Philip Norman - John Lennon - The Life

The week in question was certainly a bad one for Liverpool. The records of its Watch Committee show that on the night of 7-8 October, high-explosive bombs fell on Stanley Road and Great Mersey Street in the city centre, and on Lichfield Road and Grantley Road, Wavertree, causing damage to houses and demolishing the Welsh Chapel. The next night came two separate raids, hitting Everton Valley, Knotty Ash, Mossley Hill and Mill Street in the first, and the Anfield area in the second. On the night of 11-12 October, two more raids dropped tons of high explosive on the City and North Docks first, then on Alexandra and Langton Dock, causing serious damage to the Harbourmaster’s House, sheds, railway tracks, Admiralty stores and four ships.

But on the night of 9-10 October, the Luftwaffe unaccountably stayed away. As Mimi hurried towards Oxford Street, she would undoubtedly have seen the results of previous bombing, in rubble, shattered glass and white-helmeted ARP wardens. On later visits to Julia, the situation could have been as she remembered that first night, with a land mine falling next to the hospital and the new baby being wrapped in a rough blanket and put under his mother’s bed for safety. Uppermost in Mimi’s thoughts on 9 October was concern for her sister, mingled with delight that a boy had entered the overwhelmingly female Stanley family. Possibly it was the strength of her own emotion when she first held her nephew in her arms that helped give the scene its apocalyptic quality in her memory.

E M Forster once wrote that ‘there is a battle fought over every baby.’ The battle over this particular Liverpool baby was to be fiercer than most—revealing not that he ‘wasn’t wanted’, as he came to believe, but that too many people wanted him too much. Nor would it become clear for some little time who had won him.

About his name, at least, there was no conflict. Julia decided to call him John, which pleased Alf as a tribute to his paternal grandfather, the sometime Kentucky minstrel, but was also classically middleclass, suggesting every quality the Stanleys most admired—plain, upright, steady, predictable, uncomplicated. And, with fierce wartime patriotism in common, neither side of the family could object to his mother’s giving him the middle name Winston, in honour of the Prime Minister.

Alf’s long absences from home would later brand him in his son’s eyes as feckless, selfish and unloving, but it should be remembered that as a merchant sailor he was doing one of the most vital and dangerous jobs in Britain’s war effort. Thousands of other Liverpool men were in his situation, facing the same dangers from German U-boats—drowning in icy seas or turning into oil-soaked human torches—while, back at home, children they barely knew were raised by committees of women. Undoubtedly, for all its hazards, the sea provided an escape from dull routine and responsibility, where Alf could turn into ‘Lennie’ and live out his fantasies as an entertainer (now adding a skit on Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers to his repertoire of Jolson and Eddie Cantor). Another deterrent to seeking a safer shore job was that he was climbing the ladder of his profession. In September 1942, he gained promotion to saloon steward, the shipboard equivalent of headwaiter.

At the time, it appears, the most hostile of his in-laws no longer found anything to criticise about his nautical station, especially as he always returned home laden with booty from the ships’ pantries, meat and butter and fresh fruit otherwise impossible to obtain under wartime rationing, which he would share out liberally among them. While at sea, he would send programmes of ships’ concerts featuring himself for Julia to show to John, who for years afterwards would associate his father’s name with a mysterious number called ‘Begin the Beguine’.

Alf was at sea as saloon steward on the SS Moreton Bay from 26 September 1942 to 2 February 1943. Though air attacks on Liverpool had diminished since the horrendous ‘May blitz’ of 1941, the city centre was still considered a danger area. To make a safer as well as cleaner environment for John, Mimi persuaded Julia to move from 9 Newcastle Road out to suburban Woolton, where she herself had recently settled with her husband, George Smith. For several months, mother and son occupied a small house named the Cottage in Allerton Road, a short walk from Mimi’s home. It was here that John formed the first definite impressions of Julia as she sang him to sleep at night. ‘She used to do this little tune…from the Disney movie,’ he would remember. ‘ “Want to know a secret? Promise not to tell. You are standing by a wishing-well…” ’

The move was to put the first serious stress on a marriage that had never exactly been founded on maturity or trust. After being paid off by the Moreton Bay , Alf drew a stretch of shore leave long enough for him to register for fire-watching duties at Liverpool docks. Expecting Woolton to be a quiet retreat for Julia, he discovered that, on the contrary, she had acquired the habit of visiting local pubs, getting tipsy and flirting with unattached men while Mimi or a neighbour named Dolly Hipshaw looked after John. One day, Alf answered the door to a noisy group of Julia’s new friends, who plainly had no idea she was even married. A furious argument followed, in which Julia poured a cup of hot tea over Alf’s head. He lashed out and caught her across the face, making her nose bleed.

John’s maternal grandmother, the sweet-natured Annie Stanley, had died earlier in 1943, before she could imprint any but the vaguest picture of herself on his mind. Reluctant to stay on alone at 9 Newcastle Road, Pop Stanley decided to turn the house over to Julia and Alf while he moved in with relatives. For a time, at least, the rent was paid by Alf’s older brother, Sydney. The anonymous little bay-fronted house, duplicated a thousand times in neighbouring streets, became for John ‘the first place I remember…red brick…front room never used, always curtains drawn…picture of a horse and carriage on the wall. There were only three bedrooms upstairs, one on the front of the street, one in the back and one teeny little room in the middle…’ He was already sharply observant, as Alf had realised the previous Christmas, when every department store in central Liverpool advertised its own Santa Claus grotto. ‘How many Father Christmases are there?’ John had asked.

In July 1943, Alf travelled to New York to work on Liberty Ships, the prefabricated merchantmen that America was mass-producing to replenish Britain’s battered Atlantic convoys. He would be absent for 16 months on a bizarre journey that took him halfway around the world, showed him the inside of two prisons, saw an ominous amendment on his employment card from VG to D (Declined comment) and put the collapse of his marriage into overdrive. No ‘lost weekend’ his son would experience in future years even came close to this.

Alf later portrayed himself as the innocent victim of circumstance, bad advice from superiors and his own trusting nature—and, to be sure, the hysteria and malign happenstance of the war itself seems to have been as much blameworthy as any misdeed or mistake of his. In New York, he was kept waiting so long to be assigned a berth that he found a temporary job at Macy’s department store, acquired a Social Security card, and drank and sang his way through most of the better-known Broadway bars. Finally ordered to report to a Liberty Ship in Baltimore, he discovered he had been demoted to assistant steward. His only hope of keeping his proper ‘rate’, so a colleague advised, was to stay with the vessel until her first port of call, New York, then jump ship and take his problem to the British consul. Alf naïvely adopted this strategy and was promptly arrested for desertion and locked up for two weeks on Ellis Island.