The Beatles (6 page)

Mimi Smith easily made up for her sister’s slack attention to raising John. Unlike Julia in every way, Mimi was a proud,
no-nonsense, if “difficult,” housewife
with a steely determination who brought great reserves of discipline to the role of surrogate parent. “
Mimi was a sensible, dignified lady
… the absolute rock of the family,” recalled a family member with a mixture of admiration and awe. Anyone who crossed her could expect to earn the full measure of her wrath—perhaps a sharp tongue-lashing or, worse, the dreaded silent treatment. Determined to “bring John up right,” she had strong ideas about what was appropriate behavior that bordered on intolerance. People use words like
stubborn, impatient, authoritarian,
and
uncompromising
to describe her forceful nature. But if Mimi was a
“
merciless disciplinarian
,” as conveyed by a childhood friend of John’s who knew her, she could also be an easy touch with a big heart. “She had a terrific sense of humor, which John could crack into and make her laugh in situations where she was trying to discipline him,” says Pete Shotton. One minute she’d be giving John a frosty piece of her mind; the next minute “you’d find them rolling around, laughing together.”

In almost no time, John settled comfortably into the Smith household. The family residence on Menlove Avenue—nicknamed Mendips, after a mountain range—was as familiar as any he’d ever known, a cozy seven-room stucco-and-brick cottage with an extra bedroom that Mimi later rented to students as a means of income after George’s death. Thanks to the unobstructed expanse of a golf course across the street, sunlight filled the pleasant interior, warming an endless warren of nooks where John often curled up and paged dreamily through picture books. His bedroom was in a small but peaceful alcove over the porch, and on most mornings he was awakened early by a clatter of hoofbeats as an old dray horse made milk deliveries along the rutted road.

Aunt Mimi and Uncle George made it easy for John to feel loved there. Mimi told a close relative that she’d never wanted children, but “
she
wanted
John
.” From the moment he arrived at Mendips, she showered him with attention. She bought him books and read him stories, especially those from a tattered, lavishly illustrated volume of
Wind in the Willows
that had been passed down from his cousin Stanley to cousin Leila and finally to John.
Mimi’s morning room was always filled
with the sweet smells of apple tarts and crumbles, which she baked almost as capably and effortlessly as John later wrote songs. And there were always enough toys and sketch pads to entertain him. Besides, Julia visited – often, practically every day, which in some ways made it better for John, in other ways, worse.

If Mimi could at times be prickly and irascible, her moods were balanced out by her husband. Little is known about George Smith other than the sketchiest of details offered by his relatives. He was “
a quiet and jolly man
,” as one person described him, who had left the milk trade (he operated a dairy farm and retail milk outlet with his brother Frank that spanned four generations of their prominent Woolton family) to run a small-time bookmaking business, taking bets on the gee-gees, as they called racehorses, running at the local track. (He’d let John bet on the Grand National each year, remembers a cousin.) No one was sure how Uncle George squared such activities with upright Mimi, but one thing was clear: he doted on his nephew. “
Uncle George absolutely adored John
,” insisted another cousin
who often visited Mendips. “
I had no time
to go playing ducks in the bath with him,” Mimi sniffed, whereas “George would see him to bed with a smile most nights.” Any time of the day, George might grab his nephew by the shoulder and sing out, “Give me a squeaker,” which usually earned him a loud, slurpy kiss. Even though George worked nights, “he took us all to the pictures [and] to the park,” recalled Leila. And on those occasions when all three cousins played outside, he allowed them to have meals in the garden shed, where they demanded to “eat just like an animal, with [their] hands.”

