Free John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman Page A

nervous elderly spinster in his orbit. He has three companions, Ginger, Douglas, and Henry, with whom, in a gang knownas the Outlaws, he roams the countryside, trespassing, birdsnesting, playing Red Indians, waging guerrilla war against his sworn enemy, Hubert Lane, and dodging his besotted follower, a prototype groupie named Violet Elizabeth Bott. The Outlaws form an unbreakable blood-brotherhood against repressive and pompous adults: they have their own private language, secret signs, and sacred rituals, and their own cavernous hideout-cum-auditorium, the Old Barn.
    William is a many-sided character: a leader whose authority over his followers is absolute; a daydreamer who imagines exotic careers as a big-game hunter, secret agent, or circus clown; a virtuoso of scorn and sarcasm and an inventive liar; an exhibitionist, given to singing at the top of his voice, playing mouth organs and trumpets at top volume, dressing up in exotic clothes, and wearing elaborate false beards and mustaches; a hustler, forever trying to raise money for new water pistols or cricket bats; a tender-hearted animal lover; a tireless novelty seeker and observer of new trends and fashions; an indefatigable writer of lurid stories, dramas, and poems in his own individual spelling; and organizer of plays, shows, and exhibitions in his bedroom or the Old Barn. His greatest joy is to escape from his own genteel environment and run around with “vulgar” working-class children, swapping his nice clothes for their scruffy ones and trying to imitate the fascinating crudeness of their speech. His spirits are never lower than when he is discovered among these unsuitable companions and restored to the outraged bosom of his family.
    Having gobbled up the few red clothbound William books on Mimi’s bookshelf, John began to collect them, following their hero through the twenties, thirties, and Second World War to the threshold of the space age. He loved the caustic prose style, which made no concession to young readers, freely using words such as inamorata and rhododendron , yet always sided with William against a largely risible grown-up community of choleric retired colonels, ditzy vicars’ wives, dimwitted policemen, and sandal-wearing vegetarians. William’s world, moreover, was uncannily like the one that John himself inhabited—same “village” surrounded by countryside, same genteel home with servants’ bells. He identified totally with William’s rebelliousness, his audacity, his humor, his flights of fantasy, his needalways to be the kingpin yet always to have companions, his share-and-share-alike generosity, his proneness to hilarious misspellings and mispronunciations, even his preference for Red Indians over cowboys and addiction to playing the mouth organ. And it was William who inspired him to create his first gang of four, united against the world.
    The Outlaws have an unchanging hierarchy, with William at the top, supported by his “boon companion,” Ginger, and Henry and Douglas forming a less essential second division. In John’s Vale Road following, Ivy Vaughan and Nigel “Walloggs” Walley corresponded to Henry and Douglas, while albino-blond Pete Shotton, his prime accomplice and audience, was a natural Ginger.
    With John as their leader, they devoted after-school hours, weekends, and holidays to reincarnating William and the Outlaws in Woolton. Many of their escapades were dastardly only in their own eyes—walking on grass in defiance of KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs, entering and exiting wherever NO ENTRY or NO EXIT was proclaimed, drinking from taps marked NOT DRINKING WATER, and—in the words of their Sunday school classmate Rod Davis—“running into Marks and Spencer’s and shouting ‘Woolworths!’” At other times, they flouted authority and risked life and limb in ways that would have caused apoplexy in their respective homes. One of their favorite games was to hang on behind the trams that clanked up and down Menlove