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

“Funs is low.”
    Small boys in glasses tend to have a weak and vulnerable air. But with John, the opposite was the case. Also at Dovedale, although not in the same class, was a boy named Jimmy Tarbuck, like himself destined one day to write Liverpool’s name across the sky. “If ever there was a scrap in the school yard, John was likely to be involved,” Tarbuck says. “And I’ll always remember the way he looked at you. His glasses had really thick lenses, the kind we called bottle-bottoms. At school, we used to have this thing, if you were out for trouble with another kid you’d say ‘Are you lookin’ at me?’ But John’s lenses were so thick, you could never tell if he was looking at you or not.”
    Julia and Bobby Dykins, meanwhile, had settled on the Springwood council estate in Allerton, just a couple of miles from Menlove Avenue. Whatever his faults in Mimi’s eyes, Dykins was at least a hardworking man, and a provident one. He now had the prestigious job of headwaiter in the Adelphi Hotel’s sumptuous French restaurant. And, notwithstanding her misadventures with two children thus far, he had persuaded Julia to become a mother again. They were to have two daughters together, Julia, born in 1947, and Jacqueline Gertrude, born in 1949, although Alf Lennon’s continued failure to begin divorce proceedings would prevent them from ever becoming man and wife.
    Mimi had initially discouraged Julia from seeing too much of John, fearing that she might upset the wholesome new habits instilled at Mendips. But as time passed, the frost gradually thawed. Dykins was never allowed to join the meek males on the family’s bottom rung, but his daughters were fully accepted by Mimi—and the other sisters—and John was allowed to spend unrestricted time with Julia.
    It would have been difficult to do otherwise, since the sisters operated as a team, not merely supporting and confiding absolutely in each other, but helping run one another’s domestic affairs and look after one another’s families. As well as Mendips, therefore, John hadthe run of three alternative homes, all equally welcoming, happy, and secure. His Aunt Harrie lived only a short walk away at the Cottage, the old Smith dairy farmhouse where Julia and Alf Lennon had briefly settled during the war. His Aunt Mater lived “across the water” at Rock Ferry, Cheshire, in a rambling house with a large garden. When Mater married Bert Sutherland and moved with him to his native Scotland, the house was taken over by her sister, Nanny.
    The cousins with whom John played during these regular family get-togethers ranged from his Aunt Nanny’s and Harrie’s toddler sons, Michael and David, to Stanley, the only child of Mater’s marriage to Charles Parkes, who was seven years John’s senior. Stanley had been responsible for the sisters’ eccentric pet names, first mispronouncing Mary as “Mimi,” calling Anne “Nanny” when she’d looked after him during the war, and dubbing his own mother “Mater,” in tune with her fastidious elegance, when he went away to boarding school and began learning Latin. John extended the habit by calling his Uncle George “Pater.” Alf Lennon’s most abiding memory from their ill-omened flight to Blackpool was of a small boy who spoke “like a gentleman” and gravely inquired, “Shall I call you Pater, too?”
    He was especially fond of his cousin Liela, the daughter of Aunt Harrie’s Egyptian first marriage, a stunningly pretty girl with a smile that can still light up a forty-year-old sepia snapshot. Liela was only three and a half years John’s senior, so she became his most regular playmate and accomplice inside the family. Liela remembers a sunny-natured, affectionate small boy who had no inhibitions about hugging and kissing her. “Think of all those songs about love that John wrote before he was even twenty-one,” she says. “How could he have done that if he hadn’t had a lot of love in his own