John Lennon: The Life (18 page)

John and Paul meanwhile continued writing songs together, seated in their facing chairs in the McCartney living room. After something like six months of these mostly illicit afternoon sessions, they had around twenty compositions they thought worth preserving—though for what, they still had no idea. Paul kept them in a school exercise book, their lyrics and chord sequences set out in his neat hand, each page headed “A Lennon-McCartney Original” or “Another Lennon-McCartney Original.”

In every songwriting partnership they had ever heard of, one partner produced the melody, the other the lyrics. John and Paul made no such division of labor; both did words and music. Each song on which they collaborated was not only an expression of their mirror-image affinity but also an exercise in one-upmanship. From opposite sides of the fireplace, they would bat new ideas and chord changes back and forth like a table tennis match, each half-hoping the rally would continue forever and half that his opponent might miss and the ball go bouncing out of control among the coal scuttle and the fire tongs.

To begin with, they used the traditional Tin Pan Alley lexicon of
moon
,
June
,
true
, and
you
, from which rock ’n’ roll, for all its seeming iconoclasm, had not significantly departed. “There’s no blue moon
that I can see / There’s never been in history,” ran one lyric destined to go nowhere. Now and then, the composers would subconsciously reveal their common grounding in English literature. A casual Ping-Pong exchange around G major, for instance, produced the phrase “love, love me do,” a locution straight from the Lewis Carroll era (“Alice, Stop daydreaming, do!…”) Tape recorders at this date were still cumbersome reel-to-reel machines, costing far more than the pair could hope to scrape up between them. Consequently, they had no idea how their voices sounded together, nor any means of preserving rough versions of songs that might deserve to be polished later. Instead, a simple rule of thumb was adopted: if they came up with a new number on one day and could both still remember it on the day after, it worked.

So the titles kept accumulating in Paul’s exercise book, some predictable and derivative, others already giving off an unmistakable tang of originality and humor: “Keep Looking That Way,” “Years Roll By,” “Thinking of Linking,” “Looking Glass,” “Winston’s Walk.” In relation to their present life as musicians, the exercise was completely pointless. The audiences for whom the Quarrymen played, when they did manage to play, wanted nothing but skiffle chestnuts or American rock-’n’-roll covers. Those Lennon-McCartney Originals seemed destined not even to enjoy the limited exposure of John’s “Daily Howl.”

The old skiffle scene was growing more sophisticated in every way. Whereas once groups would audition for gigs in person, many of them now preferred to put songs on tape to circulate among promoters and club managements. Since the Quarrymen had no tape recorder, nor access to one, there was only one way so to advertise themselves. In the Kensington area of Liverpool was small studio where, for not too high a price, amateur performers could have their efforts enshrined on an actual gramophone record. Somewhat as a last resort in their hunt for work, the Quarrymen found the requisite cash among them and booked an appointment.

The studio was owned by an elderly man named Percy Phillips, who operated it single-handedly in a back room of his Victorian terrace house. Here, one afternoon in mid-1958, John, Paul, George,
and drummer Colin Hanton assembled, plus a schoolfriend of Paul’s named Duff Lowe, who was blessed with the gift of playing Jerry Lee Lewis–style arpeggios on the piano.

Even at this important moment, Lennon-McCartney Originals were left in the background. For their A-side, they chose “That’ll Be the Day,” Buddy Holly’s breakthrough hit with the Crickets, released in September of the previous year. They had been trying for months to work out Holly’s back-somersaulting guitar intro and, thanks mainly to John, had just succeeded in getting it note-perfect. The B-side was “In Spite of All the Danger,” a country-and-western pastiche—and a rather good one—written by Paul with help from George, which explained Duff Lowe’s presence on piano. John took the lead vocal on both tracks, with Paul and George singing backup harmonies.

The experience of “making a record,” about which they had been boasting to their friends and families, proved rather lacking in glamour. They were allowed only a single take for each song, then had to sit and wait while Mr. Phillips cut the disk on a machine somewhat like an industrial lathe. The price was £5, but for an extra £1, he told them, he could first transfer their recording to tape and help them edit it before putting it on wax. “We’d only just managed to raise the five quid between us,” Colin Hanton remembers. “John said there was no way we were paying another £1.”

