John Lennon’s Childhood (2009)

            When John Lennon was five years old his parents faced him with an impossible choice. They asked him to choose between them. Did he want to live with his father, whom he scarcely knew but who had spent the last week giving him a good time in Blackpool? Or did he want to be with his mother?
            He chose his father. But as his mother, breaking into tears, accepted the decision and left the house where he was staying, the little boy ran after her down the road screaming, terrified that she would leave him.
            He wouldn’t see or hear from his father again for nearly twenty years, until, in fact, as a Beatle, he opened a newspaper in 1964 and saw a photograph of a fellow washing-up in a hotel.
            But there were also years when he didn’t see very much of his mother either---years which in the new film, Nowhere Boy, will depict his childhood as one long tug-of-love.
            How much the emotional ferment of his childhood affected the man probably not even he ever knew. But that it would leave its mark there can be little doubt.
            Disputes over child custody often occur when marriages break down. But in the case of John Lennon it was different. Because, according to Imagine This, a book by Lennon’s half sister, Julia Baird, upon which the film is partly based, the two parties who fought most over him were not parents, but sisters---his mother Julia and his Aunt Mimi.
            And it would be the stronger, older, domineering sister Mimi, who, as John’s guardian, would be the lifetime winner, Julia being knocked down and killed by an off duty policeman when John was just seventeen.
            Julia Lennon was an unlucky woman in many ways, but all through his life John would unselfconsciously talk about her, even writing songs about her, at first lovingly, later angrily. “I lost my mother twice, once as a child of five and then again at seventeen,” he would say many times. “It made me very, very bitter inside.”
            Julia Baird, in a book which tried to correct what she sees as the unfair character assassination over the past forty years of the mother she shared with John, blamed Mimi for the separation. But it’s also fair to say that while Mimi may have been a determined, strict and unbending woman, everybody involved in the arrangement was a product, and in Julia Lennon’s case, a victim, of the times in which they were living.
            The story starts in Liverpool the Thirties, some years before John was born, when what he would later refer to as “five strong sisters” were becoming young women in the aspirational Stanley family. Mimi, or Mary, as she was christened, was the eldest. Julia, John’s mother, was the second youngest. But, while Mimi seemed to have been born with a rod of iron for a backbone, Julia was easy going. “She was gay, witty and full of fun,” Mimi would tell the Beatles’ authorised biographer Hunter Davies. “She never took life or anything seriously. Everything was funny. She was more sinned against than sinning.”
            So, when Julia, aged 14, took up with a boy from an orphanage called Alf Lennon (“the ignoble Alf” as John would later rename him), who appeared to have few prospects, it wasn’t surprising that neither Mimi nor the rest of the family approved.
            By making their disdain obvious they hoped the relationship would wither, but, though Alf was away at sea working as a steward for much of the time, it prevailed (probably fitfully, if we’re being realistic) for ten years until in 1938, apparently on a whim, Julia married him.
            John was born on October 9, 1940, a year into the Second World War. His father was away at sea again, Julia still living in the family home. The elder sister, Mimi, childless, though now married herself, was the first in the family to go to see the new baby. “The minute I saw John, that was it, I was lost forever,” Mimi would say. “A boy. I couldn’t get over it. I went on and on about him.”
            At first Alf Lennon sent money home for the upkeep of his wife and baby. But then the money stopped arriving. The message to Julia was that Alf had goner AWOL. Actually he’d been jailed in North Africa for three months for theft, a charge he would later deny. It must have seemed to Mimi that he was living down to all her expectations.
            Eventually Julia, an attractive young woman, alone, in wartime, began an affair with a Welsh soldier. A little girl was born, and although Alf, suddenly returning home, is said to have professed himself willing to bring up the new baby as his own, the child was put up for adoption.
            With Alf disappearing back to sea again, and with no further word, Julia eventually began another relationship with the man who would be with her until her death twelve years later, Bobbie Dykins.
            One can imagine Mimi’s reaction to what she would have considered her younger sister’s feckless behaviour. Not only had Julia married a ne’er do well, she’d had a baby by another man, and was now “living in sin” with yet another. Cruel, as they were, hypocritical even, in that wartime affairs were not at all uncommon, those were the attitudes which prevailed, particularly among lower middle class people, in the Forties.
            Deciding that John, now five, would be better with her, Mimi convinced Julia to let him stay for a while at her comfortable semi-detached home in Woolton just outside Liverpool, until things were sorted out.
            Whereupon Alf returned yet again, convinced Mimi that he should take the child out for the day, then effectively kidnapped him by taking him to Blackpool where a friend of his was making plans to emigrate to New Zealand.  That, he thought, was where he and John should make a new start.
            Discovering, through Mimi, what had happened Julia traced Alf through the Seamen’s Mission in Liverpool, and, turning up in Blackpool, demanded that John be returned to her. It was at that point the little boy was asked to choose between his two parents.
            As Mimi was the chief source of family information when John became famous, it was generally believed that Julia handed her son over to her sister upon returning to Liverpool that night. But it now seems that that may have been Mimi’s edited version of what happened.
