His pure treble singing voice quickly won him a place in the church choir, to which Nigel Walley also belonged. At first, he seemed to enjoy the ritual of dressing up in a white surplice and turning out for services twice every Sunday as well as Saturday weddings, which meant a half crown (12.5p) payment for each chorister. He was also mysteriously drawn to St. Peter’s little churchyard (or the bone orchard, as he called it) where mossy, weather-beaten tombstones traced Woolton families back two centuries and more. He would read and reread the etched inscriptions with their familiar local names, their forgotten tragedies between the lines, and their comforting euphemisms for death:
Also ELEANOR RIGBY
THE BELOVED WIFE OF THOMAS WOODS
AND GRANDDAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE
DIED 10TH OCTOBER 1939, AGED 44 YEARS
ASLEEP
Mimi would later remember how comforted John seemed by the notion in Eleanor Rigby’s epitaph that “it wasn’t gone forever…just asleep.”
The rector of St. Peter’s was a middle-aged Welsh bachelor named Morris Pryce-Jones, known to his younger parishioners as Pricey. Far from the grim stereotype of his native land, Pricey was a kindly and tolerant man, prepared for boys to be boys up to a point. But he was utterly unprepared for boys to be anything like John Lennon. One Sunday during a particularly arduous sermon, John’s fellow chorister David Ashton began surreptitiously reading a Boy Scouts’ Pocket Diary, which included the maxim “A Boy Scout is Thrifty.” John produced a pen and altered it to “A Boy Scout is Fifty,” sending everyone around them “into tucks”—the Liverpool term for laughter so uncontrollable that it puckers up the entire body as if by some invisible drawstring. Both boys were docked their next wedding payment.
One Sunday school teacher, “Ma” Davies, had an altercation with John during a lesson about Jesus’s encounter with the Scribes and Pharisees. So incensed was he by the story that he announced Christ’s persecutors “must have been Fascists.” Ma Davies told him that Fascists were far worse than Scribes or Pharisees, but John refused to be convinced. The teacher might have given him some credit for such strong emotions on behalf of the Redeemer; instead, she excoriated him for “making trouble” and ordered both him and David Ashton, who had supported him, to report to Pricey for punishment.
Deciding that a mere telling-off would have no effect, the rector decided to take the rare step of caning them. Unfortunately, the nearest to a cane he could find was an umbrella belonging to a female chorister named Bertha Radley, a relative of the Eleanor Rigby memorialized in the churchyard. Her umbrella was an ornate one, covered in crocodile skin, with a handle shaped like a crocodile’s head. “John got it first, one on each hand,” Ashton remembers. “Then when Pricey hit me, the handle broke off. I remember to this day Bertha saying ‘Oh, my poor crocodile!’”
The choicest of this rich crop of misbehavior and insubordination occurred, suitably enough, at Harvest Festival time. Woolton still remained agricultural enough for harvesting to have real significance, and St. Peter’s always rose to the occasion, decorating its altar lavishly with grain sheaves and offerings of vegetables and fruit from local greenhouses and garden plots. When Pricey emerged from the vestry to lead the singing of harvest hymns like “We Plough the Fields and Scatter,” he found the altar fruit depleted as if by a flock of predatory crows. A glance along the giggling choir stalls was sufficient to identify the pilferer. John was expelled from the choir, and he and Pete Shotton were banned from the church altogether.
Mimi urged him to beg reinstatement, but in vain. “I told him ‘It’s all part of your education, John.’ But he just shouted back ‘kayshuedshun, kayshuedshun!’ He was always inventing daft words. And he used to make me laugh by taking off the choirmaster—he’d pull a funny face and conduct the cats.”
