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4 SHORTSIGHTED JOHN WIMPLE LENNON

I thought, ‘I’m a genius or I’m mad. Which is it?’

These were days when the Eleven Plus examination regulated every child’s progress through the state educational system like traffic lights, sending those who passed the exam to grammar schools and rest to either secondary modern or technical schools. Throughout John’s latter years at Dovedale Primary, as he would recall, the idea had been ceaselessly drummed into him that ‘if you don’t pass the Eleven Plus you’re finished in life…So that was the only exam I ever passed, because I was terrified.’

For boys who brought such distinction on themselves and their families, the traditional reward was a brand-new bicycle. Uncle George, in no doubt that John would sail through, had picked out a bike for him long before the joyous news reached Mendips. It was an emerald green Raleigh Lenton—almost his own surname—fitted with luxurious extras like a Sturmey-Archer three-speed gear, a dynamo-operated front lamp and a matching green leather saddlebag. True to the spirit of their extended family, John’s cousin Liela could not be allowed to feel left out, so Mimi and George bought her a new bicycle at the same time.

John’s achievement gave him the pick of several excellent grammar schools in central and suburban Liverpool. Mimi’s choice was Quarry Bank High School in Harthill Road, an easy bicycle ride from Mendips via the path across Calderstones Park. He started there at the beginning of the 1952 autumn term, shortly before his twelfth birthday.

Quarry Bank’s designation as a ‘high school’ implied no affinity with the mixed-gender informality of American high schools but rather was a subtle hint of elevation above other boys’ grammar schools in the vicinity. Founded in 1922, it took its name from the local sandstone quarries that had begotten so many major Liverpool buildings, including the Anglican cathedral. The school itself was housed in an ornately neo-Gothic sandstone mansion, built in 1867 by a wealthy merchant named John Bland. Although part of the state system, and charging no fees, it modelled itself on a public school like Harrow or Winchester, with black-gowned masters, a house system and a general air of tradition and antiquity.

Tuition might be gratis, but each pupil’s family was expected to supply the compulsory uniform of black blazer and cap and black-and-gold striped tie. The blazer was an especially natty affair, with its breast-pocket badge of a gold stag’s head above the Latin motto Ex Hoc Metallo Virtutem—‘from this rough metal [comes forth] manhood.’ The cuffs were decorated like those of a junior naval officer, with a raised black stripe surmounted by a ring of gold stags’ heads. The blazers were costly enough when bought from the school’s official outfitter, Wareings in Smithdown Road. Mimi, however, preferred to have John’s made to measure by his Uncle George’s tailor for the whopping sum of £12 apiece, nearly as much as George had paid for the new bike. No real parents could have been more dotingly insistent that he had the best of everything.

The start of a new academic epoch scattered the Woolton Outlaws in widely different directions. Academically gifted and hardworking Ivy Vaughan had won a place at Liverpool Institute, the most renowned of the inner city’s grammar schools. Nigel Walley was bound for the Bluecoat School, near Penny Lane, the former Bluecoat Hospital where Alf Lennon had been a pupil 30 years earlier. But happily for John, his arch crony Pete Shotton also had got into Quarry Bank. ‘We went through it like Siamese twins,’ Pete would remember. ‘We started together in our first year at the top and gradually sank together into the sub-basement.’

John himself later maintained that he arrived at grammar school determined to do well and be a credit to Mimi and Uncle George. All such good resolutions melted away at his first sight of his new classmates, tearing and whooping around Quarry Bank’s playground. ‘I thought “Christ, I’ll have to fight my way through this lot,” having just made it at Dovedale. There were some real heavies there. The first fight I got in, I lost. I lost my nerve when I really got hurt. If there was a bit of blood, then you packed it in. After that, if I thought someone could punch harder than me, I said, “OK, we’ll have wrestling instead.”…I was aggressive because I wanted to be popular. I wanted to be the leader. It seemed more attractive than just being one of the toffees. I wanted everyone to do what I told them to do, to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss.’

