The Second World War scarred everywhere it touched, but Great Britain had prevailed and out of the struggle a new national attitude was emerging. In the previous thirty years there had been two world wars, and an economic depression bringing mass unemployment. But by 1945, as the troops began to return home to take up their lives again, the British people were demanding a fairer future for themselves and their children, a feeling which was quickly expressed in a General Election landslide for a Labour government. Lasting reforms to the social fabric of Britain were quickly put into place, changes that, arguably, would help make John Lennon’s generation the most fortunate ever. Born five years earlier, his life would have been very different.
One of the most important reforms had already been agreed with the 1944 Education Act, a piece of legislation that provided free education to children, with the right academic qualifications, all the way to university level. It wasn’t a perfect system, in that ability was measured at the age of eleven when a free scholarship to a grammar school creamed off the brightest, meaning that two-thirds of the country’s children, inevitably including many late developers, were deemed failures before they’d even reached their teens. But it did ensure that those who passed the 11-Plus scholarship, as it was later called, would be given opportunities that their parents, or even their older brothers and sisters, could hardly have imagined. And no parent, or in this case, guardian, would have been more aware of the possibilities for the future of the child in her care than Mary (Mimi) Smith of Mendips, 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton, Liverpool.
Mimi was an abrupt, sharp and intelligent woman, who read voraciously and who made a point of never suffering fools gladly. She had met her husband, George Smith, in 1931, when he’d delivered milk from his small, family-owned dairy to the Woolton Hospital in South Liverpool where she’d been a trainee nurse. She would go on to become the matron of a ward, before, after another long courtship in the Stanley family, she and George married, somewhat unromantically in 1939. She was, therefore, already forty when John went to live permanently with her and husband George in their solid, large, four-bedroomed semi-detached house, just across the road from the grounds of Allerton Municipal Golf Club.
Although George’s family’s lands had been requisitioned by the government towards the end of the war and his dairy business closed down, the Smiths were relatively well-off. It might not fit with the general public perception of Liverpool as a rough and raucous working-class place, but there had always been a large managerial, professional and well-heeled merchant population in and around the city. There had to be, to administer the seven miles of docks and all the ancillary businesses that shipping generated.
Woolton had, until the end of the First World War, been a small village outside the city, a place where detached Victorian mansions lay in large wooded gardens on narrow lanes alongside eighteenth-and nineteenth-century cottages. The expansion of the city in the Twenties and Thirties, and the building of Menlove Avenue as a dual carriageway to provide a central area for tramlines, had turned the area into a suburb. But when John went to live there in 1946 it still maintained a distinctly village-type atmosphere.
‘I was a nice, clean suburban boy,’ John would admit in 1967. ‘We owned our own house, had our own garden . . .’ complete with two lawns which as a teenager he had to mow every week in the summer – Mimi turning a deaf ear to his complaints. He never would like physical work; and would get through his life rarely doing any.
They also had a phone, which was a real status symbol in the Forties, and enough room on the side of the house for a car, although they never bought one. Not many people had a car in Liverpool in the Forties and Fifties.
Until John went to live in Mendips, Mimi had been working as a secretary, a job she immediately gave up as she wanted to be at home when her nephew got back from school in the afternoons. So, the new situation would have meant some financial sacrifice, compounded when, with the loss of the dairy, George, at forty-two, eventually found himself taking work in security at a nearby factory built on land where, pre-war, he had once grazed his cows. That must have been a social come-down, but Mimi would never have let it show.
To make ends meet, the family finances were helped out by the letting of the front bedroom of the Smiths’ house to a succession of lodgers, who were always young male veterinary students from Liverpool University. Here again, Mimi’s ambition and view of herself and her family showed. She didn’t want any random lodgers. They had to be educated, which would be good for John, too.
Mimi was a snob. Always well-dressed, with strict rules of behaviour and an insistence on good table manners, she believed herself and her sisters to be a cut above most other people around her, such as those living on the new council estates that were being increasingly erected as the city continued its invasion of Woolton. ‘Everybody’s common except you, Mimi,’ John would tease her when he reached his teens.
Julia was cuddly, but Mimi’s way of demonstrating her love for the boy she believed she’d rescued, and whom she now treated as though he were her own son, was by endlessly encouraging him academically. Education would be the key to his success, and she was determined that John would have every opportunity in this new and changing Britain. It was, therefore, important that he speak without a working-class Liverpool accent, generally known as Scouse, which in Mimi’s eyes would be a disadvantage later in life.
‘I had high hopes for him,’ she would remember. ‘I knew that you didn’t get anywhere if you spoke like a ruffian.’ With many boys there might well have been some truth to that in class-bound England. As it turned out, a Scouse accent never hurt John Lennon. In fact, when fame reached him, he would delight in purposely exaggerating it, just to aggravate Mimi.
