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vulnerability, and believe me, he was vulnerable.”
    Mimi. George. Mendips. Along with the mother he loved, they were John’s world.
    From the age of five, when he was brought into Mimi and George’s life, until twenty-three, John lived at various intervals at Mendips. At the age of seven, he wandered in the small but lush backyard, bordering on Strawberry Field, a home for orphans. He often, in moments of daring, scaled the fence to join the children. He enjoyed their company for years. During a 1975interview, John told me, “Most of my memories in those days were with the other children. I liked being with them. But Mimi was not happy.” Did he sense a commonality with them? Did he feel like an orphan, too? I never asked him those questions, but once again, as it happens so often in this story, the fence-jumping, Mimi-defying excursions made their way into song.
    When Mimi scolded John for jumping the fence, John said, “C’mon, Aunt Mimi, they can’t hang you for it.” Later, in the words of the song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” it was “nothing to get hung about.”
    Sitting on his narrow bed, posters of contemporary entertainers on the walls, John would read late into the night, sometimes sleeping just a few hours before heading out to his milk rounds. Mimi’s husband, George, one of the motivators of John’s teenage years, used the home as a refuge for learning. Mimi’s strong-willed sense of discipline extended to her husband. George enjoyed his time with John. Mostly they talked about the need to read. John became a master reader. His interest in contemporary news reports was intense by his fourteenth birthday. John started reading the “Just Williams” children’s series at ten, and graduated to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows , a 1908 novel of mysticism, camaraderie, and adventure, channeled through four animal characters with human-like features and traits: a mole, a rat, Mr. Toad, and Mr. Badger. The book is a classic, and the young fence-climber was fascinated by its fantasy. At the age of ten, he would share some of the stories with his friends on the “other side” at Strawberry Field.
    John was mostly peaceful at home. School was another story. He alternately puzzled and tortured his teachers at Quarry Bank. He was, as Stuart Sutcliffe’s sister Pauline describes, an “anarchist.” There may have been reasons.
    Boyhood buddy and bandmate Rod Davis says John, like him, ventured into a scary environment at Quarry Bank. It was somewhat formal yet surrounded by young goons trying to mess up the school day.
    â€œSo we had our nice little blazers with our Quarry Bank stags on and our little gold stag heads around the cuffs and so on. And we were a target for all the toughs. We were the bright guys, just for going to Quarry Bank School. So therefore we were the targets for all of the guys who decided they weregoing to take it out on us. So, John’s technique was to develop a hard exterior, and that worked quite well.”
    John was both angry and insightful, but determined to disrupt classes with outbursts, the distribution of graphic and sexual sketches, and other odd gifts. When teachers would scold him, he looked dumbfounded, with a “not me” look, an external innocence, as if to say, “Nothing to get hung about.”
    Eventually, for a short period, John became one of the “toughs” himself, to prove his mettle.
    And later, along with his friend Pete Shotton, John became one of the intellectually stimulated students; he would and could excel, depending on the day. As John plowed his way through the books, interested more in hearing music from the States than focusing on the sciences or math, teachers were frustrated by his pranks. One of them was heard to say, “This boy is bound to fail.” Failure at times, in the school setting, was something John