John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman Read Free Book Online

ward. Once, John asked her why he still called Julia “Mummy” and her “Mimi” even now that Julia was the less dominant figure in his life. “Well, you couldn’t have two mummies, could you?” Mimi answered with impermeable grown-up logic. Back then, it was quite rare for a child to receive dispensation to call an adult—other than perhaps a nursemaid or other domestic servant—by their first name. With Mimi and John it did not denote intimacy, but a certain measure of distance between them.
    With his burly, jovial Uncle George, by contrast, John developedwhat was probably the most uncomplicatedly loving relationship of his whole life. George, quite simply, treated him like the son he may well have yearned to have with Mimi. In the early war years, when the dairy farm was still active, he would take John around Woolton with him on the milk cart, showing him off to customers as proudly as if he were his own. John loved to go with him to the milking parlor or to the field where Daisy the cart horse spent her leisure hours. When he came home at night, he would open his arms, and John would fly into them, as Mimi remembered, “like two trains colliding in the doorway.” They were always kissing each other, a ritual John called “giving squeakers.”
    George’s career as a cow-keeper (his description on his business card) had ended with his call-up for military service at the late age of thirty-eight. During his absence with the army in France, his brother Frank had run down the dairy business, and its fields had been swallowed by a factory making Bear Brand nylon stockings. For a time, George tried an alternative career as a bookmaker, working out of Mendips in contravention of current gaming laws, which allowed bets to be placed only with licensed operatives at racecourses. He soon abandoned the venture, persuaded jointly by the risk of police prosecution and Mimi’s distaste for the kind of people it brought traipsing through her home. After that, the only work he could find was as night watchman at the Bear Brand factory; the most minor of employees on property his family had once owned.
    This meant that he was around the house all through the day, to play with his small nephew and soften or undermine his wife’s strict regimen. Although John already loved the cinema, Mimi had a fierce mistrust of “picturedromes,” possibly a result of Julia’s former employment in one. John was therefore limited to seemly entertainments such as the periodic Disney screen epics, Bambi or Snow White , and the Christmas pantomime at the Liverpool Empire. Sweets were still issued by ration-book “points,” as they would be until 1953: John’s daily allotment was a single piece of health-giving barley sugar each evening at bedtime.
    But George would defy the wifely Look that otherwise ruled him by taking John to Woolton’s little cinema or smuggling sweets orchocolate upstairs to him after lights-out. Mimi felt almost envious—though it was beyond her to admit as much—when she saw the two of them flying paper airplanes in the back garden or hugging each other and laughing. Even John’s tendency to tell fibs never clouded the sunshine of their relationship. “Tell you what,” George would say to Mimi with a chuckle. “He’s never going to be a vicar.”
    As Julia had before him, John soon identified Mimi’s weak spot: her sense of humor. In summertime, while she sat in the back garden in a deck chair, he would stealthily open an upstairs window and flick water onto her head in artfully small, irregular amounts, so that she’d keep thinking she felt raindrops but would never be quite sure. Despite her combustible temper, she did not smack him when he misbehaved; instead, they had shouting matches more suited to combative siblings than aunt and nephew. Afterward, exhausted as well as exasperated, Mimi would flop down in the easy chair beside the morning-room window. John would creep around the side path, then