John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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       10 MACH SCHAU

      The Germans liked it as long as it was loud.

      What Liverpool had endured at the time of John’s birth, Hamburg had received back with interest. On the night of 24 July 1943, an Allied ’thousand bomber raid’, code name Operation Gomorrah, dropped 2,300 tons of bombs and incendiaries on this most crucial of Hitler’s ports and industrial centres, unleashing greater destruction in a few hours than Merseyside had known over weeks during the purgatory of 1940. Four nights later, Gomorrah’s cleansers returned, creating a 150-mph firestorm that reduced 8 square miles of the city to ashes and claimed 43,000 civilian lives, more than Britain had lost during the entire Blitz.

      Now, only 15 years after the war’s end, with its scars still far from healed, young survivors from that bomb-battered British city were taking music to young survivors of that devastated German one. In its small, unwitting way, it was a notable act of reconciliation that was to bind Liverpool and Hamburg together forever afterward and foreshadow the apolitical youth culture soon to dominate the whole Western world. Though John never thought of it as such, he had embarked on his very first peace campaign.

      To deliver Bruno Koschmider’s new employees as cheaply as possible—and being unable to resist any kind of lark—Allan Williams offered to drive them to Hamburg personally. In the end, a party of nine squeezed into Williams’s battered green-and-white Austin van outside the Jacaranda early on 15 August, 1960. Besides John, Paul, George, Stu and new drummer Pete Best, the Welshman took along his wife Beryl, his brother-in-law, Barry Chang, and his West Indian business partner, Lord Woodbine. In London, they picked up an additional passenger, a German waiter named Georg Steiner, who had also been hired by Koschmider. The van was not like a modern minibus with rows of seats, but a bare metal shell: those in its rear had nowhere to sit but on the piled-up stage equipment and baggage.

      The two-day journey was fraught with problems that somehow only Liverpudlians could have created and only Liverpudlians had the resilience and humour to endure. At Harwich, whence they were to cross the North Sea to the Hook of Holland, dock workers initially refused to load the grotesquely overloaded vehicle aboard the ferry. According to Williams, it was mainly John who persuaded them to relent, striking up a rapport as easy as if he himself had spent a lifetime on the dockside.

      In those days, when foreign package tours were still in their infancy, most Britons setting foot on mainland Europe underwent a profound culture shock. Now every European nation wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, listens to the same music, eats the same fast food. But for 19-year-old John, this first-ever trip abroad meant entering a totally alien landscape where not a single person or thing looked or sounded or smelled the same as at home, food and toilet arrangements were hideously unpredictable, and drinking water, bizarrely, came in bottles rather than from the tap. There was as much fear as fascination in that introductory whiff of continental coffee, disinfectant, drains and tobacco as darkly pungent as liquorice.

      With customary disregard for detail, Williams had not obtained the work permits his charges needed in order to appear for six weeks in a West German club and be paid in West German currency. If challenged en route, he said, they should pretend to be students on holiday. Fortunately, this was an era of mild frontier controls when, with wartime shortages still lingering, the most serious contraband was not drugs but food. The recurring official challenge, Paul Mc-Cartney remembers, was whether they had any illicit coffee. As with the Harwich stevedores, it was usually John’s mixture of charm and cheek at checkpoints that got them waved on with friendly smiles.

      He was not always such a ray of sunshine. In Holland, Williams insisted on making a patriotic detour to Arnhem, scene of the Allies’ disastrous Operation Market Garden airborne landings in 1944. There Barry Chang took what would become a famous snapshot of Paul, George, Pete, Stu, Williams, Beryl and Lord Woodbine around the casket-shaped memorial with its partially prophetic inscription THEIR NAMES LIVETH FOR EVERMORE. John, however, refused to leave the van. One can picture the scene in the bleary Dutch dawn—the big side door sliding back; the hunched and sleepy figure disinclined to move; the attempts to rouse him answered by a torrent of swear words.

      He also took time for some shoplifting, finding the unsuspicious Netherland store owners absurdly easy victims after Woolton and Liverpool 8. The haul he later showed to Pete Best included jewellery, handkerchiefs, guitar strings and a harmonica. Years later, when every detail of his early life was pored over by millions, that harmonica thoughtlessly pocketed in a Dutch music shop would cause many of his admirers pangs of vicarious guilt. Finally, a group of them resolved to set the matter right. Travelling to the Arnhem area, they found the same shop still in business and, to its owner’s bewilderment, solemnly repaid the cost of the stolen instrument.

      Though the term had still to be coined, Hamburg’s Reeperbahn was one of the world’s earliest experiments in sex therapy. The thinking—later to spread like wildfire through Europe, even unto Britain—was that being open about extreme or deviant sexual practices was healthier than being secretive. It was also a way to manage the problems of the harbour area, corralling pleasure-bent sailors all in one place and so saturating them with off-the-radar pornography that they would hopefully be less inclined to rape or other sexual crimes outside its boundaries. The district of St Pauli, which includes the Reeperbahn, was a perfect location, handily close to the dockside and well away from Hamburg’s swiftly rebuilt centre and many respectable suburbs. This supposedly untamed carnal frontier was in effect a department of City Hall, governed by a mass of surprisingly straitlaced rules and regulations and watched over by a large and zealous police force.

      Dusk was falling on 16 August when Allan Williams’s van eventually found its way through Hamburg to St Pauli, and John, Paul, George, Stu and Pete received their first sight of their new workplace. After the almost seamless night-time blackout of Liverpool, the Reeperbahn was an eye-mugging spectacle. Continuous neon signs winked and shimmered in gold, silver and every suggestive colour of the rainbow, their voluptuous German script—Mehrer, Bar Monika, Mambo Schankey, Gretel and Alphons, Roxy Bar—making the entertainments on offer seem even more untranslatably wicked. Though it was still early, the whole strip teemed with people—or rather, with men—and had the lurching, anarchic feel of pub-closing time back home. As the arrivals СКАЧАТЬ