John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman Page A

feminine admiration and solicitude, petted and lionized even more than the youngest of his cousins. He had somehow realized that Mimi’s title to him was only of the most tenuous, unofficial kind; as time passed, he became adept at exploiting her constant fear of losing him. If aunt and nephew had a particularly explosive argument, over the state of John’s room, for instance, he would stomp off to Julia’s in Allerton for the night, sometimes the whole weekend, throwing dark hints over his shoulder that he might never come back again.
    The little council “semi” at 1 Blomfield Road where Julia lived with Bobby Dykins could not have been more a contrast to Mendips. For Julia shared none of her eldest sister’s devotion to tidiness, routine, and domestic protocol. At Julia’s one did not have to wipe one’s feet or hang up one’s coat in the proper place; meals kept no fixed schedule, but might appear on the table at any time. “That’s not to say she wasn’t a good housekeeper,” her niece, Liela, remembers. “There was always a stew or a casserole on the stove. And if anyone came to the door when we were about to sit down, an extra place would automatically be laid.”
    John seemed to feel no jealousy of the two half sisters, Julia and Jackie, who enjoyed his mother’s attention seven days a week; they in turn regarded him as a big brother, nicknamed him Stinker, bounced up and down on him in the morning as he lay in bed, and loved the tales of monsters and Mersey mermaids he told them, and the dancing skeletons he would cut out of paper. “Julia always made it clear how much she adored him,” Liela says. “She had photographs of him all over the house.” Just the same, he would have been conscious at every minute that she was no longer really his.
    Julia was one of the first in John’s circle to have television, another powerful reason to visit her. In those times, anyone so blessed was under obligation to invite friends and neighbors to “look in,” as the phrase went, filling their living rooms with extra seats, extinguishing lights and drawing blinds to create a cinemalike darkness. Early television variety shows sometimes featured elderly survivors of themusic hall and even the minstrel eras—Hetty King, singing “All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor”; Leslie Hutchinson, aka Hutch, who had first popularized Alf Lennon’s beloved “Begin the Beguine”; and Robb Wilton, the Liverpool-born “confidential comic” whose quavery monologues always began “The day war broke out…” Julia’s favorite was George Formby, a chipper Lancastrian with an outsize grin who strummed a banjolele while singing songs of innocent double entendre about Chinese laundries and window washers. “Judy adored Formby, and John caught it from her,” Liela says. “I remember one day when he was on TV, and the money in the electric meter suddenly ran out, Judy almost went mad.”
    At Julia’s, the wireless was always on, tuned to the Light Programme and blaring out the dance music that Mimi could not abide. She also had a gramophone and came home almost every week with a brand-new 78 rpm single in its dull brown wrapper. Thanks to her, John knew everything that was happening on Britain’s early pop music chart—called the Top 12 before it became the Top 20—in particular, whenever the effortless dominance of American performers like Guy Mitchell and Nat King Cole was briefly broken by some homegrown upstart like Ruby Murray or Dickie Valentine.
    In the very early fifties, the blood of a British boy was most likely to be stirred by Frankie Laine, who sang suboperatic arias with cowboy themes, like “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and “Gunfight at OK Corral.” John relished the over-the-top showmanship of Laine and also of Johnnie Ray, who wore a hearing aid and ostentatiously burst into tears during his big hit, “Cry.” Surprisingly, though, the hard-case Woolton Outlaw also liked sentimental ballads, even when