The Vanished World Of A Woolton Childhood With John Lennon – Part 2
It was on such a walk (I think we were going to Childwall Priory but we might have finished up anywhere because that was what my dad's walks were like!) that I first saw, not met but saw, John Lennon. I must have been 7 or 8 years old according to Rod Davis. My dad and I went on the path down the centre of the doubletree lined Blackwood Avenue and across Woolton Road in the field of corn and walked around the edge of the field. "Listen", my dad said. "That's a corncrake". I listened to the strange sound of what is now one of Britain’s rarest birds, found only in the Outer Hebrides. "It has got a nest" my dad said "They usually only call at dusk just before night but it's a male and it's in full breeding plume". What a strange, penetrating and persistent calling sound it was - a sort of rasping disyllabic 'crex rerrp ... crex rerrp'. As we penetrated deep into the cornfield we could hear the joyous sound of kids playing on Jackson's Pond near Childwall Abbey Church. There were kids fishing for Jack Sharps with bent pins and worms, swinging across the islands on the pond on a rope. Then like a dream a raft with a gang of lads came sailing by. One was a tall, lanky, dark-haired, squint-eyed lad. I found out later that John sometimes wore glasses - 'gig lamps' as we called them in our Woolton dialect. Woolton did not speak the well-known Liverpool Scouse dialect, which I love to hear, but cannot speak properly as, like all Wooltonians, we spoke an even older language - the Anglo-Saxon dialect of Woolton which could also be heard in South Lancashire and Cheshire. I was to meet 'the lad on the raft' later and learned that he was John Lennon.
A few days later I had gone to play in a lane between Vale Road and Menlove Avenue with my mate, Pete Brayford. Peter said that there was a spring in the lane that had been hidden in the field next door after it was filled in with bomb debris to stop the reflection diverting the German bombers and bombing the lake when along came Peter Shotton, Ivan Vaughan and this guy who had been on the raft on Jackson's Pond. He had come to live in Woolton with his aunt. They told us that the spring, which was beside an ivy-clad oak tree, was a Holy well and that if you told it your wishes and turned round twice it would all come true.
My next meeting was on a day when we were all playing football on the cow field in Reservoir Road on the top of Woolton Hill which was used to feed up pregnant cows before they began their new lactation. To us lads of top end of Much Woolton it was our football field. There was a Little Woolton, which had become Gateacre. The boundary stone between the two is still on the Church Road end of Reservoir Road or at least it was the last time I had a walk around memory lane in Reynolds Park.
Anyway, this day Alan Walpole and I were playing football in the cow field with my new child-size leather football with a blown up pig's bladder inside, french chalked to preserve it, which my dad had bought from Jack Sharp's Sports Shop in Liverpool for, I think, five shillings and sixpence. I had got the football for my birthday in November. We had a various assortment of football kits on - most of them probably pre-First World War stuff as in the Woolton of our childhood no-one had much money. We were not poor, or did not think we were anyway, but we certainly never dreamt of having a Liverpool or Everton football kit. We wore hand-me-down kits, if we had any, from fathers, uncles, brothers or cousins.
There were a lot of us playing including John Lennon and we used our coats and jumpers as goal posts. Over the pitched red sandstone wall climbed Robert Bancroft who, in his posh Southern English cultivated Liverpool College Public School accent, ' arsked’ "if one could have a game of rugger". "Join in!" he was told. He had a posh kit the like of which I had never seen before. From memory the top was yellow with navy blue hoops and he had football shorts that fitted him. I was later to find out that it was rugby kit. Robert Bancroft was picked for a side and as soon as he got near the ball he picked it up and started running with it and fell down near the goal. I thought at first that he had pinched the ball but John Lennon said that he was playing rugby so "just play along with him and when he gets the ball, grab him, pull down his 'keks' (trousers) and rub his balls with cowpat". Perhaps I should explain that in the Liverpool of my childhood Rugby was only played in foreign places with coal mines like St Helens, where they had red buses instead of green like our corporation buses and our Crossville buses, or in Widnes which was a long way to go on your bike. So how John Lennon knew the difference between rugby and football I didn't know. I was to learn later that he was like that - he knew things we others did not know. It was not long before the brave Robert Bancroft grabbed the ball again and began to run with it to the goal. We all piled on to him, got him to the ground, got his keks down and rubbed cowpat into his testes. Honour done, he went home crying and it was not long before my mother appeared at the cow field wall demanding that she be given the ball and I was to go home. Robert's mother had been round to complain and I was banned from going out for a week and banned from playing with John Lennon, Peter Shotton, Ivan Vaughan and Nige Walley. The ban did not last as we came into contact with one another at St Peter's Church - at cubs, scouts, church choir, the youth club and Sunday school - and at the barber's or just wandering around the lanes and byways of Woolton. John became interesting for I guess what I would now call his 'Huckleberry Finn' qualities. He knew things or found them out and if he liked you he got you into trouble! But it was on his side not the other side you got into trouble if you can understand the logic of it. John was alluring and beguiling, even bewitching to be with or near sometimes, even spellbinding and never boring. There were lots of kids banned from playing with the gang of Peter Shotton, Ivan Vaughan and John Lennon but we played anyway. That was Woolton!
