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

sending everyone around them “into tucks”—the Liverpool term for laughter so uncontrollable that it puckers up the entire body as if by some invisible drawstring. Both boys were docked their next wedding payment.
    One Sunday school teacher, “Ma” Davies, had an altercation with John during a lesson about Jesus’s encounter with the Scribes and Pharisees. So incensed was he by the story that he announced Christ’s persecutors “must have been Fascists.” Ma Davies told him that Fascists were far worse than Scribes or Pharisees, but John refused to be convinced. The teacher might have given him some credit for such strong emotions on behalf of the Redeemer; instead, she excoriated him for “making trouble” and ordered both him and David Ashton, who had supported him, to report to Pricey for punishment.
    Deciding that a mere telling-off would have no effect, the rector decided to take the rare step of caning them. Unfortunately, the nearest to a cane he could find was an umbrella belonging to a female chorister named Bertha Radley, a relative of the Eleanor Rigby memorialized in the churchyard. Her umbrella was an ornate one, covered in crocodile skin, with a handle shaped like a crocodile’s head. “John got it first, one on each hand,” Ashton remembers. “Then when Pricey hit me, the handle broke off. I remember to this day Bertha saying ‘Oh, my poor crocodile!’”
    The choicest of this rich crop of misbehavior and insubordination occurred, suitably enough, at Harvest Festival time. Woolton still remained agricultural enough for harvesting to have real significance,and St. Peter’s always rose to the occasion, decorating its altar lavishly with grain sheaves and offerings of vegetables and fruit from local greenhouses and garden plots. When Pricey emerged from the vestry to lead the singing of harvest hymns like “We Plough the Fields and Scatter,” he found the altar fruit depleted as if by a flock of predatory crows. A glance along the giggling choir stalls was sufficient to identify the pilferer. John was expelled from the choir, and he and Pete Shotton were banned from the church altogether.
    Mimi urged him to beg reinstatement, but in vain. “I told him ‘It’s all part of your education, John.’ But he just shouted back ‘kayshuedshun, kayshuedshun!’ He was always inventing daft words. And he used to make me laugh by taking off the choirmaster—he’d pull a funny face and conduct the cats.”
     
     
    H is bedroom, situated directly above the front porch, was a tiny, elongated space, almost filled by single bed with a blue-green canopy, pushed against the right-hand wall. A diminutive clothes cupboard and a table and chair by the window were its only other furniture. John would always classify himself as “a homebody,” and this was where he spent as many contented boyhood hours by himself as he did in the open air with his friends. At such times, the house would fall so utterly silent that Mimi presumed he was out. Then she’d push open his bedroom door and find him on his bed with a book, in a position of seeming perverse discomfort. He would lie flat with his body twisted around and his legs resting up the wall. All his life, he could never fully savor print without first folding himself into that awkward hairpin shape.
    He had caught Mimi’s love of reading—though with John it was always to be more like an insatiable physical hunger. Years later, his aunt would mimic the half-truculent way he used to scoop a volume from a shelf and turn away, his eyes already devouring the print like twin piranhas. Children’s literature in the early fifties offered a limited choice compared with what would come later—A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh , Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows , Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons , Hugh Lofting’s adventures of Doctor Dolittle. The genre was dominated by Enid Blyton, withher prolific adventures of the Famous Five and the Secret