Immediately behind Menlove Avenue was Vale Road, a quiet lane of mainly semi-detached houses where, at the age of seven, John met the best friend of his boyhood, one he would stay close to all his life. He was Pete Shotton, a little blond lad who didn’t go to Dovedale but who John would see after school and with whom he would become inseparable. Pete already had his own friends when John arrived in Woolton – Ivan Vaughan and Nigel Walley. But with John included they soon made up a quartet, with John quickly assuming the role of leader.
The friendship was initially based on boys’ games of make-believe escapades as they acted out John’s latest crazes in their back gardens, the disused wartime air raid shelter behind Pete’s house, and the many green areas of woods and parks around Woolton. Pete didn’t notice it at the time, but decades later, while reflecting in his memoirs on their boyhood together, he realised that John always had to have a special partner in his adventures, and especially those which involved mischief. ‘John desperately needed the supportive presence of whoever he felt closest to at the time,’ he would write.
Pete would be the sidekick when the two boys went pinching apples from neighbours’ trees, but, later, there would be other partners for John as the need for a like-thinking companion became a necessity. In this way, from Lennon and Shotton as boyhood scamps, it developed into Lennon and McCartney as songwriters, and then on to John and Yoko – with a couple of shorter-lasting duos interspersed along the way.
At first, the biggest trouble John would get into would be stealing bubble gum from the local sweet shop with Pete alongside to join in the fun. The scrapes continued when he and Pete became cub Boy Scouts, and, even more unlikely, choirboys at the local Woolton parish church, St Peter’s. Attending Sunday school together, John’s misdemeanours, such as pressing his chewing gum into the hand of the choir teacher when ordered to ‘hand it over’, always had to be done with Pete giggling behind him. It was more amusing for him that way.
But, although singing as choirboys at weddings provided a handy little Saturday income, as well as marking the first time John ever sang in public, neither he nor Pete stayed in surplices for long. Both were expelled from the choir for stealing the fruit at the harvest festival.
John’s aim at that stage was mainly to amuse himself, rather than to be seriously defiant. But a pattern was set. It would amuse Uncle George who, when his nephew told lies to get out of trouble, would say to Mimi, ‘Well, he’ll never be a vicar.’
Mimi wasn’t smiling, though, when she realised that John had stolen some money from her purse. It was the only occasion that she ever smacked him, she would say. ‘I must have taken too much that time,’ John would later reflect. She hadn’t noticed all the other occasions.
With Pete, Ivan and Nigel becoming his first admiring audience, John quickly began to realise that he shone in front of a crowd. ‘I was the King Pin of my age group,’ he told Hunter Davies. ‘I learned lots of dirty jokes very young. There was this girl who lived near me who told me them . . . The sort of gang I led went in for things like shoplifting and pulling girls’ knickers down . . .’ Other boys’ parents disliked him, and warned their children not to play with him. According to Rod Davis, whom he’d met at the church choir, even before John was ten he was known in the neighbourhood as ‘that John Lennon!!’
Those were the great days of Western movies, with films like Colt ’45, Red River and Rio Grande hugely popular, and despite Mimi’s strictures, Uncle George would take John, and sometimes Pete, to the Woolton Picture House. Like all small boys at the time, John loved Westerns, invariably playing a Red Indian as he and his gang re-enacted their battles with the cowboys and the US Army. ‘That was typical of John . . . supporting the underdog,’ Mimi would say, laughing at the memory. Of course, because he was leader of the gang, history would have to be reversed and the Indians always won the battles, with John wearing a head-dress of pheasant feathers that Mimi had made up for him. ‘He loved it. He never took it off,’ she would say. ‘I can see him now in the garden, dancing around Pete Shotton who was tied up to a tree.’
Even playing cowboys and Indians, John always had to be in charge. And when he said the other boys in the game were dead, that he’d got them with his imaginary bow and arrow or make-believe rifle, they had to act dead. ‘Pretend you’re dead properly,’ he would shout at them.
Those early years with Mimi and Uncle George were the most settled and happy of John’s young life. And, like other middle-class children, he would be taken on outings to pantomimes at Christmas, one of which was to see the ukulele-playing singer George Formby at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool. Then there would be trips to the sandhills at Formby, or the Tudor mansion Speke Hall, which was just a short bus ride away, as well as summer days out to the local resorts of New Brighton and Southport.
