John Ono * (nee Winston) Lennon was born at Liverpool in England during a Luftwaffe night raid bombing on the city and was among the fiercest carried out during WWII. It was October 9th in 1940 when his mother, Julia, gave birth to him at a maternity home on Oxford Street. The Nazis had been doing periodic night raids on Liverpool all during the summer that year because it hosted extensive Naval shipyards and had miles of dock where their convoys normally waited to take to the North Atlantic seas. At that time the city had become the receiver of overseas food supplies. Explosions from the raids tore away at wharves and castle walls along with the actual residences and their businesses. At one point the devastation was so bad along the Mersey that there was no place along the docks available for incoming ships with cargo.
Twenty minutes after he was born, as his Aunt Mimi was holding him for the first time, a landmine fell just outside the hospital. They placed him under the bed and his Aunt ran back to her house on Newcastle Road, risking life and limb, to tell her father, John’s grandfather, that he’d been born. John’s father was long gone as a wayward mariner who had, at one point, been locked away at Ellis Island. Even though Julia had married him, the shipping line that had employed him stopped giving her his wages and Freddy Lennon was history.
With Julia and his four aunts to care for him in his tender years he must have gained some real respect for the powers of women and never gave up his very close relationship with Aunt Mimi. Julia became secondary in his life as more of a companion once she’d remarried and started another family. On July 15, 1958 disaster struck when his mother was hit by an off-duty policeman, dying instantly, and the only witness was John’s friend Nigel Whalley. The fact that she’d been killed brought the case to trial but the policeman was acquitted even though he and the court had to deal with Aunt Mimi’s ire about the whole business. Nigel Whalley was treated like a dimwit boy and Julia’s husband and kids were further distanced. The injustice of it impacted John quite a bit even though he’d never said much about it and kept all of it bottled up inside.
By the time 1980 had rolled around and he and Yoko were getting ready to launch the album, Double Fantasy, a decidedly real and actual John Lennon was emerging that had taken years to nurture, mature and become whole. As a male feminist, his songs had taken on a wisdom that the world was ready for but not without the consequence that high profiles bring out in the best and the worst of people. You can read about what happened on the night of December 8, 1980 all over the internet but it won’t clarify the senseless death of a man who had seemed to take death in stride for most of his life.
For some, his story is tragic with agonizing longevity but I see something else, especially after so many years of his absence. John Lennon would’ve been 80 years old today if he had not had to face down a cold-blooded killer. The deed was done in such a cowardly fashion that even John was taken by surprise. But I’m reminded of what Emily Dickinson once wrote; “Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.” Something of this nature was more to blame than even the convict who tried to take his life. John’s life exists, breathes and leaps into action every time someone plays his music whether collectively with The Beatles or the extraordinary output as a solo or duet artist. How does someone finish that? Only God can answer that question.
* On April 22, 1969 John changed his middle name from Winston to Ono, in honor of Yoko, with an official ceremony and performed by the Commissioner of Oaths on the roof at Apple Studios.
Recommended reading: Shout! The Beatles in their Generation by Philip Norman
John Lennon: One Day at a Time, A Personal Biography of the Seventies by Anthony Fawcett
Lennon Remembers The Rolling Stone Interviews Straight Arrow Books 1971
The Castle Lady