His bedroom, situated directly above the front porch, was a tiny, elongated space, almost filled by single bed with a blue-green canopy, pushed against the right-hand wall. A diminutive clothes cupboard and a table and chair by the window were its only other furniture. John would always classify himself as “a homebody,” and this was where he spent as many contented boyhood hours by himself as he did in the open air with his friends. At such times, the house would fall so utterly silent that Mimi presumed he was out. Then she’d push open his bedroom door and find him on his bed with a book, in a position of seeming perverse discomfort. He would lie flat with his body twisted around and his legs resting up the wall. All his life, he could never fully savor print without first folding himself into that awkward hairpin shape.
He had caught Mimi’s love of reading—though with John it was always to be more like an insatiable physical hunger. Years later, his aunt would mimic the half-truculent way he used to scoop a volume from a shelf and turn away, his eyes already devouring the print like twin piranhas. Children’s literature in the early fifties offered a limited choice compared with what would come later—A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, Hugh Lofting’s adventures of Doctor Dolittle. The genre was dominated by Enid Blyton, with her prolific adventures of the Famous Five and the Secret Seven and her chronicles of the girls’ boarding schools Mallory Towers and St. Clare’s. Lying on his red quilt, with his feet higher than his head, John read them all.
The two outstanding favorites of his youngest years were Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. He loved the pure anarchy that lay behind their prim Victorian facade, the incessant punning and spoonerizing, the lunatic logic, always spelled out in flawless syntax and perfect scansion; the songs whose hypnotically simple refrains (“Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?…”) needed no setting to music. In Carroll’s fabulous bestiary, if he had known it, lay several future incarnations of himself—the hyperactive Mad Hatter, the sleepy Dormouse, the Caterpillar puffing smugly on its hookah, the derisively grinning Cheshire Cat, Alice herself, as she experiments with life-transforming pills and potions, the Walrus, on that nightmare beach where the sun never goes down, sweet-talking a school of baby oysters into becoming hors d’oeuvres. Most influential of all was the mock-epic poem entitled “Jabberwocky”—to the boy with his legs up the wall, nothing less than a tutorial in how nonsense can be made infinitely more descriptive than sense:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe….
Through the Looking-Glass ends with a little known coda, which runs:
A boat beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July…
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
Twenty-five years in the future, there would be a song about that same phantom girl, that same “boat on the river,” and “marmalade skies” recalling the Orange Marmalade jar Alice sees during her fall into the White Rabbit’s burrow.
At the opposite end of the scale, he devoured the weekly boys’ comics that existed in huge quantity in the early fifties, from the Rover, Wizard, and Hotspur, which contained serial stories (usually about wartime Nazis going “Himmel!” and “Donner und Blitzen!”) to the all-cartoon periodicals the Beano, the Dandy, Radio Fun, Film Fun, and Knockout. Along with sweets and picturedromes, Mimi had forbidden him comics, except perhaps the high-minded Eagle (edited by a clergyman), but his Uncle George would defy the Look by smuggling Beanos or Dandys up to him—and in any case they were freely available at the homes of his friends.
He would write his own adventure stories, like the ones in Wizard and Hotspur, but with himself as their hero, and invent his own cartoon strips like the ones in the Beano and Knockout. At the age of seven, he handwrote and drew a whole magazine entitled “Speed and Sport Illustrated” by J. W. Lennon, with portraits of socce
r players in action, cartoon strips, and the beginning of an adventure serial. “If you liked this,” the first installment ended, “Come again next week. It’ll be even better.” But of all the diverse high and low cultural sources that fed his imagination—and shaped his character forever—none could compare with William Brown.
William was the creation of Richmal Crompton Lamburn (1890–1969), a Lancashire classics teacher who switched to writing under the name Richmal Crompton after being stricken by polio. Her eleven-year-old hero had originally been intended for an adult readership, but children quickly latched on to him, ensuring his continuance through thirty-seven story collections. William was the archetypal naughty small boy in the innocent decades before vandalism, mugging, joyriding, and alcopops changed the agenda. Incorrigibly noisy and untidy, his pockets bulging with catapults, marbles, and live frogs, he is the bane of his conventional parents, his uptight older brother and sister, and every schoolteacher, clergyman, and nervous elderly spinster in his orbit. He has three companions, Ginger, Douglas, and Henry, with whom, in a gang known as the Outlaws, he roams the countryside, trespassing, birdsnesting, playing Red Indians, waging guerrilla war against his sworn enemy, Hubert Lane, and dodging his besotted follower, a prototype groupie named Violet Elizabeth Bott. The Outlaws form an unbreakable blood-brotherhood against repressive and pompous adults: they have their own private language, secret signs, and sacred rituals, and their own cavernous hideout-cum-auditorium, the Old Barn.