Quarry Bank’s founding head, R F Bailey, had been an outstanding educator with a special talent for spotting the potential in offbeat or eccentric boys. He had retired five years before John’s arrival, handing over the reins to an austere ex-serviceman and Methodist lay preacher named Ernest R Taylor. Quarry Bank pupils of ‘Ernie’ Taylor’s era remember him as an unapproachable figure, striding along corridors lost in aloof, headmasterly thought, his black gown billowing out behind him.

As at most boys’ school of that era, corporal punishment was routinely administered. Pete Shotton never forgot the first time John and he were called to the head’s study to be caned. While they waited outside together, John reduced the nervous Pete to tucks by speculating that the head’s cane might be produced like some royal regalia from a case studded with jewels and lined with velvet. They were called in separately to receive their punishment, John going first. A few moments later, the door opened and he emerged on his hands and knees, groaning melodramatically. What Pete didn’t realise was that a small lobby lay between the head’s study and the corridor, so Ernie was quite unaware of this performance. ‘I was laughing so much when I went in that I got [the cane] even harder than John had.’

The five houses in which the boys were grouped supposedly fostered loyalty and brotherhood as well as giving a competitive edge to sporting activities. Each house was named after one of the adjacent suburbs and consisted only of pupils from that neighbourhood, so perpetuating the rivalries and social snobberies that existed between them. Woolton house, which claimed John and Pete, lay about midway in this social microcosm, not quite so select as Childwall or Allerton, but a decided cut above Wavertree and Aigburth.

Also among Quarry Bank’s 1952 intake was Rod Davis, their former classmate at St Peter’s Sunday school. All three were put into the ‘A’ stream of boys considered most intelligent and promising of the batch. From there, while Rod went from strength to strength, John and Pete were quickly downgraded to the ‘B’ and thence with minimum delay to the ‘C’ stream, stopping at that point only because there was nowhere lower to go. ‘I never really understood how that happened,’ Rod Davis says. ‘It was always obvious that John was just as bright or a good bit brighter than anyone else around. But right from the beginning it was obvious he’d made up his mind not to subscribe to the system in any way.’

A strong contributory factor was his extreme shortsightedness, coupled with his obstinate refusal to wear the glasses he so detested. Rather than risk being taunted as a ‘four-eyes’ or a ‘drip’ he preferred to walk around in a state of such mole-like myopia that he could read the number on a bus stop only by shinning halfway up the pole. Davis, it so happened, had even weaker sight but made sure he missed nothing on the blackboard by reading it through opera glasses. John, however, was content to skulk with Pete Shotton at the back of the room, letting sentences, dates, mathematical equations and chemical formulae all swim together into the same untranslatable blur.

Pete’s analogy with Siamese twins may have been more telling than he knew, for John, the one-off, the super-original, never liked acting alone. As he would prove time and again in the future, to flourish at his most individualistic he needed a partner—a kindred spirit perfectly tuned to his special wavelength, acting simultaneously as a stimulus and an audience. Wherever some school rule was most flagrantly broken, the resultant hue and cry would be after ‘Lennon and Shotton’, which John turned into ‘Shennon and Lotton’ to symbolise their inseparability and unanimity of purpose, or purposelessness. Like two chain-gang escapees handcuffed together, neither of them could do anything without the other helplessly following suit.

Over the following terms, Quarry Bank’s punishment book thronged with the diverse crimes of Shennon and Lotton: ‘Failing to report to school office’…‘Insolence’…‘Throwing backboard duster out of window’…‘Cutting class and going AWOL [Absent Without Leave]’…‘Gambling on school field during house [cricket] match…’ Sometimes their offences went off the scale even of Quarry Bank’s draconian punishments, leaving Ernie Taylor no choice but to call in their respective families. Back home at Mendips, Mimi grew to dread the peal of the telephone during school hours. ‘A voice would say, “Hello, Mrs. Smith, it’s the [head’s] secretary at Quarry Bank here…” “Oh Lord,” I’d think. “What’s he done now?” ’

