Free John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman

Seven and her chronicles of the girls’ boarding schools Mallory Towers and St. Clare’s. Lying on his red quilt, with his feet higher than his head, John read them all.
    The two outstanding favorites of his youngest years were Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass . He loved the pure anarchy that lay behind their prim Victorian facade, the incessant punning and spoonerizing, the lunatic logic, always spelled out in flawless syntax and perfect scansion; the songs whose hypnotically simple refrains (“Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?…”) needed no setting to music. In Carroll’s fabulous bestiary, if he had known it, lay several future incarnations of himself—the hyperactive Mad Hatter, the sleepy Dormouse, the Caterpillar puffing smugly on its hookah, the derisively grinning Cheshire Cat, Alice herself, as she experiments with life-transforming pills and potions, the Walrus, on that nightmare beach where the sun never goes down, sweet-talking a school of baby oysters into becoming hors d’oeuvres. Most influential of all was the mock-epic poem entitled “Jabberwocky”—to the boy with his legs up the wall, nothing less than a tutorial in how nonsense can be made infinitely more descriptive than sense:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
    All mimsy were the borogoves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe….
     
    Through the Looking-Glass ends with a little known coda, which runs:
A boat beneath a sunny sky
    Lingering onward dreamily
    In an evening of July…

    Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
    Alice moving under skies
    Never seen by waking eyes.
     
    Twenty-five years in the future, there would be a song about that same phantom girl, that same “boat on the river,” and “marmalade skies” recalling the Orange Marmalade jar Alice sees during her fall into the White Rabbit’s burrow.
    At the opposite end of the scale, he devoured the weekly boys’ comics that existed in huge quantity in the early fifties, from the Rover , Wizard , and Hotspur , which contained serial stories (usually about wartime Nazis going “Himmel!” and “Donner und Blitzen!”) to the all-cartoon periodicals the Beano , the Dandy , Radio Fun , Film Fun , and Knockout . Along with sweets and picturedromes, Mimi had forbidden him comics, except perhaps the high-minded Eagle (edited by a clergyman), but his Uncle George would defy the Look by smuggling Beano s or Dandy s up to him—and in any case they were freely available at the homes of his friends.
    He would write his own adventure stories, like the ones in Wizard and Hotspur , but with himself as their hero, and invent his own cartoon strips like the ones in the Beano and Knockout . At the age of seven, he handwrote and drew a whole magazine entitled “Speed and Sport Illustrated” by J. W. Lennon, with portraits of soccer players in action, cartoon strips, and the beginning of an adventure serial. “If you liked this,” the first installment ended, “Come again next week. It’ll be even better.” But of all the diverse high and low cultural sources that fed his imagination—and shaped his character forever—none could compare with William Brown.
    William was the creation of Richmal Crompton Lamburn (1890–1969), a Lancashire classics teacher who switched to writing under the name Richmal Crompton after being stricken by polio. Her eleven-year-old hero had originally been intended for an adult readership, but children quickly latched on to him, ensuring his continuance through thirty-seven story collections. William was the archetypal naughty small boy in the innocent decades before vandalism, mugging, joyriding, and alcopops changed the agenda. Incorrigibly noisy and untidy, his pockets bulging with catapults, marbles, and live frogs, he is the bane of his conventional parents, his uptight older brother and sister, and every schoolteacher, clergyman, and