            According to books by both Julia Baird and John’s first wife Cynthia Lennon, whose information came from other members of the family, Mimi was adamant that John would not be brought up by Julia, whom she considered an unfit mother.
            Rebuffed by Julia when she demanded that John be handed over, she returned relentlessly with first one social worker and then another more senior one, pointing out that John would have to sleep in the same room as his mother and her new man, while at her home he could have his own bedroom.
            Eventually she won. Julia gave in and John went to live with Mimi and her husband, Uncle George Smith, of whom John became very fond.
            Today it would be thought that Mimi did a dreadful thing, parting a child from his mother, if as, Julia Baird believes, that was not what the mother wanted. But from Mimi’s point of view it’s easy to see her justification for what happened.
            It was true, she could offer John a more comfortable, respectable, stable home life than his mother at that time. Almost certainly she convinced herself that what she was doing was for the best, and John always gave her full credit for encouraging him to read “proper books”---Alice In Wonderland, Just William and Wind In The Willows.
            “He always wanted a book rather than a toy,” Mimi would later remember.  She made sure he got them. So it could be said that as a surrogate mother, she gave him an excellent educational grounding, and he never complained of being unhappy as a little boy
            She was, however, a strong, snobbish woman, who didn’t find it easy to show affection as did her husband, Uncle George, but who was to die when John was twelve. And, although it was Mimi who bought John his first guitar when he discovered rock and roll, she was initially unimpressed by his new friends, Paul McCartney and, especially,  George Harrison with his common Scouse accent. “You always go for the low types, don’t you, John,” she would carp.
            At the same time, John’s new obsession with rock music, to the disregard of his academic chances, must have made him increasingly difficult. Mimi worried that he was throwing his life’s chances away, and as the rancour increased he turned more and more to his mother, for fun and affection.
            Julia had never lived very far from him, but only in his teenage years, did he start regularly visiting her and the two daughters she’d had with Bobby Dykins. Finally getting to know the zany, funny, encouraging, attractive woman, someone so different from his aunt, must have been a liberating experience. She even went to watch him performing with the Quarrymen.
            As Julia had never divorced Alf Lennon, she was, of course, still living in sin, in Mimi’s world. But Mimi had a secret, too, as Julia Baird has discovered. To make some extra money Mimi had taken in a lodger, a postgraduate student called Michael Fishwick at Liverpool University, and by the time John was sixteen had embarked on a relationship with him. She was fifty: Fishwick was 24. What’s more, she was, for some reason, a virgin when the relationship started.
            It’s almost certain that John never knew about the relationship. Possibly Julia never knew either. But behind Mimi’s ever so respectable front, from which she would row with John about his friends, his music, his clothes, and later Cynthia, his girl friend whom he would get pregnant, she was all the time living a lie.
            Of course as neither Fishwick nor she was married there was no reason why they shouldn’t have a relationship. Neither was being unfaithful to anyone. All the same she was breaking her own rules of respectability and self control. In mid-life she had discovered sex, having preached self denial to her younger sister for so long.
            Then on the evening of July 15, 1958, Julia called on Mimi, as she often did. It was the summer holidays and John was due to stay at her house that night. Leaving Mimi at the doorstep Julia walked along the road with one of John’s friends, Nigel Walley. Then,  saying “goodnight “ to him, she crossed over the duel carriageway where Mimi lived.
            Walley said later he heard a screech of brakes, a loud thump, and turned to see Julia flying through the air. Inside the house Mimi and Michael Fishwick heard the noise and rushed out to find Julia’s body lying in the road. She was 44. John was told that evening when a policeman called at the house where Julia had lived.
            That it was a tragedy for John we’ve known for over forty years. But it was a greater loss for Julia’s two young daughters, Julia and Jackie, then aged 11 and 8. Not only had they lost their mother, they would never live with their father again, being brought up by another of those five strong sisters John would talk about.
            What’s more, because Mimi’s interpretation of events has become the accepted version, the kind, loving, fun mother they knew may have been judged unkindly for a very long time. Julia Baird’s book is an attempt to redress the balance.
            John never got over Julia’s death. At first he felt a destructive anger that he’d been robbed of her. Then in 1968, as a Beatle, he would write the loving song Julia about her. “Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you, Julia,” he sang.
            By the Seventies, however, after undergoing primal scream therapy in California, his attitude in song had hardened to:“Mother, you had me, but I never had you. I wanted you, but you didn’t want me.”
            His relationship with his half sisters drifted as fame overtook him and he moved to America, although for a time he did phone Julia Baird a few times. His ties to Mimi never changed, however, even phoning her the day he was murdered, telling her that he would soon be coming back to England. They may have had their rows, and she may have exasperated him, but there was a lifelong fondness there. He was aware of everything she’d done for him.
            Or was he?
            Did it ever cross his mind that Mimi might possibly have legally stolen him at the age of five from his mother because she wanted him for herself? And, if so, was that what she was referring to when, according to Cynthia Lennon, Mimi told a nurse shortly before her death in 1992: “I’m afraid of dying. I’ve been a wicked woman.”
            We’ll never know.

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