Authors: Hunter Davies
‘I used to go thieving with this kid, pinching apples. We used to ride on the bumpers of tram cars in Penny Lane and ride miles without paying. I’d be shitting myself all the time, I was so scared.
‘I was the king pin of my age group. I learned lots of dirty jokes very young, there was this girl who lived near who told me them.
‘The sort of gang I led went in for things like shoplifting and pulling girls’ knickers down. When the bomb fell and everyone got caught, I was always the one they missed. I was scared at the time, but Mimi was the only parent who never found out.
‘Other boys’ parents hated me. They were always warning their kids not to play with me. I’d always have smart-alec answers if I met them. Most of the masters hated me like shit.
‘As I got older, we’d go on from just stuffing rubbish like sweets in our pockets from shops, and progressed to getting enough to sell to others, like ciggies.’
On the surface, his environment at home with the loving, kind, but firm Mimi, seemed good enough. But although she never told him about himself, there were the vague memories of the past in his mind and also, as he grew older, more and more unanswered questions which worried him.
‘On Julia’s visits, he did once or twice ask me things,’ says Mimi. ‘But I didn’t want to tell him any details. How could I? He was happy. It would have been wrong to say your father’s no good and your mother’s found someone else. John was so happy, singing all the time.’
John remembers beginning to ask Mimi and being always given the same sort of answers. ‘Mimi told me my parents had fallen out of love. She never said anything directly against my father and mother.
‘I soon forgot my father. It was like he was dead. But I did see my mother now and again and my feeling never died off for her. I often thought about her, though I never realized for a long time that she was living no more than five or ten miles away.
‘My mother came to see us one day in a black coat with her face all bleeding. She’d had some sort of accident. I couldn’t face it. I thought, that’s my mother in there, bleeding. I went out into the garden. I loved her, but I didn’t want to get involved. I supose I was a moral coward. I wanted to hide all feelings.’
John might have thought that he was stifling all his worries and feelings, but Mimi and his other three aunts – Anne, Elizabeth and Harriet – say that to them John was completely open and sunny-natured. They say that John was as happy as the day was long.
Quarry Bank High School, when John started there in 1952, was a small suburban grammar school in Allerton, Liverpool, not far from Mimi’s house. It was founded in 1922. It’s not as big or as well known as the Liverpool Institute in the middle of the city, but it still has a good reputation. Two of its old boys went on to become Labour government ministers – Peter Shore and William Rodgers.
Mimi was pleased that he was at a local grammar school, rather than one in the city. She thought she would be able to keep an eye on him. Pete Shotton went with him to Quarry but his other close friend, Ivan Vaughan, went instead to the Institute, much to his relief. He was the only academic one of John’s gang. He knew that going with John would make all school work impossible. But he was still accepted as a member of John’s gang after school hours. Ivan began to bring boys back from his school to join John’s gang. ‘The first one I brought was Len Garry. But I didn’t bring many. I was always very selective about people I brought to meet John.’
John has a clear image of his first day at Quarry. ‘I looked at all the hundreds of new kids and thought, Christ, I’ll have to fight all my way through this lot, having just made it at Dovedale.
‘There was some real heavies there. The first fight I got in I
lost. I lost me nerve when I got really hurt. Not that there was much real fighting. I did a lot of swearing and shouting, then got a quick punch. If there was a bit of blood, then you packed in. After that, if I thought someone could punch harder than me, I said OK, we’ll have wrestling instead.
‘I was aggressive because I wanted to be popular. I wanted to be the leader. It seemed more attractive than just being one of the toffees. I wanted everybody to do what I told them to do, to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss.’
He was caught with an obscene drawing in his first year. ‘That really set me up with the masters.’ Then Mimi found an obscene poem he’d written. ‘She found it under my pillow. I said I’d just been made to write it out for another lad who couldn’t write very well. I’d written it myself, of course. I’d seen these poems around, the sort you read to give you a hard on. I’d wondered who wrote them, and thought I’d try one myself.
‘I suppose I did try to do a bit of school work at first, as I often did at Dovedale. I’d been honest at Dovedale, if nothing else, always owning up. But I began to realize that was foolish. They just got you. So I started lying about everything.’
From then on, after the first year, it was Lennon and Shotton versus the rest of the school, refusing all discipline or imposed ideas. Pete thinks that without John as his permanent ally he might have gone under and been forced to follow the school line, though John probably wouldn’t have done. ‘But with two of you,’ says Pete, ‘it’s a lot easier to stick to what you believe in. When you’ve had a bad time, there’s someone to laugh with. It was laughs all the time. We never stopped, all the way through school. It was great.’
Pete says most of their escapades don’t sound as funny in retrospect, but they still make him laugh when he thinks about them.
‘We must have been very young this first time when we had to go to a senior master for having done something bad. He was sitting at his desk writing when we came in and made me
and John stand either side of him. As he was sitting down there, telling us off, John started tickling the hairs on his head. He was almost bald, but with a few wisps across the top. He couldn’t understand what was tickling him and kept on putting his hand up to rub his bald head as he was telling us off. It was terrible. I was doubled up. John was literally pissing himself. Really. It started to run down his trousers. He had short trousers on, that’s why I know we must have been pretty young at the time. The piss was dripping on to the floor and the master was looking round and saying, “What’s that? What’s that?”’
John had a gift for art which he always managed to do well, despite everything else. Pete in turn was good at maths. John was jealous of Pete’s interest in maths, which he could never do, and always tried to spoil it for Pete.
‘He tried to ruin my concentration by putting drawings in front of me. Some were obscene, but they were mostly just funny and I’d burst out. “Look at Shotton, sir,” the rest of the class would shout as I was in hysterics.
‘If I had to stand at the front of the class for some reason, when the master had his back to everyone, John would stand up and hold up a drawing behind the master’s back for me to see. I’d no chance. I couldn’t stop laughing at him.’
Even when they were up before the head for their very first caning, John was still unoverawed by authority, or appeared to be.
‘John had to go in first while I waited outside the head’s door. I was in agony, all uptight, worrying what was going to happen to me. I seemed to wait hours, but it was probably only a few minutes. Then the door opened and John came out – crawling on the floor on his hands and knees, giving great exaggerated groans. I burst out at once. I hadn’t realized at first that the head had two sets of doors. John was crawling out of the lobby place where no one could see him from inside. I had to go into the head next, still with a smile on my face, which of course they never like.’
John got steadily worse from year to year. By the third year, having started near the top of the first form, he had been demoted to the B stream. His reports contained remarks like: ‘Hopeless. Rather a clown in class. A shocking report. He is just wasting other pupils’ time.’ There was a gap for parents to add their comments. On this one, Mimi wrote: ‘Six of the best.’
Mimi kept on at him all the time at home, but she didn’t know how badly he was doing or how uncooperative he was at school.
‘I only got one beating from Mimi. This was for taking money from her handbag. I was always taking a little, for soft things like Dinkies, but this day I must have taken too much.’
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.