a garden-variety low-class accent, Scouse more resembles the rich tonal inflections of its Irish ancestry. The ends of declamatory sentences often rise up like questions, which lends Scouse conversation musicality and innate self-mockery. As an adult, even though he had not grown up on the docks and his accent was far less pronounced, Lennon often spoke Scouse to “take the piss out of” someone whom he thought ridiculous. Like most Scousers, he enjoyed confirming people’s worst assumptions about low-class northerners. All Scousers nursed a fierce local pride—one that Lennon adopted as his own.
During Liverpool’s shipbuilding heyday, which lasted from 1881 to 1921, the local elite had erected an array of monumental public buildings proclaiming the respectability of the city and its leading citizens. During those same decades of prosperity, Liverpool sprouted a ring of leafy suburbs, claimed from fallow fields that had been overfarmed for two centuries and no longer supported the dairy trade that had anchored the region’s economy since the Middle Ages. With prosperity, the city’s population grew, spawning a new class of teachers, accountants, tailors, clerks, watchmakers, and grocers who strove toward a higher standard of living—and to separate themselves from the nation’s common image of working-class Liverpudlians.
George Stanley’s brood joined this great social migration toward middle-class respectability, but fun-loving Judy had no interest in abiding by the rules of decorum that governed “respectable” people. Self-confident and self-absorbed, small-boned and pretty, she cut a striking figure with her high heels, gleaming red nail polish, and auburn hair cut in stylish imitation of the movie stars of the day. “People used to turn back for another look at her,” John’s cousin Leila Harvey reported. “When some cheeky boy gave her a wolf whistle, she would say, ‘Hmmm, not bad yourself.’ ”8 Judy Stanley was determined to do as she pleased, and one thing she liked to do was provoke her parents. Alfred Lennon, a young man with no skills, no connections, and no “class,” was ready-made to outrage the Stanleys’ carefully wrought propriety.
Alfred was born in 1912, the fourth of six surviving children of Jack Lennon Jr., an Irish shipping clerk. Jack was musical, and had spent the 1890s touring the United States as a singer with Andrew Robertson’s “Kentucky Minstrels,” a traveling act that played vaudeville venues and country fairs. Although little information survives about this troupe, the act donned blackface to perform popular minstrel material to American audiences for an uncanny musical foreshadow.
Around 1900, John’s paternal grandfather moved back to Britain with an American wife, whose name has been lost. Rather than return to Ireland, Jack Jr. found work as a shipping clerk in Liverpool, which by then was known as “Little Ireland.”9 After the death of his first wife, Jack married his Irish housekeeper, Mary “Polly” McGuire, who bore him eight children, six of whom survived. In 1917, after a life spent clerking, singing, touring, and drinking, Jack fell dead at sixty-two from “liver disease,” the era’s polite euphemism for advanced alcoholism. Polly was overwhelmed. Alone now, with four children to support (her eldest, George, was sixteen and old enough to work) and another on the way, she gave five-year-old Alf and his two-year-old sister, Edith, over to the Blue Coat Orphanage, a charitable institution for children of the poor, in an act of desperation that would be repeated a generation later. From then on, young Alf and Edith saw their mother and other siblings only on holidays, although their brothers Sydney and Charles remained constant figures throughout Alf’s life. Although no Dickensian workhouse, the Blue Coat adhered to strict regimens—especially tough by today’s standards—which prompted Alf to attempt more than one escape.10
From the start, young Alf also had health problems. As a boy playing in the soot-darkened streets of industrial Liverpool, he’d developed rickets, a disease caused by inadequate exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays and made worse by poor diet. Rickets shorten and deform the weight-bearing limbs, and the orphanage put Alf in leg braces for straightening until he was twelve. Even so, as a full-grown man he was only five feet, two inches tall, six inches shorter than his famous son, and both his legs curved outward (think Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, whose bowlegs symbolized privation).
Like his father, Jack, Alf loved to sing. When he was fourteen and out on a weekend pass from the Blue Coat, his brother Sydney took him backstage after hearing the Will Murray Gang, a song-and-dance act at the Liverpool Empire. Alf plunged into a rendition of “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside,” and his plucky presentation persuaded Murray to offer him a slot in the show. The next day, Alf grabbed his harmonica, fled the orphanage, and headed to Glasgow to join the band.
