![]() The cruelty, like the anger that occasionally erupted from time to time into physical violence may have had its roots in his constant childhood feeling of not quite belonging anywhere, or to anyone. An early girlfriend, Thelma Pickles, who hung out with Lennon at art school, later recalled: "Anyone limping or crippled or hunchbacked, or deformed in any way, John laughed and ran up to them to make horrible faces." Lennon filled notebooks at Quarry Bank school with drawings of human grotesques and, as his first biographer, Ray Coleman, put it, "developed an instinctive ability to mock the weak, with whom he had no patience". In A Hard Day's Night, someone asks Ringo if he is a mod or a rocker. He dresses like a teddy boy, but there is barely a glimpse of the semi-delinquent behaviour of his grammar school years – the gangs he led, the shoplifting, the hapless pupils and teachers he bullied – or his fascination with, the disabled and the disfigured. The John Lennon that Aaron Johnson portrays in Nowhere Boy, though, has had his sensitivity amplified and his arrogance turned down. "Take the money, Mimi," he said, "and tell them I was a juvenile delinquent who used to knock down old ladies." There was more than a grain of truth in that description. ![]() ![]() When an American magazine offered to publish her memoirs, Mimi rang and asked for his advice. By then, Mimi was Lennon's mother in all but name. After that, Freddie disappeared from Lennon's life for two decades, only to resurface after his son had become famous. John first chooses Freddie, then, in tears, runs up the street after his mother. One of the more traumatic childhood scenes, shown in flashback in Nowhere Boy, shows the five-year-old John being instructed by Freddie to choose whether he wanted to live with Julia or him. It was Mimi who complained to the social services that her sister was unfit to look after the young boy, an intervention that began the sisters' long battle for John's affections. When he returned to Julia in 1944 after a long absence, she was pregnant by another man. His father, Alfred "Freddie" Lennon, was a merchant seaman and only fitfully present during his son's childhood. Lennon was born during an air raid on 9 October 1940. In Lennon's case, nature triumphed over nurture. Julia loved Lonnie Donegan Mimi listened to Tchaikovsky. His mother, Julia, is working-class, wild-spirited and mostly absent, and his aunt, Mimi Smith, is respectable, strict and domineeringly present. He is a troubled but gifted teenager caught between two women, two worlds. S am Taylor-Wood's film, Nowhere Boy, paints John Lennon's formative years in the broadest of brush strokes.
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