Their money bought them just the one shellac disk in the new, shrunken 45 rpm size, with a yellow label saying “Kensington” and the song titles and composer credits handwritten by Percy Phillips. Nigel Walley duly hawked it around the clubs and dance halls, but without notable success. Merseyside as yet had no local radio that might have picked it up, nor discotheques that might have introduced it to live audiences. The most effective plugger turned out to be Colin’s printer friend, Charles Roberts, who worked for the Littlewoods mail-order organization. Roberts managed to get John’s rendition of “That’ll Be the Day” played over the public-address system to Littlewoods’ largely female employees.

The disk became the common property of its makers, each enjoying custody of it in turn, one week at a time. John had it for a week, then passed it to Paul, who had it for a week, then passed it to
George, who had it for a week, then passed it to Colin, who had it for a week, then passed it to Duff Lowe, who had it for the next two decades, until it was worth a fortune.

A
ll these new people and preoccupations in his life had helped blind and deafen John to an unbelievable thing going on under his very nose. Aunt Mimi was having a clandestine affair with her boarder, the biochemistry student Michael Fishwick. Yes, Mimi, that brisk suburban Betsey Trotwood, who seemed so scornful of normal feminine susceptibilities—scornful of the entire male species—had a lover half her age and only eight years older than the nephew in her care.

She had taken to Fishwick from the moment he arrived at Mendips as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate in 1951. It was not just that the Yorkshire teenager was studious and serious beyond his years and able to provide the intellectual stimulation Mimi had craved in her mundane marriage to George Smith. Something about him recalled the only real love of her life, the young doctor from Warrington who had died from a virus in 1932 before they could marry. She would later give Fishwick the gold cuff links she had bought her doomed fiancé as an engagement present and secretly had cherished ever since.

After George’s death, Mimi had leaned heavily on Michael Fishwick, making him almost a surrogate head of the household and increasingly turning to him for advice in coping with John. A few months later—to their mutual astonishment—friendship turned into something more. He was twenty-four and she was fifty, though she said she was forty-six. The affair was consummated, revealing the exact nature of poor Uncle George’s fabled “kindness.” Mimi was still a virgin.

Their relationship, Fishwick now recalls, was punctuated by his absence during university vacations and was carried on almost entirely at Mendips. Occasionally they would go together to an art exhibition—like the big Van Gogh show in Liverpool—or stroll around one of the National Trust stately homes in the neighborhood, always taking care to do nothing that might set Woolton’s tongues wagging and front-room curtains twitching. Once, when Mimi was with John
at her sister Mater’s in Edinburgh, she left him there and returned home so that she and Fishwick could have the house to themselves for a few days.

John never once suspected what was going on, often beyond a flimsy plaster wall in the bedroom next to his. Nor did Mimi confide in her three sisters, despite their unspoken vow to share everything. Julia, the one with the most highly tuned sexual antenna, had recently noticed a change in her—an indefinable blooming—and told the others she might have a “fancy man,” but never guessed his identity.

In July 1958, Fishwick returned to Mendips for another extended stay. Three months earlier, he had been drafted into one of the last batches of young Britons compelled to do National Service. He was now an RAF officer trainee on the Isle of Man but applied for leave to return to Liverpool, as he said, to check over the PhD thesis he was having typed at the university.

Mimi was deeply worried about John’s lack of progress at art college, and more than that: when taking his coat to be dry-cleaned, she had found a packet of Durex “rubber Johnnies” in one of the pockets, a precaution doubtless inspired by what had happened to Barbara Baker. Fishwick was the only person to whom she showed the packet, opening a tightly clenched hand to reveal it and asking, “What do I do about this?” His advice was not to make too big a thing of it—which she evidently took, for on this occasion, at least, he recalls, there was no fiery argument between aunt and nephew, no door-slamming exit by John to seek sanctuary at Julia’s.

