‘Other boys’ parents hated me. They were always warning their kids not to play with me. I’d always have smart-alec answers if I met them. Most of the masters hated me like shit.
‘As I got older, we’d go on from just stuffing rubbish like sweets in our pockets from shops, and progressed to getting enough to sell to others, like ciggies.’
On the surface, his environment at home with the loving, kind, but firm Mimi, seemed good enough. But although she never told him about himself, there were the vague memories of the past in his mind and also, as he grew older, more and more unanswered questions which worried him.
‘On Julia’s visits, he did once or twice ask me things,’ says Mimi. ‘But I didn’t want to tell him any details. How could I? He was happy. It would have been wrong to say your father’s no good and your mother’s found someone else. John was so happy, singing all the time.’
John remembers beginning to ask Mimi and being always given the same sort of answers. ‘Mimi told me my parents had fallen out of love. She never said anything directly against my father and mother.
‘I soon forgot my father. It was like he was dead. But I did see my mother now and again and my feeling never died off for her. I often thought about her, though I never realized for a long time that she was living no more than five or ten miles away.
‘My mother came to see us one day in a black coat with her face all bleeding. She’d had some sort of accident. I couldn’t face it. I thought, that’s my mother in there, bleeding. I went out into the garden. I loved her, but I didn’t want to get involved. I suppose I was a moral coward. I wanted to hide all feelings.’
John might have thought that he was stifling all his worries and feelings, but Mimi and his other three aunts — Anne, Elizabeth and Harriet — say that to them John was completely open and sunny-natured. They say that John was as happy as the day was long.
2 john and the quarrymen
Quarry Bank High School, when John started there in 1952, was a small suburban grammar school in Allerton, Liverpool, not far from Mimi’s house. It was founded in 1922. It’s not as big or as well known as the Liverpool Institute in the middle of the city, but it still has a good reputation. Two of its old boys went on to become Labour government ministers — Peter Shore and William Rodgers.
Mimi was pleased that he was at a local grammar school, rather than one in the city. She thought she would be able to keep an eye on him. Pete Shotton went with him to Quarry but his other close friend, Ivan Vaughan, went instead to the Institute, much to his relief. He was the only academic one of John’s gang. He knew that going with John would make all school work impossible. But he was still accepted as a member of John’s gang after school hours. Ivan began to bring boys back from his school to join John’s gang. ‘The first one I brought was Len Garry. But I didn’t bring many. I was always very selective about people I brought to meet John.’
John has a clear image of his first day at Quarry. ‘I looked at all the hundreds of new kids and thought, Christ, I’ll have to fight all my way through this lot, having just made it at Dovedale.
‘There was some real heavies there. The first fight I got in I lost. I lost me nerve when I got really hurt. Not that there was much real fighting. I did a lot of swearing and shouting, then got a quick punch. If there was a bit of blood, then you packed in. After that, if I thought someone could punch harder than me, I said OK, we’ll have wrestling instead.
‘I was aggressive because I wanted to be popular. I wanted to be the leader. It seemed more attractive than just being one of the toffees. I wanted everybody to do what I told them to do, to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss.’
He was caught with an obscene drawing in his first year. ‘That really set me up with the masters.’ Then Mimi found an obscene poem he’d written. ‘She found it under my pillow. I said I’d just been made to write it out for another lad who couldn’t write very well. I’d written it myself, of course. I’d seen these poems around, the sort you read to give you a hard on. I’d wondered who wrote them, and thought I’d try one myself.
‘I suppose I did try to do a bit of school work at first, as I often did at Dovedale. I’d been honest at Dovedale, if nothing else, always owning up. But I began to realize that was foolish. They just got you. So I started lying about everything.’
From then on, after the first year, it was Lennon and Shotton versus the rest of the school, refusing all discipline or imposed ideas. Pete thinks that without John as his permanent ally he might have gone under and been forced to follow the school line, though John probably wouldn’t have done. ‘But with two of you,’ says Pete, ‘it’s a lot easier to stick to what you believe in. When you’ve had a bad time, there’s someone to laugh with. It was laughs all the time. We never stopped, all the way through school. It was great.’
Pete says most of their escapades don’t sound as funny in retrospect, but they still make him laugh when he thinks about them.
‘We must have been very young this first time when we had to go to a senior master for having done something bad. He was sitting at his desk writing when we came in and made me and John stand either side of him. As he was sitting down there, telling us off, John started tickling the hairs on his head. He was almost bald, but with a few wisps across the top. He couldn’t understand what was tickling him and kept on putting his hand up to rub his bald head as he was telling us off. It was terrible. I was doubled up. John was literally pissing himself. Really. It started to run down his trousers. He had short trousers on, that’s why I know we must have been pretty young at the time. The piss was dripping on to the floor and the master was looking round and saying, “What’s that? What’s that?”’
John had a gift for art which he always managed to do well, despite everything else. Pete in turn was good at maths. John was jealous of Pete’s interest in maths, which he could never do, and always tried to spoil it for Pete.
‘He tried to ruin my concentration by putting drawings in front of me. Some were obscene, but they were mostly just funny and I’d burst out. “Look at Shotton, sir,” the rest of the class would shout as I was in hysterics.
‘If I had to stand at the front of the class for some reason, when the master had his back to everyone, John would stand up and hold up a drawing behind the master’s back for me to see. I’d no chance. I couldn’t stop laughing at him.’
Even when they were up before the head for their very first caning, John was still unoverawed by authority, or appeared to be.
‘John had to go in first while I waited outside the head’s door. I was in agony, all uptight, worrying what was going to happen to me. I seemed to wait hours, but it was probably only a few minutes. Then the door opened and John came out — crawling on the floor on his hands and knees, giving great exaggerated groans. I burst out at once. I hadn’t realized at first that the head had two sets of doors. John was crawling out of the lobby place where no one could see him from inside. I had to go into the head next, still with a smile on my face, which of course they never like.’
John got steadily worse from year to year. By the third year, having started near the top of the first form, he had been demoted to the B stream. His reports contained remarks like: ‘Hopeless. Rather a clown in class. A shocking report. He is just wasting other pupils’ time.’ There was a gap for parents to add their comments. On this one, Mimi wrote: ‘Six of the best.’
Mimi kept on at him all the time at home, but she didn’t know how badly he was doing or how uncooperative he was at school.
‘I only got one beating from Mimi. This was for taking money from her handbag. I was always taking a little, for soft things like Dinkies, but this day I must have taken too much.’