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

suddenly rear up and make monster noises at her through the glass. “However cross I was, I’d find myself roaring with laughter,” Mimi recalled. “He could always get me going, the same way Julia could.”
    His education, too, assumed an even keel that gave Mimi every hope for his future. In November 1945, just after his fifth birthday, his father had enrolled him at Mosspits Lane Infants School in Woolton. But he remained there only five months, leaving at the end of the spring term in 1946. It would later be claimed that the upheavals in his family life had caused some serious behavioral problems and that he was expelled from Mosspits Lane for bullying other children. However, the school’s logbook makes no mention of any expulsion, giving the only reason for his premature departure as “left district.”
    When Mimi took charge a year later, she sent him to Dovedale Primary School, near the Penny Lane traffic roundabout. After a few initial bus journeys there together, John insisted on going by himself. “He thought I was making a show of him [making him look foolish],” Mimi remembered. “Imagine that! So what I used to do was let him get out of the house and then follow him to make sure he didn’t get into any mischief.” Dovedale proved the perfect choice.After only six months, he was reading and writing with complete confidence. “That boy’s as sharp as a needle,” Mr. Bolt, the head teacher, told Mimi. “He can do anything as long as he chooses to do it.” Uncle George had helped by sitting John on his knee each night and picking out words in the Liverpool Echo —thus fostering what would become a lifelong addiction to newsprint.
    He had always loved to draw and paint, begging to be bought pencils, paint boxes, and paper rather than toys, spending hours wrapped up in worlds of his own creation. At Dovedale he won several prizes for art, including a book entitled How to Draw Horses , which he was to treasure for years afterward. His choice of subjects could sometimes startle teachers accustomed to normal infant renditions of pussycats or “My Mummy.” The notable example was a painting he once did of Jesus Christ—a longhaired and bearded figure like a psychic vision of himself twenty years into the future. But mostly his work tended to be caricatures of his classmates and teachers, crazily distorted yet instantly recognizable, which made their models, child and adult alike, howl with laughter. Though good at running and swimming, he was less successful at team sports like soccer and cricket, owing to a disinclination—and, it soon proved, genuine inability—to keep his eye on the ball. He had inherited his mother’s extreme nearsightedness, and by age seven was pronounced to be in need of glasses. Under the new socialist National Health Service, these were now available free of charge. But John so hated the standard issue, with their round wire frames and pink nosepieces, that Mimi agreed to buy him whatever kind he liked. He was taken to a private optician and allowed to choose an expensive pair with more comfortable plastic frames. He could not abide wearing even these, however, and left them off whenever he could.
    As a result, his view of the world was largely created by sheer myopia—the weird new forms that everyday people and things can take on for the nearsighted and the wild surrealism that can flow from printed words misread. In addition, he possessed the very Liverpudlian traits of a fascination with language and an irresistible compulsion to play around with it. If his weak eyes did not misrepresent some word accidentally, his quick mind did so deliberately, missingno chance of a pun, a spoonerism, or double entendre; he was an instinctive cartoonist in speech as well as on paper. When he suffered a bout of chicken pox—his childhood’s one serious ailment—he called it “chicken pots.” Away on holiday, with pocket money in short supply, he sent Mimi a postcard saying,