Sunday, July 15, brought Merseyside warm, sunny weather that showed the woods, golf greens, and trim hedges of Woolton at their lushest. John, on vacation from college, was around the house in the morning but, as Fishwick remembers, “drifted off later with some friends.” Mimi’s only visitor was Julia, who dropped in that afternoon for a cup of tea and a chat as she invariably did. It wasn’t until late evening—past nine thirty—that she left to catch her bus back to Allerton. The longest day of the year had been only three weeks earlier. Dusk was only just starting to fall.

Julia’s bus stop was in Menlove Avenue, about two hundred yards
from Mendips’s front gate, on the other side of the busy two-lane road, with no pedestrian crossing anywhere near—though a 30 mph speed limit was in force. Usually Mimi walked to the stop with her, but this evening she said she wouldn’t if Julia didn’t mind. “That’s all right, don’t worry,” was the cheerful reply. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Just then, Nigel Walley turned up at the front gate, looking for John. But John had not returned home all afternoon—and, in fact, was now over at Blomfield Road, waiting for his mother’s return. Julia explained this to Walloggs, adding in her flirtatious way, “Never mind. You can walk me to the bus-stop.”

Mimi watched from the front door as they strolled off together, Nigel chuckling at some remark of Julia’s. They parted at the junction with Vale Road; Nigel turned right toward his home while Julia crossed Menlove Avenue’s southbound lane to the median strip. This marked the route of the old tramway, where John and his Outlaws used to play their urchin games, and was now grassed-over and planted with a hedge. Julia stepped through the hedge and was halfway across the northbound lane when a bulky Standard Vanguard sedan, registration number LKF 630, loomed out of the twilight. Nigel heard a screech of brakes and a thud, and turned to see Julia’s body thrown high into the air.

The noise was loud enough to reach Mimi and Michael Fishwick in the kitchen at Mendips. “We looked at each other and didn’t say a word,” Fishwick remembers. “We both just ran like hell.” They found Julia lying in the road, with a stunned Nigel Walley kneeling beside her. Nigel would always be haunted by the memory of how strangely peaceful she looked, with a stray lock of her auburn hair fluttering in the summer breeze. The impact seemed to have left no mark, though Fishwick could see blood seeping through the reddish curls; she was still just barely alive. “[But] when I ran across the road and saw her,” Mimi remembered, “I knew there was no hope.”

An ambulance arrived within minutes to take Julia to Sefton General Hospital. Mimi got into the ambulance, still wearing the slippers in which she’d rushed out of doors. Fishwick joined her at the hospital later, bringing her some shoes and her handbag. Her immediate concern was that he should telephone other family members with
the news, so that one of them could break it to John. “She didn’t want John to find out just from a policeman turning up at the door.”

Unfortunately, that was exactly how it happened: a Liverpool bobby in a Praetorian-crested helmet, knocking on the front door of 1 Blomfield Road and asking John in embarrassed officialese if he was Julia’s son. At this unspeakable moment, the only person with him was the member of his extended family he least cared about: Bobby “Twitchy” Dykins. “Twitchy took it worse than me,” John would recall. “Then he said ‘Who’s going to look after the kids?’ And I hated him. Bloody selfishness. We got a taxi over to Sefton General, where she was lying dead…I talked hysterically to the taxi-driver all the way, ranted on and on, the way you do. The taxi-driver just grunted now and again. I refused to go in and see her. But Twitchy did. He broke down.

“It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. We’d caught up so much, me and Julia, in just a few years. We could communicate. We got on. She was great. I thought ‘Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. That’s really fucked everything. I’ve no responsibilities to anyone now.’”

Michael Fishwick met Mimi at the hospital, then took her to Blomfield Road, where John’s aunts Nanny and Harrie and their husbands had now arrived. Mimi collapsed into her sisters’ arms while Fishwick was given a large whiskey by one of the ever-sub-ordinate menfolk. When John finally left the house, it was not to return home but to seek out his old girlfriend, Barbara Baker, and tell her the news. As Barbara would recall, the two of them went into Reynolds Park and “stood there with our arms around each other, crying our eyes out.” Late that night, Mimi’s next-door neighbor, a Mrs. Bushnell, saw John playing his guitar in his usual place out in Mendips’s front porch—the only real form of comfort or healing he could find.