‘I never took his music seriously. He would say he’d written this new tune and I would think that was pretty fantastic, someone writing a tune, but I couldn’t see what good it was. I knew it took miracles to get anywhere writing bits of tunes, so what was the point.
‘I knew he could be famous, at something, but I didn’t know what. He was so different and original. But I just couldn’t see what he could be famous at. Perhaps a comedian, I thought.’
John agrees with most of Thelma’s memories of him at Art College. But he remembers it all flatly, with little nostalgia or amusement. That was just how it was. ‘I had to borrow or pinch as I had no money at college,’ he says. Mimi says she gave him 30s. a week pocket money and can’t understand how he spent it. ‘I used to cadge all the time from spaniels like Thelma.
‘I suppose I did have a cruel humour. It was at school that it had first started. We were once coming home from a school speech day and we’d had a few bevvies.
‘Liverpool is full of deformed people, the way you have them in Glasgow, three-foot-high men selling newspapers. I’d never really noticed them before, but all the way home that day they seemed to be everywhere. It got funnier and funnier and we couldn’t stop laughing. I suppose it was a way of hiding your emotions, or covering it up. I would never hurt a cripple. It was just part of our jokes, our way of life.’
Two new people came into John’s life at Art College. The first was Stuart Sutcliffe. He was in the same year but unlike John showed genuine promise, and keenness, as an artist. He was slight and slender, artistic and highly strung, but very fierce and individualist in his views. He and John became immediate friends. Stu admired John’s clothes and his presence, the way he created an atmosphere round him with his strong dominant personality. John in turn admired Stu’s talent for art, which was better than his, and also Stu’s greater knowledge and artistic feeling.
Stu couldn’t play any instrument and knew little about pop music, but he was completely bowled over when he heard John and his group play in the Art College at lunchtimes. He was always saying how good they were, when nobody else was very impressed.
George and Paul appear to have been slightly jealous of Stu and his influence with John, not that outsiders could see how much John admired Stu. John picked on Stu all the time and hurt him when he could. Paul, following John’s lead, also began to pick on Stu, even though he was interested in art and, like John, was getting from Stu a lot of new ideas and fashions.
The other important friend John made at Art College was Cynthia Powell, now his wife.
‘Cynthia was so quiet,’ says Thelma. ‘A completely different type from us. She came from over the water, the posh part, from a middle-class area. She wore a twin set. She was very nice, but I just couldn’t see her suiting John. He used to go on about her, telling us how marvellous she was. I just couldn’t see it.
‘I left college for a year, and when I was away I heard they were going strong. I thought that would settle him, calm him down a bit, but it didn’t turn out that way at all.’
Cynthia Powell was in the same year as John from the beginning, and in the same lettering class. But for well over the first year they took no notice of each other and moved in completely different circles, she the rather shy and refined girl from over the water, he the loudmouthed Liverpool Teddy Boy.
‘I just thought he was horrible. My first memory of looking at him properly was in a lecture theatre when I saw Helen Anderson sitting behind him stroking his hair. It awoke something in me. I thought it was dislike at first. Then I realized it was jealousy. But I never had any contact with him, apart from him stealing things from me, like rulers and brushes.
‘He looked awful in those days. He had this long tweed overcoat which had belonged to his Uncle George and his hair all greased back. I didn’t fancy him at all. He was scruffy. But I didn’t get a chance to know him anyway. I wasn’t one of his crowd. I was so respectable, or I thought I was.’
‘She was a right Hoylake runt,’ says John. ‘Dead snobby. We used to poke fun at her and mock her, me and my mate Jeff Mohamed. “Quiet please,” we’d shout. “No dirty jokes. It’s Cynthia.”’
They had their first proper conversation in a lettering class one day. ‘It came out that we were both shortsighted. We talked a bit about it. John doesn’t remember that at all. Very disheartening. But I do. After that I found myself getting into the class early, so that I could sit next to him. I used to hang around outside afterwards, hoping to bump into him.
‘I didn’t make any advances. It was just something I felt which John didn’t know. I wasn’t seeming to push. I couldn’t do that. I don’t think even now he realizes how often I used to hang around, on the off chance of seeing him.’
They met, properly, at Christmas time in their second year, in 1958.
‘We had a class dance,’ says John. ‘I was pissed and asked her to dance. Jeff Mohamed had been having me on, saying “Cynthia likes you, you know.”
‘As we danced I asked her to come to a party the next day. She said she couldn’t. She was engaged.’
‘I was,’ says Cynthia. ‘Well almost. I’d been going out with the same boy for three years and was about to get engaged. John got annoyed when I said no. So he said come and have a drink afterwards at the Crack. I said no at first, then I went. I wanted to really, all the time.’
‘I was triumphant,’ says John, ‘at having picked her up. We had a drink, then went back to Stu’s flat, buying fish and chips on the way.’
They went out every night after that and usually in the afternoon as well, going to the pictures instead of lectures.
‘I was frightened of him. He was so rough. He wouldn’t give in. We fought all the time. I thought if I give in now, that’ll be it. He was really just testing me out. I don’t mean sexually, just to see if I could be trusted, to prove to him that I could be.’
‘I was just hysterical,’ says John. ‘That was the trouble. I was jealous of anyone she had anything to do with. I demanded absolute trust from her, just because I wasn’t trustworthy myself. I was neurotic, taking out all my frustrations on her.
‘She did leave me once. That was terrible.’
‘I’d had enough,’ says Cynthia. ‘It was getting on my nerves. He just went off and kissed another girl.’
‘But I couldn’t stand being without her. So I rang her up.’
‘I was sitting by the phone, waiting for him.’
Cynthia wasn’t in a hurry to introduce John to her mother. She wanted to prepare her for the shock. ‘He was never over-polite and he looked so scruffy. My mother played it cool. She was good really, though I’m sure she was hoping for it to peter out. But she never tried to stop it.
‘The teachers warned me about going out with him, that my work was beginning to suffer. My work did go to pot and they were always on at me. Molly, the cleaning woman, once caught John hitting me, really clouting me. She said I was a silly girl, to get mixed up with someone like that.’
‘I was in a sort of blind rage for two years,’ says John. ‘I was either drunk or fighting. It had been the same with other girlfriends I’d had. There was something the matter with me.’
‘I just kept hoping he’d get over it, but I wondered if I could stick it long enough to find out. I blamed his background, his home, Mimi and the College. College just wasn’t the place for him. Institutions aren’t made for John.’
8 from quarrymen to moondogs