Orphanage officers quickly caught up with him and dragged him back, berating him in front of his classmates. None of this quenched Alf’s thirst for freedom and fun, which marked the rest of his life and echoed down into his son’s persona.11 In this break from the narrow confines of his childhood, Alf, the stunted child, the unwanted boy who’d been sent away and locked into leg braces, ran, as his son later would, toward all the things that his life at the orphanage lacked—adventure, independence, music. He would be on the run, more or less, for the rest of his days, chasing a long string of small-time scams, always looking for the “big break” that would free him from a perpetual hand-to-mouth existence.
Alf met Judy in 1927, when she was thirteen and he was fifteen. Their meeting, though entirely accidental, seemed almost foreordained. He was strolling in Sefton Park, one of Liverpool’s ample expanses of public green, south of the Toxteth Park Cemetery near the Penny Lane roundabout. After ten years and two escape attempts, he’d finally left the Blue Coat for good and found work as a bellboy at the Adelphi Hotel. He was taking a stroll, seeing what else the world had to offer. “I had just bought myself a cigarette holder and a bowler hat and I fancied my chances,” Julia’s daughter and namesake quotes Alf as saying in her memoirs.12
A friend was teaching Alf how to pick up girls when they spotted the pretty redhead lounging on a bench by the boat lake. Before Alf even had a chance to try his new moves, the girl called out to him, telling him he looked silly. He responded that she looked lovely and sat down on the bench. If he wanted to sit next to her, the girl said, he’d have to take off his hat. Without hesitating, Alf Lennon stood up and threw his new hat into the lake, which made Judy Stanley laugh. With that impulsive flourish, he won her over.13
They suited each other’s needs. Besides sharing a wayward sense of fun, they were both trying to eclipse their pasts: Alf was on the lam from the deprivations of the orphanage, while Judy wanted to slip free of the claustrophobic, post-Victorian embrace of her respectable parents. What better way for Alf to exercise his independence than by hooking up with a stylish, fun-loving girl determined to defy her family? The Stanleys saw themselves as much higher-class than an orphan-bred boy with no family to speak of. To Judy, this only made Alf more desirable. She enjoyed his irreverence and off-color sense of humor while at the same time taunting her family. They dated on and off for the next several years, touring the pubs and dance halls (although Alf’s crippled legs meant he more often sang than danced), including several near the docks that were frequented by sailors—establishments where “nice girls” just didn’t go. Pops Stanley forbade their courtship for a time, but this didn’t deter Judy—it just prompted the two of them to be more ingenious and secretive about their rendezvous.
In Liverpool in those years, a loafer could always find work as a merchant seaman by lining up at the dockyard gates (“the pools”) every morning to see if any boats were hiring. With no engineering training, navigation experience, or ability to manage accounts or track inventory, the best Alf could do was scramble for jobs as cook and steward. He never knew until he’d signed on whether he’d be at sea for three weeks or three months, and the work was strictly job-by-job—steady employment was rare. After every voyage, he had to start from scratch, hanging out at the pools or going from one shipping office to another looking for his next assignment. With no job security and lousy pay, Alf quickly learned to supplement his income by gambling and by smuggling hard-to-find goods to sell on the black market.14
After eight years of peripatetic dating, Alf and Judy were finally married on Saturday, December 3, 1938. He’d saved up for three weeks to pay for their marriage license. Why they finally decided to marry is unclear. Alf’s second wife and widow, Pauline Lennon, edited Alf’s memoirs after he died and published them as Daddy Come Home in 1990.15 As she tells it, Judy dared him to “put up the banns”—the old practice of publicly announcing one’s intention to marry three weeks ahead of time. This allowed any interested party a chance to object. Alf supposedly took the dare. Beatle historian and Lennon’s art school classmate Bill Harry suggests another reason: with work scarce, Alf needed a marriage certificate to get on the dole.16 Whatever the prompt, Alf and Judy tied the knot at the Mount Pleasant Registry Office with Alf’s older brother Sydney as their witness. Afterward, they went to the Trocadero Cinema on Camden Street, where Judy worked off and on as an usherette, and watched Mickey Rooney in The Boy from Barnardo’s (as Lord Jeff was called in England). They laughingly called this their honeymoon. She was twenty-four and Alf was twenty-five.
“That’s it! I’ve gone and married him then!” Judy announced as she made her entrance at the family house in Toxteth that night. While the length of their courtship testifies to the strength of their bond, Alf and Judy’s whimsical nuptials suggest that what each prized most about the other may have been a shared love of frivolity and a deep aversion to being serious.