In Woolton a favourite walk would take the family along Menlove Avenue and then around the corner and up the hill to a Victorian mansion, Strawberry Field, with its overgrown wooded grounds. Once it had been the grand home of a nineteenth-century Liverpool merchant, but, when John lived nearby, it had been turned into a Salvation Army children’s orphanage, where every summer there would be a garden fete. ‘As soon as he could hear the Salvation Army band starting to play,’ Mimi would say, ‘he would jump up and down shouting “Come on, Mimi, we’re going to be late”.’ And he would rush her off along the road and through the big wrought iron gates of the estate.
Not everyone could afford a summer holiday away in those days, but, from the age of nine, John would always go to Scotland for a week or two to stay in Edinburgh with Mimi’s sister Elizabeth (who was always known as Aunt Mater) and her husband, Bert. At first Mater’s son Stanley Parkes, who was six years older than John, would come for him, but John was soon allowed to travel there on his own. On one occasion he played his mouth organ so much on the journey that the coach driver told him to come to the bus company’s lost property office in Edinburgh the following day. When he got there, he was handed a new harmonica which had been lying unclaimed for months.
The time spent in Scotland would become a highlight of his year, and especially the week in a croft that the Parkes family owned in Durness in the north-west Highlands, to which they would drive every August. Later, at his senior school, when asked what he would like to do in life, he replied: ‘Salmon fishing.’ It seemed ridiculous at the time, but he meant it. He liked to be near water. He always would.
Despite Mimi taking over John’s upbringing, she and Julia remained close, as did all the Stanley sisters, who would regularly congregate at Menlove Avenue, particularly Aunt Harrie and her daughter Liela, who was three years older than John. Harrie’s first husband having died, she and her second husband and Liela lived in the Woolton cottage at the old dairy that Uncle George had once owned.
George would also be at the get-togethers, although not Julia’s partner Bobby Dykins, but when later John talked of those days, as he often did, it was as though he was remembering a matriarchal society with Mimi at the top of the pyramid. The Stanley sisters, he would tell interviewers, ‘were five strong women’, and all his life he would be attracted to strong women. Women who couldn’t stand up to him would get hurt.
Was Julia a strong woman? Not in Mimi’s eyes. But she’d been unlucky, too, and, although technically still married to Freddie – they would never divorce – she put her life together when she met Dykins. With him she had a daughter in 1947, also called Julia, while another daughter, Jacqui, would follow two years later. How happy Julia was with the situation and with her life is impossible to know. But when she arrived at Mendips one day ‘wearing a black coat and with her face bleeding’, as was John’s memory of the moment, her son didn’t believe that she’d simply been in an accident. Nor, though, did he ask her who had hit his mother. Instead he went into the garden, not wanting to be involved.
His father, meanwhile, hadn’t quite given up hope of seeing him again. According to Freddie’s account, which would be published after his death, he wrote to Mimi in 1949, enquiring about John, who was now eight. But, as he had just spent six months in jail for kicking in a shop window in London’s West End while drunk, Mimi was not going to see all her efforts on John undone. Freddie, she is said to have replied, had ‘made a shambles’ of his life and ‘brought shame’ on his family. Then she added that, should he ever try to become involved in his son’s life again, she would tell John that his father was a jailbird.
Freddie got the message. There was no way back for him. Unable to return to sea because of his criminal record – petty though it was – and finding it difficult to find any other regular employment, he took to the road.
John’s behaviour might have been edging towards occasional minor delinquency with his and Pete’s shoplifting, but, to no one’s surprise, at the age of eleven he passed the 11-Plus exam. ‘That was the only exam I ever passed,’ he would remember. His reward was a brand new, three-speed, green Raleigh bicycle – the customary 11-Plus present from parents who could afford it.
For John’s next school, Mimi considered the Liverpool Institute, the most highly thought of school in Liverpool. But it was in the middle of the city. So, she settled for the local Quarry Bank High School for Boys, which, on the far side of Calderstones Park, was only a pleasant mile and a half away in a quiet, middle-class area. It, too, was an excellent school. She must have been delighted with the way things were turning out. But just as pleasing for John was the fact that his friend Pete had also passed the exam and would be joining him there.
One of his other friends, Ivan Vaughan, would, however, not be with them, his parents choosing the Institute for their boy – precisely because ‘that John Lennon’ would be going to Quarry Bank. Ivan was clever. They didn’t want to risk him being led astray.
One consequence of the decision to send Ivan to a different school could never have been imagined. But five years later it would completely change John’s life . . . and eventually the lives of millions of others.