The duo were more or less permanently in detention, either writing out hundreds of lines beginning ‘I must not…’ or engaged in military-style fatigues around the school grounds. It was during such a work detail that they learned the untruth of the axiom ‘Crime does not pay.’ While emptying rubbish into a trash can, Pete came upon three bulky brown envelopes addressed to the headmaster. Inside were used dinner tickets, the vouchers purchased by boys at a shilling apiece to exchange for their school lunch. Used tickets being indistinguishable from unused ones, Shennon and Lotton could resell the whole cache at sixpence each, a bargain that left the purchaser half his daily lunch allowance to spend as he pleased. ‘We had 1,500 dinner tickets up in John’s bedroom,’ Pete remembered. ‘They were worth £75, which was like almost £1,000 today. We were rich. We even gave up shoplifting while that was going on.’

Any teacher showing less than drill-sergeant ruthlessness could expect no mercy from Shennon and Lotton. One afternoon when they returned to Ernie’s study to be carpeted yet again, they found the head absent and his mild little deputy, Ian Gallaway, facing them over the magisterial desk. As Mr Gallaway bent forward to peer at the punishment book, John began gently tickling the few wisps of hair on the deputy head’s cranium. Thinking a fly had landed there, he brushed absent-mindedly at it without looking up. ‘John was laughing so much that he actually pissed himself,’ Pete Shotton remembered. ‘Then Gallaway said, “What’s that puddle on the floor?’ John said, “I think the roof must be leaking, Sir.”’

The curious thing about this stubborn ne’er-do-well was that, away from the classroom and its hated compulsion, he was a bookworm whose taste in literature far outpaced Quarry Bank’s English syllabus and who, left to his own devices, spent hours in the posture of the most conscientious student, reading, writing or drawing.

Quarry Bank’s head of English, Lancelot (‘Porky’) Burrows, was never one of his classroom targets and, indeed, regarded him as a stimulus to other pupils rather than a distraction. Porky dealt with John by appealing to his sense of the absurd, for example instituting a punishment known as whistling detention: if John persisted in whistling when told not to, he would be kept in after school and forced to whistle for ten or so fatiguing minutes. Porky also artfully fostered his interest in poetry via his talent for art. An English exercise book from his junior year at Quarry Bank—neatly covered in brown paper and titled MY ANTHOLOGY—demonstrates what pains he would take if his enthusiasm were aroused. Quotations from classic poems like Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha and Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ are framed by watercolour cartoons showing a remarkable maturity of line and grasp of perspective as well as their unmistakable scatty humour. Porky kept the book to show future generations of students the standard they should aim for.

Two comic artists, one British, one American, were to have a profound influence on John’s style. He loved the intricate, scratchy technique of Ronald Searle, whose sadistic St Trinian’s schoolgirls were modelled on Searle’s guards as a Japanese prisoner of war in Burma. And, thanks to Aunt Mimi, he became a devotee of James Thurber, both the writings for The New Yorker and the cartoons, whose surreally wavering lines were a product of Thurber’s own near-blindness. John later said he began consciously ‘Thurberising’ his drawings from about the age of 15.

He kept a special exercise book for caricatures of his teachers and classmates, organised with a meticulous care that would have astonished Quarry Bank staff other than Porky Burrows. Pete Shotton (‘A Simple Hairy Peters’) popped up repeatedly, with his pale curls and rosy face, shaking a baby’s rattle or peeping from a dustbin. There was even a portrait of the artist himself, wearing his hated National Health glasses and self-deprecatingly captioned ‘Simply A Simple Pimple Shortsighted John Wimple Lennon.’ In this case, ‘Wimple’ did not mean a nun’s veil but was the name of a character in one of John’s favourite radio programmes, Life with the Lyons.