Judy and Alf made unconventional newlyweds, even for England on the cusp of World War II. Alf shipped out soon after the wedding while Judy continued to live with her parents, working sporadically as a waitress and as an usherette at the Trocadero. In 1939, with an almost empty nest, George and Annie Stanley relinquished their Toxteth home for a more modest apartment at 9 Newcastle Road in Wavertree, near Alf’s Blue Coat Orphanage, and Judy moved in with them. With Alf at sea, the Stanleys may have figured that he wouldn’t be sharing the space much, and their other four daughters had already married and moved out. Although Judy had no apparent interest in becoming a mother, John was conceived “on a cold January afternoon in 1940 on the kitchen floor,” Alf recalled, just as rationing became a way of wartime life.17
Nine months later, Judy went alone to the hospital to have her baby. Whether she didn’t tell her family where she was going or they stayed home because of the bombing (or they didn’t want to risk their necks for Alf Lennon’s child), no one held her hand or sat in the waiting room, worried about her safety, or expressed any interest in greeting her child. The following evening, October 9, at 6:30 P.M., after thirty hours of difficult labor, Judy—alone and exhausted—finally gave birth to a healthy seven-pound, eight-ounce boy. It’s hard to imagine the complicated feelings she must have felt when, bereft of her husband, she first held her son. She was twenty-six and liked her freedom—what was she going to do with a baby? She named him John, after Alf’s father and grandfather. With Churchill’s radio speech from the day before ringing in her ears, she selected “Winston” for his middle name. “Winston” spoke to Judy’s ambivalent class attitudes, only to confound her son’s “Working Class Hero” legacy.
Later that night, a nurse called the Stanley house to announce, “Mrs. Lennon has had a boy.” Galvanized by this news, her oldest sister, Mimi Smith, raced to see the infant. Mimi later wrote:
I was dodging in doorways between running as fast as my legs would carry me. . . . I was literally terrified. Transport had stopped because the bombs began always at dusk. There was shrapnel falling and gunfire and when there was a little lull I ran into the hospital ward and there was this beautiful little baby.18
Mimi’s memory might be the only place in town where bombs actually fell that night—there was certainly a curfew, and the buses were not running, but records indicate bombs fell on London and another “north-west town,” but not on Liverpool.19 Nonetheless, Mimi’s memory defined Lennon’s story: he grew up believing he was born during an air raid, and felt branded by Churchill’s name as a reminder. Regardless, as soon as Mimi picked John up, the air-raid sirens screamed again. The hospital staff insisted that she go down to the basement or go home. Mimi chose to go home. Judy, worn out, stayed put. “John, like the other babies, was put underneath the bed.”20
In the brief moments, however, when she held him, Mimi literally fell in love. Whether it was because she was one of five sisters and he was a boy, or because she herself, the oldest Stanley daughter, was childless, John’s arrival answered some need in Mimi. It was a need that she would play out—often at the expense of the boy she believed she was protecting—throughout her nephew’s childhood. For the rest of her life, she claimed that the moment she saw John in the hospital she knew that she was supposed to be his mother, not Judy. “Does that sound awful?” she asked when she related this story to Bill Harry. “It isn’t really,” she explained, “because Julia accepted it as something perfectly natural. She used to say, ‘You’re his real mother. All I did was give birth.’ ”21 Judy, though she had little appetite for motherhood, didn’t hand him over outright—not yet. After the standard week of “lying in,” she took her son home to the family apartment on Newcastle Road to meet his grandparents. On October 12, the Liverpool Echo ran the following birth announcement: “Lennon—October 9th, in hospital to Julia (née Stanley) wife of ALFRED LENNON, Merchant Navy (at sea), a son. 9 Newcastle Road.”
Three weeks later, the Empress of Canada docked in Liverpool, and Alf Lennon met his son for the first time. He spent several weeks with his wife and child before leaving again, and those first few weeks of John Lennon’s life were the only time that he and his parents lived peacefully together under the same roof—albeit with Judy’s parents. During the next five years, Alf would spend barely a total of three months in Liverpool, and much of that time he spent in air-raid shelters with his wife and child or at the docks “fire watching” during raids.22
The Nazi bombing peaked the following May, when the Germans dropped 2,315 high-explosive bombs and 119 other incendiaries on Liverpool, putting half the docks out of action, killing 1,741 people, and injuring 1,154. On May 3, the Germans blew up the Makaland, docked in Liverpool and loaded with more than a thousand tons of bombs and explosives. When the dust cleared, 2,500 Liverpudlians had been killed outright, and more than 50,000 more were homeless; another 50,000 were relocated outside the imperiled metropolis. The children who remained in the city, many of them orphaned, grew up amid ruins. John remembered playing in bomb craters.
