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Authors: Philip Norman
Tags: General, Biography & Autobiography
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their families needing to feel the least anxiety. And Woolton and its environs offered many inviting places for John and his friends to explore. Across from the Tip was a rugged open space called Foster’s Field, with thickets of blackberry bushes and a pond where they caught tadpoles, newts, and frogs and paddled a homemade raft. There were meadows that frothed creamily with cow parsley in summer, and tracts of dense woodland haunted by cuckoos and corncrakes. Calderstones Park and Reynolds Park lay within easy walking distance, as did the grounds of Strawberry Field and of a vanished stately home named Allerton Towers. On the opposite side of Menlove Avenue from Mendips stretched the greens and bunkers of Allerton Golf Course.
Their games were fueled by make-believe, demanding vigorous activity rather than the modern child’s sedentary trance. The favorite 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 bethe 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 center 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 cottage-shaped 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 comforting euphemisms for death:
Also ELEANOR RIGBY
THE BELOVED WIFE OF THOMAS WOODS
AND GRANDDAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE
DIED 10 TH 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 forever…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 native land, 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,”
Their games were fueled by make-believe, demanding vigorous activity rather than the modern child’s sedentary trance. The favorite 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 bethe 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 center 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 cottage-shaped 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 comforting euphemisms for death:
Also ELEANOR RIGBY
THE BELOVED WIFE OF THOMAS WOODS
AND GRANDDAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE
DIED 10 TH 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 forever…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 native land, 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,”
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