He was becoming closer to his Uncle George all the time. ‘We got on fine. He was nice and kind.’ But, in June 1953, when John was almost 13, Uncle George had a haemorrhage and died. ‘It happened quite suddenly one Sunday,’ says Mimi. ‘He hadn’t had a day’s illness in his working life. John had been very close to him. In any little rows John and I had, George had always been John’s friend. They went out a lot together. I was often jealous when they had good times. I think John was very shocked by George’s death, but he never showed it.’
‘I didn’t know how to be sad publicly,’ says John, ‘what you did or said, so I went upstairs. Then my cousin arrived and she came upstairs as well. We both had hysterics. We just laughed and laughed. I felt very guilty afterwards.’
Around the time of Uncle George’s death someone else was becoming more and more important in John’s life — his mother Julia. She had always kept in touch with Mimi, though Mimi told John very little about her. She was obviously fascinated to see him growing up, developing, becoming a personality. And John, now that he was a teenager, was even more fascinated by her. She had by then two daughters by the man she had gone to live with.
‘Julia gave me my first coloured shirt,’ says John. ‘I started going to visit her at her house. I met her new bloke and didn’t think much of him. I called him Twitchy. But he was allright really.
‘Julia became a sort of young aunt to me, or a big sister. As I got bigger I had more rows with Mimi. I used to go and live with Julia for a weekend.’
Both Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan, John’s two constant friends, have very vivid memories of Julia becoming important in John’s life and the effect she had on them all.
Pete remembers starting to hear about Julia when they were in about the second or third year at Quarry Bank. By then they were both constantly being warned about the terrible things that lay ahead of them. Pete’s parents and John’s Aunt Mimi were always warning them. But they laughed at these warnings, on their own. Then Julia came along and laughed with them openly at masters, mothers and everyone.
‘She was great,’ says Pete. ‘A groove. She’d just say forget it, when we’d tell her what was going to happen to us. We loved her. She was the only one who was like us. She told us the things we wanted to hear. She did everything for laughs, just like us.’
Julia was living in Allerton and they often went to visit her after school. Sometimes she came to see them. ‘We met her once with a pair of knickers over her head like a headscarf. The knicker legs hung down over the back of her shoulder. She pretended she didn’t realize when people stared at her. We just fell over.
‘Another time we were walking up the street with her and she was wearing a pair of spectacles with no glass in. She would meet people and they wouldn’t realize. As she was talking to them, she’d put her fingers through the glasses to rub her eye. People would stare in amazement.’
Ivan thinks it was Julia who helped to make John a rebel. She encouraged what was there, laughed at everything he did, while Mimi had been strict with him, though no more than most mothers, trying to make sure he didn’t smoke or drink. Mimi had to give way a bit, but he naturally preferred Julia, which was why he was always going away to stay with her. She had been the black sheep, at least the wild one in her family. She wanted John, who was like her anyway, to be the same.
John was by now in 4C, his first time in a C stream, the bottom stream. ‘I was really ashamed this time, being with the thick lads. The B stream wasn’t bad, because the A stream had all the drips. I started cheating in exams as well. But it was no good competing with all the mongols and I did as badly as ever.’
Pete Shotton also came down each form with him. ‘I wrecked his life as well.’
By the final term of the fourth year he dropped right down to 20th in the class, the bottom of the bottom class. ‘Certainly on the road to failure,’ wrote one master on his report.
In John’s fifth year, a new headmaster arrived, Mr Pobjoy. He soon found that Lennon and Shotton were the school’s leading troublemakers. But he genuinely seems to have had some contact with John, which most teachers by this time did not. They knew only too well what he was like.
‘But he was a thorough nuisance, full of practical jokes. I didn’t really understand him. I did cane him once myself, I’m sorry to say. Sorry because I am against corporal punishment. I inherited the system, but soon did away with it.’
Mr Pobjoy was rather surprised when John failed all his O levels. ‘I thought he was capable of passing. He only failed them all by one grade, which was probably one of the reasons I helped to get him into the Art College. I knew he was good at art and felt he deserved the chance.’
Mimi went to see the headmaster when John’s future was at stake. ‘He asked me what I was going to do with him. I said what are you going to do with him. You’ve had him five years.’
Mimi liked the idea of the Art College, though she probably didn’t realize how lucky he was to get in. ‘I wanted him to be qualified to earn a living in a proper manner. I wanted him to be something.
‘At the back of my mind I was thinking of his father and how he had turned out, but of course I could never say that to John.’ Looking back now at his school years John has absolutely no regrets.
‘I’ve been proved right. They were wrong and I was right. They’re all still there, aren’t they, so they must be the failures.
‘They were all stupid teachers, except one or two. I never paid attention to them. I just wanted a cheap laugh. There was only one master who liked my cartoons. He used to take them home to his digs with him.
‘They should give you time to develop, encourage what you’re interested in. I was always interested in art and came top for many years, yet no one took any interest.
‘I was disappointed at not getting Art at GCE, but I’d given up. All they were interested in was neatness. I was never neat. I used to mix all the colours together. We had one question which said do a picture of “Travel”. I drew a picture of a hunchback, with warts all over him. They obviously didn’t dig that.
‘But I’d say I had a happy childhood. I came out aggressive, but I was never miserable. I was always having a laugh.
‘It was all imagining I was Just William really.’
Towards the end of his days at school, John had become interested in pop music, although pop music was something that Mimi had always discouraged. She never liked him singing pop songs which as a little boy he picked up from the radio.
John had no musical education or training of any sort. But he did teach himself to play the mouth organ, after a fashion. Uncle George had bought him a cheap mouth organ.
‘I would have sent him to music lessons,’ says Mimi, ‘the piano or violin, when he was very young. But he didn’t want that. He couldn’t be bothered with anything which involved lessons. He wanted to do everything immediately, not take time learning.
‘The only musical encouragement he ever got was from a bus conductor on the way from Liverpool to Edinburgh. We packed him off with his cousins in Edinburgh each year to stay with my sister. He’d got a battered old mouth organ from George and played it all the way there, driving everybody mad, no doubt.
‘But the conductor was greatly taken by him. When they got to Edinburgh, he said come down to the bus station tomorrow morning and I’ll give you a really good mouth organ. John couldn’t sleep that night, and he was down there first thing. It was a real good one as well. John must have been about ten at the time. It was the first encouragement he ever had. That conductor didn’t know what he started.’