John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ be. Like John, he had been captivated by the Everly Brothers’ close harmony, and vaguely planned to form an Everly-style duo with a friend named Ian James (as John had with Len Garry), but nothing came of it. On the daily bus trip to school, he’d become friendly with another Institute boy, George Harrison, who shared his fascination with guitars and rock ‘n’ roll. Though George was nine months his junior, they found common ground in drawing pictures of curvaceous guitar bodies and comparing new chords, and had become close enough to go on a hitchhiking holiday together.

      The hot Saturday of 6 July did not seem an auspicious one for John. In the morning, Mendips’ mock-Tudor hallway echoed to another blazing argument when he came downstairs in his chosen outfit of drape jacket, open-necked checked shirt and ankle-hugging black jeans. ‘Mimi…said to me I’d done it at last, I was a real Teddy boy,’ he would recall. ‘I seemed to disgust everyone, not just Mimi.’

      The afternoon unfolded with the slow-motion predictability of every village pageant John had ever read about in a William story. The procession of decorated carnival floats made its way down Allerton Road, Kings Drive and Hunts Cross Avenue, at its head the brass band of the Cheshire Yeomanry (‘By permission of Lt Col. CGV Churton, MC, MBE’), at its rear a flatbed coal-merchant’s lorry bearing the Quarrymen. Despite the grinding slowness of the parade, it was difficult to play with any effectiveness on such an unsteady perch, and John quickly gave up, took off his guitar and sat on the tailboard with his legs dangling. A little way on, he spotted his mother and two half-sisters in the crowd. Julia, the younger, and Jackie walked behind the truck, trying to make him laugh, but he still regarded himself in serious performance mode and refused to respond.

      At the fête itself, his group had been allotted two brief spots, at 4.15 and 5.45, separated by a display of dog-handling from the City of Liverpool Police. By John’s own account, that afternoon was the first time he ever attempted Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ live onstage. One can shut one’s eyes and almost hear the crazy words that, for once, he didn’t have to invent (‘We-e-ll she’s the woman in the red blue jeans…’) rising and falling against the competitive clamour of craft-and homemade cake-stalls, games of hoop-la, quoits and shilling-in-the-bucket, children’s cries, indifferent adult conversation, and birdsong. Paul McCartney, quietly checking him out from the sidelines, remembers him also doing his reworded version of ‘Come Go with Me’.

      A famous photograph of him in mid-performance was taken by his Quarry Bank schoolfriend Geoff Rhind from directly in front of the low open-air stage. Jacketless and tousled, visibly wilting in the heat, he has the narrow-eyed, challenging look that always went with leaving off his glasses. Behind him is a screen of ragged hedgerow; to his right stand a knot of expectant-looking younger boys, rather like the village children who always collected around William, hoping he would liven things up. At one point, so the story goes, he looked down into his audience and met the horrified gaze of his Aunt Mimi. According to Mimi, she had been unaware that John was performing that afternoon until a loud clash and a familiar raspy voice penetrated the refreshment tent, where she was savouring a quiet cup of tea. She would describe how when John saw her, he turned the words he was singing into a mock-fearful running commentary: ‘Oh-oh, Mimi’s here! Mimi’s coming down the path…’ However, his cousin Michael Cadwallader, then aged ten, remembers being at the fête in a large family group that, besides Julia and John’s two half-sisters, included two more aunts, Nanny and Harrie, and his ten-year-old cousin, David. ‘I got the sense that we’d been rounded up to go,’ Michael says. ‘And Mimi was the only one who could have been behind that.’

      The Quarrymen were also booked to play at the Grand Dance, which was to round off the day’s merrymaking—that is to say, they’d been given another brief youth-pleasing spot in an evening of conventional quicksteps and foxtrots by the George Edwards Band. It was while they were setting up their gear in the too-familiar surroundings of St Peter’s Church Hall that Ivan Vaughan brought in the schoolfriend he wanted John to meet.

      Even at this early time, it seems, Paul knew how to make an entrance of maximum effect. The pop ballad hit of the summer was ‘A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation)’, written by the American country star Marty Robbins but covered in the UK by a briefly burning Elvis clone named Terry Dene. And here was Ivy’s much talked-about schoolfriend, resplendent in just such a white sports jacket—a wide-shouldered, long-lapelled confection, dusted all over with silver flecks, reaching almost to his knees and set off by the narrowest pair of black drainies yet to have been smuggled past a vigilant father.

      Introductions were made a little stiffly; this was, after all, a very youthful interloper and a particularly tight-knit group. Paul broke the ice by picking up one of the Quarrymen’s guitars—whether John’s or Eric Griffiths’s no one now remembers—and levitating straight into ‘Twenty Flight Rock’, as played by Eddie Cochran in The Girl Can’t Help It, which he’d learned from the record a few days earlier. The song was a tricky one to sing and strum simultaneously, not just for a left-handed guitarist on a right-handed guitar but also because, thanks to Julia, the instrument was tuned like a banjo, its two bass strings slack and useless. Even so, the combined effect of the backswept hair, the baby face, the high yet robust voice, and the white sports jacket was irresistible.

      Years later, in a foreword to John’s first published book, Paul would affectionately recall what a grown-up and dissipated character the Quarrymen’s leader seemed on that day. ‘At Woolton church fête I met him. I was a fat schoolboy and as he leaned an arm on my shoulder, I realised he was drunk…’ Hallowed myth has always stated that, in reaction to his strife with Mimi, and possibly against the oppressive sanctity of the occasion, John had laid hands on a supply of beer and, by late afternoon, was seriously under the influence. Four of the Quarrymen—Davis, Hanton, Garry and Griffiths—have disputed the story. ‘Except for Colin Hanton, we none of us had any money to get tanked up on beer,’ Rod Davis says. ‘John might have managed to sneak a half-pint of bitter, but that would have been it.’

      Paul himself is now inclined to revise the degree of John’s intoxication, which he says did not become apparent until after ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ was over. ‘I also knocked around on the backstage piano and that would have been “A Whole Lot of Shakin” by Jerry Lee [Lewis]. That’s when I remember John leaning over, contributing a deft right hand in the upper octaves and surprising me with his beery breath. It’s not that I was shocked, it’s just that I remember this particular detail.’

      More desultory conversation followed while church helpers completed preparations for the Grand Dance or emptied dregs from tea urns in the adjacent kitchen, unaware of an encounter that was to rank alongside Gilbert’s first with Sullivan or Rodgers’s with Hart. Paul made himself still more impressive by tuning John’s and Eric’s guitars as guitars, giving them their full six-string span for the very first time. He remembers they did all go out to a pub in Woolton village later that evening, when he and John—and all the others except pint-sized Colin Hanton—had to lie about their ages before being served. The visitor felt himself even more in dangerous adult company when talk arose of an impending raid by Teds from Garston and a mass punch-up in the centre of the village. ‘I was wondering what I’d got myself into. I’d only come over for the afternoon and now I was in Mafia-land.’

      As John remembered, he asked Paul to join the Quarrymen when they first met in St Peter’s Church Hall, though Paul did not take it as official until Pete Shotton formally repeated the invitation a couple of weeks later. John realised at the time it was a major step, though how major he could not have dreamed. ‘I thought, half to myself, “He’s as good as me.” I’d been kingpin up to then. Now I thought “If I take him on, what will happen?”…The decision was whether to keep me strong or make the group stronger…It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line if I let him join. But he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him.’

      Eleven days after the Woolton fête, John reached the end of his final term at Quarry Bank High School. He had sat O-levels СКАЧАТЬ