All in all, it’s easy to see that, once John arrived at Mendips, the house tended to revolve around what was good for him . . . whether he liked it or not. And never for a minute was he ever made to feel that his presence was an imposition. Quite the reverse: Mimi made sure he knew that it was his home, too. Decades later when he was rich and famous John pleaded with her not to sell the house. It was the place where all his childhood memories were stored.
John’s bedroom was directly over the front door and hall, giving him a view from his window along Menlove Avenue. Until he was eight, trams would still run up and down the tracks in the grassy central reservation of the dual carriageway, and he would kneel at his window watching them, spotting Uncle George or Mimi coming home. On some days he would see his mother arriving, too, when she came on a visit. Buses replaced the trams in 1949, after which the lines were pulled up and replaced with bushes. And kneeling at his window lookout post he would watch the cars go by – not very many in those days.
Uncle George, a mild-mannered man who was under his wife’s thumb, behaved quite differently from Mimi in his relationship with John. ‘George thought that John had been put on earth purely to amuse him,’ Mimi would often joke. But one of John’s fondest early memories was when his uncle had taken him out on his float during the war, sitting behind the horse with the crates and large metal urns of milk, as George made his rounds. Always a more tactile person than Mimi, George would later sit John on his lap and help him read the headlines in the local evening newspaper, the Liverpool Echo.
Some of the newspaper stories would inevitably have involved football, and most boys living in Liverpool would have shown at least a little interest in the game. It’s pretty difficult not to in that football mad city. But, though George would kick a ball around the back garden with John, sport in all forms passed the boy by completely. Instead, as soon as he learned how to write, he would leave little notes asking Uncle George to tuck him up in bed instead of Mimi, or ask him to take him to the pictures in Woolton, which wasn’t Mimi’s style at all.
More to her liking would be educational family trips five miles into the centre of Liverpool. Rattling along on the hard, wooden benches of the pre-war, double-decker trams, overhead electric lines flashing as they went, they would make their way from Woolton past the shops at Penny Lane and on down Smithdown Road towards the windswept open spaces of the Pier Head.
Once Liverpool had, after London, been the second city of the British Empire, and grand Victorian buildings had been erected on the banks of the River Mersey to administer the docks and the ships that sailed from there. After more than half a century of wind, rain, smoke, smog, neglect and recent war, those buildings wouldn’t have looked very impressive to John in the late Forties. But Liverpudlians have always been proud of their city, and for him it would have been exciting to see the water chopped into creamy foam behind the ferries as they made their short crossings of the River Mersey to Birkenhead and New Brighton. While, sometimes, a little further along the dock, there might have been a grand liner waiting to depart for America.
America! The very idea of America, always thrilling and exciting, was lodged in every Liverpudlian heart in that west-facing corner of England. From that waterfront so many migrants had left from all over Europe to make new lives across the ocean, in ships crewed by other Liverpudlians.
John would have been told by his father that his grandfather had left from this very spot to make a living by singing in America. And that he, too, Freddie, had sailed there many times, and that the big buildings here in Liverpool, as towering as they might look to John, were nothing compared with those the Americans had in New York. That was what every other seaman in Liverpool told his children.
But John didn’t have to go to America to see Americans. They were right there in Liverpool, and, from his earliest days, he would recognise, by their light cotton uniforms, the US servicemen who would flood into the centre of the city from the nearby US Air Force base at Burtonwood. To small boys of the time, GIs were glamorous. America, ran the repeated subliminal message, was the place to be. And for John Lennon that message was only going to keep growing the older he became.
The Smiths’ house in Menlove Avenue, which had been built in 1933, was a cosy home. With elm trees in the back garden, it had mock Tudor exposed beams, leaded windows at the front, a front and side porch and a coal fire around which the family would sit on winter nights – along with a dog and two, then three, cats. Decades later John’s first wife, Cynthia, would complain about the smell of fish which ‘was always being cooked in the kitchen for the cats’, and which, she said, permeated the house. But John didn’t mention it. He liked cats, too.
Although he had spent a few weeks at another infant school before being handed over to Mimi, to all intents and purposes his education began at Dovedale Primary, which was down Menlove Avenue towards Penny Lane. Very quickly it was noticed at school that he was a clever but unusual child, ‘as bright as a button’, Mimi would like to recollect, ‘and quick in his movements’. Able to read and write within a few months at Dovedale, this encouraged her to give him a classic book of her own childhood, Alice In Wonderland, reading to him at first, and then leaving it up to him. Over the next few years he would repeatedly pore over both it and Lewis Carroll’s sequel, Through The Looking Glass, with its poem ‘The Walrus And The Carpenter’. He loved nonsense rhymes, wordplay and dream world imagery. Twenty years later he would dip into the memories of those books to create the surrealism of ‘I Am The Walrus’ and ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ in the Beatles’ late Sixties era.
‘I was passionate about Alice In Wonderland,’ he would often remember, ‘and I drew all the characters. I did poems in the style of the Jabberwocky, too.’ He also loved The Wind In The Willows and the very funny Just William books by Richmal Crompton, stories about an adventurous boy of about ten and his gang. ‘I wrote my own William stories, with me doing all the things,’ he would say.
