John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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       9 UNDER THE JACARANDA

      I was never—repeat NEVER—known as Johnny Silver.

      Just before Christmas, Mrs Plant, the long-suffering owner of 9 Percy Street, had paid her property a surprise visit and been horrified by what she’d found. A cache of antique furniture awaiting renovation in the basement had been chopped up and used as firewood to warm the ex-Quarrymen’s practice sessions and John’s illicit nights with Cynthia. The Adam fireplace in Stu Sutcliffe’s studio had been torn out to create a contemporary openhearth effect, and had since disappeared. (‘We left bits of it all over town,’ Rod Murray admits. ‘Like getting rid of a dead body…’) So outraged was Mrs Plant by this wholesale vandalism that she gave every tenant in the building an eviction notice.

      By early January, Rod and Stu had found new accommodations at 3 Hillary Mansions, Gambier Terrace, a handsome Georgian-style block overlooking the unfinished Anglican cathedral. To share the spacious first-floor flat they enlisted three other college friends: Margaret Morris (known as Diz), Margaret Duxbury (known as Ducky) and John.

      Aunt Mimi was informed of his decision to leave Mendips with typical bluntness. ‘He told me, “Mimi, all the others have flats on their own…and anyway, I don’t like your cooking,”’ she recalled. ‘He’d had it soft with me around to do all the cooking and washing for him. I knew even before he went that he couldn’t cope on his own. He didn’t even know how to light a gas-cooker, let alone cook a tin of beans. He told me he could live off “Chink food”. I said to myself, “We’ll see, John Lennon, we’ll see.”’

      The flat consisted of three oversized bed-sitting-rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom with a Geyser water heater, lit by a flame that responded with a threatening Woomph! if anyone tried to light it. As signatory of the lease, Rod chose the best quarters, at the front, with the cathedral view and fancy iron balustrade; John and Stu took the barnlike room at the rear.

      For John, the Gambier Terrace flat served two equally important purposes. It provided a place for him, Paul and George to rehearse with their new bass player, his new flatmate. And it allowed him to spend unrestricted nights with Cynthia, albeit in conditions even more rough-and-ready than at Percy Street. The room he shared with Stu was also a communal art studio for the other tenants, and so permanently littered with shabby easels, half-squeezed paint tubes, empty bottles, misappropriated traffic signs, old fish-andchips wrappings and cigarette ends. ‘The floor was filthy,’ Cynthia recalled. ‘Everything was covered with muck.’ On mornings when the Geyser failed and they had to wash in cold water, they would arrive at college ‘looking like a couple of chimney sweeps’.

      But, as Mimi had predicted, it wasn’t long before John’s appetite for self-reliance waned and he began to miss the home comforts he had always taken for granted. ‘For about three weeks I didn’t hear from him. Then one night he arrived back on the doorstep looking very sorry for himself. I said to him, “I’m cooking dinner, do you want some?” but he was too proud to admit that he was hungry or that he couldn’t stand living away. He went away again that night, but about a week later he turned up again. This time I was cooking a steak pie, and I didn’t bother asking whether he wanted any or not. That got him mad. He could smell the food and yet he was too stubborn, too proud, typical John really, to let on that he was hungry or that he’d made a mistake.

      ‘In the end the smell got too much for him and he burst in on me, saying, “I’ll have you know, woman, I’m starving!” He wolfed his food down and then he decided it was getting late and that he wanted to stay in his room for the night. It was his way of coming back without admitting he was wrong to leave.’ From then on, he made regular trips home to get his washing done and fill up on Mimi’s cooking. But even the most succulent of her steak pies couldn’t lure him back permanently from Gambier Terrace, Rod, Diz, Ducky and Stu.

      The idea had been that Stu would master the bass within a week or so, then take his place as an equal among John’s onstage brotherhood. Unfortunately, it was not as simple as that. Stu’s small hands, so quick and sure while painting, drawing or sculpting, showed none of the same deftness with his shiny new Hofner President. Even the most basic underlay patterns of rock ‘n’ roll were laborious for him to learn and troublesome to execute. He was angered and frustrated by his slow progress and would have given up altogether had not John sat with him for hours in their huge back room at Gambier Terrace, demonstrating the patterns time and again on the bass strings of his own Club 40. Just as Stu had made John believe in himself as an artist, so he was now determined Stu should believe in himself as a musician, whatever the evidence might be to the contrary.

      He therefore insisted that Stu should join Paul, George and him onstage when still all too obviously the rawest of beginners. The principal object was to show off the Hofner President: as George later recalled, ‘Having a bass player who couldn’t play was better than not having a bass player at all.’ To hide his embarrassment, Stu would turn on his James Dean persona, wearing dark glasses and standing with his back half-turned to the audience as if lost in some СКАЧАТЬ