“We once went on a holiday and Julian was along, his first son. The kind of family I’m from in Liverpool, there was always babies. You’d been thrown a baby to jiggle on your knee. It wasn’t anything precious. We were very tactile, I think, my family. There was always babies. I always imagined it like a bit of an Italian sort of thing. John didn’t know that, and I didn’t realise any of that until much later in our relationship. You don’t talk about that stuff when you’re a teenager and you’re in a group. But we were on this holiday, and I would be bored with the adults, because, you know, they’re just sitting around getting drunk or whatever, you know, which is fun for a while. But I’d get bored, so I’d go off with Julian and we would be on a boat and I’d be like, okay, now, I’m a pirate and you’re an Indian and I’m going to get you, okay?? And I’d just go into the fantasy world and he’d go, ‘Okay’ And so the two of us would be running around this boat and stuff with all the adults in the next door, you know. And John saw this once and he came up to me and he said, ‘how do you do that?’ And I just, I felt like crying, you know. It was like, God, you know, I can’t tell you. It’s just years of having babies thrown at me or being a kid or playing with kids. It was just something my family taught you. Whereas his, with his dad leaving home when he was three and his mum not living with him, I would go with him to visit his mum. I would be John’s moral support. When we’d go, we’d go together, we’d see his mum, and he idolised his mum. But then again, she got knocked over by an off-duty policeman who was a learner driver or something. It was terrible, tragic stuff. I was just very, very fortunate to have this sort of rather stable, warm Liverpool family. And in talking to John later, he had none of that. So he had to fend for himself. So that was the basis of John’s acerbic wit. He was always having to use it.”
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