William is a many-sided character: a leader whose authority over his followers is absolute; a daydreamer who imagines exotic careers as a big-game hunter, secret agent, or circus clown; a virtuoso of scorn and sarcasm and an inventive liar; an exhibitionist, given to singing at the top of his voice, playing mouth organs and trumpets at top volume, dressing up in exotic clothes, and wearing elaborate false beards and mustaches; a hustler, forever trying to raise money for new water pistols or cricket bats; a tender-hearted animal lover; a tireless novelty seeker and observer of new trends and fashions; an indefatigable writer of lurid stories, dramas, and poems in his own individual spelling; and organizer of plays, shows, and exhibitions in his bedroom or the Old Barn. His greatest joy is to escape from his own genteel environment and run around with “vulgar” working-class children, swapping his nice clothes for their scruffy ones and trying to imitate the fascinating crudeness of their speech. His spirits are never lower than when he is discovered among these unsuitable companions and restored to the outraged bosom of his family.
Having gobbled up the few red clothbound William books on Mimi’s bookshelf, John began to collect them, following their hero through the twenties, thirties, and Second World War to the threshold of the space age. He loved the caustic prose style, which made no concession to young readers, freely using words such as inamorata and rhododendron, yet always sided with William against a largely risible grown-up community of choleric retired colonels, ditzy vicars’ wives, dimwitted policemen, and sandal-wearing vegetarians. William’s world, moreover, was uncannily like the one that John himself inhabited—same “village” surrounded by countryside, same genteel home with servants’ bells. He identified totally with William’s rebelliousness, his audacity, his humor, his flights of fantasy, his need always to be the kingpin yet always to have companions, his share-and-share-alike generosity, his proneness to hilarious misspellings and mispronunciations, even his preference for Red Indians over cowboys and addiction to playing the mouth organ. And it was William who inspired him to create his first gang of four, united against the world.
The Outlaws have an unchanging hierarchy, with William at the top, supported by his “boon companion,” Ginger, and Henry and Douglas forming a less essential second division. In John’s Vale Road following, Ivy Vaughan and Nigel “Walloggs” Walley corresponded to Henry and Douglas, while albino-blond Pete Shotton, his prime accomplice and audience, was a natural Ginger.
With John as their leader, they devoted after-school hours, weekends, and holidays to reincarnating William and the Outlaws in Woolton. Many of their escapades were dastardly only in their own eyes—walking on grass in defiance of KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs, entering and exiting wherever NO ENTRY or NO EXIT was proclaimed, drinking from taps marked NOT DRINKING WATER, and—in the words of their Sunday school classmate Rod Davis—“running into Marks and Spencer’s and shouting ‘Woolworths!’” At other times, they flouted authority and risked life and limb in ways that would have caused apoplexy in their respective homes. One of their favorite games was to hang on behind the trams that clanked up and down Menlove Avenue. Another was to climb a tree over a busy main road and play a version of Chicken with the double-decker buses passing beneath. When a bus approached, one of them would poke a leg into its path and dangle it there until the last possible moment before impact. Whoever kept his nerve for longest was the winner. If anyone’s shoe actually touched the bus roof, that counted as bonus points.
Lennon’s gang, as people soon took to calling them, became the curse of a district otherwise blessedly free from persecution or disturbance. They trespassed on Allerton Golf Course, annoying the grave businessmen at play there and conducting riotous games of their own. They crept in through the back entrances of cinemas without paying and disrupted performances until ejected by furious usherettes. Their “scrumping” of apples from other people’s gardens became so pestilential that one enraged grower appeared with a shotgun and fired both barrels at John’s fleeing form.
