John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman

Until John reached his teens, he was like a prospector, panning through the drab shale of logicand common sense that constituted his daily life at Quarry Bank and Mendips for those few stray, gleaming nuggets of absurdity. The school library introduced him to Stephen Leacock, Canadian author of “nonsense novels” like Q: A Psychic Pstory of the Psupernatural and Sorrows of a Supersoul, or the Memoirs of Marie Mushenough (Translated out of the Original Russian by Machinery) . Early children’s television programs featured occasional appearances by “Professor” Stanley Unwin, a pious-looking man who told fairy stories in innuendo-laced gibberish, such as “Goldiloppers and the Three Bearlodes.” English lessons at Quarry Bank provided an unexpected seam in the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (“When that Aprille with his shoures soote…”) so often like Stanley Unwin speaking from the fourteenth century.
    All this was mere marginalia, however, in comparison with The Goon Show , which had begun its first series on BBC radio in 1951 but hit full stride in 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Scripted almost single-handedly by a sometime jazz musician named Spike Milligan, it superficially harked back to the Second World War ( Goons had been Allied prisoners’ nickname for their German guards) and to a Conan Doyle-esque world of spies, intrigue, and derring-do. But in content, it was mold-breakingly anarchic, a mélange of demented voices and lunatic situations such as had never before been offered to a British audience, least of all on the sanctified airwaves of the BBC.
    Together with a little-known variety comedian named Peter Sellers, Milligan created a gallery of characters who often seemed to have only the most nodding acquaintance with the human race—the decrepit Colonel Bloodnok, the quavery duo of Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister, the moronic Eccles, the supersmooth Grytpype-Thynne, the whining hermaphrodite Bluebottle. Embedded in the madness like hooks in blubber were jibes against previously inviolable national institutions such as the army, the church, the Foreign Office, and even the BBC itself (which the corporation, amazingly, never noticed).
    The Goons’ most besotted fans were middle-class preadolescent schoolboys, those overserious war babies who had hitherto believedthe oppressive sanity of life to be everlasting. For John, between 1953 and 1955, they were the brightest spot in his whole existence. Nothing could unstick him from the wireless on evenings when the cut-glass voice of announcer Wallace Greenslade presaged another Milligan free-form fantasy such as “Her” (a parody of H. Rider Haggard’s She ) or “The Sinking of Westminster Pier,” featuring Minnie and Henry as oyster-sexers, with frantic musical interludes by Dutch harmonica player Max Geldray. John could do the voices and catchphrases of every character, from Minnie’s senile gurgle to Bluebottle’s scandalized shrieks of “I do not like dis game,” “Dirty, rotten swine!,” and “You deaded me!”
    As the terms passed, “Cutting class and going AWOL” became an ever more frequent charge against Shennon and Lotton in Quarry Bank’s punishment book. The bicycles that had been a reward for scholastic excellence allowed them to escape far from the school precincts and any likelihood of detection. By their third year, they had discovered smoking, a habit then practiced almost universally by adults and attended by no health warnings. The usual routine was to filch a packet of Wild Woodbines or Players Weights from some unsuspecting tobacconist, then repair to Reynolds or Calderstones Park, rest their bikes on the grass, and smoke all ten “ciggies” at one go, while John blew salvoes on his mouth organ or shouted in Bloodnok or Bluebottle voices at passers-by or the ducks on the lake.
    He was not irrevocably twinned with Pete Shotton. Sometimes on weekends or in the school