The book was passed around among John’s cronies each time a new character was added to it. Harry Gooseman was once even allowed to take it home overnight to show to his family. John liked to regard it as a campaign of subversion that would bring authority’s direst wrath on his head if it were ever discovered. In fact, Quarry Bank’s teachers were no less sorely in need of some comic relief than the boys, and they tended to laugh just as loudly if they chanced to see his lampoons of them. One summer term, during preparations for the school’s fund-raising garden fête, he even found his subversion co-opted to official ends. Half facetiously he proposed decorating squares of card with caricatures of his teachers, then pinning them up for people to throw darts at—but to his amazement, the idea was accepted. The game attracted a large crowd and Shennon and Lotton were later commended for raising more money than any other stall, despite having kept back £16 of the take for themselves.

Even the po-faced early fifties had not quite extinguished a timehonoured British trait, handed on from Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear to W S Gilbert and P G Wodehouse—that of using all one’s intelligence to be unbelievably silly. Until John reached his teens, he was like a prospector, panning through the drab shale of logic and common sense that constituted his daily life at Quarry Bank and Mendips for those few stray, gleaming nuggets of absurdity. The school library introduced him to Stephen Leacock, Canadian author of ‘nonsense novels’ like Q: A Psychic Pstory of the Psupernatural and Sorrows of a Supersoul, or the Memoirs of Marie Mushenough (Translated out of the Original Russian by Machinery). Early children’s television programmes featured occasional appearances by ‘Professor’ Stanley Unwin, a pious-looking man who told fairy stories in innuendo-laced gibberish, such as ‘Goldiloppers and the Three Bearlodes’. English lessons at Quarry Bank provided an unexpected seam in the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (‘When that Aprille with his shoures soote…’) so often like Stanley Unwin speaking from the 14th century.

All this was mere marginalia, however, in comparison with The Goon Show, which had begun its first series on BBC radio in 1951 but hit full stride in 1953, the year of the Queen’s coronation. Scripted almost single-handedly by Spike Milligan, it superficially harked back to the Second World War (Goons had been Allied prisoners’ nickname for their German guards) and to a Conan Doyle-esque world of spies, intrigue and derring-do. But in content it was mouldbreakingly anarchic, a mélange of demented voices and lunatic situations such as had never before been offered to a British audience, least of all on the sanctified airwaves of the BBC.

Together with a then little-known variety comedian named Peter Sellers, Milligan created a gallery of characters who often seemed to have only the most nodding acquaintance with the human race—the decrepit Colonel Bloodnok, the quavery duo of Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister, the moronic Eccles, the supersmooth Grytpype-Thynne, the whining hermaphrodite Bluebottle. Embedded in the madness like hooks in blubber were jibes against previously inviolable national institutions such as the army, the church, the Foreign Office and even the BBC itself (which the corporation, amazingly, seemed never to notice).

The Goons’ most besotted fans were middle-class pre-adolescent schoolboys, those over-serious war babies who had hitherto believed the oppressive sanity of life to be everlasting. For John, between 1953 and 1955, they were the brightest spot in his whole existence. Nothing could unstick him from the wireless on evenings when the cut-glass voice of announcer Wallace Greenslade presaged another Milligan free-form fantasy such as ‘Her’ (a parody of H Rider Haggard’s She) or ‘The Sinking of Westminster Pier’, featuring Minnie and Henry as oyster-sexers, with frantic musical interludes by Dutch harmonica player Max Geldray. John could do the voices and catchphrases of every character, from Minnie’s senile gurgle to Bluebottle’s scandalised shrieks of ‘I do not like dis game’, ‘Dirty, rotten swine!’ and ‘You deaded me!’

As the terms passed, ‘Cutting class and going AWOL’ became an ever more frequent charge against Shennon and Lotton in Quarry Bank’s punishment book. The bicycles that had been a reward for scholastic excellence allowed them to escape far from the school precincts and any likelihood of detection. By their third year, they had discovered smoking, a habit then practised almost universally by adults and attended by no health warnings. The usual routine was to filch a packet of Wild Woodbines or Players Weights from some unsuspecting tobacconist, then repair to Reynolds or Calderstones Park, rest their bikes on the grass, and smoke all ten ‘ciggies’ at one go, while John blew salvoes on his mouth organ or shouted in Bloodnok or Bluebottle voices at passers-by or the ducks on the lake.

