Understanding John Lennon. Francis Kenny

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ sisters. This mother model developed a strong air of the disciplinarian in her, which carried over when she became John’s ‘new mother’.

      The area where Mimi and Julia lived was essentially solid upper-working-class/lower-middle-class. As a rule of thumb, the further you lived up and away from the river and the docks, the better the housing and status of the area; dock workers, on the other hand, needed to be near their place of work. The casual nature of such work meant a precarious living based on being selected for a gang from a ‘pen’ of men seeking work. This humiliating act of selection is vividly captured by Marlon Brando’s Terry Molloy in the Brooklyn-set film, On the Waterfront. Some of the ‘lucky’ chosen dock workers owed their selection to buying a drink for the foreman in the pub, commonly known as the ‘blue eye system’, while those unfortunate enough not to be picked would go home and later return to the pen for the afternoon selection, hence the importance to live as near as possible to the riverfront.

      The four-mile stretch from the Pier Head that made up the north end and south end dockland zones contained at this time 250,000 people, the most densely populated area in either Europe or America.

      Pop was intimately familiar with the dockland neighbourhoods. He regularly made his way through the narrow walkways and dismal courts on his way to work, an experience that instilled in him the desire to provide a better standard of living for his own family. No daughter of his was going to work in a seed cake mill, margarine factory, or as a sack maker or soap wrapper. Mimi, as the eldest daughter, would be fully indoctrined by Pop into being self-regarding, status-conscious, thrifty and thick-skinned. She learned, as a second mother to her sisters, to make certain she would better herself as soon as possible and move up. Whereas Mimi was thus constantly looking to climb the social ladder, Julia was content to pick up the new wisecracks of Mae West in her latest movie at the local picture house. The conditions of housing in Toxteth made living ‘cheek-by-jowl’ the norm, and John’s parents were both living in these conditions in streets that were less than a ten-minute walk from each other. But this short distance represented the difference between the free and easy casualness of the Lennons in Copperfield Street and the skilled disciplinarian atmosphere found in Head Street.

      Alf Lennon (more commonly known as Freddie) was six years younger than Mimi and lived with his brothers and sister at the family home at 27 Copperfield Street. The red-bricked terraced houses were built to accommodate skilled and semi-skilled workers mainly from the port-related industries, such as shipyard, marine engineering or transport workers. From Copperfield Street, where Freddie lived, it was a short walk to Head Street down the district’s main thoroughfare of Park Road, named after the path taken to King John’s medieval royal hunting ground of Toxteth Park. This is also the walk Freddie’s Irish-born dad, Jack would have taken to the Flat Iron pub, which sat in front of Head Street at the junction of Mill Street and St James Place.

      When Jack died of liver damage, Freddie was seven years old. Shortly afterwards, he was placed with his sister in an orphanage. Freddie was in some ways lucky insomuch that the children’s home turned out to be the local charitable Blue Coat School, which was well considered and had a good standing, being located in the Wavertree suburb of Liverpool – less than half a mile from Penny Lane.

      While Freddie and Julia grew up, the pressures to find work increased as the recession of the 1930s continued. Freddie was at a distinct disadvantage here, having suffered from rickets as a child. This condition forced him into wearing callipers, which resulted in stunted growth (5ft 4in) and bandy legs. But any physical disadvantages were more than made up for by an exuberant personality and the ability to perform a song at the drop of a hat. This came together with a strong sense of humour and wit. As a youngster he would give Saturday ‘shows’. This would consist of taking in a few pennies from friends for a performance which included songs and imitations of Charlie Chaplin and the latest hits, which he played on his harmonica.

      While at Blue Coat School, Freddie, with his older brother Sidney, visited the local Empire Theatre to see the children’s spectacular, Will Murray’s Gang. He was immediately bitten by the showbiz bug. Backstage after the show, Freddie approached Will Murray with the less-than-subtle declaration of ‘I’m better than your leading boy’.⁴ Taken in with the young Freddie’s confidence and smart Blue Coat School uniform, Murray offered him a place in the troupe. His delight was shattered when he was told in no uncertain terms by the headmaster that this would not happen. Undeterred, the rebel in Freddie made him decide to write his mother a farewell letter and make his own way to Glasgow – the next venue for the show. Within a few days, Freddie’s world collapsed. Blue Coat’s headmaster turned up at the Glasgow venue and escorted him by train back home. Worse was to follow when the same headmaster ridiculed him in a full assembly at the school. He derided and goaded him with such comments as: ‘You thought you were going to be a star’, and ‘Which part were they going to give you, Tom Thumb or perhaps one of the Seven Dwarfs?’⁵ The assembled boys laughed on cue.

      If this was an effort to break Freddie’s spirit and make him conform, it failed. He was determined to make his own rebellious and unorthodox way in life and turned a deaf ear to those who criticised him. The showbiz bug in Freddie was to find inspiration in two places. The first was the opportunities that a life in the merchant navy could offer and the chance to give a ‘turn’ to both the ship’s crew and passengers. Freddie would spend many hours down at the Pier Head gazing enviously at the cargo ships and liners passing through the mouth of the Mersey, making journeys to places such as Valparaiso, Cape Town and Shanghai. A local journalist at the time described the Pier Head as ‘a threshold to the ends of the earth’.⁶ The second source of inspiration turned out to be the free-spirited – and some might say the slightly eccentric – Julia Stanley. The problem for Freddie was simple: life at sea and being with Julia weren’t compatible.

      Julia Stanley was a nonconformist during a time of mass unemployment and political uncertainty, a period when one couldn’t really afford to be as unconventional as she was. The 1930s were witness to unprecedented economic depression and extreme austerity, but she did not worry. The vagaries of trade for the port left it particularly vulnerable to high unemployment. The largest area of work for women in the city, and still a reflection of the wealth, was domestic service. Thousands of household servants found employment in the richer sections of the city. The attitudes of a nonconformist like Julia to a position ‘in service’ as a parlour maid or scullery girl was incredulity and disdain. At her first job in a printer’s shop in the city centre, she lasted only a week before being sacked due to her indulgence in horseplay and practical jokes. Freddie’s own first job, by coincidence, was as a bellboy at the Adelphi Hotel, the same hotel that was to employ Julia’s common law husband, Bobby Dykins, as wine waiter. While Julia was in many ways an easy-going type of person, often described as happy-go-lucky and good company, Mimi was assertive and aggressive. The sisters could not be more opposite. Mimi looked towards social mobility and the skills she had gathered in her role as ‘second mother’. This brought authority and obedience over her younger sisters. Mimi was all for pulling oneself up by the boot straps. She was a social climber of the first order. She lived by a code in which accent was one of the first indicators as to how she would treat a person.

      These values would be exercised on the young John Lennon in later years at Mendips. The effects of the ‘hungry thirties’ increasingly moulded Mimi’s already powerful personality into a burning need for status, career and a comfortable niche in life. Julia’s reaction towards a career, by contrast, was not to have one. Because she liked films, she instead found herself a job in the local cinema as an usherette. Mimi, meanwhile, moved from the discipline of dealing with her siblings to the discipline of dealing with patients: she became a trainee sister in the Woolton Convalescent Home, situated in an affluent suburb of Liverpool. She was also personal assistant to an industrial magnate who made his fortune in biscuits in Manchester. Mr Vickers invited Mimi to become a personal secretary at the family home in Betws-y-Coed on the North Wales coast. Here she enjoyed the life she craved. She was treated as one of the family with trips on Vickers’ yacht around the coast. For reasons that remain unclear, this was only to last СКАЧАТЬ