John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

each evening at bedtime.

      But George would defy the wifely Look that otherwise ruled him by taking John to Woolton’s little cinema or smuggling sweets or chocolate upstairs to him after lights-out. Mimi felt almost envious—though it was beyond her to admit as much—when she saw the two of them flying paper aeroplanes in the back garden or hugging each other and laughing. Even John’s tendency to tell fibs never clouded the sunshine of their relationship. ‘Tell you what,’ George would say to Mimi with a chuckle. ‘He’s never going to be a vicar.’

      As Julia had before him, John soon identified Mimi’s weak spot: her sense of humour. In summertime, while she sat in the back garden in a deck chair, he would stealthily open an upstairs window and flick water onto her head in artfully small, irregular amounts, so that she’d keep thinking she felt raindrops but would never be quite sure. Despite her combustible temper, she did not smack him when he misbehaved; instead, they had shouting matches more suited to combative siblings than aunt and nephew. Afterwards, exhausted as well as exasperated, Mimi would flop down in the easy chair beside the morning-room window. John would creep around the side path, then suddenly rear up and make monster noises at her through the glass. ‘However cross I was, I’d find myself roaring with laughter,’ Mimi recalled. ‘He could always get me going, the same way Julia could.’

      His education, too, assumed an even keel that gave Mimi every hope for his future. In November 1945, just after his fifth birthday, his father had enrolled him at Mosspits Lane Infants School in Woolton. But he remained there only five months, leaving at the end of the spring term in 1946. It would later be claimed that the upheavals in his family life had caused some serious behavioural problems and that he was expelled from Mosspits Lane for bullying other children. However, the school’s logbook makes no mention of any expulsion, giving the only reason for his premature departure as ‘left district’.

      When Mimi took charge a year later, she sent him to Dovedale Primary School, near the Penny Lane traffic roundabout. After a few initial bus journeys there together, John insisted on going by himself. ‘He thought I was making a show of him [making him look foolish],’ Mimi remembered. ‘Imagine that! So what I used to do was let him get out of the house and then follow him to make sure he didn’t get into any mischief.’ Dovedale proved the perfect choice. After only six months, he was reading and writing with complete confidence. ‘That boy’s as sharp as a needle,’ Mr Bolt, the head teacher, told Mimi. ‘He can do anything as long as he chooses to do it.’ Uncle George had helped by sitting John on his knee each night and picking out words in the Liverpool Echo—thus fostering what would become a lifelong addiction to newsprint.

      He had always loved to draw and paint, begging to be bought pencils, paint boxes and paper rather than toys, spending hours wrapped up in worlds of his own creation. At Dovedale he won several prizes for art, including a book entitled How to Draw Horses, which he was to treasure for years afterward. His choice of subjects could sometimes startle teachers accustomed to normal infant renditions of pussycats or ‘My Mummy’. The notable example was a painting he once did of Jesus Christ—a long-haired and bearded figure like a psychic vision of himself 20 years into the future. But mostly his work tended to be caricatures of his classmates and teachers, crazily distorted yet instantly recognisable, which made their models, child and adult alike, howl with laughter. Though good at running and swimming, he was less successful at team sports like football and cricket, owing to a disinclination—and, it soon proved, genuine inability—to keep his eye on the ball. He had inherited his mother’s extreme shortsightedness, and by age seven was pronounced to be in need of glasses. Under the new National Health Service, these were available free of charge. But John so hated the standard issue, with their round wire frames and pink nosepieces, that Mimi agreed to buy him whatever kind he liked. He was taken to a private optician and allowed to choose an expensive pair with more comfortable plastic frames. He could not abide wearing even these, however, and left them off whenever he could.

