John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

hotels, theatres and variety halls, the gilt-encrusted chemists’ shops with giant globes of blue liquid in their windows, the grocers displaying enamel signs for Bovril or Mazawattee Tea.

      To people down south, it was a vaguely sleazy and menacing place, whose Lime Street was famously a beat for the folk-ballad prostitute Maggie May, and whose polyglot mix of Welsh, Irish, Chinese and West Indians hinted at the nameless perils and vices of some coldwater Barbary Coast. Almost equal ill fame sprang from its reputation as a hotbed of extreme left-wing politics and trade-union militancy, not only on the docks but in the factories and car plants that made up Merseyside’s industrial sprawl. For many years, its most prominent personality was Bessie Braddock, Labour Member of Parliament for Liverpool’s Exchange district, a battleship of a woman whose abrasive rhetoric seemed to convey all the grimness of her home city as much as it did her government’s zeal to make everyone as uncomfortable and miserable as possible.

      However, there was another, very different Liverpool, far removed from the world of wharves and warehouses and teeming, brawling dockside pubs. The shipping industry also employed a vast white-collar class of executives, managers and clerical workers, as keen in their social aspirations as any other section of the bourgeoisie. Outside the city’s grimy hub and across the Mersey in Cheshire lay neat, decorous suburbs where the Scouse accent was barely detectable—self-contained middle-class communities, kept in pristine order by benign local authorities and well supplied with high-class shops, leafy parks, golf courses and first-rate schools.

      The Magnet, the Ealing film mentioned earlier, recounts the adventures of a well-spoken small boy from such a suburb who gets mixed up with some riotous street kids in tough downtown Liverpool. With hindsight, it seems prophetic.

      The oft-repeated tale of how Mimi Smith came to assume sole responsibility for bringing up her six-year-old nephew, John Lennon, could not be simpler or more heart-warming. Mimi was of the type that people of earlier generations called a ‘good sort’ or a ‘brick’, a modern-day Betsey Trotwood whose exterior brusqueness camouflaged a heart of purest gold. When John’s real father and mother proved deficient, she took it on herself to fill the role of both together, making it her single-minded mission to give him, in her own words, ‘what every child has a right to—a safe and happy home life.’

      That was the version of events John himself always firmly believed. ‘My parents couldn’t cope with me,’ he was to tell countless interviewers in those words or similar ones, ‘so I was sent to live with an auntie…’ Nothing can detract from Mimi’s care and self-sacrifice in the years that followed. But the background circumstances were rather more complicated than either of them remembered, or cared to remember.

      Born in 1906, Mimi was one of those people, very like Betsey Trotwood and other sinewy Dickens females, who seemed never to have known youthful passion or indiscretion. She was a person of exceptional intelligence, highly articulate and an omnivorous reader, who should have gone on from school to university, and might have done equally well as a lawyer, doctor or teacher. Instead, she had always been expected to act as an extra parent to her four younger sisters and to regard the values of home and family as paramount. In young womanhood, the brisk and practical side of her seemed to promise more than the intellectual one. When she was 19, she enrolled as a student nurse at Woolton Convalescent Hospital, staying on there after she qualified and eventually reaching the rank of ward sister. During the early 1930s, she became engaged to a young doctor from Warrington whom she had met on the wards, but before wedding plans could be made, her fiancé died from a virus passed on to him by one of his own patients.

      Not that her early life was without its exotic moments. At the convalescent hospital, her charges included some former employees of a wealthy industrialist named Lynton Vickers, who remained conscientiously concerned for their welfare and came regularly to visit them. Between the caring plutocrat and the angular young ward sister there developed a mutual respect and affection. At Vickers’ invitation, Mimi took a sabbatical from nursing to become his secretary, living in at his Gothic mansion in Betws-y-Coed in North Wales.

      Such diversions came to an end with her marriage to George Smith, at the mature age of 33 in 1939. The Smith family were dairy farmers in Woolton, a place which at that time, with its open fields and leafy lanes, resembled a country village more than a big-city suburb. George first got to know Mimi because the convalescent hospital where she worked was part of his morning milk round. The dairyman’s thoughts soon turned to marriage, but Mimi proved more cautious, declaring herself unwilling to be ‘tied to a gas stove or a sink’ and regarding George as no more than a reliable standby ‘whenever I was hungry or stuck in town’. Even for that buttonedup time and place, theirs was a relationship singularly lacking in romance. When Mimi finally did agree to get engaged, it was sealed with a businesslike handshake rather than a kiss. ‘George was different from me…chalk and cheese, really,’ she would remember. ‘I was always filibustering about, but he was a quiet man. Set in his ways a bit, but a kind man.’ She recalled, too, how George’s mild nature made him easily controllable, without resort to ‘filibustering’. ‘I used to give him a look and he’d know all right if he’d upset me. Just give him The Look and he’d know.’

      Possibly in reaction to their domineering father, all the Stanley sisters but Julia had ended up with quiet, unassertive men whose sole function in the family was to be breadwinners and who took little or no part either in its management or its complex internal politics. Elizabeth, the second eldest, known as Mater, had first married a marine surveyor named Charles Molyneux Parkes; after Parkes’ death in 1944, she had married a Scottish dentist, Robert (‘Bert’) Sutherland. Anne, the third in seniority, known as Nanny, had married a Ministry of Labour official named Sydney Cadwallader. Harriet, known as Harrie, the second-youngest of the five sisters and most adventurous of the quartet, had first married an Egyptian engineering student named Ali Hafez and emigrated with him to Cairo. Just prior to the war, Hafez had died of septicaemia after a routine tooth extraction, and Harrie had returned to Liverpool with their daughter, Liela. Having given up British nationality, Harrie was classed as a foreign alien and obliged to report regularly to the authorities. A judiciously swift remarriage to Norman Birch of the Royal Army Service Corps restored her UK passport to her.

      Mimi, Mater, Nanny and Harrie were recognisably a clan. Though none was as strikingly pretty as Julia, all four had a rangy, suntanned elegance—not the Marlene Dietrich type so much as the Katharine Hepburn. All dressed immaculately, never setting foot out of doors without hats, gloves and matching shoes and handbags; all were immensely house-proud, capable, talkative, humorous and forceful. Later in John’s life, he would talk of writing a story on the lines of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga about the ‘strong, intelligent, beautiful women [who] dominated the situation in the family. I was always with the women. I heard them talk about the men and talk about life. They always knew what was going on. The men never ever knew.’ Their husbands were categorised, even openly referred to, as outsiders—a tag that would also be given the marriage partner of every child in the family.

      But of the four, only Mimi had remained childless. Her explanation was that she’d had to be a mother to the others during their girlhood, and didn’t want to go through it all again. She was, in fact, thought not to care very much for small children, preferring them when they grew older and could join in intelligent conversation about things she cared for, such as reading and music.

      From gentle George Smith, Mimi received social standing as a farmer’s wife in a salubrious part-rural area, and a home that more than met her exacting standards. This was a house named Mendips, at 251 Menlove Avenue, Woolton, where the couple took up residence in 1942. Even to someone less attuned to nuances of class, the dwelling proclaimed its superiority in diverse ways: the fact that it was semi-detached rather than terraced; that, instead of plain brick, it was coated in knobby grey pebble dash; that it stood on an avenue, so much more exclusive-sounding than a mere street or road; above all that, far from being just a number on the postman’s round, it also had a name, grandiosely identifying it with the range of hills in far-off Somerset.

      On the inside, Mendips was designed to suggest an Elizabethan manor house. Its entrance hall had a half-timbered finish, the lower beams serving as display shelves for Mimi’s prized collection of Royal Worcester and Coalport