However unlike Mimi he may have been in other respects, the two both stressed the absolute necessity, if not compulsion, for constant self-education, especially through their love of words. In the parlor, behind the couch,
Mimi shelved “twenty volumes
of the world’s best short stories,” which she claimed “John… read… over and over again,” along with “most of the classics.” George recited John’s favorite nursery rhymes and, later, when he was old enough, taught John how to solve crossword puzzles. “Words needn’t have to be taken at their face value,” he explained. “They had many meanings”—valuable advice saved for later. That is not to imply, as some books claim, that John’s time with Mimi was housebound. He was devoted to his cousin Stanley and remained so throughout his life. Although Stanley was seven years older than John and away most months at prep school, they enjoyed an easy, undemanding friendship that functioned on equal footing. John was sent for most vacations on a ten-hour bus ride to his cousin’s home in Scotland, where the boys wandered around Loch Madie, an old anglers’ haunt, and fished for trout in the icy burns. Stanley had an air rifle that fired lead pellets and he taught John how to shoot. “
My mother had a .22
,” he recalled, “and John and I would do some target practice. We’d go out shooting rabbits… or [at] tin cans and bottles.” If they got bored with that, as invariably happened after several hours, they’d head down to one of the five beautiful white sand beaches, where Stanley eventually taught John how to swim. The boys copied speedway riding on their bicycles, building small dirt tracks and then, recalled Leila, “peddling like hell down the straightaway before putting the bike into a slide.” Afterward, they would pack picnic lunches and go to the all-day marionette shows or to the open-air baths in Blackpool. Stanley recalled “drag[ging] Leila and John to the cinema as often as three times in a day—out of one cinema and into another.”

Unlike the loner persona he cultivated later on as a teenager, John Lennon’s childhood seems marked by frivolity and happiness. “He was
such a happy-go-lucky, good-humored, easygoing, lively lad,” recalled Leila. Contrary to popular opinion, the preadolescent John Lennon wasn’t an outcast. He might not have “
fit in
” with kids less artistically curious, as he argued incessantly with his interviewers. He might have languished “
in a trance for twenty years
,” owing to a lack of intellectual stimulation. But he wasn’t “
very deprived
” as a child, as Yoko Ono later tried to assert. “
This image of me being the orphan
is garbage,” John confessed in his last published interview, “because I was well protected by my auntie and my uncle, and they looked after me very well, thanks.”

He was also looked after at Quarry Bank, the state grammar school (comparable to high school) he entered in 1952, although not in the manner that one is proud of. Quickly earning the reputation as “a clown in class,” he attracted the attention of Quarry Bank’s stern, authoritarian masters, who prided themselves on scholarship and discipline. John, bored stiff, prized neither, flouting the rules. Not even the threats of corporal punishment fazed him. He couldn’t have cared less.

Instead, the questions he grappled with later while growing up were why he was
different,
how he could cultivate the unformed ideas churning inside of him. And what, if anything, would open up the world for a well-adjusted but bored middle-class kid from suburban Liverpool? He found the answer quite by chance one night in the privacy of his bedroom as he was scanning the radio dial.

Chapter 2
The Messiah Arrives

A
gain, luck and bliss: thanks to a confluence of geography and the cosmos, Radio Luxembourg, broadcasting at 208 on most medium-wave radio dials, had a signal that by some miracle could sprint its semidirect way to the United Kingdom. Everything depended on the fickle frontal masses that collided over the Irish Sea. “
There was always a bad reception
—you’d have [to put] your ear to the speaker, always fiddling with the dial,” recalls one of Paul McCartney’s grammar-school classmates, “but it would give you plenty to dream about.” Every Saturday and Sunday night, the station’s English-language service featured a playlist cobbled from a mixture of rockabilly and rhythm-and-blues hits by Bill Haley, Fats Domino, Lavern Baker, Carl Perkins, the Platters, and dozens of other American singers whose tangy delicacies served to stimulate the bland diet of Western European music. Its impact was felt most keenly in Britain, where the state-controlled radio had all the personality of an old scone. From eight o’clock to midnight, three of the boys who would later become the Beatles tuned in individually to the station’s staticky signal, as prodigal deejays, in pneumatic bursts of glibness, introduced the rock ’n roll records that were climbing the American charts. No one missed the broadcast unless their parents strictly forbade it, which none fortunately did. John, Paul, and Ringo observed the radio broadcast faithfully, the way one would a religious holiday. George, who was younger and presumably asleep by eleven o’clock, got a recap of the show the following morning from his mate Arthur Kelly.