      As a result, his view of the world was largely created by sheer myopia—the weird new forms that everyday people and things can take on for the shortsighted and the wild surrealism that can flow from printed words misread. In addition, he possessed the very Liverpudlian traits of a fascination with language and an irresistible compulsion to play around with it. If his weak eyes did not misrepresent some word accidentally, his quick mind did so deliberately, missing no chance of a pun, a spoonerism or double entendre; he was an instinctive cartoonist in speech as well as on paper. When he suffered a bout of chicken pox—his childhood’s one serious ailment—he called it ‘chicken pots’. Away on holiday, with pocket money in short supply, he sent Mimi a postcard saying, ‘Funs is low.’

      Small boys in glasses tend to have a weak and vulnerable air. But with John, the opposite was the case. Also at Dovedale, although not in the same class, was a boy named Jimmy Tarbuck, like himself destined one day to write Liverpool’s name across the sky. ‘If ever there was a scrap in the school yard, John was likely to be involved,’ Tarbuck says. ‘And I’ll always remember the way he looked at you. His glasses had really thick lenses, the kind we called bottle-bottoms. At school, we used to have this thing, if you were out for trouble with another kid you’d say “Are you lookin’ at me?” But John’s lenses were so thick, you could never tell if he was looking at you or not.’

      Julia and Bobby Dykins, meanwhile, had settled on the Springwood council estate in Allerton, just a couple of miles from Menlove Avenue. Whatever his faults in Mimi’s eyes, Dykins was at least a hardworking man, and a provident one. He now had the prestigious job of headwaiter in the Adelphi Hotel’s sumptuous French restaurant. And, notwithstanding her misadventures with two children thus far, he had persuaded Julia to become a mother again. They were to have two daughters together; Julia, born in 1947, and Jacqueline Gertrude, born in 1949, although Alf Lennon’s continued failure to begin divorce proceedings would prevent them from ever becoming man and wife.

      Mimi had initially discouraged Julia from seeing too much of John, fearing that she might upset the wholesome new habits instilled at Mendips. But as time passed, the frost gradually thawed. Dykins was never allowed to join the meek males on the family’s bottom rung, but his daughters were fully accepted by Mimi—and the other sisters—and John was allowed to spend unrestricted time with Julia.

      It would have been difficult to do otherwise, since the sisters operated as a team, not merely supporting and confiding absolutely in each other, but helping run one another’s domestic affairs and look after one another’s families. As well as Mendips, therefore, John had the run of three alternative homes, all equally welcoming, happy, and secure. His Aunt Harrie lived only a short walk away at the Cottage, the old Smith dairy farmhouse where Julia and Alf Lennon had briefly settled during the war. His Aunt Mater lived ‘across the water’ at Rock Ferry, Cheshire, in a rambling house with a large garden. When Mater married Bert Sutherland and moved with him to his native Scotland, the house was taken over by her sister, Nanny.

      The cousins with whom John played during these regular family get-togethers ranged from his Aunt Nanny’s and Harrie’s toddler sons, Michael and David, to Stanley, the only child of Mater’s marriage to Charles Parkes, who was seven years John’s senior. Stanley had been responsible for the sisters’ eccentric pet names, first mispronouncing Mary as ‘Mimi’, calling Anne ‘Nanny’ when she’d looked after him during the war, and dubbing his own mother ‘Mater’, in tune with her fastidious elegance, when he went away to boarding school and began learning Latin. John extended the habit by calling his Uncle George ‘Pater’. Alf Lennon’s most abiding memory from their ill-omened flight to Blackpool was of a small boy who spoke ‘like a gentleman’ and gravely inquired, ‘Shall I call you Pater, too?’

      He was especially fond of his cousin Liela, the daughter of Aunt Harrie’s Egyptian first marriage, a stunningly pretty girl with a smile that can still light up a 40-year-old sepia snapshot. Liela was only three and a half years John’s senior, so she became his most regular playmate and accomplice inside the family. Liela remembers a sunny-natured, affectionate small boy who had no inhibitions about hugging and kissing her. ‘Think of all those songs about love that John wrote before he was even 21,’ she says. ‘How could he have done that if he hadn’t had a lot of love in his own life?’

      He