John Lennon

1940 - 1980

The Vanished World of a Woolton Childhood with John Lennon

by DAVID ASHTON

Page 2

My father, Ted Ashton, had a great passion for nature, the countryside and the village of his childhood and forbears going back generations.

His love fostered my own awareness of nature and beauty which was not difficult growing up as I did in Woolton surrounded by fields, parks, beautiful buildings and the stately homes of the Merchant Princes of Liverpool who had made their wealth from slave trading - a fact for which Liverpool has apologised - as well as from cotton, tobacco, sugar and other trade.

This was not the Woolton most folk in the world imagine when they think of John Lennon but it was so.

As a child I did a vast amount of walking with my father - oh! how we walked! Winter and summer we tramped by Shank's Pony, as he called it, the busless, motorless roads, the footpaths, the blackberry hedges in the Black Woods, met men and womenfolk on our walks and stopped and talked. This was my university.

We met heroes from the Battle of Mafeking in the Boer War, Old Comrades - ordinary heroes - from the First War, mates of my dad's from the Second War.....in fact at the end of this I will include the anonymously-written Ballad of Woolton Green which seems to epitomise life in the Woolton of its day.

It was on such a walk (I think we were going to Childwall Priory but we might have finished up anywhere because that was what my dad's walks were like!) that I first saw , not met but saw, John Lennon.

I must have been 7 or 8 years old according to Rod Davis. My dad and I went on the path down the centre of the double-tree lined Blackwood Avenue and across Woolton Road in the field of corn and walked around the edge of the field. "Listen", my dad said. "That's a corncrake".

I listened to the strange sound of what is now one of Britain's rarest birds, found only in the Outer Hebrides. "It has got a nest" my dad said "They usually only call at dusk just before night but it's a male and it's in full breeding plume".

What a strange, penetrating and persistent calling sound it was - a sort of rasping disyllabic 'crex rerrp ... crex rerrp'. As we penetrated deep into the cornfield we could hear the joyous sound of kids playing on Jackson's Pond near Childwall Abbey Church. There were kids fishing for Jack Sharps with bent pins and worms, swinging across the islands on the pond on a rope.

Then like a dream a raft with a gang of lads came sailing by. One was a tall, lanky, dark-haired, squint-eyed lad. I found out later that John sometimes wore glasses - 'gig lamps' as we called them in our Woolton dialect.

Woolton did not speak the well-known Liverpool Scouse dialect which I love to hear but cannot speak properly as, like all Wooltonians, we spoke an even older language - the Anglo-Saxon dialect of Woolton which could also be heard in South Lancashire and Cheshire. I was to meet 'the lad on the raft' later and learned that he was John Lennon.

A few days later I had gone to play in a lane between Vale Road and Menlove Avenue with my mate, Pete Brayford. Peter said that there was a spring in the lane that had been hidden in the field next door after it was filled in with bomb debris to stop the reflection diverting the German bombers and bombing the lake when along came Peter Shotton, Ivan Vaughan and this guy who had been on the raft on Jackson's Pond.

He had come to live in Woolton with his aunt. They told us that the spring, which was beside an ivy-clad oak tree, was a Holy well and that if you told it your wishes and turned round twice it would all come true.

My next meeting was on a day when we were all playing football on the cow field in Reservoir Road on the top of Woolton Hill which was used to feed up pregnant cows before they began their new lactation.

To us lads of top end of Much Woolton it was our football field. There was a Little Woolton which had become Gateacre. The boundary stone betwen the two is still on the Church Road end of Reservoir Road or at least it was the last time I had a walk around memory lane in Reynolds Park.

Anyway, this day Alan Walpole and I were playing football in the cow field with my new child-size leather football with a blown up pig's bladder inside, french chalked to preserve it, which my dad had bought from Jack Sharp's Sports Shop in Liverpool for, I think, five shillings and sixpence.

I had got the football for my birthday in November. We had a various assortment of football kits on - most of them probably pre-First World War stuff as in the Woolton of our childhood no-one had much money.

We were not poor, or did not think we were anyway, but we certainly never dreamt of having a Liverpool or Everton football kit. We wore hand-me-down kits, if we had any, from fathers, uncles, brothers or cousins.

There were a lot of us playing including John Lennon and we used our coats and jumpers as goal posts. Over the pitched red sandstone wall climbed Robert Bancroft who, in his posh Southern English cultivated Liverpool College Public School accent, ' arsked' if "if one could have a game of rugger". "Join in!" he was told.

He had a posh kit the like of which I had never seen before. From memory the top was yellow with navy blue hoops and he had football shorts that fitted him.

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