Like William, he became a Boy Scout, joining the 3rd Allerton troop, but also like William, he had little time for the Scout code of duty and respectfulness. David Ashton, his companion in the troop’s “Badgers” section, recalls the alternative marching chorus he encouraged the others to sing as they tramped along in their shorts, bush hats, and neckerchiefs: “We are the Third! The mad Third! We come from ALLeerTON and we are MAD! MAD!”
A frequent background for William’s and the Outlaws’ adventures are summer fetes and garden parties. Their Woolton disciples, too, were invariably to be found when some local church or institution set out its innocent fund-raising paraphernalia of raffia stalls, lucky dips, and kiddies’ fancy-dress parades. They would sneak into the tents where home-made cakes and pies or lovingly nurtured raspberries awaited the judges’ inspection, and make off with whatever they fancied. Once stuffed to the gills, they would entertain themselves by mocking the well-meaning people who were attempting to raise money for good causes, and the families innocently enjoying themselves. Nigel Walley has a mirthful recollection of one garden fete “run by the nuns” where they spotted a group of monks seated together on a bench. “Somehow John got hold of this robe and dressed himself up as a monk. He was sitting with the other monks, talking to them in all these funny words while we were rolling about under the tent, in tucks.”
The portrayal, however, contained one major departure from character. Whereas William, for all his lawlessness, never stoops to intentional larceny, John—egged on, as always, by Pete—became a habitual and dedicated shoplifter. Confectioners in those days would often trustingly display sweets and chocolate on their counters in open boxes or arranged in glass dishes with paper doilies. “We’d go into this certain place that was run by a little old lady,” Nigel Walley remembers. “John’d point to things he said he wanted on the top shelf, and all the time he’d be filling his pockets from the counter. He did the same at a shop that sold Dinky Toys in Woolton, opposite the Baths. He’d put a tractor or a little car in his pocket while the bloke was looking the other way. We went back to that same shop later, but this time John hadn’t got his glasses on. He couldn’t understand why his fingers couldn’t get at the Dinky cars. He couldn’t see that the bloke had covered them with a sheet of glass.”
Mimi was generous with pocket money, giving John a weekly allowance of five shillings (the same amount received by William’s pampered arch-foe, Hubert Lane), on condition that he did certain household jobs, such as mowing the lawn. Like William, he share
d whatever he had with his “boon companions.” He found it impossible to hang on to money, just as he would all his life; nor was he willing to earn a bonus by legitimate means. The one time he ever received physical chastisement from Mimi was when she found he’d stolen some cash from her handbag. “I was always taking a little, for soft things like Dinkies,” he would recall. “This day I must have taken too much.”
In contrast with his kind heart and impulsive generosity, he could show a lack of sensitivity and compassion that even roistering Liverpool boys sometimes felt to be going too far. This was not an era of verbal tact toward the physically and mentally handicapped, but John seemed to find all forms of affliction hilarious. His drawings teemed with hideously misshapen, obese, or skeletal figures, endowed with too few or too many limbs and covered with warts or sores. A blind person tapping along with a white stick, or a child-on-crutches collection box would reduce him to giggles—a device with which many people try to disguise fear or repugnance. He often entertained his followers with what they called his “cripple act” when he would shamble and cavort like Quasimodo, grinning with the blank-eyed oblivion of a simpleton and holding one hand crookedly like a claw.
Even then, when nothing in his daily life even hinted at it, he seems to have had premonitions of his strange destiny, almost as if his grandmother Polly’s reputed psychic powers were reaching out to him, too. So vivid and exciting were his dreams that he looked forward to going to sleep in his red-quilted bed almost as much as to a theatrical performance or movie. As he later remembered, he always dreamed in brilliant color and weird shapes that gave his subsequent first encounters with painters like Salvador Dalí and Hieronymus Bosch the shock of déjà vu.