In June of 1941, Judy’s mother, Annie, died at age seventy, leaving George—“Pop”—alone in the Newcastle Road apartment with Judy and John.23 Despite the presence of her father, Judy continued to take a lackadaisical approach to raising her son and honoring her marriage vows. With soldiers and sailors streaming through the city and wartime romances commonplace, Judy found various opportunities to escape the rationing, divert herself from the air raids, and shrug off the war’s gloom. Although Alf sent home most of his wages to support his family, he often returned to find John stashed at Mimi’s and to discover traces of other men. Having told his wife to “go out and have a good time” while he was gone, and probably not averse to the standard merchant marines’ “favors” in foreign ports himself, Alf at first took Judy’s infidelities in stride.
The following year, when John was two, Mimi invited Judy and John to move into her Woolton cottage at 120A Allerton Road, behind the house called Mendips where she had settled with her husband, George Smith. Judy jumped at the chance to get away from her father’s disapproving presence. But Alf’s next visit was rocky. Judy had become accustomed to her routine of trolling the pubs and dance halls each night, and soon after Alf’s return she left John behind with him—“for a change,” in her words—and went out by herself. Brushing past the protesting Alf, Judy left the house with her friends.24
The next morning Alf confronted her: her mother, he said, would have been ashamed of her behavior. Judy poured a cup of hot tea over his head, and Alf responded by slapping her across the face—the only reported account of his striking her.25 Alf’s blast gave Judy a nosebleed, and he called to Mimi to “set things straight.” But things were never quite the same again. His next job brought Alf a promotion: to chief steward on the Berengaria, bound for New York. Although he thought his career was on the upswing, this trip turned out to be a prolonged disaster. It would be another eighteen months before Alf saw Liverpool, or his family, again.
Shortly after Alf left, for reasons that remain unclear, Pop Stanley relocated with other relatives, and Judy moved back into a previous apartment at 9 Newcastle Road with John, by then an active three-year-old. For the rest of the war, Judy remained in this apartment, and at some point she even had her father’s name on the lease replaced by Alf’s. Mother and son lived on the money Alf sent home, and Judy continued her rambunctious pub life, often coming home drunk. She seems to have had no compunction about bringing men home and sleeping with them with her son in the house, perhaps even the same bed. “Mummy being Mummy, she naturally just tucked him in beside her each night in their large double bed,” John’s half sister, Julia, later explained.26
Aboard the Berengaria, Alf’s singing made him the star attraction at the Pig and Whistle, the crew’s bar, where even passengers sought entrance to watch the crewmen perform. Merchant shipping at the time supported a healthy show-business subculture, complete with elaborate variety shows and drag queens. Belowdecks was one place in British culture where gay men openly expressed themselves, even inventing a pidgin language called “Parole,” a witty offshoot of Scouser slang.
Alf often played master of ceremonies, recruiting the talent and hosting the show and singing his own numbers between sketches. When four-year-old John began asking whether his father would come home for Christmas, Judy gave him a program that Alf had enclosed in his last letter to her, with Alf listed singing “Begin the Beguine.” John was tantalized, but Judy hid an unspoken worry: the letters—and checks—had stopped coming. During the war, most merchant ships carried supplies and munitions for the military effort. Targeted by Nazi U-boats and submarines, the merchant ships were shepherded from port to port in large convoys, and one in twenty such “commercial” ships were sunk during the war.27 Alf was as much a target as any military sailor.
Luckily, it was carousing that got Alf into trouble, not Nazi torpedoes. In New York, having been dropped by the Berengaria, Alf was scheduled to ship out on a trawler called the Middle East, but he missed the ship’s departure after a long night of singing at a dockside bar. (In Daddy Come Home, Alf claims it was all an elaborate scam, in which ship owners persuaded workers to take reduced pay with promises of promotion and then conned them out of work once they reached New York.) With no visa and no job, Alf was interned at Ellis Island by the U.S. Immigration Service, and from there he was unable to get word to his wife. Judy went down to collect her monthly check only to be told that her husband had “jumped ship.” Strapped for cash, she assumed the worst about Alf: that he had jumped the marriage or was lost at sea—or dead. The Stanleys, including Mimi, shook their heads knowingly. Even if he was alive, wasn’t Alf just the sort to skip out on his responsibilities? Without Alf’s checks, Judy had little means of support, especially since her father was no longer living with her on Newcastle Road. Unsubstantiated rumors, strongly denied years later by her daughter, swirled around her that she started sleeping with men for money during this time.28 Whether or not this is true, concern for her son’s welfare does not seem to have rated high on Judy’s list of priorities.