I went to Mosspits Lane County Primary School with Pete Shotton who I was sometimes mistaken for due to us both having blonde hair and with Ivan Vaughan. Later I was to go to the Bluecoat School near Penny Lane with Nigel Walley - so one way or another we were often playing together or mixed up in something. We only lived around the corner from one another.
There were two barbers in Woolton village to which we Woolton kids were sent - Dicky Jones' and Ashcroft's. In our childhood both of them inflicted a considerable amount of torture and pain. Even now almost half a century later I still intensely dislike having my haircut unless the barber seems like a humane human being. One such barber existed outside the world of Woolton but nearer to where I went to school at Mosspits Lane and the Bluecoat. John Lennon was later to go to school at Quarry Bank after he had been to Dovecote Primary School. The lovely expatriate Italian family of Bioletti in Penny Lane ran the barber I’m referring to. It was rumoured that old man Bioletti had been involved with Guiseppe Garibaldi (1807 - 1882) in Italy's battle for independence and statehood. The Bioletti family had old guns, bullets, grenades and pictures of happy Italians waving their flags high, on the walls around the barbershop. They were certainly a loving, kind, happy family with brother; sister and old man Bioletti cutting your hair. Unless you knew him, and I guess he would have been nearly ninety when I was 9 or 10 years old, old man Bioletti in 'Penny Lane Barber's Shop' would frighten the life out of you with his shaky hands thinking that any moment he would nip your neck or cut your ear off. When you knew him he really was a kind, loving, gentle ex-revolutionary who actually loved us lads and he often with his shaky hands deviated from the regulation army-pudding-bowl, short back-and-sides hair cut that our parents demanded - sometimes to good effect, sometimes to bad effect. Old man Bioletti also had a rule that boys could only get their haircut when there were no men waiting. I had met John going into Bioletti's in Penny Lane on his way back from Quarry Bank School and me from the Bluecoat School. It was after 4 in the afternoon and not long before the men would start arriving on their way home from work with their gasmask knapsacks they used to wear round their necks to carry their packed lunches - their 'bait' - and newspapers. John and I sat down on Bioletti's comfortable bus bench seats that the family had for the boys to sit on and read comics. We were behind two other boys in the queue when some men came in. Exasperated, John said to the two lads in front of us "Do you know, last week old man Bioletti cut off somebody's scalp completely, with his shaky hands. You could actually see the brains wobbling around like a dark grey blancmange inside the head. But he was alright 'cos he stuck the scalp back on with sticking plaster". The two boys left - without a haircut and we got ours done before the rest of the men came in. It was this taste for devilment and bizarre imagery and creative thinking that made John an attractive friend to have on your side.
Strangely enough the last time I saw John to speak to was in Bioletti's. It must have been after the success of 'She Loves You' because he had become well known. I was home from Denmark where I was studying agriculture intending to go to the Danish Adult Education College or Folk High School called Rødding Folk High School. John asked me while he was sitting in the chair and talking to me through the mirror what I was doing and I explained the philosophy of the Danish Folk High School movement and that the founders, N.F.S.Grundvig (1789-1872) a visionary genius and inspired and pioneered by the educator Christen Kold (1816 - 1870) had the idea that each and every individual had the potential to blossom and flower and have a rich, fulfilling life. The idea was not to have any entrance exam or exit exam. But through lectures, talks, discussion and actually doing, to let everyone develop to their full potential. John was also later to go himself to a Danish Folk High called the New Experimental College at Skomum Bjerg, Thy Thisted in North Jutland in the 1970s where they had an interesting Rector called Ove Rosendahl. Whether our talk in Bioletti's had inspired him to go or not I will never know because I lost contact and did not take it up with him when I should have. But one thing, thinking back. John was a very good philosopher and was deeply concerned about the development of the human individual - lessons I think we learnt listening to conversations in Bioletti's in Penny Lane as kids. This was my own Danish Folk High School or Adult Education College.
