The friend he was staying with in Blackpool was planning to emigrate to New Zealand. Fred decided to go with him. All the preparations were made, when one day Julia arrived at the door.
‘She said she wanted John back. She’d now got a nice little home and decided she wanted him. I said I was now so used to John I was going to take him to New Zealand with me. I could tell she still really loved me. I said why didn’t she come with me? We could start again? She said no. All she wanted was John. So we argued and I said, well, let John decide.
‘I shouted to John. He runs out and jumps on my knee. He clings to me, asking if she’s coming back. That’s obviously what he really wanted. I said no, he had to decide whether to stay with me or go with her. He said me. Julia asked again, but John still said me.
‘Julia went out of the door and was about to go up the street when John ran after her. That was the last I saw of him or heard of him till I was told he’d become a Beatle.’
John went back to Liverpool with Julia but not to stay with her. It was his Aunt Mimi who wanted him back. He moved in, for good this time, with Mimi and her husband George at their semidetached house in Menlove Avenue, Woolton, Liverpool.
‘I never told John about his father and mother,’ says Mimi. ‘I just wanted to protect him from all that. Perhaps I was overanxious. I don’t know. I just wanted him to be happy.’
John is very grateful to Mimi for what she did. ‘She was obviously very good to me. She must have been worried about the conditions I was brought up in and must have been always on at them to think about me, telling them to make sure the kid’s safe. As they trusted her, they let her have me in the end, I suppose.’
John soon settled down with Mimi. She brought him up as her son. She was a disciplinarian and stood no nonsense, but she never hit him or shouted at him. She considers this a sign of weakness in a parent. Her worst punishment was to ignore him. ‘He always hated that. “Don’t ‘nore me, Mimi,” he used to say.’
But Mimi allowed his personality to develop. ‘We were always an individual family. Mother never believed in being conventional, and neither do I. She never wore a wedding ring all her life and neither have I. Why should I?’
But Uncle George, who ran the family dairy business, was the weak link, if John wanted to be spoiled. ‘I used to find notes John had left under George’s pillow. “Dear George, will you wash me tonight and not Mimi.” Or “Dear George, will you take me to Woolton Pictures.”’
Mimi allowed John only two outings of that sort a year — one to the Christmas Pantomime at the Liverpool Empire and the other to a Walt Disney film in the summer. But there were smaller treats, such as Strawberry Fields, a local Salvation Army children’s home which each summer had a big garden party. ‘As soon as we could hear the Salvation Army band starting, John would jump up and down shouting, “Mimi, come on. We’re going to be late.”’
John’s first school was Dovedale Primary. ‘The headmaster, Mr Evans, told me this boy’s as sharp as a needle. He can do anything, as long as he chooses to do it. He won’t do anything stereotyped.’
John was reading and writing after only five months at school, with the help of his Uncle George, though his spelling was funny, even then. Chickenpox was always chicken pots. ‘He went on holiday to my sister’s in Edinburgh once and sent me a postcard saying “Funs are getting low.” I’ve still got it.’
Mimi wanted to take John back and forward to Dovedale School herself, but he wouldn’t allow it. After only his third day, he said she was making a show of him and she hadn’t to come any more. So she had to content herself by walking secretly behind him out of school, keeping about 20 yards behind, shadowing him to see that he was all right.
‘His favourite songs were “Let Him Go, Let Him Tarry” and “Wee Willy Winkie”. He had a good voice. He used to sing in the choir at St Peter’s, Woolton. He always went to Sunday School and was later confirmed when he was 15 of his own free will. Religion was never forced on him but the inclination was there until he was a teenager.’
Until the age of 14, Mimi gave him only five shillings a week pocket money. ‘I tried to teach him the value of money, but it never worked.’ To get any extra money, John had to work for it by helping in the garden. ‘He always refused to, until he was really desperate. We’d hear the shed door being furiously opened, then he’d get the lawn mower out and race across a few feet of the lawn at about 60 miles an hour, then storm in for his money. But money didn’t really mean anything to him. He didn’t care about it. He was always generous beyond belief when he had any.’
John started writing his own little books when he was about seven. Mimi still has bundles of them. His first series was called ‘Sport Speed and Illustrated. Edited and Illustrated by J. W. Lennon’. It contained jokes, cartoons, drawings, pasted-in photographs of film stars and footballers. It had a serial story which ended each week with ‘If you liked this, come again next week, it’ll be even better.’
‘I was passionate about Alice in Wonderland and drew all the characters. I did poems in the style of the Jabberwocky. I used to live Alice, and Just William. I wrote my own William stories, with me doing all the things.
‘When I did any serious poems, like emotional stuff later on, I did it in secret handwriting, all scribbles, so that Mimi couldn’t read it. Yes, there must have been a soft soul under the hard exterior.
‘Wind in the Willows, I loved that. After I’d read a book, I’d relive it all again. That was one reason why I wanted to be the gang leader at school. I’d want them all to play the games that I wanted them to play, the ones I’d just been reading.’
As a little boy, he had golden hair and looked very like his mother’s side of the family. People always mistook him for Mimi’s real son, which she liked. If they were strangers, she never contradicted them.
Mimi was very protective, looking after him all the time, trying not to let him mix with what she called common boys.
‘I was coming down Penny Lane one day and saw this crowd of boys in a ring, watching two boys fighting. “Just like those common scruffs,” I said. They were from another school, not John’s. Then they parted and out came this awful boy with his coat hanging off. To my horror, it was Lennon.
‘John always liked me telling him that story. “Just like you, Mimi. Everybody else is always common,” he used to say.’
In his playing, with kids around the neighbourhood, Mimi says he always had to be the boss. But at school it was much more serious. He had his own gang, which led to brawls and physical fights with everyone, just to prove he was the best. Ivan Vaughan and Pete Shotton, his two closest friends at school, say he seemed to be perpetually fighting.
Mimi quite approved of these two friends, as they both lived locally, in the same sort of semis, but not of some of the others.
‘I did fight all the way through Dovedale, winning by psychological means if ever anyone looked bigger than me. I threatened them in a strong enough way that I would beat them, so they thought I could.
‘I used to go thieving with this kid, pinching apples. We used to ride on the bumpers of tram cars in Penny Lane and ride miles without paying. I’d be shitting myself all the time, I was so scared.
‘I was the king pin of my age group. I learned lots of dirty jokes very young, there was this girl who lived near who told me them.
‘The sort of gang I led went in for things like shoplifting and pulling girls’ knickers down. When the bomb fell and everyone got caught, I was always the one they missed. I was scared at the time, but Mimi was the only parent who never found out.