Meanwhile, in New York, the British consulate found Alf a job on a steamer called the Sammex, which kept him from being charged with desertion by the U.S. authorities. But he had to take a demotion, and the Sammex was loaded with “hot” cargo—booze and cigarettes. When police boarded the boat in North Africa, the loot was confiscated and Alf was taken into custody for “stealing and finding,” and thrown into prison for three months, unable to send money to Judy. He finally found his way home to Liverpool on a ship called the Monarch of Bermuda, which docked as the war was winding down in mid-1945.
If Alf envisioned a happy homecoming, he was disappointed. At Newcastle Road, Judy was nowhere to be found, and neighbors were watching his son. When Judy returned home around midnight, quite pregnant with another baby, she informed a stupefied Alf that she’d been raped by a soldier. Initially, she refused to give up his name, but Alf pressed her. Once Judy relented, Alf headed straight off to the Cheshire barracks and dragged the man, one “Taffy” Williams, back to Liverpool to “sort things out.” Williams denied raping Judy and pledged his undying love. The rape story quickly unraveled: apparently the two had been seeing each other for well over nine months. But when Alf brought them face-to-face, Judy laughed and threw Williams out of the house.
This second baby realigned family politics. Alf, ever forgiving, offered to stick by Judy and help raise the new child, but Judy refused. Mysteriously, Pop Stanley supported her in this. Ignoring Alf’s, Mimi’s, and even Williams’s offers to bring up the child, and unhappy at the prospect of two fatherless children being raised by an absent, careless mother, Pop insisted that Judy put the new baby up for adoption. Mimi arranged for Judy to stay at Elmswood, a Salvation Army hostel in North Mossley Hill Road. She gave birth to a little girl on June 19, 1944, less than two weeks after D-Day, named her Victoria Elizabeth (did such respectable, patriotic names help Judy legitimize her offspring?), and turned her over for adoption by a Norwegian sailor. (In 1998, a Norwegian woman named Ingrid Pedersen made plausible claims that she was John Lennon’s half sister.)29 Judy forbade Alf ever to mention the baby again. Alf, in his memoirs, describes her personality as forever changed by the giving up of this child; and his emphasis on this moment suggests that he saw it as central to her turning away from the marriage.From most other accounts, though, it appears that Judy remained the same old Judy—a woman who had begun moving on from Alf long before.
There is disagreement among family histories about whether John, almost five, knew that his mother was pregnant and understood what had happened to the baby she bore. Most five-year-olds today know what it means when a woman is pregnant and recognize a pregnant woman when they see one. Many people have described Lennon as an alert, bright, and curious child; it seems unlikely that he would have been oblivious to such a big event. Although Mimi Smith insists that the truth was kept from him, this may have been what Mimi needed to believe. If John did understand what was happening, it can only have increased his feeling that his place in the world was uncertain, even perilous. His mother had given away another child; mightn’t she one day give him away, too?
Just before John turned five in autumn 1945, Mimi, stepping into the mother’s role, enrolled him in the Mosspits Lane Infant School, the neighborhood kindergarten. That following spring, however, the school dismissed him for severe behavioral problems, which suggests that he was already confused and angry, even before he watched his mother carry another baby and give her away. Nigel Walley, a childhood schoolmate, remembers a scuffle: “John was expelled for being disruptive. . . . I remember he bullied a girl called Polly Hipshaw.”30
After the birth of Victoria, Alf returned to sea, assuming that his on-again, off-again marriage was back on. But he was gone a long time, and when he returned to Newcastle Road in March 1946 the situation had changed again: Pop Stanley was back in the apartment and had had Alf’s name removed from the lease. Someone else was living in the apartment, too: Judy’s new boyfriend, a waiter named Bobby Dykins, who worked at the same hotel, the Adelphi, where Alf once had been a bellhop. Why Pop Stanley would tolerate living in the same apartment with his married daughter’s lover remains a mystery, unless his distaste for Alf outweighed his disapproval of Dykins.
Coming back to this new arrangement, Alf responded by throwing Dykins out and telling Pops to move out the next day. He was still sending home money to support Judy and John and figured that gave him certain rights. But this time Judy rebelled, announcing that she was moving out, too. Alf didn’t take her seriously until he woke up the next morning to find half the furniture on its way out the door. He pleaded with his wife to stay for John’s sake, if not for his own. In his memoirs—which offer the only version we have of this conversation—Alf described Judy’s response: “What difference will it make to him?” John rarely saw his father anyway, she pointed out. “The sea has always been more important to you than we have.” She blamed the rift that had opened between them on his misadventures in New York and Morocco. “You can’t just disappear for eighteen months and expect things to be the same.”31
Taking John with her, Judy went to live with Dykins in a tiny one-bedroom flat across town in Gateacre. Convinced that the marriage was truly over and enraged by his wife’s behavior, Alf followed his brother Sydney’s advice and hired a lawyer to place notices in the local papers declaring that Alfred Lennon was no longer responsible for his wife’s debts.32 But the Gateacre arrangement was short-lived: within months, Judy, John, and Bobby Dykins had moved back into 9 Newcastle Road.
