Free John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman Page B

Avenue. Another was to climb a tree over a busy main road and play a version of Chicken with the double-decker buses passing beneath. When a bus approached, one of them would poke a leg into its path and dangle it there until the last possible moment before impact. Whoever kept his nerve for longest was the winner. If anyone’s shoe actually touched the bus roof, that counted as bonus points.
    Lennon’s gang, as people soon took to calling them, became the curse of a district otherwise blessedly free from persecution or disturbance. They trespassed on Allerton Golf Course, annoying the grave businessmen at play there and conducting riotous games of their own. They crept in through the back entrances of cinemas without paying and disrupted performances until ejected by furious usherettes. Their “scrumping” of apples from other people’s gardensbecame so pestilential that one enraged grower appeared with a shotgun and fired both barrels at John’s fleeing form.
    Like William, he became a Boy Scout, joining the 3rd Allerton troop, but also like William, he had little time for the Scout code of duty and respectfulness. David Ashton, his companion in the troop’s “Badgers” section, recalls the alternative marching chorus he encouraged the others to sing as they tramped along in their shorts, bush hats, and neckerchiefs: “We are the Third! The mad Third! We come from ALLeerTON and we are MAD! MAD!”
    A frequent background for William’s and the Outlaws’ adventures are summer fetes and garden parties. Their Woolton disciples, too, were invariably to be found when some local church or institution set out its innocent fund-raising paraphernalia of raffia stalls, lucky dips, and kiddies’ fancy-dress parades. They would sneak into the tents where home-made cakes and pies or lovingly nurtured raspberries awaited the judges’ inspection, and make off with whatever they fancied. Once stuffed to the gills, they would entertain themselves by mocking the well-meaning people who were attempting to raise money for good causes, and the families innocently enjoying themselves. Nigel Walley has a mirthful recollection of one garden fete “run by the nuns” where they spotted a group of monks seated together on a bench. “Somehow John got hold of this robe and dressed himself up as a monk. He was sitting with the other monks, talking to them in all these funny words while we were rolling about under the tent, in tucks.”
    The portrayal, however, contained one major departure from character. Whereas William, for all his lawlessness, never stoops to intentional larceny, John—egged on, as always, by Pete—became a habitual and dedicated shoplifter. Confectioners in those days would often trustingly display sweets and chocolate on their counters in open boxes or arranged in glass dishes with paper doilies. “We’d go into this certain place that was run by a little old lady,” Nigel Walley remembers. “John’d point to things he said he wanted on the top shelf, and all the time he’d be filling his pockets from the counter. He did the same at a shop that sold Dinky Toys in Woolton, opposite the Baths. He’d put a tractor or a little car in his pocket while thebloke was looking the other way. We went back to that same shop later, but this time John hadn’t got his glasses on. He couldn’t understand why his fingers couldn’t get at the Dinky cars. He couldn’t see that the bloke had covered them with a sheet of glass.”
    Mimi was generous with pocket money, giving John a weekly allowance of five shillings (the same amount received by William’s pampered arch-foe, Hubert Lane), on condition that he did certain household jobs, such as mowing the lawn. Like William, he shared whatever he had with his “boon companions.” He found it impossible to hang on to money, just as he would all his life; nor was he willing to earn a bonus by legitimate means. The one time he ever received physical chastisement from Mimi was