Free Seize the Day by Mike Read Page A

‘Keep on the right side of him’.
    The embarrassment was multiplied to the power of ten when he turned up at Radio One after my show one morning in December 1980. ‘Come with me,’ he insisted. He was a dab hand at ‘insisting’.
    Rather than make a scene, I followed him down Regent Street, asking several times what he wanted. My blood ran slightly cold. It was rumoured that he knew some, shall we say, shady characters.
    ‘Here we are … down here.’
    I cautiously walked behind him down a flight of rubbish-strewn steps. He knocked on a door, shouted his name and was admitted. Unfortunately so was I. So this was where the ‘shady characters’ hung out. The place froze as I walked in. Everybody stopped whatever they’d been doing and turned to statues … all staring in my direction.
    ‘It’s all right, he’s with me.’
    For the first time I was pleased I was.
    ‘Drink?’
    I shook my head.
    The conversation was wide of anything I might have been expecting, not that I’m sure what that might have been. ‘I’ve sold Kenwood and I want you to have the door.’
    Everyone had to pass through the door to get to the house. I knew it well; the names of all four Beatles and many other interesting people were carved on it. ‘Why?’
    ‘Because you’re a music history aficionado, you’ve spent time at the house and I know you have more respect than to flog it to make some easy money.’ He was right and I was grateful, but there seemed an unnatural sense of urgency about his pressing this extraordinary gift on me. ‘It’s sitting in the Reardons’ garage next door. Go round tomorrow morning and pick it up. Promise me now. Tomorrow morning. Don’t leave it any later.’
    I promised him, thanked him and scuttled back into the overworld.
    I lay in bed the next morning and reflected on the strange encounter and his absolute insistence that I should collect the door first thing. ‘Waste no time,’ he’d said. It’d be fun to have Lennon’s door.Maybe I could make a coffee table out of it or hang it on a wall. I switched on the radio. John Lennon was dead. Shot. I barely heard the details. But if I didn’t collect that door immediately I knew that I never would. Then my father happened to call round about something. I don’t think he’d ever seen me cry. He did that morning but had no idea what to do, or what to say to me. Not his fault, of course, but he stood there looking very uncomfortable.
    What’s more, that night I had to put together and present a Radio One special programme about John Lennon. It was a tough one. Emotions were running high across the country. There were a few personal stories I was able to tell, both about Kenwood and Tittenhurst Park, John’s house in Ascot, having gone to the latter the same year that the ‘Imagine’ video was filmed there, 1971. As well as the grand piano featured in the video, there was an upright piano at the house with a small plaque fixed to it listing five or six songs that had been written on it. I may be wrong, but I seem to remember ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘For the Benefit of Mr Kite’ being two of them.
    The coincidence, Billy’s insistence, the sudden and furtive meeting and the timing have made me think about it many times. Did he know something? Was there any involvement? He was, after all, obsessed with Lennon, bought his house, and the word ‘imagine’ ran through his conversation like lettering through a stick of rock.
    A few years later Julian Lennon and his girlfriend came down to my home in Holmbury St Mary, near Dorking. He talked quite extensively about his childhood at Kenwood, even expressing an interest in buying it if it ever came onto the market. Acting upon Jesus’ suggestion to ‘render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ I gave the door to Julian. His mother, Cynthia, later told me that he’d hung it by four chains over his bed. As a footnote, Billy Atkins sold Kenwood to songwriter Bill Martin, the