Филип Норман – John Lennon: The Life (страница 11)

Their games were fuelled by make-believe, demanding vigorous activity rather than the modern child’s sedentary trance. The favourite of all was cowboys and Indians, with the participants shooting each other and falling down ‘dead’ with no conception of pain, and Native Americans cast as villains in obedience to Hollywood mythology. But John’s version was different. ‘He always wanted to be the Indian,’ Mimi recalled. ‘That was typical John, to support the underdog. And because he was leader of his little group, the Indians always won.’ Rather than white Western icons like Buffalo Bill or Wild Bill Hickok, his hero was Sioux Chief Sitting Bull. Mimi would stain his face with gravy browning and daub it with lipstick for war paint. From their local butcher’s shop she begged cock-pheasant feathers to make him a chief’s headdress. ‘He loved it,…he never took it off. I can see him in it now, dancing around Pete Shotton, tied to a tree in our garden.’

The centre of Woolton village, socially as well as spiritually, was its Anglican church, St Peter’s, a sandstone edifice with a square Norman-style clock tower. John attended Sunday school in its church hall, as did Pete, Ivy and Walloggs, plus a boy named Rod Davis from King’s Drive and a precociously pretty little girl named Barbara Baker. On leaving home after Sunday lunch, they would each be given a few pennies to put into the collection plate or the cottageshaped money box for Dr Barnardo’s homes. At John’s instigation, they spent the money on chewing gum instead, masticating it showily through their couple of hours’ Bible study.

His pure treble singing voice quickly won him a place in the church choir, to which Nigel Walley also belonged. At first, he seemed to enjoy the ritual of dressing up in a white surplice and turning out for services twice every Sunday as well as Saturday weddings, which meant a half crown (12.5p) payment for each chorister. He was also mysteriously drawn to St Peter’s little churchyard (or the bone orchard, as he called it) where mossy, weather-beaten tombstones traced Woolton families back two centuries and more. He would read and reread the etched inscriptions with their familiar local names, their forgotten tragedies between the lines and their soft euphemisms for death:

Also ELEANOR RIGBY

THE BELOVED WIFE OF THOMAS WOODS

AND GRANDDAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE

DIED 10TH OCTOBER 1939, AGED 44 YEARS

ASLEEP

Mimi would later remember how comforted John seemed by the notion in Eleanor Rigby’s epitaph that ‘it wasn’t gone for ever…just asleep.’

The rector of St Peter’s was a middle-aged Welsh bachelor named Morris Pryce-Jones, known to his younger parishioners as Pricey. Far from the grim stereotype of his race, Pricey was a kindly and tolerant man, prepared for boys to be boys up to a point. But he was utterly unprepared for boys to be anything like John Lennon. One Sunday during a particularly arduous sermon, John’s fellow chorister David Ashton began surreptitiously reading a Boy Scouts’ Pocket Diary, which included the maxim ‘A Boy Scout is Thrifty.’ John produced a pen and altered it to ‘A Boy Scout is Fifty,’ sending everyone around them ‘into tucks’—the Liverpool term for laughter so uncontrollable that it puckers up the entire body as if by some invisible drawstring. Both boys were docked their next wedding payment.

One Sunday school teacher, ‘Ma’ Davies, had an altercation with John during a lesson about Jesus’s encounter with the Scribes and Pharisees. So incensed was he by the story that he announced that Christ’s persecutors ‘must have been Fascists’. Ma Davies told him that Fascists were far worse than Scribes or Pharisees, but John refused to be convinced. The teacher might have given him some credit for such strong emotions on behalf of the Redeemer; instead, she excoriated him for ‘making trouble’ and ordered both him and David Ashton, who had supported him, to report to Pricey for punishment.

Deciding that a mere telling-off would have no effect, the rector decided to take the rare step of caning them. Unfortunately, the nearest to a cane he could find was an umbrella belonging to a female chorister named Bertha Radley, a relative of the Eleanor Rigby memorialized in the churchyard. Her umbrella was an ornate one, covered in crocodile skin, with a handle shaped like a crocodile’s head. ‘John got it first, one on each hand,’ Ashton remembers. ‘Then when Pricey hit me, the handle broke off. I remember to this day Bertha saying “Oh, my poor crocodile!”’

