John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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      Neither of their families was told in advance what they had decided. On 3 December, Julia left home as if it were just another working day and at noon met with Alf at the register office in Bolton Street, behind the Adelphi Hotel. The only witnesses to the ceremony were Alf’s brother Sydney, whom he’d let into the secret at the last moment, and one of Julia’s usherette colleagues. Afterwards, Sydney stood the new Mr and Mrs Lennon drinks and a meal of roast chicken at a pub over the road called the Big House; they spent the evening at the cinema, watching a Mickey Rooney film (which happened to be about an orphanage), then separated to spend their wedding night at their respective homes. Mimi was never to forget the heart-sinking moment when Julia walked in, threw her wedding certificate onto the table and said, ‘There, I’ve done it! I’ve married him.’

      Pop Stanley’s initial reaction was also one of explosive horror and disgust. But, under the gentler influence of his wife, Annie, he accepted that there was nothing that could be done—indeed, that as a conscientious father he must try his best to give the newlyweds a proper start in life. Swallowing his feelings, Pop volunteered to leave the family flat in Berkeley Street and rent more spacious accommodation so that Julia and Alf could move in with Annie and him. The chosen property was number 9 Newcastle Road, a bay-windowed terrace house a few minutes’ walk from Penny Lane and Alf’s alma mater, the Bluecoat Hospital.

      The four coexisted in relative harmony throughout 1939, as war with Germany drew nearer and Britain succumbed to a fever of gasmask issuing, child evacuation and air-raid precautions. For Pop Stanley in particular, it was an eventful time. In June, a brand-new Royal Navy submarine, the Thetis, sank during her trials in Liverpool Bay. Pop joined the massive operation to recover the vessel, whose stern was initially visible rising vertically from the water. The crew considered themselves in no great peril, tapping out cheerful Morse messages to their rescuers on the steel hull as cables were passed underneath to drag it to the surface. But at the crucial moment, the cables snapped and the submarine disappeared for good, taking 71 men with her.

      Alf had gone to sea again, on the SS Duchess of York, but returned home in time for the first Christmas of the Second World War. His only child with Julia was conceived at 9 Newcastle Road one day in January 1940. Finding themselves, unusually, alone in the house for a couple of hours, they made love on the kitchen floor. They had not been trying for a baby, and Julia’s immediate pregnancy was equally dismaying to them both. ‘Ninety per cent of people [of my generation] were born out of a bottle of whisky on a Saturday night, and there was no intention to have children,’ the baby would one day observe bitterly. ‘I was never really wanted.’

      Julia’s pregnancy coincided with the bleakest months in Europe’s history, as Hitler’s mechanized armies swept across Belgium and France, the battered remains of the British Expeditionary Force were evacuated from Dunkirk, and RAF fighters whirled like fiery gnats around the Luftwaffe’s incoming swarms of heavy bombers. Alone and braced for invasion, the country often seemed to have nothing to sustain it but the voice of Winston Churchill, whose bulldog-like mien and gift for blood-igniting oratory made the most desperate moments seem somehow glorious.

      In August, Alf sailed away again on the SS Empress of Canada. With London under nightly bombing and Britain seemingly defenceless, the RAF made a surprise hit-and-run raid on Berlin—an event that the Luftwaffe’s commander, Hermann Goering, had boasted could never happen. A furious Hitler promised to retaliate by razing all Britain’s other major cities. As a key port for the nation’s vital Atlantic food convoys, Liverpool prepared for the worst.

      Julia’s sister, Mimi, would often relate how the baby’s arrival on 9 October was marked by an especially ferocious German night attack. According to Mimi, when news came that Julia had been delivered of a 71/2-pound boy, the air-raid sirens were wailing and all public transport, as usual, had ground to a standstill. Such was her excitement that she ran the 2 miles from her parents’ home to the Oxford Street maternity hospital, oblivious of bombers and their parachute-borne land mines. The worst that Hitler could do seemed trivial by comparison with this marvellous event.

      The week in question was certainly a bad one for Liverpool. The records of its Watch Committee show that on the night of 7-8 October, high-explosive bombs fell on Stanley Road and Great Mersey Street in the city centre, and on Lichfield Road and Grantley Road, Wavertree, causing damage to houses and demolishing the Welsh Chapel. The next night came two separate raids, hitting Everton Valley, Knotty Ash, Mossley Hill and Mill Street in the first, and the Anfield area in the second. On the night of 11-12 October, two more raids dropped tons of high explosive on the City and North Docks first, then on Alexandra and Langton Dock, causing serious damage to the Harbourmaster’s House, sheds, railway tracks, Admiralty stores and four ships.

      But on the night of 9-10 October, the Luftwaffe unaccountably stayed away. As Mimi hurried towards Oxford Street, she would undoubtedly have seen the results of previous bombing, in rubble, shattered glass and white-helmeted ARP wardens. On later visits to Julia, the situation could have been as she remembered that first night, with a land mine falling next to the hospital and the new baby being wrapped in a rough blanket and put under his mother’s bed for safety. Uppermost in Mimi’s thoughts on 9 October was concern for her sister, mingled with delight that a boy had entered the overwhelmingly female Stanley family. Possibly it was the strength of her own emotion when she first held her nephew in her arms that helped give the scene its apocalyptic quality in her memory.

      E M Forster once wrote that ‘there is a battle fought over every baby.’ The battle over this particular Liverpool baby was to be fiercer than most—revealing not that he ‘wasn’t wanted’, as he came to believe, but that too many people wanted him too much. Nor would it become clear for some little time who had won him.

      About his name, at least, there was no conflict. Julia decided to call him John, which pleased Alf as a tribute to his paternal grandfather, the sometime Kentucky minstrel, but was also classically middleclass, suggesting every quality the Stanleys most admired—plain, upright, steady, predictable, uncomplicated. And, with fierce wartime patriotism in common, neither side of the family could object to his mother’s giving him the middle name Winston, in honour of the Prime Minister.

      Alf’s long absences from home would later brand him in his son’s eyes as feckless, selfish and unloving, but it should be remembered that as a merchant sailor he was doing one of the most vital and dangerous jobs in Britain’s war effort. Thousands of other Liverpool men were in his situation, facing the same dangers from German U-boats—drowning in icy seas or turning into oil-soaked human torches—while, back at home, children they barely knew were raised by committees of women. Undoubtedly, for all its hazards, the sea provided an escape from dull routine and responsibility, where Alf could turn into ‘Lennie’ and live out his fantasies as an entertainer (now adding a skit on Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers to his repertoire of Jolson and Eddie Cantor). Another deterrent to seeking a safer shore job was that he was climbing the ladder of his profession. In September 1942, he gained promotion to saloon steward, the shipboard equivalent of headwaiter.

      At the time, it appears, the most hostile of his in-laws no longer found anything to criticise about his nautical station, especially as he always returned home laden with booty from the ships’ pantries, meat and butter and fresh fruit otherwise impossible to obtain under wartime rationing, which he would share out liberally among them. While at sea, he would send programmes of ships’ concerts featuring himself for Julia to show to John, who for years afterwards would associate his father’s name with a mysterious number called ‘Begin the Beguine’.

      Alf was at sea as saloon steward on the SS Moreton Bay from 26 September 1942 to 2 February 1943. Though air attacks on Liverpool had diminished since the horrendous ‘May blitz’ of 1941, the city centre was still considered a danger area. To make a safer as well as cleaner environment for John, Mimi persuaded Julia to move from 9 Newcastle Road out to suburban Woolton, СКАЧАТЬ