Alfred lennon julia lennon mod#

Such was the emotional tumult of John Lennon's early years, it is difficult to imagine him having an uneventful life even if he hadn't been famous. His adolescent need to rebel and offend stayed with him long into adulthood, his maturity arrested by the gilded prison of celebrity and the copious amounts of LSD he took in the mid to late 60s when he seemed intent on obliterating his troubled psyche. Presumably she would have allowed it.' Taylor-Wood's film hints at, but pulls back from, that transgressive moment, which is probably for the best given Lennon's tendency to say things for effect. 'I was wondering if I should do anything else,' Lennon told a journalist years later, 'I always think I should have done it. Lennon's most recent biographer, Philip Norman, has suggested that the 14-year-old Lennon was sexually attracted to his mother, having become aroused when he accidentally touched her breast. She was hit by a speeding car driven by a policeman Lennon retreated into himself, bonding with the young Paul McCartney, who had also lost his mother as a boy, but barely talked about the loss of Julia until years later when his long bout of primal therapy helped create the musical cry for help that is 'Mother' on his first solo album. Julia died when John was 17 his best friend, Stuart Sutcliffe, died suddenly from a brain haemorrhage in 1962 and his manager and mentor, Brian Epstein, who nursed an unrequited love for Lennon, died of an overdose in 1967. The death of the young Lennon's surrogate father, Mimi's husband George, in 1955, was the first of four deaths that would wound and harden him.

Julia, doted on him when she saw him, but was absent for most of his childhood.

Mimi treated him sometimes as her son, sometimes as an equal. The cruelty, like the anger that occasionally erupted from time to time into physical violence may have had its roots in his constant childhood feeling of not quite belonging anywhere, or to anyone. An early girlfriend, Thelma Pickles, who hung out with Lennon at art school, later recalled: 'Anyone limping or crippled or hunchbacked, or deformed in any way, John laughed and ran up to them to make horrible faces.' Lennon filled notebooks at Quarry Bank school with drawings of human grotesques and, as his first biographer, Ray Coleman, put it, 'developed an instinctive ability to mock the weak, with whom he had no patience'.

Alfred lennon julia lennon mod#

In A Hard Day's Night, someone asks Ringo if he is a mod or a rocker. He dresses like a teddy boy, but there is barely a glimpse of the semi-delinquent behaviour of his grammar school years – the gangs he led, the shoplifting, the hapless pupils and teachers he bullied – or his fascination with, the disabled and the disfigured. The John Lennon that Aaron Johnson portrays in Nowhere Boy, though, has had his sensitivity amplified and his arrogance turned down. 'Take the money, Mimi,' he said, 'and tell them I was a juvenile delinquent who used to knock down old ladies.' There was more than a grain of truth in that description. When an American magazine offered to publish her memoirs, Mimi rang and asked for his advice. By then, Mimi was Lennon's mother in all but name. After that, Freddie disappeared from Lennon's life for two decades, only to resurface after his son had become famous. John first chooses Freddie, then, in tears, runs up the street after his mother. One of the more traumatic childhood scenes, shown in flashback in Nowhere Boy, shows the five-year-old John being instructed by Freddie to choose whether he wanted to live with Julia or him. It was Mimi who complained to the social services that her sister was unfit to look after the young boy, an intervention that began the sisters' long battle for John's affections. When he returned to Julia in 1944 after a long absence, she was pregnant by another man. His father, Alfred 'Freddie' Lennon, was a merchant seaman and only fitfully present during his son's childhood. Lennon was born during an air raid on 9 October 1940. In Lennon's case, nature triumphed over nurture. Julia loved Lonnie Donegan Mimi listened to Tchaikovsky. His mother, Julia, is working-class, wild-spirited and mostly absent, and his aunt, Mimi Smith, is respectable, strict and domineeringly present. He is a troubled but gifted teenager caught between two women, two worlds. Sam Taylor-Wood's film, Nowhere Boy, paints John Lennon's formative years in the broadest of brush strokes.