The choicest of this rich crop of misbehaviour and insubordination occurred, suitably enough, at Harvest Festival time. Woolton still remained agricultural enough for harvesting to have real significance, and St Peter’s always rose to the occasion, decorating its altar lavishly with grain sheaves and offerings of vegetables and fruit from local greenhouses and garden plots. When Pricey emerged from the vestry to lead the singing of harvest hymns like ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’, he found the altar fruit depleted as if by a flock of predatory crows. A glance along the giggling choir stalls was sufficient to identify the pilferer. John was expelled from the choir, and he and Pete Shotton were banned from the church altogether.

Mimi urged him to beg reinstatement, but in vain. ‘I told him “It’s all part of your education, John.” But he just shouted back “kayshuedshun, kayshuedshun!” He was always inventing daft words. And he used to make me laugh by taking off the choirmaster—he’d pull a funny face and conduct the cats.’

His bedroom, situated directly above the front porch, was a tiny elongated space, almost filled by a single bed with a blue-green canopy, pushed against the right-hand wall. A diminutive clothes cupboard and a table and chair by the window were its only other furniture. John would always classify himself as ‘a homebody’, and this was where he spent as many contented boyhood hours by himself as he did in the open air with his friends. At such times, the house would fall so utterly silent that Mimi presumed he was out. Then she’d push open his bedroom door and find him on his bed with a book, in a position of seeming perverse discomfort. He would lie flat with his body twisted round and his legs resting up the wall. All his life, he could never fully savour print without first folding himself into that awkward hairpin shape.

He had caught Mimi’s love of reading—though with John it was always to be more like an insatiable physical hunger. Years later, his aunt would mimic the half-truculent way he used to scoop a volume from a shelf and turn away, his eyes already devouring the print like twin piranhas. Children’s literature in the early fifties offered a limited choice compared with what would come later—A A Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, Hugh Lofting’s adventures of Doctor Dolittle. The genre was dominated by Enid Blyton, with her prolific adventures of the Famous Five and the Secret Seven and her chronicles of the girls’ boarding schools Mallory Towers and St Clare’s. Lying on his red quilt, with his feet higher than his head, John read them all.

The two outstanding favourites of his youngest years were Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. He loved the pure anarchy that lay behind their prim Victorian façade, the incessant punning and spoonerising, the lunatic logic, always spelled out in flawless syntax and perfect scansion; the songs whose hypnotically simple refrains (‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?…’) needed no setting to music. In Carroll’s fabulous bestiary, if he had known it, lay several future incarnations of himself—the hyperactive Mad Hatter, the sleepy Dormouse, the Caterpillar puffing smugly on its hookah, the derisively grinning Cheshire Cat, Alice herself, as she experiments with life-transforming pills and potions, and the Walrus on that nightmare beach where the sun never goes down, sweet-talking a school of baby oysters into becoming hors d’oeuvres. Most influential of all was the mock-epic poem entitled ‘Jabberwocky’—to the boy with his legs up the wall, nothing less than a tutorial in how nonsense can be made infinitely more descriptive than sense:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe…

Through the Looking-Glass ends with a coda, which runs:

A boat beneath a sunny sky

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July…

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

Twenty-five years in the future there would be a song about that same phantom girl, that same ‘boat on the river’, and ‘marmalade skies’ recalling the Orange Marmalade jar Alice sees during her fall into the White Rabbit’s burrow.

At the opposite end of the scale, he devoured the weekly boys’ comics that existed in huge quantity in the early fifties, from the Rover, Wizard and Hotspur, which contained serial stories (usually about wartime Nazis going ‘Himmel!’ and ‘Donner und Blitzen!’) to the all-cartoon periodicals the Beano, the Dandy, Radio Fun, Film Fun and Knockout. Along with sweets and picturedromes, Mimi had forbidden him comics, except perhaps the high-minded Eagle (edited by a clergyman), but his Uncle George would defy the Look by smuggling Beanos or Dandys up to him—and in any case they were freely available at the homes of his friends.