John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman Page A

holidays, he would forsake Pete and his Raleigh Lenton and go for a long bus ride by himself, past the Penny Lane roundabout and through the descending suburbs into central Liverpool. His usual destination was the Kardomah coffeehouse in Whitechapel, where he had a favorite stool at the ledge along the street window. He would sit there for so many hours, sketching in his book and on the steamed-up window or, as he put it, “just watching the world go by,” that Mimi nicknamed him the Kardomah Kid.
    To Mimi, his drawings and poems were no more than time-wasting distractions from schoolwork. Often he would come home and find she had conducted a guerrilla raid on his bedroom and thrown every piece of paper she could find into the kitchen wastebin. There woulda furious argument in which even his usual ally, Uncle George, dared not take his side. “I used to say [to Mimi] ‘You’ve thrown my fuckin’ poetry out and you’ll regret it when I’m famous,’” John remembered. “I never forgave her for not treating me like a fuckin’ genius.”
     
     
    P rior to John’s fifteenth year, the British had regarded the process of growing up as perfectly straightforward. The system was that children went on being children until puberty was well advanced; then, virtually overnight, they turned into grown-ups, wearing the same kind of clothes as their parents, aspiring to the same values, and seeking the same amusements. The effect of rioting hormones on immature and impressionable minds had yet to be studied in any depth by scientists or sociologists. The continuance of wartime’s mass conscription claimed all able-bodied males at age eighteen and put them through two years of military discipline that, in most cases, left a permanent mark. Only university students, then accounting for just 2 percent of young people, were permitted an interlude of free will and indulgence—even some public unruliness—before assuming the burdens of adulthood.
    American films made John and his friends enviously familiar with a society that, on the contrary, recognized the years between thirteen and twenty as a distinct season of life and catered to it with superabundant lavishness. A blissful interlude it seemed, with its open-to-all college campuses, its high schools so very different from Quarry Bank, its giant-lettered boys’ jerseys, its girls’ ponytails, its hamburgers, Coca-Cola, cheerleaders, and hops. Long before it had any personal relevance for him, John had picked up on the fundamental cultural difference: “America had teenagers…. Everywhere else just had people.”
    American young people as Hollywood projected them—which, of course, meant young white people—had always been gee-whiz happy and healthy-minded and, if possible, even more respectful and conformist than their British counterparts. But since the war, ominous cracks had begun to appear in this cornerstone of the American Dream. Nineteen fifty-one saw publication of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye , a novel written in the voice of a seventeen-year-old boy,Holden Caulfield, alternately mocking and reviling the Utopia into which he had been born. In 1953 came The Wild One , a film about the terrorizing of a small town by a group of leather-clad teenage motorcyclists (collectively known as the Beetles). “What are you rebelling against?” a woman character demands of the young Marlon Brando as the pack’s leader. “Whaddaya got?” he replies.
    All these vague, discontented mutters and hormonal stirrings first took definite shape in James Dean, a young stage actor from the Midwest, schooled with Brando in the Method technique and then picked up by Hollywood. Gaunt and melancholic, Dean was the first star with specific appeal to teenagers of the new troubled and troublesome variety. He wore their to-hell-with-it uniform of T-shirts and shabby jeans, suffered their same agonies of uncertainty and hypersensitivity, spoke in their same surly or shy mumble. Their