The drama didn’t end there. In May of 1946, hours before Alf was due to sail for two weeks on the Queen Mary out of Southampton as a night steward, he received a long-distance call from Mimi Smith. Mimi told Alf that John had just walked two miles from Newcastle Road to Mendips because he didn’t like living with Judy and Dykins. Mimi put John on the phone to plead with his father not to leave, but Alf said he’d lose his job if he didn’t sail—he was still earning back the good faith of his employers after his jail time in New York and Africa. Alf told John to stay with his aunt Mimi and promised he’d be back soon.33
When Alf returned to England in June, he docked at Southampton and traveled straight to Mendips to find John. Mimi had already put John down for bed, so she invited Alf back to her kitchen for tea and began itemizing her expenses for taking care of the little boy. Alf gave Mimi a twenty-pound note and accepted her invitation to spend the night. After retiring, he made a momentous decision: he would take John with him. The following morning, he told Mimi he was going to take John for a short holiday at Blackpool, a resort town about thirty miles up the northwest coast from Liverpool. Mimi hesitated. Judy was out of town on “a short trip”—there’s no record of where she went or with whom. In Alf’s memoirs, Mimi revealed that John had been living with her on and off for about nine months. She may have begun to feel as though she could finally keep him. With Judy out of town, Mimi had misgivings about letting the boy go. But Alf was his father, and perhaps, after taking his money, she didn’t feel she could refuse.
When John woke up the next morning, Mimi told him that Alf had come to see his boy and had spent the night. John raced upstairs and jumped on his father in bed. John knew his father, of course, but until that day Alf’s visits had always devolved into arguments with Judy, disruption of John’s routine, and often a move. With Alf’s infrequent time ashore during John’s first five years, John had had no chance to form an attachment. Judy had told John stories of their ten-year courtship, “always larking around and laughing.” And Alf’s letters and postcards had filled John’s head with images of his exotic travels. Now his father was finally there, and he told John that they were going on a fabulous holiday.
Did any five-year-old ever get a more irresistible invitation? John begged his aunt to let him go. Mimi packed a small bag for him, and the little boy followed Alf into what must have seemed like a waking dream.
Blackpool had long been the preferred seaside resort for workers, sailors, and their families in the region’s industrial towns, an Atlantic City on Britain’s western shore, complete with a promenade, rides, games, and vendors. Its 1894 Tower replicated the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and three piers were lined with concessions. Holiday goers liked to promenade on its boardwalk, romp in the waves, and visit its amusement park built in an American Style.34 Although past its prime in 1946, Blackpool still had carnival rides, games to play, donkeys to ride, and prizes to win. Playwright John Osborne set his 1957 play The Entertainer in an unnamed Blackpool to symbolize the end of empire during the Suez crisis of 1956. In one of his great, self-lacerating roles (immortalized in Tony Richardson’s 1960 film), Laurence Olivier portrayed the repulsive, over-the-hill music-hall comic Archie Rice, and there was a lot of Archie Rice in Alf—a ham past his prime, working his racket in a town sinking from its own faded glory.
To a five-year-old boy accustomed to wartime rationing, however, Blackpool must have seemed like paradise. Alf had abruptly removed John from the physical and emotional rubble of his life in Liverpool to a sunny seaside where he could eat treats and play all day. Now that the war was over, a father finally had time for his boy.
Alf had misrepresented his intentions to Mimi, however. One of his shipmates, a man named Billy Hall, was planning to relocate to New Zealand, and this became Alf’s plan, too: he would take his son to New Zealand and start a new life. Having finished two stints in prison and given up on reconciling with Judy, Alf was ready for a big change. Judy wasn’t taking proper care of the boy, anyway. In his memoir he wrote, “I set off with John for Blackpool—intending never to come back.”
Alf took John with him to Billy Hall’s parents’ place in Blackpool and set about getting ready for the big move. To fund the trip, though, he and Billy needed to unload some swag. “You couldn’t go wrong in those days, just after the war,” Alf wrote later. “I was on lots of rackets, mainly bringing back black market stockings. They’re probably still selling the stuff in Blackpool I brought over.”35 At some point, Alf needed to leave town for several days, and he took John to stay with his brother Sydney, who had a summer house nearby—a familiar experience for John, whom Judy had handed off several times to Sydney’s home in Liverpool. When Alf returned, he was full of talk about their new life abroad.
