Thelma Pickles, John Lennon’s First Girlfriend At Liverpool College Of Art, On Her Relationship With

Thelma Pickles, John Lennon’s first girlfriend at Liverpool College of Art, on her relationship with John 

My first impression of John was that he was a smartarse. I was 16; a friend introduced us at Liverpool College of Art when we were waiting to register. There was a radio host at the time called Wilfred Pickles whose catchphrase was "Give them the money, Mabel!". When John heard my name he asked "Any relation to Wilfred?", which I was sick of hearing. Then a girl breezed in and said, "Hey John, I hear your mother's dead", and I felt absolutely sick. He didn't flinch, he simply replied, "Yeah". "It was a policeman that knocked her down, wasn't it?" Again he didn't react, he just said, "That's right, yeah." His mother had been killed two months earlier. I was stunned by his detachment, and impressed that he was brave enough to not break down or show any emotion. Of course, it was all a front. When we were alone together he was really soft, thoughtful and generous-spirited. Clearly his mother's death had disturbed him. We both felt that we'd been dealt a raw deal in our family circumstances, which drew us together. During the first week of college we had a pivotal conversation. I'd assumed that he lived with his dad but he told me, "My dad pissed off when I was a baby." Mine had too – I wasn't a baby, I was 10. It had such a profound effect on me that I would never discuss it with anyone. Nowadays one-parent families are common but then it was something shameful. After that it was like we were two against the world.

I went to his house soon after. It seemed really posh to me, brought up in a council house. We were alone, he showed me round and we had a bit of a kiss and a cuddle in his bedroom. Paul and George came round and we all had beans on toast, then they played their guitars in the kitchen. I had to leave early because Mimi wouldn't allow girls in the house. She was very strict. She wouldn't let him wear drainpipe trousers so he used to put other trousers over the top and remove them after he left the house. We used to take afternoons off to go to a picture-house called the Palais de Luxe where he liked to see horror films. I remember we went to see Elvis in Jailhouse Rock at the Odeon. He didn't take his glasses. We were holding hands and he kept yanking my hand saying, "What's happening now Thel?" John was enormous fun to be with, always witty, even if it was a cruel wit. Any minor frailty in somebody he'd detect with a laser-like homing device. We all thought it was hilarious but it wasn't funny to the recipients. Apart from the first instance, where he mocked my name, I never experienced it until I ended our relationship. We were close until around Easter of the following year, 1959. At an art school dance he took me to a darkened classroom. We went thinking we'd have it to ourselves but it was evident from the din that we weren't alone. I wasn't going to have an intimate soirée with other people present. I refused to stay, and he yanked me back and whacked me one. He had aggressive traits, mainly verbal, but never in private had he ever been aggressive - quite the opposite. Once he'd hit me that was it for me, I wouldn't speak to him. That one violent incident put paid to any closeness we had. I took care to not bump into him for a while. I didn't miss drinking at Ye Cracke with him but I missed the closeness we had. Still, we were friendly enough by the end of the next term. Because he did no work, he was on the brink of failure, so I loaned him some of my work, which I never got back. I've never wondered what might have been. It sounds disingenuous, but I wouldn't like to have been married to John – that would be quite a gargantuan task! He would've been 70 next year and I just cannot imagine a 70-year-old John Lennon. I'd be fearful that the fire would've gone out.

- Interview within Imogen Carter, ‘John Lennon, the boy we knew’, The Guardian (Dec 2009)

Thelma also briefly dated Paul McCartney and later married Mike McCartney’s bandmate, Roger McGough, in 1970.

Thelma also gives more detail of her relationship with John in Ray Coleman's 1984 John Lennon biography. Just to note, she mentions towards the end of the section that their romantic relationship just petered out, and John was never physically violent with her - it's likely the case that by the 2009 Guardian interview above, she would've felt more free to speak about John hitting her as the reason for the relationship's end, rather than this being two contrasting stories.

