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overwhelming.”
    Quarrymen drummer Colin Hanton recalls, “John could be impossible sometimes. He was driven to extremes. He could be almost near violent. When he acted like that, sometimes I wanted to give him a smack. But he was always determined to be something, to stand above.”
    Davis, a current world traveler and surfing enthusiast, will always remember John as tough and sensitive, two traits hard to reconcile as a teenager:
    F IGHTING BACK, AND HARD, WAS A L ENNON TRADEMARK . . . . I NEVER KNEW HE WAS A SENSITIVE HUMAN BEING, ALTHOUGH OF COURSE HE DID WRITE POETRY; HE DID WRITE THINGS FOR THE SCHOOL MAGAZINE . B UT HE WASN’T FLOWERS AND BIRDS AND CLOUDS AND STUFF . I MEAN, HE WROTE A POEM CALLED “T HE T ALE OF H ERMAN F RED ,” WHICH WAS PUBLISHED IN THE SCHOOL MAGAZINE, AND WAS QUITE AMUSING . S O HE HAD THIS ABILITY TO EXERCISE TOUGHNESS, BUT HE DID NOT VIEW HIMSELF AS UNMANLY BECAUSE HE ENJOYED WRITING . H E COULD BE CHAOTIC IN THE CLASSROOM, THOUGH .
    Psychologists like to tell us that we are what we think we are. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for everybody, but for John, it was always a work in progress—the challenge of channeling his childhood loneliness and constant despair into the real-life messages of hope, love, and loss that showed up in the songs he wrote both with Paul and after the Beatles. To this day, John Lennon may be the most autobiographical of songwriters, unashamed for the rest of us to share his ordeals.
    One can image the loneliness he felt in the mid- to late fifties, and the reasons: a mother struck by a car and killed when he was seventeen; a father who had supposedly vanished from his life; the hostile failure of his teachers to recognize his creative endeavors; and the lack of mentors, save for the recording artists he worshipped.
    So, inevitably, imagination took over. It is not without coincidence that his most iconic song is “Imagine.”
    The photograph of John sprawled out on his narrow bed in Mimi’s home, reading and sketching and listening to records, is the most compelling. His second-floor bedroom at 251 Menlove Avenue is still locked in time today, much like the sitting room below. The furniture is circa 1955, and thewalls are as they were. Like many British homes, it has a name, Mendips. The home provided John a room with a view, a bright and shiny view of the world outside. When I glance around the narrow room I can imagine the teenage world of the smoking milkman as he lay in his bed, reading, getting up to look at the avenue, quietly shaving in the bathroom, fantasizing about being on stage, rocking like the famous rockers, infuriating his teachers, and dealing with his kind Uncle George and his upright and strict Aunt Mimi, guardian of the young empire, dominatrix of the household, surrogate mother, for a time, and puritanical challenger of everything John.
    Mimi was a force, although Freda Kelly, the teenage secretary to Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and one of the closest people to Mimi, has a different take. Kelly was the main liaison to the Beatles’ parents. When she first met John and Mimi, months after she went berserk with the rest of the crowd at the Cavern, she was in a different position. Now she saw John as a wild and creative and unchained force. In Kelly’s view, five years after the death of John’s mother, Mimi was quite necessary.
    â€œShe was like my father: old school,” she says. “John needed controlling. He was a rebel. She was a woman who was trying to do the right thing, doing her best to guide and bring him up right. She was a lovely person who didn’t suffer fools gladly. Her imagery as a tough, unrelenting woman is not the whole story.”
    Brian Epstein’s lifelong friend Joe Flannery sees the aunt’s assertiveness from a different angle: “There is no doubt that Mimi, who was someone who loved him beginning at birth, saw and understood John’s