The Beatles Read online

  Freed from this latest imposition, Julia spun back into the vibrant social scene, which, by Liverpool standards, had become livelier than ever. American soldiers, stationed at a sprawling base in nearby Burtonwood, brought their irrepressible exuberance to the mix. Julia had always been a good-time girl; now, as good times became harder to afford, she sought out a sugar daddy to secure her stake. It took no longer than a few weeks for Julia to land a new suitor.

  Julia and Bobby Dykins had met a year earlier, while they were involved with different partners in an ongoing double date. Dykins, whose given name was John, had been seeing Julia’s neighbor Ann Stout, but there was never any doubt as to where his affections lay. He “would always wink at [Julia],” which “she enjoyed, laughing it off,” as one would a playful flirtation. They met again, soon after Julia left the nursing home, and with her no longer encumbered, things turned serious right out of the box.

  A Liverpool native several years Julia’s senior, Dykins was a smooth, dapper Irish Catholic wine steward at the Adelphi Hotel, who was as dedicated to pursuing the high life as Julia was to living it. Bobby was “very good looking,” according to those who crossed his path. A dark-skinned, wiry man who held himself erect, he was nicknamed Spiv by the Stanley kids because he reminded them so much of Arthur English, the British music hall comedian, famous for his “little pencil moustache and porkpie hat.” John’s memory of him wasn’t as flattering, nicknaming Dykins “Twitchy” because of “a nervous cough and… thinning, margarine-coated hair.” Few men had better access to such tightly restricted luxuries: liquor, chocolate, silks, cigarettes. “He was certainly earning good money,” said Stanley Parkes, and he never failed to lavish it, along with charm, on his appreciative new woman. “He was worldly, he’d seen a lot of life… and he was always very open and cheerful.”

  Not always: Julia’s family and friends remember a seismic temper that could erupt without warning. Dykins, they recalled, was moody, unpredictable, even violent when drunk and something did not please him. “He had a very short fuse. Julia knew when to get out of his way, but occasionally he would lash out and slap her.” John himself remembered a time when “my mother came to see us in a black coat with her face bleeding.” And there were other scattered recollections of abuse.

  Still, Julia was committed to her new lover, and she and Bobby moved in together in an attempt to give their illicit affair an aura of respectability. This brought new complications to bear—especially on John. The appearance of yet another strange man in the house proved unsettling, to say nothing of the hostile flare-ups he witnessed between the adults, and he was shuttled from one sister to another while Julia devoted all her efforts to making the relationship work. This and other neglect took an early toll on John. “It confused him, and he often ran away,” Mimi told an interviewer, enumerating the times she opened the door to find her distraught nephew cowering there in tears, unable to speak. More than once Mimi marched John back to Julia’s, where she gave her younger sister a piece of her mind. Fuming angrily, she would shout, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Judy, behave yourself!” Another time, Leila Harvey recalled “being in Mimi’s morning room, with John behind her in the chair, and Judy being told, ‘You are not fit to have this child!’ ” Not only did the family “disagree with the way she was living her life,” but they considered Julia “frivolous and unreliable,” a woman who never took anything seriously, even when it came to mundane household chores. Relatives who visited might find her sweeping out the kitchen while wearing a pair of knickers on her head. And as for cooking, “she was absolutely crackpot,” mixing ingredients like a mad scientist. “A little bit of tea went in the stew,” recalled her niece. In fact, “a bit of everything went in [there].”

  In June 1946 Freddie took an unexpected leave of absence from his job and returned to Liverpool to rescue John from the pressures that had been building up at home. There was no objection from Julia when he asked to visit his boy; Mimi, who was acting as John’s unofficial guardian, also obliged. Father and son set off on a reunion, ostensibly for a seaside holiday in Blackpool but, as Freddie later admitted, “intending never to come back.” After two weeks cruising the boardwalk, a plan materialized: they decided to emigrate to New Zealand. It seemed like the perfect place for a man like Freddie Lennon to start over, and above all, he would have John with him.

  It has been said that John was delighted at the prospect of traveling with his father, although there is nothing, other than Freddie’s unreliable account, that expresses such a sentiment. But in all probability, John craved a man’s loving attention—to say nothing of a sailor, to say nothing of his father—and Freddie’s dreams were always suffused with layers of romantic fantasy. How could a boy resist? What seemed to make this episode so important for John was not the relocation or the adventure of going abroad, but that he had finally gotten his father’s attention. Having suffered through five years of indifference and neglect during which his parents pursued their own pleasures, that is what he wanted most.

  Shortly before the long journey south, late in July 1946, Julia and Bobby Dykins appeared unexpectedly in Blackpool to take John back home to Liverpool. One can only imagine the scene this touched off. As Freddie later recounted it, an argument ensued, in which he offered to take Julia with them to New Zealand. “She said no. All she wanted was John.” Freddie could not persuade her to reconsider, much less abandon her son. Sensing a standoff, he suggested that John choose between them.

  It was a horrible, thoughtless decision to ask a five-year-old boy to make. And while the incident seems improbable (John never recalled it as an adult), it has an affecting, if pitiful, resonance. According to Freddie’s oft-reported version: “He had to decide whether to stay with me or go with her. He said me. Julia asked again, but John still said me. Julia went out of the door and was about to go up the street when John ran after her. That was the last I saw or heard of him till I was told he’d become a Beatle.”

  [III]

  Back in Liverpool, John Lennon soon found himself embroiled in another new melodrama, one even more traumatic and gut-wrenching than the last.

  That summer, intending to give John the kind of love and stability he sorely needed, Julia organized a model of family life and enrolled him in a school near her home. But within weeks of their return, he was no longer living with her. The exact circumstances surrounding this development have been blurred by speculation and myth. There may have been some friction between Julia and Bobby Dykins that led to John’s removal; perhaps the intrusion of a young boy put too much strain on their relationship. Some relatives have suggested that Julia simply wasn’t up to the responsibility of full-time motherhood. Leila Harvey believed a decision “was forced” on Julia by Mimi and her tyrannical father as punishment for sinful behavior. “She wouldn’t have parted with John unless she was told,” Leila insisted.

  None of this made any difference to John. He seemed to accept the idea that it was somehow his fault, that he was to blame for her incompetence. “My mother… couldn’t cope with me” was the way he later explained it. Whatever the reason, at some point that August, John was sent outright to Mimi’s, once and for all, where it was determined he would receive “a proper upbringing.”

  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 discipli
narian,” 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

  [I]

  Again, 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 Arth
ur 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.