To fifteen-year-old John Lennon, the broadcast was some kind of personal blessing, like a call from a ministering spirit.
He was known to “behave distractedly
” around his friends hours beforehand, withdrawing like a pitcher in the midst of throwing a no-hitter. “He regarded it like
scripture,” says Pete Shotton, who, under penalty of best-friendship, likewise never missed a show. In the dark front bedroom of his aunt’s house on Menlove Avenue, Lennon invariably sat cross-legged on the end of his bed, the ripe, impressionable student in his Fruit of the Looms, cradling a full arsenal of notetaking paraphernalia. Skillfully, with caressing fingertips, he massaged the dial of his radio much like Willie Sutton until Jack Jackson’s companionable voice crackled in the enveloping night. Sometimes he would furiously jot down lyrics to the songs, filling in his own approximation where he’d missed crucial words; other times, overcome by a thrilling piece of music, he would push the tablet away, lean back, close his eyes, and let himself be carried off by the voices and melodies that would have a lasting effect on his life.

“
That’s the music that brought me
from the provinces of England to the world,” John recalled later. “That’s what made me what I am.”

It was an unusual passion for a boy raised by archguardians who were by all accounts unmusical and by an aunt who not only disdained popular music but banished it futilely from the house. The Smiths kept an old fruitwood radiogram in the parlor of their Menlove Avenue house when John was growing up, but they rarely, if ever, burdened it with anything but one of the old 78s they’d acquired of Sir Thomas Beecham conducting Handel or Bach. The Smiths’ trusty radio dial rarely strayed from the BBC’s indomitable frequencies. As a result, John picked up much of what he learned from friends and, somewhat later, from his own precious transistor radio, which was displayed like priceless art in his bedroom.

The fresh air and easygoing lifestyle that had drawn families to Woolton from Liverpool center now drew John outside, not to escape his radio but to further connect with its transmissions. Each summer day, he’d meet up with his friends at a place they’d nicknamed “the Bank,” an easy slope of grass with a view of the surrounding fields and lake, which served as their lookout in lovely Calderstones Park. No meeting time was prearranged, and none of the boys wore watches, but by eleven or twelve each morning they’d have turned up there on their bicycles—John, Pete Shotton, Len Garry, and Bill Turner. From atop the Bank, the world was theirs; they had an incomparable vantage point and could survey the distant expanse of close-cropped lawns and magnificent gorges, where children played leisurely in unorganized groups and teenagers prowled the faded footpaths leading in and out of the wooded groves. The view was unobstructed, stretching far off across to the main administrative building, once an elegant Victorian mansion that now housed a café, and to the left, where boats idled on a mirror-smooth
lake. Yet however much the action beckoned, the Woolton boys chose not to explore it. “
We savored the pleasure
of just being friends,” Pete Shotton explains, with rightful significance. “Our fifteenth birthdays were approaching. We had just discovered what girls were about, and more than anything else we’d all taken an avid interest in music.”

This interest was reinforced by the sudden appearance of a musical instrument, a Hohner harmonica, which had apparently been a gift from one of Aunt Mimi’s student lodgers, and also by Len Garry, an easygoing, imperturbable boy who “was always singing or whistling.” The boys would hunker down and burst into versions of “Bubbles” and “Cool Water,” songs that fit a schoolboy’s romantic vision of a real man’s world. Reclining on the grass against their overturned bikes, they’d wait for the harmonica’s long, slurry cue, then throw their heads back and sing: “Keep a-movin’, Dan, don’t you listen to him, Dan, he’s a devil not a man…” At first, John never sang; he was too self-conscious. But as the sessions became less intimidating and more unrestrained, he was encouraged by the vigorous prompting of his friends. The boys’ musical taste stretched out considerably, thanks to overworked jukeboxes at Hilda’s Chip Shop and the Dutch Café, where among their many discoveries were crooners such as Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. Under the influence of the earthy, if gratuitously slick, Laine, the boys would wait until the Bank’s sight lines grew clear, then burst out singing: “I’m just a-walkin’ in the rain…,” strangling each syllable with burbles of imagined heartbreak.