A year younger than John, Thelma was to figure in one of his most torrid teenage affairs before he met Cynthia.  Their friendship blossomed in a spectacular conversation one day as they walked after college to the bus terminus in Castle Street. In no hurry to get home, they sat on the steps of the Queen Victoria monument for a talk.  ‘I knew his mother had been killed and asked if his father was alive,’ says Thelma. ‘Again, he said in this very impassive and objective way: “No, he pissed off and left me when I was a baby.” I suddenly felt very nervous and strange. My father had left me when I was ten. Because of that, I had a huge chip on my shoulder. In those days, you never admitted you came from a broken home. You could never discuss it with anybody and people like me, who kept the shame of it secret, developed terrific anxieties. It was such a relief to me when he said that. For the first time, I could say to someone: “Well, so did mine.”’ 

At first Thelma registered that he didn’t care about his fatherless childhood. ‘As I got to know him, he obviously cared. But what I realised quickly was that he and I had an aggression towards life that stemmed entirely from our messy home lives.’ Their friendship developed, not as a cosy love match but as teenage kids with chips on their shoulders. ‘It was more a case of him carrying my things to the bus stop for me, or going to the cinema together, before we became physically involved.’ John, when she knew him, would have laughed at people who were seen arm in arm.’ It wasn't love's young dream. We had a strong affinity through our backgrounds and we resented the strictures that were placed upon us. We were fighting against the rules of the day. If you were a girl of sixteen like me, you had to wear your beret to school, be home at a certain time, and you couldn't wear make-up. A bloke like John would have trouble wearing skin-tight trousers and generally pleasing himself, especially with his strict aunt. We were always being told what we couldn’t do. He and I had a rebellious streak, so it was awful. We couldn't wait to grow up and tell everyone to get lost. Mimi hated his tight trousers and my mother hated my black stockings. It was a horrible time to be young!’ Lennon's language was ripe and fruity for the 1950s, and so was his wounding tongue. In Ye Cracke, one night after college, John rounded on Thelma in front of several students, and was crushingly rude to her. She forgets exactly what he said, but remembers her blistering attack on him: ‘Don't blame me,’ said Thelma, ‘just because your mother's dead.’ It was something of a turning point. John went quiet, but now he had respect for the girl who would return his own viciousness with a sentence that was equally offensive. ‘Most people stopped short,' says Thelma. ‘They were probably frightened of him, and on occasions there were certainly fights. But with me, he met someone with almost the same background and edge. We got on well, but I wasn't taking any of his verbal cruelty.’

When they were together, though, the affinity was special, with a particular emphasis on sick humour. Thelma says categorically that John and she laughed at afflicted or elderly people ‘as something to mock, a joke’. It was not anything deeply psychological like fear of them, or sympathy, she says. ‘Not to be charitable to ourselves, we both actually disliked these people rather than sympathised,’ says Thelma. ‘Maybe it was related to being artistic and liking things to be aesthetic all the time. But it just wasn't sympathy. I really admired his directness, his ability to verbalise all the things I felt amusing.’ He developed an instinctive ability to mock the weak, for whom he had no patience.  He developed an instinctive ability to mock the weak, for whom he had no patience. In the early 1950s, Britain had National Service conscription for men aged eighteen and over who were medically fit. John seized on this as his way of ridiculing many people who were physically afflicted. ‘Ah, you're just trying to get out of the army,’ he jeered at men in wheelchairs being guided down Liverpool's fashionable Bold Street, or ‘How did you lose your legs? Chasing the wife?’ He ran up behind frail old women and made them jump with fright, screaming 'Boo' into their ears. ‘Anyone limping, or crippled or hunchbacked, or deformed in any way, John laughed and ran up to them to make horrible faces. I laughed with him while feeling awful about it,’ says Thelma. ‘If a doddery old person had nearly fallen over because John had screamed at her, we'd be laughing. We knew it shouldn't be done. I was a good audience, but he didn't do it just for my benefit.’ When a gang of art college students went to the cinema, John would shout out, to their horror, ‘Bring on the dancing cripples.’ says Thelma. ‘Perhaps we just hadn’t grown out of it. He would pull the most grotesque faces and try to imitate his victims.’ 