Soon, though, it wasn’t enough for him simply to read stories, he wanted to create them, too, and by the age of nine he was writing and illustrating his own little books of jokes, cartoons and drawings entitled ‘Sport, Speed and Illustrated’ by J. W. Lennon. It was a very grown-up title and an adult author’s name for a young boy, with the books including an ongoing dramatic serial. ‘If you like this, come back again next week, it’ll be even better,’ he would write at the end of every episode.
He would always like reading and writing, and newspapers, too. And when he became famous he would be friendly with journalists and curious about their jobs. ‘I used to think about becoming a journalist,’ he would one day tell me. ‘Well, I suppose I really wanted to be a writer, but in Liverpool, writing for a newspaper was the only way I thought I could make a living out of it.’
At a time when children made much of their own entertainment, Children’s Hour at 5 p.m. every weekday on the BBC Home Service gave him a radio snapshot of healthy, worthy, middle-class culture. But it was the nightly fifteen-minute serial Dick Barton – Special Agent at a quarter to seven that would bring him running from playing in the garden or reading in his room every night.
In those pre-television days (for the great mass of the people, anyway), radio, with its comedy shows Up The Pole and Life With The Lyons – a sitcom about an American family living in London – was the national glue. Everybody listened. Later John would remember that there wasn’t much music in his house, but in those days a child could get a decent foundation in the popular classics and arias by listening to the BBC’s weekly record request programme, Family Favourites.
He had inherited a good ear for popular songs from his parents, and, as a little boy, would sing ‘Let Him Go, Let Him Tarry’, a traditional Irish song that was revived in 1945 by Jean Simmons in the wartime film The Way to the Stars, around the house. And, after lending John his mouth organ and seeing how much the boy liked it, one of the lodgers promised him one for himself, if he could learn to play a tune on it by the following morning. John learned two tunes overnight and was given his own new mouth organ for Christmas. ‘That was one of the great moments of my life, when I got my first harmonica,’ he liked to say. Nor did he leave it at that. Saving his pocket money, he then bought himself a manual on how to play the harmonica. He was already showing intent.
If getting a mouth organ was exciting, one of the more dismal moments of his childhood came at seven when he was taken to the opticians and fitted for a pair of glasses – with very thick lenses. He was fiercely short-sighted. Twenty years later he would make round wire-framed NHS glasses a fashion statement, but that wasn’t the way he saw it when he was in primary school and sometimes mocked as a ‘four eyes’ by the other children. As soon as he was out of class he would whip off his glasses and put them in his pocket, a habit he would continue in public until the mid-Sixties.
Aware of how well he was doing at school, Mimi must have been proud to see her encouragement reaping such immediate rewards, and she and John would sit together at the dining table in the evening, John always writing and drawing, and Mimi reading. Strict as she was in so many ways, they would often laugh together, too. He could always amuse with his made-up words and little boy silliness, and was always good company – probably more in tune with her than was her husband.
But that was John when he was at home. At school he was a different child, as, almost from the start, he became an aggressive little fellow in the playground where he quickly built a reputation for confrontation. ‘He wasn’t a sit-in-the-corner quiet Harry,’ comedian Jimmy Tarbuck who was at Dovedale Primary at the same time remembered to the Guardian newspaper in 2009. ‘If there was a bit of uproar he’d be amongst it . . . He wasn’t a hard case, but he wouldn’t back off anything.’
‘I was aggressive because I wanted to be popular,’ John would later explain. ‘I wanted to be the leader. It seemed more attractive than just being one of the toffees. I wanted everyone to do what I told them to, to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss.’
Why he wanted to be the leader, and it was a facet of his character throughout his life, he never divulged, or perhaps understood. But, by letting it be known that he was prepared to fight for dominance, although usually verbally more than physically, and getting his retaliation in early, he found the quickest route to getting his own way. With a birthday in October he would have been older than most of the children in his year at school, so that would help him boss his way around the playground, too. But, all through his life, he had a maturity that belied his age. He seemed more mature than he was, and more worldly-wise than his age-mates – with that sing-song deliberate way of talking that suggested sarcasm but which also brooked no argument.
But was there something else? With his school situated further down the road towards Liverpool, there would have been some tough children at Dovedale. John’s start in life had been rocky. Did he intuit very early that the outside world could be hostile and that if he was to find and keep his place in it, he would have to stand up for himself, and take on rivals like the rough kids at school? Had he, as Paul McCartney would one day surmise, built a protective shell around himself?
Whatever the explanation, his ever-ready defiance would become a character trait that would stay with him for life. And, just as he could never resist the opportunity to make a joke, he also rarely backed off in an argument, becoming verbally vicious when riled, as some of the people who loved him most would find. He would rarely apologise, though he would often change his mind about people he’d hurt. ‘That was just me mouth talking,’ he would regularly justify himself, when reminded of something particularly wounding that he’d said.
But saying cruel things was really just another part of being John Lennon.