New Worker Features: My Childhood mate -- John Lennon

by David Ashton

MY FIRST recollections of my mother were on the night of a late bombing raid during the 1939-45 war. We, my sister Pauline and myself, had gone into our Anderson Bomb Shelter, at the back of our Liverpool home. I was hugging my Golliwog, called Golly who got me through the worst of the blitz krieg, with his love for me, lying on my bunk bed.
The adults: Mother, (our Dad was on fire watch duty in Liverpool) and our neighbours called Meakin from next door and Miss Newman, were stood outside looking up at the sky, watching the searchlights pinpointing the German bombers. The Polish Air force Hurricane Squadron based at Speke Airport defended Liverpool and saved us from the worst of the Nazi onslaught. John and I suffered terribly from the war; we saw dead bodies piled up in the street. My mother put a coat in front of my eyes and for years she denied that it had happened.
John told me that he’d had similar experiences. It really was the basis of John’s search for peace. John, like me, was very much committed to peace because we had that trauma of war. But when the men came home there was no time to listen to our childhood traumas.
As kids we were afraid that if our houses got bombed we wouldn’t be able to get out. Every 20th house was given a ladder.
When I was five John and I drew pictures of us jumping out of our houses onto the ladder some of these pictures turned up just two years ago, after my Mum died.
Dialectically I wish to argue that the aftermath of war gave our generation a great deal of freedom, which may have helped to feed John Lennon’s extraordinary imagination, which was growing up in progressive working class Liverpool. But when the men came back from war they were shaken up. They’d killed. They’d been brutalised. They were violent. You’d be sitting down having your dinner and all of a sudden the food would go flying across the room.
The women had to try and cope with it, and that gave us kids a lot of freedom to wander as far as we wanted without supervision. We’d go to “Speakers’ Corner” at the Pier Head where a world of ideas would be pulled apart and discussed in an informed, intelligent way. Liverpool was a major port. There were people from every nationality: Ulster’s Orangemen, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Africans – every race and creed on earth. I don’t think we’d be more than five or six. Such was the wonder world of the Woolton, Liverpool of our childhood. It was there were we learnt about “Dialectical Materialism as the Ultimate Foundation of Working-Class Analysis”, and in identifying solutions to complexities like the “Current Food, & Political/Economic Problems of today”!
In the case of John Lennon that wonder was overshadowed by tragedies that marred his childhood and scarred the rest of his life. John had a very troubled childhood. He had experienced the war. He had lost his mother when his Aunt Mimi took him away from her; then he lost her again when she was knocked down and killed by a drunken policeman after John had only just got to know his mother again. When she died John talked to me.
Mimi more or less kidnapped John with the help of Liverpool Corporation Social Department because John’s mum, Julia, was, as they called it in those days, “living in sin”. She had a child out of wedlock with a lovely man who she had taken up with since her own man, a seaman, had not returned after the war. Aunt Mimi denied that John had got a mother or sisters.
But John had a very progressive uncle who told John where his mother was. It wasn’t far from where John was living. So we got on our bikes and went to see her. I would have been seven or eight. That was the first time John seen her for years.
It was of course very emotional. Julia, John’s mum was very tactile and kissed us both and we talked and talked. She was always very kind to me, as she was to all of John’s friends. She was herself a loving, kind, progressive person and a great musician, and we loved her!
As John says in his great Ballad to the Working Class Hero:

As soon as you’re born they make you feel small

By giving you no time instead of it all

Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all