John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