John Lennon was born on October 9, 1940, in Liverpool. The following month, the first round of raids from The Blitz, the Nazis’ attempt to pulverize England from the air, began. In an often merciful phenonmenon that neuroscientist call “infantile amnesia,” Lennon’s earliest memories, as he tried to sleep in the arms of his mother, would’ve been the detonations of Luftwaffe bombs, both muffled and instant, the fetid stink of human waste in the network of shelters designed to protect the port city’s workers and stevedores and their families, and, when the raid was over, he would’ve felt cold air and smelled the stink of burning buildings, burned Liverpudlians, and air made dense and moist by firehoses.

So that’s how Lennon’s life began.

His father, Alfred, was a merchant seaman; and the month John was born, U-boats sent 350,000 tons of Allied shipping to the bottom. The u-boats’ goal was to starve Great Britain, and, in 1940, they were winning. Alfred, also known as “Freddie,” wasn’t. He went AWOL in 1943, allegedly fleeing for stealing a bottle of beer, and the checks he sent to his little family stopped coming.

This means that John’s childhood would’ve been a meager one, and that included the love any little boy would’ve wanted from his parents. He adored him Mum, Julia, but she was more of a playmate—musical, as was Freddie, high-spirited, funny—than a real Mum. It was her sister, Mimi, who did the mothering when Lennon was five.

Julia was walking near Mimi’s house in 1958 when she was killed. She was run down by a car driven by an off-duty policeman. John succumbed to what he called a “blind rage” for the next two years, fighting and drinking.

But what Julia left behind for her son the guitar she bought for him. It was his first.