He was not irrevocably twinned with Pete Shotton. Sometimes on weekends or in the school holidays, he would forsake Pete and his Raleigh Lenton and go for a long bus ride by himself, past the Penny Lane roundabout and through the descending suburbs into central Liverpool. His usual destination was the Kardomah coffeehouse in Whitechapel, where he had a favourite stool at the ledge along the street window. He would sit there for so many hours, sketching in his book and on the steamed-up window or, as he put it, ‘just watching the world go by’, that Mimi nicknamed him the Kardomah Kid.

To Mimi, his drawings and poems were no more than timewasting distractions from school work. Often he would come home and find she had conducted a guerrilla raid on his bedroom and thrown every piece of paper she could find into the kitchen wastebin. There would be a furious argument in which even his usual ally, Uncle George, dared not take his side. “I used to say [to Mimi] ‘You’ve thrown my fuckin”’ poetry out and you’ll regret it when I’m famous,” John remembered. ‘I never forgave her for not treating me like a fuckin’ genius.’

Prior to John’s 15 year, the British had regarded the process of growing up as perfectly straightforward. The system was that children went on being children until puberty was well advanced; then, virtually overnight, they turned into grown-ups, wearing the same kind of clothes as their parents, aspiring to the same values and seeking the same amusements. The effect of rioting hormones on immature and impressionable minds had yet to be studied in any depth by scientists or sociologists. The continuance of wartime’s mass conscription claimed all able-bodied males at age 18 and put them through two years of military discipline that, in most cases, left a permanent mark. Only university students, then accounting for just 2 per cent of young people, were permitted an interlude of free will and indulgence—even some public unruliness—before assuming the burdens of adulthood.

American films made John and his friends enviously familiar with a society that, on the contrary, recognised the years between 13 and 20 as a distinct season of life and catered to it with superabundant lavishness. A blissful interlude it seemed, with its open-to-all college campuses, its high schools so very different from Quarry Bank, its giant-lettered boys’ jerseys, its girls’ ponytails, its hamburgers, Coca-Cola, cheerleaders and hops. Long before it had any personal relevance for him, John had picked up on the fundamental cultural difference: ‘America had teenagers…Everywhere else just had people.’

American young people as Hollywood projected them—which, of course, meant young white people—had always been gee-whiz happy and healthy-minded and, if possible, even more respectful and conformist than their British counterparts. But since the war, ominous cracks had begun to appear in this cornerstone of American life. The year 1951 saw publication of J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, a novel written in the voice of a 17-year-old boy, Holden Caulfield, alternately mocking and reviling the Utopia into which he had been born. In 1953 came The Wild One, a film about the terrorising of a small town by a group of leather-clad teenage motorcyclists (collectively known as the Beetles). ‘What are you rebelling against?’ a woman character demands of the young Marlon Brando as the pack’s leader. ‘Whaddaya got?’ he replies.

All these vague, discontented mutters and hormonal stirrings first took definite shape in James Dean, a young stage actor from the Midwest, schooled with Brando in the Method technique and then picked up by Hollywood. Gaunt and melancholic, Dean was the first star with specific appeal to teenagers of the new troubled and troublesome variety. He wore their to-hell-with-it uniform of T-shirts and shabby jeans, suffered their same agonies of uncertainty and hypersensitivity, spoke in their same surly or shy mumble. Their feeling of alienation from a seemingly bountiful and indulgent world was perfectly expressed in Rebel Without a Cause, the 1955 film that was both Dean’s apotheosis and farewell. That same year, he died in an car accident in his Porsche sports car, thereby achieving immortality.

In Britain also, the postwar years had seen rising concern over what was still patronisingly termed ‘the younger generation’. Juvenile crime increasingly dominated newspaper headlines, from the Craig-Bentley murder case (in which a London policeman’s 16-year-old killer was judged too young to face otherwise automatic capital punishment) to the rise of so-called ‘cosh-boys’ as a threat to formerly safe urban streets.