Alf’s point of view has been given little credence in most Lennon histories; he didn’t get his say until his second wife published his memoirs in 1990, almost fourteen years after his own death and ten years after John’s. For years, Mimi Smith’s version of events stood unchallenged. In her version, Alf was a low-class lout who impregnated Judy and then lived the life he’d always lived: as a drifter with no real prospects. He went to Blackpool to run an undergarment black market with his no-good buddy Hall and left John with his brother. In Mimi’s view, far from rescuing John, Alf was dumping him with family the same way Judy had. And if John was going to be dumped with a relative, Mimi wanted it to be her.
From Alf’s vantage point, Judy gave few signs that she cared much for their son. Alf seems to have truly loved her, however, and even took some responsibility for her behavior. At each juncture, he was willing to carry on with her in spite of a sequence of betrayals. Once she’d decided firmly against him, Alf concluded that he had just as much right to raise their son—he couldn’t do any worse than she had. Since he never had the chance to try, we can’t say for certain whether he would have made a go of it, but he had no personal experience of a stable home himself. At one point during the Blackpool holiday, he stopped to light a cigarette and John, running ahead, fell into a deep gully in the sand and couldn’t climb out. Alf was sufficiently far behind not to have seen where he fell, and he ran up and down the beach for five minutes before discovering the boy at the bottom of the hole, frightened but unhurt.36 Although this incident reflects badly on Alf, his reporting of it gives the rest of his story added credibility.
The length of the Blackpool holiday is in dispute, but it appears to have lasted three weeks at most. It came to an abrupt end on June 26, when Judy knocked on Billy Hall’s door. She’d tracked down her husband through the local “pools”—the dockworkers’ work log—and she’d come to retrieve her son. Alf was stunned: he was days away from setting off for New Zealand, and the last person he expected to get in his way was his carefree wife.
Dykins had accompanied Judy to the house, and waited nervously by the gate as she went in. In Alf’s recollection, Judy didn’t seem quite herself; she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Her manner was uncharacteristically meek; her spirited and challenging personality seemed muted. She always dressed with panache, but on that day she wore an “ill-shaped” getup that made her look positively matronly—and was definitely out of character for the girl Alf knew and the “wickedly” irresponsible mother Mimi had described to him.37 Did Judy dress more conservatively to impress Alf with her new commitment to family? Were her awkwardness and subdued manner products of her ambivalence about making the trip—about insisting that Alf give John back? Did she bring Dykins along for moral support, to keep her from being swayed by Alf’s charm, or to remind herself that she had another life she wanted to go back to, one that had nothing to do with this man and his child?
Alf sent John into the kitchen to wait with Hall’s parents while he and Judy talked in the front room. He begged Judy to get back together with him, told her that he still loved her, and said making up would be good for the boy. The three of them could get a fresh start in New Zealand together. “I could tell she still loved me,” he wrote in his memoir. But Judy refused. A reconciliation with Alf was out of the question. She presented herself as newly stable, anxious to finally prove herself and give John the home he deserved. She had set herself up with a new man and planned to make her own fresh start, including having more children, with Dykins.
After they reached this stalemate, the two adults who should have taken the most care to protect their son and choose the best life for him instead did something shockingly cruel. Alf called John in, and the boy ran out from the kitchen and jumped onto his father’s lap. John asked if his mother was going to stay with them, if they’d all be going away together. Alf said no. John would have to decide which parent he wanted to go with. Whom did he prefer, his father or his mother? Would he rather stay with his father and travel abroad and have a wonderful adventure in New Zealand, or go back home with his mother (to gray Liverpool) and the life he knew (of not belonging)?
As these two adults sat there, expecting their five-year-old to make his choice, perfectly willing to accept whatever he decided, the ground must have opened up beneath the child. If you’ve never had a real father and your mother is fun and tenderhearted but unreliable and self-absorbed; if your father is a glamorous adventurer but never around; if you love your mother because she’s your mother, but she’s distracted (though compellingly mysterious); if you know that choosing your mother doesn’t really mean having your mother, and choosing your father means . . . what?; if you’ve watched your mother give away another child; if you’ve been having a great holiday with the first and only man who has belonged specially to you—whom do you choose? At some level John, consistently described as a sensitive child, may have intuited that either option was essentially tragic: that either choice was simply more abandonment in different clothes.
