The Day John, yoko and The Peace Corps Came to Canada
(Evening Standard, December 1969)

            Toronto, Monday: I don’t suppose Ronnie and Wanda Hawkins will ever quite recover from the events of the past few days. There they were, all ready to celebrate Christmas like any other Canadian family, a little spruce tree in the living room covered in all those flashing bulbs and things, tinsel and decorations and fake snow scattered around the mantelpieces and on the chandeliers, and decorations everywhere.
            Then suddenly the call came from London – “Yes. John and Yoko would be delighted to accept your hospitality during their stay in Canada.”
            And within hours a man in a Chrysler from Capitol Records appeared at their ten-acre smallholding out there on the Mississauga Road, Streetsville, Ontario, and unloaded the biggest, whitest, most synthetic-looking gingham draped Christmas tree you ever saw together with a gilded cage, bearing two pure white live, but uncooing doves, that sit almost lost in a surrounding jungle of green and orange plastic plants.
            And Wanda polished and cleaned and told the children to be on their best behaviour, and the telephone company came and installed half a dozen new lines and a macrobiotic cook was hired together with his Zen cook book, and a girl with good teeth was chauffeured out to the house to do the washing up.
            And then there they  were - John and Yoko – bursting with energy, and Superchicken, their velvet-and-chiffon suited assistant Anthony Fawcett, flashing his super-status visiting card all over the province of Ontario.
            But that was only the beginning: over from Paris flew an art publisher with 500 huge lithographs by former art student Lennon, for personal autographing by the artist, out from Toronto came a couple of Canadian Rock producers, bent now upon promoting “peace through rock”, and with them a varying number of wives and hangers-on, and behind them the flotsam and jetsam of Toronto young society.
            Then after that came the television teams, producers, sound men, cameramen and interviewers, radio men with their tape recorders, and journalists with notebooks.
            And by Friday, when I got there, all of Wanda’s housework had come to nothing – and the children were getting lost under a thousand “WAR IS OVER” placards, and wondering why it said “BRITAIN KILLED HANRATTY” everywhere.
            And there was John, in as high spirits as I’ve ever seen him, steadily and patiently working his way through mountains of his erotic lithographs, scribbling his name like a madman at the rate of sixteen a minute.
            All around him buzzed the nervous and rhythmic activity of his company, shifting and feeding the mountains to and from him, reminding me of a scene from the Sorcerers Apprentice. While all the time Yoko sat and watched and waited without expression.
            “You know,” says John between scribbles, “during Beatlemania Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall used to sign our autographs for us. It was Neil who signed the pictures that were sent to Prince Charles.”
            Everyone laughs, none more than Ronnie Hawkins. He’s an old rock ’n’ roll friend of John’s, and right now he’s possibly on the brink of a come-back.
            John and Yoko are in Canada for a variety of purposes – but mainly they’re here, they say, to spread their peace message. Canada, it seems, is the only country to take them seriously.
            All over Toronto the “WAR IS OVER” posters are on display and they’re getting a more serious response than they ever get in England. As we drove through the city on Saturday night dozens of young people, spotting the white Rolls-Royce, turned to give us the two-fingered open palm peace sign, while later at a television studio a middle-aged rabbi, well known as a television performer, became squirmingly embarrassing by telling John and Yoko that he thought they were the finest people he had ever met.
            Even the newspaper editorials are favourable – comfort indeed for a man who last week was designated Clown of the Year by one of the best known journalists in Britain.
            “I’m selling a product,” he keeps on saying. “Henry Ford knew how to sell cars by advertising. I’m selling peace . Yoko and I are just one big advertising campaign.
            “It may make people laugh, but it might make them think, too. And when they’re laughing, they’re not killing. Really we’re Mr. and Mrs. Peace. And we’ll spend just as much as it takes. All anybody asks me is how much I’ve spent on it. I won’t know that until the bills come in. But if I get hard up, I can always go and write a few songs.”
            It’s fashionable in England to regard the Lennons as a couple of cranks with more money than sense, and it would make a much funnier article if I were able to tell you lots of cranky things about them. But I can’t. After three days and nights of watching and participating with them I have to admit an admiration for their commitment.
            And in Canada I’m not alone. On a television show on Saturday night the Premier of Manitoba offered to devote an area of the province as a peace park, to be followed, by the time we got home, by a phone call from a representative of the government of Alberta with a similar suggestion. Now they’re optimistically hoping for a meeting with Trudeau before they come home on Tuesday.
            Day and night radio stations are pledging themselves to the peace cause from all over Canada and the United States and John is busy putting out peace promotional call signs. Then yesterday Dick Gregory flew up from New York to join the Peace Committee, suggesting a peace colouring book for the children (he’s got seven of his own). Someone else suggested using a white flag as their symbol.
            In fact the only edgy moment in the whole weekend came during a television confrontation with academic and prophet of the media Marshall McLuhan, when I got the distinct impression that we were all back in a seminar, wondering what answers were expected from his rhetorical, wordy questions.
            The first major event of their movement will be a pop festival to be held in July, in which John is hoping to get Elvis Presley, and all four Beatles on stage at the same time, whether or not they are still together permanently as a group. He thinks they’re now an antique monument.
And all the time as the talking and phoning goes on the macrobiotic Zen cook serves up his organic food ----a marvellous diet, they say, of 50 per cent unpolished brown rice, broiled cod, red carrots and seaweed – a diet devoid of man-made preservatives.
            Only occasionally do we relax when we’re all off on skidoos – motorised sledges, and jiggers, which are something like miniature DUKWS, and go like fury over the 10 inches of snow. Lennon’s in his balaclava and the sergeant’s jacket he got in an Army and Navy store is a lunatic in a jigger, and Yoko’s got to the point where she won’t go with him.    
Hardly at all have the Beatles been mentioned – and only in the past tense.
            “I think I’ll go and change,” says Yoko.
            “Oh good, I’ll come and watch,” says John.

Footnote: It was while I was with the Lennons in Canada on this occasion that John told me he’d left the Beatles—asking me to keep it a secret until the release the following Spring of the Let It Be film and album. I kept the secret.

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