Understanding John Lennon. Francis Kenny
John. He was born in the city’s Oxford Street Maternity Hospital. Mimi was to recall in vivid detail:
I was dodging in doorways [in] between running as fast as my legs would carry me … There was shrapnel falling and gunfire, and when there was a little lull: I ran into the hospital ward and there was this beautiful little baby.3
Later, according to a relative of Mimi’s who lived nearby, ‘there were 56 people blown to pieces in an air raid shelter’,4 while Mimi had to grapple with a number of incendiary bombs that constantly dropped into her garden, tossing wet blankets on the bombs and then stamping them out. This version of events was intended to paint Mimi as a determined, brave and lovable surrogate mother. These certainly weren’t the first efforts to muddy the waters of the true role she was to play in John’s life. The account of the night’s bombing offers up Mimi as a cross between Wonder Woman and Mrs Doubtfire. It is ludicrous and untrue. There were no German bombing raids on Liverpool the night John was born. Although the city was bombed no fewer than 60 times that year between September and December, no raids occurred during the day or night that Mimi gives her account. It seems somewhat perverse that she should want to paint this scene of ‘heroic’ selflessness against a backdrop of real heroics, suffering and deprivation by those in the inner city.
During the air raids on Liverpool, the bombs fell mostly on the docks and industrial areas of the city. This is where the very people whom Mimi had come to look down on lived – the people who stoically bore the brunt of the raids. Mimi’s account of her role during the birth of John and the Liverpool air raid is one that she gave not once, but on a number of occasions. It was not just a case of a single recollection. If it was a straight-forward recollection, inasmuch as there were bombs falling when John was born, leaving out the misinformation of her ‘deadly dash’ five miles across bomb-strewn Liverpool, then this could be accepted. It was neither, though, and as David Bedford points out, ‘Mimi lived eleven years after John had died. And in that time, Mimi reinvented herself. With John gone, she could say anything she liked, without anyone to contradict her.’5 Mimi set out to rewrite John’s history at Mendips. Her account of John’s life became a familiar pattern of fabrication and misleading statements. The story of his upbringing at her hands is riddled with inconsistencies.
Freddie’s service on the Empress of Canada, which started on 30 July, only ended on 1 November and he missed John’s birth by some three weeks. Initially, Julia and baby John had moved from Newcastle Road to the cottage owned by Mimi’s husband George. The problem with this move was that while Newcastle Road was ideally placed for transport and shops, the cottage was out in the sticks. It made for long spells of isolation. For Julia it made for greater pressure to get out and about, and out and about is what Julia did. When home, Freddie would accompany Julia to the local dance halls. He was not a dancer himself, but he would be content to watch her dancing with a string of different men. Aware of the pressures on his young wife, stuck at home with a baby, Freddie’s ‘instructions’ to Julia when he sailed away was to ‘go out and enjoy yourself’.
The following year in New York, he shipped out on a short voyage as the chief steward only to discover he was to be demoted to assistant steward. Instead of the short trip, he would be transporting arms and ammunition to the Far East. He consequently jumped ship, hid out in New York City and waited for a liner directly back to Liverpool. Days later he was arrested under suspicion of breaking into a cargo of whisky, locked in the ship’s brig and then jailed at Ellis Island. Released two weeks later, he waited another month before being allocated on the Sammex, which was bound for the Far East again. This time Freddie found himself set up by another crew member on a charge for stealing whisky and cigarettes from the ship’s hold. He was placed for another two weeks in a cell on Ellis Island and then for three months in an army prison camp in Malta. After 18 months away, Freddie made his way back home. What would be waiting there would surprise even him.
With little contact with her husband and even less money, Julia did not sit at home and mope. Insead she decided to ‘live a little’. Returning to Liverpool as part of a convoy in 1943, Freddie stayed at the cottage with Julia and John. One Saturday night this pleasant family scene was interrupted by the sound of knocking on the front door. When it opened, Freddie was surprised to discover a sailor in full uniform with a platinum blonde on his arm. They were both in high spirits, asking for Julia. The couple had come to take Julia out for a drink. Freddie was shattered and begged Julia not to go. His wife was having none of it. ‘I hardly ever go out’, was her response to Freddie’s pleas. Freddie slammed the front door and barred it against Julia leaving. For her part, Julia took her high heels off, climbed on the kitchen sink and out of the window, and proceeded to run down the road, shoes in hand, to catch up with the sailor and his blonde girlfriend.
Freddie’s wartime service in the Merchant Navy was characterised by a complex series of cock-ups and incompetence. The highlight of this odyssey was Freddie giving a ‘star turn’ to wildly appreciative servicemen in a New York bar. He was then carried shoulder-high down Broadway to Jack Dempsey’s bar, where he continued with his show.
Freddie came home to find his young wife pregnant, but obviously not by him. Instead, the father turned out to be a young Welsh soldier called Taffy Williams. At first, Julia claimed that she had been raped. After Freddie confronted the soldier, it was discovered that this wasn’t the case. Taffy offered to marry Julia. She laughed in his face. Freddie offered to accept the child into the family, but Julia refused and instead she entered a Salvation Army hospital in the Mossley Hill area, where she went full term and gave birth to a girl. As previously arranged with the hospital, after six weeks the baby – named Victoria – was eventually given up for adoption to a Norwegian sea captain and his Liverpudlian wife.
Julia would now return to Pop at Newcastle Road. Further conflict was to follow when Freddie, returning from another trip, discovered his wife had been having a six-month affair with Bobby Dykins, who was two years her junior. During this period, Mimi was to make her move for John. When Mimi was interviewed by Hunter Davies, ‘She claimed Julia wasn’t caring for him properly’6 and informed Freddie that John had walked from Newcastle Road to her house at Mendips. This was in all likelihood untrue. That an unaccompanied four-year-old would be in a position to navigate two major dual carriageways and make his way along the mile-and-a-half route past a police station seems extreme in the least. Why would Mimi say this? It was the beginning of a long campaign of false accusations, half-truths and lies against Julia and Freddie to gain permanent access to John.
On Freddie’s next return home to Newcastle Road, he was shocked to find Julia in a steady, long-term relationship, now living with Bobby Dykins. Julia hadn’t heard from Freddie for 18 months and took it upon herself to find another man. Freddie must have known this was the end of the marriage. He asked to see John and was informed that he’d spent the last two weeks in Mendips. When he called to see him, Mimi demanded £20 for John’s ‘keep’. This was a month’s wages.
Mimi was critical of Julia for bringing shame on the family with her relationship with Dykins. She seemed to be unusually supportive towards Freddie’s position. What was later to transpire was that Mimi and Pop had been in collusion. Julia’s mother had died in 1941, and since then Pop had been looking to snare one of his daughters to take the place of his wife-cum-housekeeper. At 71 years of age, Pop was becoming incapable of looking after himself. He desperately needed a carer and, as all of his other daughters were unavailable, Julia was the one he chose. Mimi, on the other hand, wanted a child, and she was determined it would be John. The plan was to give Julia a home in Newcastle Road along with Bobby (but if possible without him) and in return she would give up John to Mimi. Before Freddie finally bowed out of the Stanley family, there was the sad spectacle of him taking John to his brother Sidney’s home in Blackpool. The intention was for them both to emigrate to New Zealand. John’s prospective antipodean adventure with his father ended when Freddie was located by Julia and Bobby. John, just five years old, was presented with the traumatic choice of who he would like to live with: his mother or his father. John’s first choice was his father Freddie, followed by a quick reversal. He ran into his mother’s arms. For such a young child, his first few years had been stressful in the extreme. Sadly, things weren’t going to get better.
Following on from