Often, when he was with her, he would pass Thelma his latest drawings of grotesquely afflicted children with misshapen limbs. The satirical Daily Howl that he had ghoulishly passed around at Quarry Bank School was taken several stages beyond the gentle, prodding humour he doled out against his former school teachers. ‘He was merciless,’ says Thelma Pickles. ‘He had no remorse or sadness for these people. He just thought it was funny.’ He told her he felt bitter about people who had an easy life. ‘I found him magnetic,’ says Thelma, ‘because he mirrored so much of what was inside me, but I was never bold enough to voice.’  Thel, as John called her, became well aware of John's short-sightedness on their regular trips to the cinema. They would ‘sag off’ college in the afternoons to go to the Odeon in London Road or the Palais de Luxe, to see films like Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock and King Creole. ‘He’d never pay,’ says Thelma. ‘He never had any money.’ Whether he had his horn-rimmed spectacles with him or not, John would not wear them in the cinema. He told her he didn’t like them for the same reason that he hated deformity in people: wearing specs was a sign of weakness. Just as he did not want to see crutches or wheelchairs without laughing, John wouldn't want to be laughed at. So he very rarely wore his specs, even though the black horn-rimmed style was a copy of his beloved Buddy Holly.  ‘So in the cinema we sat near the front and it would be: “What’s happening now, Thel?” “Who’s that, Thel?” He couldn’t follow the film but he wouldn’t put his specs on, even if he had them.’

[...] It was not a big step from cinema visits and mutual mocking of people for John and Thelma to go beyond the drinking sessions in Ye Cracke. ‘It wasn't love’s young dream, but I had no other boyfriends while I was going out with John and as far as I knew he was seeing nobody except me.’  On the nights that John's Aunt Mimi was due to go out for the evening to play bridge, Thelma and John met on a seat in a brick-built shelter on the golf course opposite the house in Menlove Avenue. When the coast was clear and they saw Mimi leaving, they would go into the house. ‘He certainly didn’t have a romantic attitude to sex,’ says Thelma. ‘He used to say that sex was equivalent to a five-mile run, which I’d never heard before. He had a very disparaging attitude to girls who wanted to be involved with him but wouldn’t have sex with him. ‘“They’re edge-of-the-bed virgins,” he said.  ‘I said: “What does that mean?” ‘He said: “They get you to the edge of the bed and they’ll not complete the act.” ‘He hated that. So if you weren’t going to go to bed with him, you had to make damned sure you weren’t going to go to the edge of the bed either. If you did, he’d get very angry. ‘If you were prepared to go to his bedroom, which was above the front porch, and start embarking on necking and holding hands, and you weren’t prepared to sleep with him, then he didn’t want to know you. You didn’t do it. It wasn’t worth losing his friendship. So if you said, “No”, then that was OK. He’d then play his guitar or an Everly Brothers record. Or we’d got to the pictures. He would try to persuade you to sleep with him, though.  ‘He was no different from any young bloke except that if you led him on and gave the impression you would embark on any kind of sexual activity and then didn’t, he'd be very abusive. It was entirely lust. 

[...] Thelma was John’s girlfriend for six months. ‘It just petered out,’ she says. ‘I certainly didn’t end it. He didn’t either. We still stayed part of the same crowd of students. When we were no longer close, he was more vicious to me in company than before. I was equally offensive back. That way you got John’s respect. Her memory of her former boyfriend is of a teenager ‘very warm and thoughtful inside. Part of him was gentle and caring. He was softer and gentler when we were alone than when we were in a crowd. He was never physically violent with me - just verbally aggressive, and he knew how to hurt. There was a fight with him involved once, in the canteen, but he’d been drinking. He wasn’t one to pick a fight. He often enraged someone with his tongue and he’d been on the edge of it, but he loathed physical violence really. He’d be scared. John avoided real trouble.’

- Within Ray Coleman, John Winston Lennon: 1940-66 vol.1 (1984)