John chose Alf. He was sitting on Alf’s lap; he’d just spent the happiest weeks of his life with his father, and what Alf was offering, speculative though it truly was, probably seemed more enticing than anything he had experienced with his mother. Judy asked again; and when John repeated his choice, she got up and said good-bye. She joined Dykins at the gate and headed up the street. Having left it to a confused five-year-old to decide his own fate, Judy was content to walk off with another man and abandon her child completely—to let him travel halfway around the world, perhaps never to see him again.
Within seconds, panicking, John ran out of the house after Judy. What five-year-old could watch his mother, even a careless mother like Judy, walk away forever and not call her back? He ran after her. And this time it was Alf who turned away. He didn’t try to stop the boy. He’d shown the kid a good time, showered him with treats and toys, and John didn’t want to go with him. That was that. Alf didn’t change his plans and stay in England to be near his son. He went off to New Zealand with Hall and continued to travel as he had before. His own mother had abandoned him when he was young—it was clearly acceptable to walk away from your children and leave them to other people to raise. He’d given the boy a chance to have a father, and the boy had chosen against him; and for Alf, that was decisive. That night at his pub, he recalled, he sang Al Jolson’s number, “My Little Pal,” as “My Little John,” with tears in his eyes. But he never made another attempt to contact John until his son had become famous, when Alf approached him—eighteen years later—on the set of A Hard Day’s Night.38
This Blackpool trauma ricocheted one last time back in Liverpool. Mimi may have deputized Judy to go to Blackpool and retrieve John, but she still felt as though John belonged to her. She hated that Judy had moved in with another man while she was still legally married to Alf and raising his son. Even if this suited Judy—what about the child? It was as if Judy didn’t give a hang about the Stanleys’ hard-won reputation. Mimi decided to claim her nephew even if it meant wrenching him from his mother. Surely, a home with both a father and a mother figure would be preferable to a broken home with an illegal, live-in stepfather. Even before the Blackpool trip, hadn’t John run away (at least once that we know of) to demonstrate his discomfort with Judy’s new boyfriend?
Mimi alerted Liverpool Social Services, telling them that her sister was an “unfit mother.” Although a social worker visited the Newcastle Road apartment twice during that summer of 1946, it wasn’t until the second visit that John’s lack of a bed seemed to register with the officials. When Social Services insisted that she find an alternative situation for the boy or they would be forced to take him from her, Judy handed off her son to Mimi for the last time. For Judy, giving John to Mimi was both an abdication of parenthood and a surrender to Mimi’s driving will—and one Dykins favored, with his natural desire for a family of his own.39
Mimi Smith had good reason to be concerned about John’s home life, but her motives mixed simple compassion with self-interest, creating a second complicated layer of possession and competition for John as he turned six years old that October of 1946. The questions a child wrestles with at this age of psychological development—Where do I belong? Who will take care of me? Where can I feel safe?—were hardwired as confusion into John’s young mind. Born into a failing marriage between a heedless girl-about-town and a perpetually absent seafaring father, John Lennon began his life rootless. Shuttled from dwelling to dwelling, handed off repeatedly to a possessive aunt or to one of his uncles, he was relocated more than half a dozen times before he was five. Despite his troublemaking at school, many adults who met John at the time describe him as a charming, cheerful little boy. Several people besides Mimi Smith offered to adopt him, including his uncle Sydney and Billy Hall’s parents. Nonetheless, he was, in a fundamental and obvious way, unclaimed.
Lennon was installed in his familiar bedroom in Mendips the autumn of 1946, and for years afterward he saw his mother only sporadically. Mimi Smith later said that at first John wanted to know where his mother was, but she dodged his questions. “I didn’t want to tell him any details,” she said. “How could I? He was so happy. It would have been wrong to say your father’s no good and your mother’s found someone else.”40 Although Lennon himself never described the Blackpool episode in any of his interviews or writings, he did report on its aftermath. “I soon forgot my father,” he said. “It was like he was dead. But I did see my mother now and again and my feeling never died off for her. I often thought about her, though I never realized that all the time she was living no more than five or ten miles away. Mimi never told me. She said she was a long, long way away.”41
In quick order, Judy and Dykins moved out of the tiny Newcastle Road apartment into a larger one in Allerton, where they raised two girls of their own, Julia, born in 1947, and Jacqueline, two years later, but the couple never married. This apartment, at 1 Blomfield Road in a council-estate development called Spring Wood, was across the Allerton Golf Course from Mendips, not far from the newer council houses where a family named McCartney would soon settle.